Looks like it’s all over for Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. It seems that Fox News has gotten the goods on him and his defection to the Taliban. In case you missed it, here is what Fox reported on June 6:
U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl at one point during his captivity converted to Islam, fraternized openly with his captors and declared himself a “mujahid,” or warrior for Islam, according to secret documents prepared on the basis of a purported eyewitness account and obtained by Fox News.
“Secret documents.” But where did those documents come from, and how reliable are they? The answer to the first part of that question provides the answer to the second part. The Fox story explains the origin of the documents, and at the same time provides a hint as to their accuracy, or lack thereof.
These real-time dispatches were generated by the Eclipse Group, a shadowy private firm of former intelligence officers and operatives that has subcontracted with the Defense Department and prominent corporations to deliver granular intelligence on terrorist activities and other security-related topics, often from challenging environments in far-flung corners of the globe.
The group is run by Duane R. (“Dewey”) Clarridge, a former senior operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s best known for having been indicted for lying to Congress about his role in the tangled set of events that became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. He was pardoned by the first President Bush in December 1992 while on trial.
Clarridge was the subject of a New York Times feature in 2011. According to the Times, since he left the CIA, he has been involved in running his own spy network. The U.S. military cut off funding for his group in May 2010, and since then he has relied on private donations to pay his operatives. Mark Mazzetti, who authored the Times story, makes the following observation:
For all of the can-you-top-this qualities to Mr. Clarridge’s operation, it is a startling demonstration of how private citizens can exploit the chaos of combat zones and rivalries inside the American government to carry out their own agenda.
Donations from secretive right wing groups and individuals to pay private spies? Of course there’s no way the “intelligence” gathered by those spies would fit neatly into the pre-drawn conclusions of their benefactors, right?
We’ve seen this movie before.
According to Mazzetti’s story, Clarridge was hired by a security consulting firm in 2008 to try and obtain the release of reporter David Rohde, who was being held by the Taliban. Rohde escaped on his own, but Clarridge was able to use his involvement to advertise his spy group to the military. In late 2009, the security firm that had hired Clarridge was awarded a Pentagon contract. The contract was arranged by Michael D. Furlong, who was a civilian employee in the Pentagon at the time. Furlong has since been the subject of a criminal investigation for unauthorized intelligence gathering, and lying about it.
Clarridge’s history suggests that there is not much substance in the documents that Fox News claims to have seen. In May 2010 , Clarridge’s spies reported that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been captured by Pakistan and placed under house arrest. The story was featured on biggovernment.com, which was run by serial fabricator Andrew Breitbart. The biggoverment.com piece was trumpeted as an “exclusive,” and was followed in early 2011 by another story that said that Mullah Omar had suffered a heart attack and had been taken to a hospital by Pakistani security forces. Neither report was ever confirmed, and news reports of a statement issued by Mullah Omar last week, concerning the Bergdahl release, give strong indications that both reports were false.
A private spy network, funded by right wing donors, and run by an ex-CIA agent with a past full of questionable activities, who was indicted for perjury, is what Fox News is now using for information to taint Sgt. Bergdahl. What’s next at Fox – interviews about Bergdahl from the cast of the “Bourne” films? Or maybe it would be more fitting to interview Chevy Chase, in character, as “spy” Emmett Fitz-Hume, from the movie “Spies Like Us.”
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