Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.
His dispatches -- an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports -- have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-Contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.
It must be nice to be able to run a private intelligence service from poolside - it's not a gig that most would be able to land but if you are a credentialed crook, perjurer and right-wing ideologue with references from Lt. Colonel Oliver North to the aforementioned Abrams it is pretty easy to feed like a blood-sucking leech off of the taxpayer dole. The Fox News "EXCLUSIVE" was immediately dealt a blow when retired CENTCOM chief General James Mattis denounced it as the baseless piece of garbage that it is. A weekend story in The Tampa Tribune (the home city of CENTCOM) by Howard Altman says as much. I excerpt from the story entitled "Mattis: No evidence of Bergdahl collusion with Taliban":
During his time in Tampa as commander of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. James Mattis said he saw no evidence to confirm that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, released in a prisoner swap last week, collaborated with his captors.
"I have never seen one bit of verified or confirmed evidence of that," Mattis said in a phone interview with The Tampa Tribune. "Not one bit. You hear things and it was second- and third-hand."
Other information "specifically discounted" reports that Bergdahl, captured by the Taliban in June 2009 after leaving his outpost in Afghanistan, was working with his captors, he said. Mattis declined to comment on what that information was because it remains classified.
Mattis led the MacDill Air Force Base-headquartered command from August 2010 to March 2013, when he retired after a storied career. Mattis was asked to comment on a report by Fox News that a group run by Duane R. "Dewey" Clarridge, a former senior operations officer for the CIA, provided situation reports to Centcom showing Bergdahl was working with his captors at points during his five years as a prisoner. Clarridge, who gained notoriety in the 1980s after being indicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, was a civilian contractor at the time.
In the Fox News story, Mattis made similar comments discounting the notion that, according to Fox, "Bergdahl had evolved into an active collaborator with the Haqqani network or the Taliban."
The Fox News story says information about Bergdahl converting to Islam, fraternizing openly with his captors and declaring himself a "mujahid," or warrior for Islam, came from a source new to Clarridge's Eclipse Group "whose trustworthiness had not been fully vetted by the group. However," the report stated, the informant "does have plausible access to the information reported."
AND
The Pentagon "is not aware of any contract, subcontract or otherwise" between SOLIC and the Eclipse Group, Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost, Defense Department spokeswoman, said late Friday afternoon. Clarridge declined comment. Public affairs staff for Ashley, since promoted to major general and now serving as the commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence & Fort Huachuca, did not respond to a call for comment from the Tribune. Officials from Centcom did not respond to requests for comment and officials from Fox News did not immediately respond to a call and email late Friday afternoon.
Mattis, who took command of Centcom a little more than a year after Bergdahl's disappearance, told the Tribune that Clarridge's reports "were simply one bit of information coming in. You do your normal due diligence. We found nothing to support it."
The Pentagon statement denying knowledge of "contract, subcontract or otherwise" should be viewed with the usual skepticism that the American war machine should be subjected to but that they are commenting on this at all shows just how toxic that Duane "Dewey" Clarridge is. So goes the latter years of the career of a loose cannon who was associated with one of the most flagrant violations of the United States Constitution of the 20th century that was Iran-Contra. If the Pentagon won't admit any funding of "The Eclipse Group" that subsidizes Duane Dewey Clarridge's ability to spend his waning days poolside rather than in the prison cell in which he belongs then who really is providing the funding - that is an interesting question that begs an answer
That this is even taken seriously at all is a sad indictment of our current national state of decline. Americans, at least a good amount of them, are at the point where they are so brainwashed and cast adrift in fantasy worlds that the crap that they see on television and reality are bleeding over. Evidence of this are the comparisons of Bowe Bergdahl to the Muslim terrorist sleeper "Brody" in Showtime's smash hit Homeland series. In terms of politics and the ongoing manipulation of the angry white lynch-mob demographic it also builds on the original attacks of Barack Obama as a secret Muslim who was embedded within the American power structure to transform the USA!, USA!, USA! into a country ruled by Sharia law where white Christians would be transformed into slaves for Allah with their straw bosses being Obama's militant Negro Gestapo ACORN. It would be a great dark comedy if it was not so terrifyingly real.
Being an election year this is only the beginning of the tsunami of anti-Muslim demagoguery that will be invoked by Republicans conducting their own jihad against America.
Keep those televisions tuned to Fox News.
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