The word from the State Department is that incoming Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte will oversee an "embedded" unit of private contractors who are preparing for an attack against Iran. Although the Baker-Hamilton Commission called for dialogue with both Iran and Syria over the Iraq Civil War and quagmire the neo-cons foisted on the U.S. military, the Bush administration appears intent on confronting Iran militarily.
As reported by the Boston Globe on Jan. 2, the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group (ISOG) is setting the stage for a U.S. military confrontation with Iran and Syria and is supported by BearingPoint, the same contractor that provided assistance for the Iraq Policy and Operations Group (IPOG), the group that helped bring about the disaster in Iraq. BearingPoint also had the contract for selling off Iraq state-owned enterprises and was involved in a number of the dubious financial deals of Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
BearingPoint also came up in the FBI and NSA set-up of imprisoned NSA "Iraq shop" signals intelligence analyst Ken Ford, author of an NSA report that concluded that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. BearingPoint acted as a go-between for an FBI confidential informant and NSA security. The confidential informant placed a classified document inside Ford's Waldorf, Maryland home that was used to trigger a false prosecution of the NSA analyst and former White House Secret Service uniformed agent under President Clinton.
BearingPoint was formerly known as KPMG Consulting. WMR has been informed that KPMG was involved in aspects of the 1980 October Surprise concocted by George H. W. Bush, William Casey, Robert Gates, and Donald Gregg. The demise of the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Chester, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, the very company from which Vice Presidential candidate George H. W. Bush spoke on October 18, 1980 just prior to his secret trip to Paris to meet with the Ayatollah Khomeini's representatives, also reportedly involved the disappearance of the SS Poet, which was "lost at sea" with its 34 crewmen, but was more likely involved in transporting the arms and spare parts to Iran promised by Bush and Casey if they held on to the American hostages until after the 1980 presidential election and "disappeared" on purpose. The Sun scandal also reportedly involved a little-known Mayor of Marcus Hook, the Sunoco "company town" adjacent to Chester, named Curt Weldon.
In a further demonstration that the Bush administration is outsourcing key government posts to the private sector, it is being reported that former National Security Agency (NSA) director Adm. Mike McConnell (retired), who is currently a senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a major intelligence contractor, will take over Negroponte's position as Director of National Intelligence. That would place two former NSA directors, McConnell, and Gen. Mike Hayden, the CIA director, in the two most powerful intelligence jobs in the United States.
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Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, nationally distributed columnist, and author who has covered Washington, DC, politics, national security, and intelligence issues since 1994. He has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, CAQ, Counterpunch, and the Intelligence Newsletter (based in Paris).
Look for his new book, Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day: The Internet Irregulars vs. The Powers That Be!, in the fall.
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