and 2) defraud the Pentagon by peddling worse-than-useless domestic political spyware.
The MZM case is all about neocon espionage and an organized plot (that succeeded) to politicize intelligence collection and analysis.
That's the good stuff they aren't widely telling the American people about this trial. Consider this:
1) Laura Rozen's WARandPIECE:
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/003244.html It's based on eRiposte's analysis of a Walter Pincus article from July. What begins as an article about a gross example of conflict of interest -- MZM hired the son of the executive director of the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center two months after MZM was awarded an NGIC contract and shortly before it got a far bigger one -- further down reveals that NGIC is at the center of the infamous Iraq aluminum tubes controversy. The NGIC claimed wrongly the tubes must be for a nuclear centrifuge. As Pincus wrote:
The NGIC, which is facing an inquiry by the director of national intelligence for its prewar mistakes in analyzing Iraq's weapons programs, has been drawn into the federal investigations of MZM, according to Army and Justice Department spokesmen.
The NGIC was criticized in March by the Silberman-Robb presidential commission for "gross failure" in its analysis of Iraqi arms. The commission said the center was "completely wrong" when it found in September 2002 that the aluminum tubes Iraq was purchasing were "highly unlikely" to be used for rocket motor cases.
That inaccurate finding bolstered a CIA contention that the tubes were meant for nuclear centrifuges and were evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program. Two NGIC analysts who produced the inaccurate finding have received annual performance awards each year since 2002. Officials said the bonuses were for their overall activities.
According to the timeline established in the Pincus article, in September 2002, the NGIC determined that the aluminum tubes Iraq was purchasing were "'highly unlikely' to be used for rocket motor cases," e.g. they were likely to be for a nuclear weapons program -- which was "completely wrong" the Silberman-Robb report found. Then in October 2002, MZM got its first orders from the NGIC, to "perform a seven-week, $194,000 analysis of 'FIRES', a computer program concept to collect blueprints of facilities worldwide to create an intelligence database," Pincus reported. Then in December 2002, according to the Pincus report, MZM hired the NGIC executive director's son, William Scott Rich III. Shortly thereafter, "MZM received multimillion-dollar orders to continue work on FIRES and other programs," Pincus reports.
2) AND, Justin Rood at TPM Muckraker:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/000105.php Cunningham Felon Involved In Domestic Spying
By Justin Rood - March 15, 2006, 2:37PM
Here's an interesting -- but overlooked -- detail of the Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) saga: one of the crooked contractors who bribed the Duke Stir was apparently involved in a Total Information Awareness-like data-mining operation that looked at U.S. citizens' data.
Mitchell Wade, former CEO of MZM Inc., pleaded guilty to several conspiracy and bribery charges a few weeks ago in connection with the Cunningham scandal. But a little-noticed piece of his history goes into one of the most sensitive domestic spying operations we have heard of to date: the Pentagon's Virginia-based Counterintelligence Field Activity office (CIFA).
Wade got over $16 million in contracts with CIFA by bribing Duke Cunningham, who forced earmarks in to Defense appropriations bills on his behalf. Furthermore, Wade's second-in-command was a consultant to the Pentagon on standing up the operation.
In its brief life -- it was created in 2002 -- CIFA has had trouble keeping its nose clean. Despite the ink that's been spilled on the center, little is actually known about what it does, and how MZM serviced it.
Here's what we know: After the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon used its massive budget and urgent sense of mission to push into areas of intelligence it had once left to others. Domestic intelligence was one of those areas. DoD created CIFA in 2002 to become a joint center for "force protection" intelligence work at DoD, mainly anti-terrorism.
What's "force protection?" Pentagonese for "carte blanche." In encompasses protection for bases, troops and equipment. And the water supply. The electrical grid. Highways. Contractors, their suppliers -- the list goes on. Which leaves CIFA with a mandate to gather information on, well, just about anything and anybody it wants.
If you don't believe me, believe the unnamed former Pentagon intelligence official who told the Post,
They started with force protection. . . but when you go down that road, you soon are into everything. . . . is too big, too rich an organization and should not be left unfettered. They rush in where there is a vacuum.
CIFA's not small -- it employs 1,000 people, roughly quadruple the size of the State Department's intelligence division.
One branch, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center, "identifies and assesses threats" from "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine or covert entities," according to a December 2005 Washington Post article. Another has 20 psychologists working on "offensive and defensive counterintelligence efforts."
The area that's gotten them into hot water recently is TALON, a system of receiving "threat reports" from around the country and storing them in a database, known as Cornerstone. Last December, NBC news got their hands on a printout of a portion of the database which revealed they were keeping tabs on nonviolent protesters, mostly anti-war, around the United States.
A subsequent Pentagon investigation found one of every 100 records in the database shouldn't be there.
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