Text of 11 December 2006 fax broadcast, which is highly relevant to the present consideration of US President Barack Obama's nominee Leon Panetta to be the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agnecy.  Panetta was a member of the Iraq Study Group, whose Report, as shown below, contained a critical failure:

THE IRAQ STUDY GROUP REPORT:  A CRITICAL FAILURE

NEW YORK, NEW YORK   *   11 DECEMBER 2006   Citizen of the USA Stephen M. St. John addresses the international community in Washington and here in New York City, all members of the US Congress as well as other organizations and individuals, public and private, and, according to his prediction, points to the critical failure of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) to take into account either the true number of private contractors and other mercenary groups operating in Iraq or the full spectrum of their activities there.

Citizen St. John notes the ISG's wildly erroneous figure of 5,000 civilian contractors in Iraq (page 12); whereas the Central Command's recent preliminary census of the civilian contractors in Iraq gives a much, much higher count of 100,000, which will very likely exceed the current number of regular coalition forces (157,500) after subcontractors are also counted.

(See http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/04/AR20061204...)

Citizen St. John concludes that the ISG's failure to discuss civilian contractors anywhere in its report (other than to give such a grossly inaccurate estimate of how many there are, and to dedicate the report to the military and civilian men and women who have served in Iraq (page 4) and to thank them for the jobs they are doing there), indicates either a remarkable lack of due diligence on the part of the members of the ISG, or a deliberate deception glossed over by their truly impressive biographies at the end of their report.

Citizen St. John commends the ISG for its candid admissions that "events in Iraq have been set in motion by American decisions and actions" (page 9), and that "our government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias" (page 61); however, the ISG's Recommendation 77, which calls for the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to "devote significantly greater analytic resources to the task of understanding threats and sources of violence in Iraq" (page 62) will go nowhere if private contractors and other mercenary groups are automatically excluded from the range of possible sources of violence just as they are excluded in the ISG report.

In this regard Citizen St. John calls to mind the 19 September 2005 incident in Basra where two operatives under British control were apprehended dressed as Sunni Arabs driving an automobile rigged with explosives on a Shi'ite religious holiday (See http://www.brusselstribunal.org/BritishBombers.htm#britishbombs) and asks, how many times have these men, whose photographs appear in the Brussels tribunal web site courtesy of the Iraqi police, whom the ISG deems incompetent (page 13), carried out such missions without being caught in the act?  How many are involved in such "false flag" missions?  Why hasn't this incident, and its implications, been reported in the mainstream news media?  Were the members of the ISG aware of this incident?  If so, why didn't they pursue this incident as a lead in their investigation and report on it?  If not aware of the incident, who held this information from them?

In consideration of the foregoing, Citizen St. John recommends modification of the ISG's statement that "sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability" (page 6) so that "false flag" black operations to stoke sectarian violence be taken into account.  Citizen St. John contends that this brand of synthetic state-sponsored terrorism is the coalition's sponsors' best friend, providing a pretext to "stay the course."

Citizen St. John also notes that the phenomenon of death squads in Iraq is reminiscent of the death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s when John Negroponte was ambassador to neighboring Honduras and that these death squads in Iraq emerged around the time Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq, which circumstance suggests that Negroponte, now the Director of National Intelligence, is perhaps the least qualified to carry out in earnest the task the ISG would give him under Recommendation 77 "to devote significantly greater analytic resources to the task of understanding threats and sources of violence in Iraq."  (page 62)

This article appears at http://www.show-the-house.com/id8.html where you scroll to entry of 11 December 2006.

Submitted by Stephen M. St. John on Sun, 2009-02-08 04:53

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