Tag: CIA

No Moral Compass: Pelosi, Democrats, & the WP Revelations

Crossposted at Invictus and Daily Kos

Notoriously (depending upon your point of view), this past weekend the Washington Post published an article revealing that a number of top Democrats and Republicans were briefed in September 2002 on CIA interrogation methods. They were “given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.” The reported techniques are said to have included waterboarding.

Yesterday, Pelosi released a statement clarifying what happened from her perspective. This must have shocked even a little those Democratic Party stalwarts, but no, as we’ll see, their Nancy can make no mistake. She was, you see… helpless.

The Ballad Of Abu Zubaydah

(cross-posted from kos at buhdy’s request; thanks for all the recs, dd people!)

We know that one of the two destroyed CIA interrogation tapes documented the torture of Abu Zubaydah.

We know that Zubaydah was no “high-value” Al Qaeda operative, but an “insane, certifiable” gofer. We know that when this truth was conveyed to George II, his response was to personally press the CIA to pursue further “information extraction.” We know that Zubaydah provided no actionable intelligence, but that his desperate attempts to placate his torturers may have resulted in US-directed “dark side” operations that killed innocent people. And we know that George II, aware of all this, has nonetheless persisted in attributing an increasingly important role to Zubaydah as both Al Qaeda fiend, and key to “cracking” the 9/11 plot.

We can assume, then, that the tape documenting Zubaydah’s interrogation was destroyed not only because of the monstrous nature of the torture techniques inflicted upon him. It likewise represented a dangerous lever, one that could have toppled the tower of lies that BushCo has erected upon the tormented mind and tortured body of Abu Zubaydah.

It could have exposed the truth. That what has been done to this man may be the filthiest, most outrageous act committed by an administration that has redefined, in our name, filth and outrage.    

USAToday on the Destroyed Tapes

I’ll start by saying I find USAToday an example of everything bad and wrong about today’s print media.  Well maybe not everything, WaPo is worse because they’re also dishonest.  But USAToday is deliberately designed (and has been since it’s inception) to be the McEyewitness News of Newspapers, a pile of print for you to step in on the way out of your room at the Marriott in the morning.  Reading it takes no longer than a cup of coffee and a danish.

But lots of people do because it’s free and a step up from a local ‘shopper’ newsprint magazine, so I occasionally check their opinion section to get the pulse of what’s supposed to be mainstream.

Today one of their opinions was No torture, no need to destroy videotapes.  Whoever wrote this has no doubt that the tapes would make us look bad-

Had the tapes ever gotten out, they might have made the Abu Ghraib prison photos look tame. Imagine the propaganda value Osama bin Laden could reap from video of Arabs struggling in pain as Americans subjected them to waterboarding or other torture. The fact that the prisoner might have been a murderous thug would be lost in the revulsion and condemnation of the United States for barbarism.

Then again the prisoner might not have been a murderous thug, just a low level wacko, but I digress.

Like all things USAToday it’s a very quick read and I encourage you to do so.  The author mostly gets it right.  “The original sin was the torture itself, not the tapes or their destruction.  Spy agencies don’t get to write their own laws.”

What I think the author misses though is how much seeing these tapes would inflame not only Arabs, but Americans.

Who among us, a society that buys its meat shrink wrapped in plastic at best, in microwavable breaded nuggets more often, really wants to see sausage made?

I’ll tell you who.  The 30%.  Dogfighting, executions, we’re Romans and we deserve the best circuses to display the power and wealth of our empire!

It puts me in mind of later empires too, where dictators and their sycophants giggle and eat popcorn while flickering images of state traitors dance at the end of piano wire nooses like obscene puppets.

Do you suppose W watched these tapes?  How many times?  Special bonus question- how many times for Saddam’s execution?

Iran NIE and the Hall of Mirrors

Crossposted at Invictus

More than one author has described writing about the intelligence world as akin to walking into a hall of mirrors. It’s difficult to know what’s what, who to believe, or even know where you stand. Truths are fungible. Lies are opaque versions of tomorrow’s news.

When the U.S. released its limited version of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the revelation that Iran does not have a working nuclear arms program landed with a thud upon the collective heads of the D.C. pundits. Bush’s pugnacious news conference which followed, wherein he repeated ad nauseaum his intention that Iran never get the “knowledge” to construct a nuclear weapon, signalled no real change in direction from the administration that was only weeks before dangling World War III before the glazed eyes of a fearful electorate.

In discussions with colleagues, I was struck by the fact that the authorship of the new NIE was from the same man who wrote the previous NIE, and the same man who assured the administration that there was a nuclear weapons program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, CIA stalwart, Robert Walpole, who was (if he in fact is still), according to the Washington Post, “chief CIA officer for nuclear programs”. In other words, I smelled a rat.  

NYTimes: CIA destroyed interrogation tapes

I just love watching the news on Fridays.  The most interesting things come out at the very end of the week.  Like this story, broken by the New York Times today,:  

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

Go read it, people.  It’s so Nixonian, I swear I think it’s 1974 again.  Cue the disco music, guys, it’s the perfect background music for this obscenity.

/shaking head in disgust…

Krongard Brothers Update – Meta

After our Monday Morning News Drop story appeared here and on Kos, Keith Olbermann and John Dean ran with it as documented on Raw Story.

“It is a component of a larger investigation,” Dean asserted, “and I cannot escape the metaphor that has been running through my head, that we might see Waxman running into a cookie that is starting to crumble because it’s run into a buzzsaw brother. … Waxman isn’t one who will turn away from digging this entire matter out.”

Since then it was discovered that Mother Jones has been doing their own research on the issue where we learn some of the corruption charges:

Krongard stands accused of inadequate oversight of construction contractors at the new, $600-million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad; refusing to pursue procurement fraud charges in a case related to a DynCorp contract; intervening in an ongoing investigation of former Broadcasting Board of Governors Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson; questionable auditing of State Department financial statements; and an “abusive management style” that has contributed to an almost wholesale revolt against him by his own staff.

“It’s self interest” said Buzzy Krongard

On Friday at 4:43 pm this report,  regarding conflicting accounts from a State Department official and his own brother,  hit the news wires.  The most interesting part of this article is that Krongard, the official in jeopardy,  “had begun the hearing by denying the “ugly rumors” that his brother was associated with the company, which is under scrutiny for a September 16 shooting incident in Baghdad in which 17 Iraqis were killed.”  According to the article he then took a break and came back into the same exact room and recused himself from the probes into Blackwater.

This is a clear example of a Public Official  so used to doing things the Bush/GOP way that he didn’t even bother to check his facts before taking part in a hearing of this magnitude.   I’ll say that again,  this is a clear example of a Public Official  so used to doing things the Bush/GOP way that he didn’t even bother to check his facts before taking part in a hearing of this magnitude.

Did it sink in?

Intelligence Agents Call for Hold on Mukasey Nomination

Larry Johnson over at Daily Kos has released a letter to the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling for a hold on Mukasey’s nomination for Attorney General until Judge Mukasey clarifies his position on waterboarding. They ridicule Mukasey’s claim of ignorance on the subject, and suggest a classified briefing for him and other Committee leaders, which would be taped in order to “enhance the likelihood of candor”. Johnson is a former Intelligence analysis and operations officer, and was deputy director of Office of Counter Terrorism at the U.S. State Department.

The letter follows the news last Friday that Democratic Senators Feinstein and Schumer said they would vote to recommend Mukasey out of committee. The memorandum from assorted former intelligence operatives from the CIA/FBI/DIA and State Department is full of lofty calls for a return to American values and a return to the “high moral ground” supposedly held previously by the U.S. military and CIA. One only has to contemplate the history of the CIA, of how the U.S. government has trained torturers around the world, of the U.S. unprovoked invasions of Iraq and Vietnam with deaths in the millions, of the torture-assassination program that was Operation Phoenix, in addition to the fact the agents’s memorandum says nothing about other forms of torture, or about the CIA extraordinary rendition program, to recognize the bogus nature of such previously held moral values and positions.

The letter itself is worth publishing as an example of the rebellion within the governmental bureaucracy against the hard-line Bush/Cheney cabal, for whom anything goes. You can bet that these former government spooks wouldn’t have published if there wasn’t some support for their position within the active military and intelligence community.

The memorandum also demonstrates that political opposition to the Mukasey nomination hasn’t totally crumbled in the wake of Feinstein and Schumer’s genuflection to Bush. Johnson says this letter can be posted “at any blog or site, in full”, asking only for attribution to No Quarter. What follows is the full text of this letter to the Judiciary Committee:

“It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.”

“Waterboarding is torture – I did it myself”

So declared advisor to Dept of Homeland Security Malcom Nance, publicly repudiating the practice reborn from the middle ages in new and improved form by the Bush Administration. Although the Pentagon has been “banned” from using waterboarding by Congress, the same technique described below has NOT been banned from being used by the CIA.

Vote Down Michael ‘Is Waterboarding Torture?’ Mukasey

The New York Times continues to cover the Senate confirmation hearings for Bush Attorney General nominee Michael B. Mukasey. As the general consensus built for a Mukasey confirmation, doubts have crept in through the cracks, as it became obvious Mukasey was as adept at parsing his language regarding torture as former Justice Department head, the despised Alberto Gonzales.

This came out more clearly today, when Mukasey told a dubious Senate panel that he didn’t even know what waterboarding, a well-publicized CIA torture technique, was. Really. Would I make this stuff up?

“Is waterboarding constitutional?” he was asked by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, in one of today’s sharpest exchanges.

“I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” Mr. Mukasey replied. “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”

CIA Investigates Its Own Inspector General for Investigating the CIA About Torture

In the latest of a seemingly endless series of shocking revelations about the Bush Administration’s attempts to punish anyone who attempts to hold them accountable to the rule of law, it is being reported today that the CIA is investigating its own Inspector General for investigating the CIA for committing acts of torture.

From the New York Times:

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.

Detention and interrogation programs? In other words, torture.

A small team working for General Hayden is looking into the conduct of the agency’s watchdog office, which is led by Inspector General John L. Helgerson. Current and former government officials said the review had caused anxiety and anger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hill that it posed a conflict of interest.

Concern? This warrants more than concern! This warrants an immediate and aggressive investigation by Congress into a clear case of attempting to suppress dedicated public servants because they may believe the United States should abide by international law and basic human morality.

Any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would be unusual, if not unprecedented, and would threaten to undermine the independence of the office, some current and former officials say.

To state the obvious: that’s stating the obvious.

The CIA, of course, officially says this investigation of the investigators is no big deal, completely appropriate, have a doughnut and some coffee and- hey, how’s the weather, today?

Meanwhile, back in reality:

Beware Misdirection on Torture Scandal (The “DDD” Story)

The New York Times had a front page article on the legal peregrinations of the Bush Administrations as it seeks safe harbor for its ship of torturers. The next day, the scandal spills out into official Washington, and the stubborn evil denizens at 1600 Pennsylvania trot out for a desultory press conference. There’s the snarling, contemptuous Bush, explaining, “This government does not torture people.”

Away, in countless rooms in millions of houses, the populace reads the stories and sighs and does nothing. Politicians screech, and pundits blather, and the war their generation shouldered with both protest and calm continued its carnage. Slowly, the news media formed a tight narrative around the new scandal: Bush’s Justice Department had found a way to legally, and yet secretly (and only in 2007 America can this occur without oxymoron), legitimate forms of torture too bestial to contemplate — beatings, simulated drownings, freezing men half to death… you know, Bush had growled, interrogation techniques that were “tough, safe, necessary and lawful.”

But no one knew, no one could know, that in the bowels of CIA headquarters at Langley, a group of men and women were safeguarding a group of techniques that were already exposed, and already forgotten, that were carefully cozened, that men were trained in, that were meant to outlast the worst New York Times editorial or Congressional investigation. And if they were referred to, if anyone should have to whisper them, they could use the awful acronym that had referenced them for over fifty years now: DDD.

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