On-Line Articles Outlining future Peril to Individual Freedoms
and
Future Religious Wars of the United States
ASHINGTON,
Dec. 18 - The Pentagon is drawing up a plan that would give
the military a more prominent role in intelligence-collection operations
that have traditionally been the province of the Central Intelligence Agency,
including missions aimed at terrorist groups and those involved in weapons
proliferation, Defense Department officials say.
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The proposal is being described by some intelligence officials as an effort by the Pentagon to expand its role in intelligence gathering at a time when legislation signed by President Bush on Friday sets in motion sweeping changes in the intelligence community, including the creation of a national intelligence director. The main purpose of that overhaul is to improve coordination among the country's 15 intelligence agencies, including those controlled by the Pentagon.
The details of the plan remain secret and are evolving, but indications of its scope and significance have begun to emerge in recent weeks. One part of the overall proposal is being drafted by a team led by Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, a deputy under secretary of defense. (see footnotes)
Among the ideas cited by Defense Department officials is the idea of "fighting for intelligence," or commencing combat operations chiefly to obtain intelligence.
The proposal also calls for a major expansion of human-intelligence collection efforts under the Pentagon's auspices, both within the military services and the Defense Intelligence Agency, including more aggressive, offensive missions aimed at acquiring specific intelligence sought by policy makers. (The term human intelligence refers to information gathered directly by spies rather than by technological means.)
The proposal is the latest chapter in the fierce and long-running rivalry between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. for dominance over intelligence collection.
White House officials are monitoring the Pentagon's planning, as is the C.I.A. The proposal has not yet won White House approval, according to administration officials. It is unclear to what extent American military forces have already been given additional authority to carry out intelligence-gathering missions.
Until now, intelligence operations run by the Pentagon have focused primarily on gathering information about enemy forces, the main preoccupation of military commanders. But the overarching proposal being drafted in the Pentagon, which encompasses General Boykin's efforts, would focus military intelligence operations increasingly on counterterrorism and counterproliferation, areas in which the C.I.A.'s directorate of operations has always played the leading role.
"Right now, we're looking at providing Special Operations forces some of the flexibility the C.I.A. has had for years," said a Defense Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan has not yet been approved. "It would be used judiciously, and with all appropriate oversight controls."
General Boykin's proposal would revamp military commands to ensure that senior officers planning and fighting wars work more closely with the intelligence analysts tracking threats like terrorists and insurgency cells. Another part of the Pentagon's plan was articulated in a recent directive by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that instructed regional commanders to expand the military's role in intelligence gathering, particularly in tracking terrorist and insurgent leaders.
While declining to comment directly on the recent directive, a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said, "Regional commanders are looking at ways to maximize the use of their resources to contribute to the overall intelligence picture."
In public allusions to the plan, both General Boykin and Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, have stuck to generalities that have left unclear exactly what is being proposed. But some intelligence officials say they believe those remarks open the way to more clandestine military operations intended to gather intelligence on terrorists and weapons proliferators.
One former intelligence official questioned the utility of the military's putting more resources into intelligence collection at a time when it is already stretched thin in dealing with the counterinsurgency in Iraq and addressing threats elsewhere.
"If you're a shooter, go do that job," said the former intelligence official, who has opposed efforts by the Pentagon to expand its intelligence gathering role. "But don't put the shooter in a pinstripe suit and send him to Beirut to chase bad guys." He said he regarded the military's initiative as an attempt to make inroads into turf controlled by intelligence agencies.
A current intelligence official who works outside the Pentagon described the relationship between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. as "closer than ever," but he added that "cooperation is strongest in the places where it counts most, like Iraq and Afghanistan." The official said, "There's a real sense that there's plenty of work for everyone, and the key for both agencies is close coordination and insisting that all of us apply the best possible tradecraft in human intelligence operations."
General Boykin was traveling abroad and not available for comment this week. Over the last two weeks, he and his top aides have declined repeated interview requests on this subject.
The general provided an overview of the plan in an
address in October to the Association of the
A synopsis of General Boykin's plan was provided by Defense Department officials, as were remarks prepared for delivery in a Nov. 15 address by Admiral Jacoby at a conference on military intelligence.
"Our present intelligence collection architecture - optimized to identify and track large conventional forces - is inadequate to warn against these new challenges for terrorists, provide sufficient information on insurgent groups, determine the status of discrete W.M.D. production capabilities, learn the intentions of leaderships from rogue states, or determine friend from foe when intermingled in a foreign country," Admiral Jacoby said in that speech.
The admiral said intelligence agencies needed to put a new premium on acquiring "persistent surveillance" through "close-in and continuous collection against broader problem sets."
General Boykin, who attracted controversy last year for saying in remarks to Christian groups that Muslims worship "an idol" and describing the battle against Muslim radicals as a fight against Satan, has been the prime architect of the proposal, which has been under review at the Pentagon since January 2004. The general reports to Stephen A. Cambone, who since 2003 has used his newly created post as under secretary of intelligence to assert a role in which he has competed with George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, and his successors for influence over American intelligence agencies.
Among the proposals described by Defense Department officials is a plan to create a Joint Intelligence Operational Command within the Pentagon, which would elevate intelligence to much more power and prominence. The command being proposed could replace the Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Department officials say.
If approved, General Boykin's proposal would allow the Pentagon to be less reliant on other intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, for its operations, senior defense officials said.
"It will give more options to the military for how they gather the intelligence, instead of having to depend on other agencies," said one senior military officer who has received a preliminary briefing on the proposal and spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not yet been approved.
Maj. Gen. Charles W. Thomas, a retired senior Army intelligence officer who has worked as a consultant for General Boykin on his project, said he broadly supported the general's goals. But he warned that one possible danger in bringing battle commanders and intelligence officials so close together to fight a common enemy was the risk that the intelligence could be skewed to fit the commander's war plan and not the reality on the ground.
A spokesman for the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., Col. Samuel Taylor, said on Friday that the command had been briefed on an early draft of General Boykin's remodeling initiative, but that staff officers and senior commanders had not yet reviewed it in depth.
President Bush last month ordered the C.I.A. and the Defense Department to review a plan that could expand the Pentagon's role in covert operations, perhaps replacing the C.I.A. in providing paramilitary forces for such missions. Mr. Bush's directive set a 90-day deadline for the review.
The idea of transferring paramilitary authority from the intelligence agency to the military's Special Operations Forces was among several prominent recommendations made by the Sept. 11 commission.
The proposal remains under review. But in public testimony in August, Mr. Rumsfeld and John E. McLaughlin, who was then the acting intelligence chief, expressed reservations about the idea, and it was not included in the measure Mr. Bush approved on Friday.
Footnotes:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are defending a new deputy undersecretary of defense "who has reportedly cast the war on terror" in religious terms.
Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, whose promotion and appointment was confirmed by the Senate in June, has said publicly that he sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.
Appearing in dress uniform before a religious group in Oregon in June, Boykin said Islamic extremists hate the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christians. ... And the enemy is a guy named Satan."
No separation of Church and State here - - - - - Frank
William G. "Jerry" Boykin
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Published on
Thursday, October 16, 2003 by the Los
Angeles Times
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General Casts War in Religious Terms
The top soldier assigned to track down Bin Laden and Hussein is an evangelical Christian who speaks publicly of 'the army of God.' |
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by Richard T. Cooper
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WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has assigned the task of tracking down and eliminating Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets to an Army general who sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan. Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, is a much-decorated and twice-wounded veteran of covert military operations. From the bloody 1993 clash with Muslim warlords in Somalia chronicled in "Black Hawk Down" and the hunt for Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar to the ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, Boykin was in the thick of things. Yet the former commander and 13-year veteran of the Army's top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan." Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." |
"We
in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised
for such a time as this," Boykin said last year.
On at least one occasion, in Sandy, Ore., in June, Boykin said of
President Bush:
"He's in the White House because God put him there."
Boykin's penchant for casting the war on terrorism in religious terms appears to be at odds with Bush and an administration that have labored to insist that the war on terrorism is not a religious conflict.
Although the Army has seldom if ever taken official action against officers for outspoken expressions of religious opinion, outside experts see remarks such as Boykin's as sending exactly the wrong message to the Arab and Islamic world.
In his public remarks, Boykin has also said that radical Muslims who resort to terrorism are not representative of the Islamic faith.
He has compared Islamic extremists to "hooded Christians" who terrorized blacks, Catholics, Jews and others from beneath the robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
Boykin was not available for comment and did not respond to written questions from the Los Angeles Times submitted to him Wednesday.
"The first lesson is to recognize that whatever we say here is heard there, particularly anything perceived to be hostile to their basic religion, and they don't forget it," said Stephen P. Cohen, a member of the special panel named to study policy in the Arab and Muslim world for the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.
"The phrase 'Judeo-Christian' is a big mistake. It's basically the language of Bin Laden and his supporters," said Cohen, president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development in New York.
"They are constantly trying to create the impression that the Jews and Christians are getting together to beat up on Islam.... We have to
be very careful that this doesn't become a clash between religions, a clash of civilizations."Boykin's religious activities were first documented in detail by William N. Arkin, a former military intelligence analyst who writes on defense issues for The Times Opinion section.
Audio and videotapes of Boykin's appearances before religious groups over the last two years were obtained exclusively by NBC News, which reported on them Wednesday night on the "Nightly News with Tom Brokaw."
Arkin writes in an article on the op-ed page of today's Times that Boykin's appointment "is a frightening blunder at a time that there is widespread acknowledgment that America's position in the Islamic world has never been worse."
Boykin's promotion to lieutenant general and his appointment as deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence were confirmed by the Senate by voice vote in June.
An aide to the Senate Armed Services Committee said the appointment was not examined in detail.
Yet Boykin's explicitly Christian-evangelical language in public forums may become an issue now that he holds a high-level policy position in the Pentagon.
Officials at his level are often called upon to testify before Congress and appear in public forums.
Boykin's new job makes his role especially sensitive: He is charged with speeding up the flow of intelligence on terrorist leaders to combat teams in the field so that they can attack top-ranking terrorist leaders.
Since virtually all these leaders are Muslim, Boykin's words and actions are likely to draw special scrutiny in the Arab and Islamic world.
Bush, a born-again Christian, often uses religious language in his speeches, but he keeps references to God nonsectarian.
At one point, immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the president said he wanted to lead a "crusade" against terrorism.
But he quickly retracted the word when told that, to Muslim ears, it recalled the medieval Christian crusaders' brutal invasions of Islamic nations.
In that context, Boykin's reference to the God of Islam as "an
idol" may be perceived as particularly inflammatory.
The president has made a point of praising Islam as "a religion
of peace." He has invited Muslim clerics to the White House for
Ramadan dinners and has criticized evangelicals who called Islam a
dangerous faith.
The issue is still a sore spot in the Muslim world.
Pollster John Zogby says that public opinion surveys throughout the
Arab and Islamic world show strong negative reactions to any statement by
a U.S. official that suggests a conflict between religions or cultures.
"To frame things in terms of good and evil, with the United
States as good, is a nonstarter," Zogby said.
"It is exactly the wrong thing to do."
Personal Footnote: Look for Boykin to establish a secret group of pentagon/C.I.A. type assassins to attempt to kill controversial Islamic religious leaders globally, especially in Iran.
What is Islam Doing?