CIA Kidnapping

 

So that happened
--State and Main (2002)
___________________

[Follow-on from last week's Italian kidnapping verdict (A Faceless Man).]

This could be a fictional Aurelio Zen kidnapping, but it is sadly not.  In a true crime scenario, U.S. Central Intelligence Agents snatched a believed "radical Egyptian Muslim cleric" off the streets of Milan in 2003.

An ex-CIA operative involved in the operation, Sabrina De Sousa, told her mother, “There was an incident in Italy. It involved what the Italians consider a crime.” Imagine the hubris or the denial to be able to be amazed that she was being charged with an actual crime. “It was kidnapping. Don’t worry. I am not a criminal” (Kidnapping Unravels Spy's Career.)

Perhaps De Sousa drank the tea, and thought calling the snatch a "rendition" rendered it legal and permissible. In fact, the Italian Supreme Court found 22 CIA officers guilty of aggravated kidnapping; they will probably never be rendered to Italy for the execution of their sentencing.

The Washington Post notes, "Unlike the other Americans caught up in the case, [De Sousa] refuses to retreat into anonymity." This ostensibly makes De Sousa appear righteous, but in fact her cover has been blown from here to Milan, so there is only personal gain to be had from talking.

The Post continues to get it wrong when it writes, "More than anything, De Sousa’s legal battles reveal the cascading personal toll on a CIA officer when a secret intelligence operation’s cover is blown."  No -- the problem is not the agent's cover being blown but rather the fact that she was involved in the commission of a crime.  Having your cover blown is not a felony.  Kidnapping is, and kidnapping done in the name of freedom and democracy is doubly damning, as it puts icing on a terrorist activity.

Describing the naturalized U.S. citizen who began working for the CIA in the 1990's, the Post writes, "DeSousa's) olive skin and fluency in Portuguese, French, Hindi, German and Italian enabled her to blend into crowds and easily take part in surveillance of suspects."  Suspect is a police term -- does the CIA do police work or intel?

Why would an intel agency investigate the cleric?  If he is engaged in terrorist activity and was "under investigation", should this not be a host nation legal and criminal concern?  The CIA  is an intel agency, not law enforcement.

We are supposed to be the Good Guys here.  Note that the kidnapped was an Egyptian cleric, not a Taliban, not a Saudi. When the CIA kidnaps, it is called "counter-terrorism"; when al Qaeda does the same it is "terrorism".

Next: Pt II of CIA Kidnapping

Boring David

 We make her bear and raise our children
And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen
We tell her home is the only place she should be
Then we complain that she's too unworldly to be our friend 
--Woman is the Nigger of the World, Yoko Ono 

Opposites attract 
It's physical 
Only logical 
--What's Love Got to do With It? 
Tina Turner 

Shame he's just this fallen idol 
Shattered like some broken glass 
Shame he's just this fallen idol 
Bits of paper for his past 
--Fallen Idol, The Tears

__________________

The saga of General Petraeus is neither surprising, novel, creative, nor sublime.  It is rather boring, sadly common and a mockery of the high-flown concepts like honor codes that supposedly guide the best of us.  It makes life a little more grotty.

It is also incompatible with membership in religious organizations, like Christianity (Though Christianity has a unique "Get of Jail Free" card which may be the loophole through which these "sinners" go; the idea will be developed in a later post.)  When we violate our bedrock codes at whim, what holds?

The story of Mr. Petraeus and his sex partner is nothing special in the pathetic annals of human behavior.  He and his wife will move on, as most people do, their lives a little more lackluster for wear, the weight of misery in the world ever-so-slightly re-weighted.  The sadly amusing thing to me is, religious people (as most Americans count themselves) have recourse to a rule book for good behavior, in this case: Thou shalt not commit adultery.  What would bite is if the good General issues a statement to the effect (as most upstanding people do) that his faith will bring him through this. No-- foul play: You are either All In, or you are out; do not invoke faith when you have forsaken it.

Reading the user comments following media coverage of the Petraeus story one sees the bifurcation in society.  Roughly half charge those who are disappointed in Mr. Petraeus with parochialism: "Everyone does it; get over it."  (There are permutations which alternately blame the wife for not being a pneumatic sex kitten and sympathize with his military life -- "It must get lonely".)  The other half hold up for the sanctity of marriage and the goodness of commitment, trust and all the other things that give comfort and safe harbor from life's storms

Count me with the latter group, parochial and seeking relationships as known quantities.  Not boring, my energy is not gotten from frenetic hook ups and "variety"; that drains me.  Looking at Petraeus or any man like him I think, what you have isn't very good.  Why the age-old impulse to take the swan dive?  Why do so few of us maintain something good? (Roll it back a few steps: Why do we not choose for the good at the get-go, groom it and revel in our good fortune?)

One answer is that The Good is different for all, despite the one-size fits all of religious or doctrinal creed. There are many ways to go in this world.  All that is required is that you make a choice, and that you honestly share that choice if you have a partner(s) running shotgun.  Immaculate honesty is the lubricant which best oils the wheels of any relationship.  

Having intimately known both behavioral styles (secretive versus direct, monogamous versus polygamous), the safe harbor, for me, is honesty.  Again, it all depends on your predilections and temperament.  If you need the hurricane and find the insane whirlwind stimulating, choose for it.  Or go be a deep-sea diver or drive race cars to satisfy your need for speed.  But the thing you do not get to do in good conscience is to take a lamb and behave like a wolf if you belong to a relational system based upon expectations of fealty.

When choosing for adultery your crime is betraying the others trust and rattling her belief system, nothing more, nothing less.  Your god is not surprised; he's already written you off as a sinner.  You have accomplished nothing rarefied or good.  Why not honestly go play in the shallow, crowded end of the pool, where there's fun aplenty and no entangling alliances?  The majority of people do not choose for the (openly) hedonic lifestyle because we have a sense that society would not long stand a majority who live by the creed, "More for me, and damn the rest."  What's good for you, if gotten at the others expense, is destructive.

We know eventually we'd get a stiletto in the back, so many of us make bargains, superficially making commitments that we do not intend to keep.  Those people keep a second and third book of accounts, thinking to hide something, because they have a sense of wrongdoing.  But the salvation for the rest of us is, their game eventually outs, maybe later than sooner, and wreckage will be the harvest.  But the marvelous thing about humans is their resiliency and ability to learn; the next wolf will be easier to spot.

An adjutant thought to this story is my disappointment in the media cabal over the last several years to convince us the marriage is passe, cheating, the norm.  While some of the studies upon which the latter assertion was predicated have been discredited, the stories persist and proliferate.  What is the agenda for downgrading these ideas which have allowed civil society to flourish?  Probably there is a political agenda, but that too is for another discussion.

Good luck to you, Mr. Petraeus.  I won't be looking at your or your lover's book.  And the wonder continues: When will we ever learn?

Torture and the Myth of Never Again

This fine piece on sentenced torture whistleblower John Kiriakou was written by friend and fellow blogger Peter Van Buren, and published on his site -- We Meant Well:

Torture and the Myth of Never Again: The Persecution of John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, pleaded guilty October 23, 2012 to leaking the identity of one of the agency’s covert operatives to a reporter and will be sentenced to more than two years in prison. As part of a plea deal, prosecutors dropped charges that had been filed under the World War I-era Espionage Act. They also dropped a count of making false statements. 

Under the plea, all sides agreed to a prison term of 2 1/2 years. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema noted the term was identical to that imposed on Scooter Libby, the chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was convicted in a case where he was accused of leaking information that compromised the covert identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, though Libby’s sentence was commuted by then-President George W. Bush.


Here is what military briefers like to call BLUF, the Bottom Line Up Front: no one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just blew the whistle on it.


In a Galaxy Far, Far Away

A long time ago, with mediocre grades and no athletic ability, I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship. I guess the Rhodes committee at my school needed practice, and I found myself undergoing a rigorous oral examination. Here was the final question they fired at me, probing my ability to think morally and justly: You are a soldier. Your prisoner has information that might save your life. The only way to obtain it is through torture. What do you do?

At that time, a million years ago in an America that no longer exists, my obvious answer was never to torture, never to lower oneself, never to sacrifice one’s humanity and soul, even if it meant death. My visceral reaction: to become a torturer was its own form of living death. (An undergrad today, after the “enhanced interrogation” Bush years and in the wake of 24, would probably detail specific techniques that should be employed.) My advisor later told me my answer was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise spectacularly unsuccessful interview.

It is now common knowledge that between 2001 and about 2007 the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) sanctioned acts of torture committed by members of the Central Intelligence Agency and others. The acts took place in secret prisons (“black sites”) against persons detained indefinitely without trial. They were described in detail and explicitly authorized in a series of secret torture memos drafted by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury, senior lawyers in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. (Office of Legal Counsel attorneys technically answer directly to the DOJ, which is supposed to be independent from the White House, but obviously was not in this case.) Not one of those men, or their Justice Department bosses, has been held accountable for their actions.

Some tortured prisoners were even killed by the CIA. Attorney General Eric Holder announced recently that no one would be held accountable for those murders either. “Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths,” he said, “the Department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Jose Rodriguez, a senior CIA official, admitted destroying videotapes of potentially admissible evidence, showing the torture of captives by operatives of the U.S. government at a secret prison thought to be located at a Vietnam-War-era airbase in Thailand. He was not held accountable for deep-sixing this evidence, nor for his role in the torture of human beings.


John Kiriakou Alone

The one man in the whole archipelago of America’s secret horrors facing prosecution is former CIA agent John Kiriakou. Of the untold numbers of men and women involved in the whole nightmare show of those years, only one may go to jail.

And of course, he didn’t torture anyone.

The charges against Kiriakou allege that in answering questions from reporters about suspicions that the CIA tortured detainees in its custody, he violated the Espionage Act, once an obscure World War I-era law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid to the enemy. It was passed in 1917 and has been the subject of much judicial and Congressional doubt ever since. Kiriakou is one of six government whistleblowers who have been charged under the Act by the Obama administration. From 1917 until Obama came into office, only three people had ever charged in this way.

The Obama Justice Department claims the former CIA officer “disclosed classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.”

The charges result from a CIA investigation. That investigation was triggered by a filing in January 2009 on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo that contained classified information the defense had not been given through government channels, and by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of alleged CIA employees among the legal materials of some detainees at Guantanamo. According to one description, Kiriakou gave several interviews about the CIA in 2008. Court documents charge that he provided names of covert Agency officials to a journalist, who allegedly in turn passed them on to a Guantanamo legal team. The team sought to have detainees identify specific CIA officials who participated in their renditions and torture. Kiriakou is accused of providing the identities of CIA officers that may have allowed names to be linked to photographs.

Many observers believe however that the real “offense” in the eyes of the Obama administration was quite different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He went on record as the first (albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it as torture. He specifically mentioned the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret prison in Thailand. Zubaydah was at the time believed to be an al-Qaeda leader, though more likely was at best a mid-level operative. Kiriakou also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear for publication a book he had written about the Agency’s counterterrorism work. He maintains that his is instead a First Amendment case in which a whistleblower is being punished, that it is a selective prosecution to scare government insiders into silence when they see something wrong.

If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone himself, even to death, there is no possibility that he would be in trouble. John Kiriakou is 48. He is staring down a long tunnel at a potential sentence of up to 45 years in prison because in the national security state that rules the roost in Washington, talking out of turn about a crime has become the only possible crime.


Welcome to the Jungle

John Kiriakou and I share common attorneys through the Government Accountability Project, and I’ve had the chance to talk with him on any number of occasions. He is soft-spoken, thoughtful, and quick to laugh at a bad joke. When the subject turns to his case, and the way the government has treated him, however, things darken. His sentences get shorter and the quick smile disappears.
He understands the role his government has chosen for him: the head on a stick, the example, the message to everyone else involved in the horrors of post-9/11 America. Do the country’s dirty work, kidnap, kill, imprison, torture, and we’ll cover for you. Destroy the evidence of all that and we’ll reward you. But speak out, and expect to be punished.

Like so many of us who have served the U.S. government honorably only to have its full force turned against us for an act or acts of conscience, the pain comes in trying to reconcile the two images of the U.S. government in your head. It’s like trying to process the actions of an abusive father you still want to love.

One of Kiriakou’s representatives, attorney Jesselyn Radack, told me, “It is a miscarriage of justice that John Kiriakou is the only person indicted in relation to the Bush-era torture program. The historic import cannot be understated. If a crime as egregious as state-sponsored torture can go unpunished, we lose all moral standing to condemn other governments’ human rights violations. By ‘looking forward, not backward’ we have taken a giant leap into the past.”

One former CIA covert officer, who uses the pen name “Ishmael Jones,” lays out a potential defense for Kiriakou: “Witness after witness could explain to the jury that Mr. Kiriakou is being selectively prosecuted, that his leaks are nothing compared to leaks by Obama administration officials and senior CIA bureaucrats. Witness after witness could show the jury that for any secret material published by Mr. Kiriakou, the books of senior CIA bureaucrats contain many times as much. Former CIA chief George Tenet wrote a book in 2007, approved by CIA censors, that contains dozens of pieces of classified information — names and enough information to find names.”
If only it was really that easy.


Never Again

For at least six years it was the policy of the United States of America to torture and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply suspected enemies. It has remained a U.S. policy, even under the Obama administration, to employ “extraordinary rendition” — that is, the sending of captured terror suspects to the jails of countries that are known for torture and abuse, an outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.

Techniques that the U.S. hanged men for at Nuremburg and in post-war Japan were employed and declared lawful. To embark on such a program with the oversight of the Bush administration, learned men and women had to have long discussions, with staffers running in and out of rooms with snippets of research to buttress the justifications being so laboriously developed. The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its torture staff. The old manuals needed to be updated, psychiatrists consulted, military survival experts interviewed, training classes set up.
Videotapes were made of the torture sessions and no doubt DVDs full of real horror were reviewed back at headquarters. Torture techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to top officials inside the White House. Individual torturers who were considered particularly effective were no doubt identified, probably rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm more people.

America just didn’t wake up one day and start slapping around some Islamic punk. These were not the torture equivalents of rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created. That we now can only speculate about many of the details involved and the extent of all this is a tribute to the thousands who continue to remain silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or were associated with. Many of them work now at the same organizations, remaining a part of the same contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our torturers.

What is it that allows all those people to remain silent? How many are simply scared, watching what is happening to John Kiriakou and thinking: not me, I’m not sticking my neck out to see it get chopped off. They’re almost forgivable, even if they are placing their own self-interest above that of their country. But what about the others, the ones who remain silent about what they did or saw or aided and abetted in some fashion because they still think it was the right thing to do? The ones who will do it again when another frightened president asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing it?

The same Department of Justice that is hunting down the one man who spoke against torture from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60 years after the end of WWII, dedicated to hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do that under the rubric of “never again.” The truth is that same team needs to be turned loose on our national security state. Otherwise, until we have a full accounting of what was done in our names by our government, the pieces are all in place for it to happen again. There, if you want to know, is the real horror.

The Watchtower

All I've got is three chords
and a red guitar and the truth
All I've got is a red guitar
and the rest is up to you,
--Along the Watchtower, U2

Why not think about times to come,
And not about the things that you've done,
If your life was bad to you,
Just think what tomorrow will do
--Don't Stop, Fleetwood Mac

Do or do not. There is no 'try'
--Yoda, Star Wars
________________

As the Wall Street Journal and other conservative outlets assiduously laid the ground for the release of the bad news, in the form of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) logs, President Obama firmly ensconced himself in the fence rider's position.

Yes, we will release the torture memos, but we will not stir up any dust actually letting Congress and the Justice Department do what they should do. Not exactly change you can be proud of. It is like putting perps behind the glass in a police line up, in perpetuity. You may look, but you may not touch.

In a sense, one can understand. Obama is a political animal; you don't make it to the White House lacking that qualification. Why should he expend political capital on an ugly business, when Susan Boyle may yet give us all hope of a better day? He is standing on the watchtower viewing his constituents' response.

What is the meaning of this gesture? It seems movement without progress, a formula which characterizes the entire Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©).

"[T]he administration plans to propose redacting parts of the memos. In addition to the prisoner names, certain operational details of interrogations are expected to stay secret. . ." vWhat could possibly remain secret, and what is the rationale? There is no middle ground.

The President cannot be anti-torture, yet defer prosecution of torture. It is disingenuous.

"White House spokesman Robert Gibbs declined to comment Wednesday on how the administration plans to handle the memos."

The memos are crummy little pieces of paper, with as little value as a GM stock cert or the average 401K. the crux of the biscuit is how to handle the illegal activity authorized by the memos.

In comments redacted from the online version of the article:

"[Obama] is wrestling with political pressure to distance himself from now-abandoned Bush administration programs while keeping on his side an agency that is critical in the fight against extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Portions of CIA Memos to be Released)."

This implies the CIA's loyalty must be purchased by the president via judicial compromise. However, the CIA does not work for the president but the taxpayers of America.

A senior administration official said, "[Obama] doesn't want to do anything that seems to be undercutting [the CIA] at the very time he needs them.]" But the U.S. does not need the help of a criminal agency or rogue elements thereof.

What we do need is a purge of the network that produced such criminality. The seine net should include the Departments of Justice and Defense, as well as CIA elements that compromised the legal requirements of a liberal democracy. Democracy and legality are not pick and choose concepts. You are or you aren't.

The big argument from the torturer's side is that "their activities were approved by the Justice Department at the time." Nuremburg, anyone? That precedent negates the faulty argument that allows the administrations and the CIA's sidestepping of legal consequences.

What is at stake are the issues of trust and accountability -- as Paul Krugman wrote yesterday, the soul of the nation has been rent. The taxpaying citizens are realizing that their leaders are a nepotistic mutual support society.

This same behavior has knocked our financial sector to its knees. Our own home-grown pirates hold us as a nation hostage, demanding tribute, exploiting our trust and patriotism.

We are holding a portfolio of toxic goods.

Hokey Smoke!

Boris, Natasha and Fearless Leader,
--Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

The Roman promoters really did things right.
They needed a show that would clearly excite.
The attendance was sparse so they put on a fight
Threw the Christians to the lions, sold out every night
--Give the People What they Want, The Kinks

But here, cleverly disguised as a bomb, is a bomb
--The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (1961)

This, too, shall pass
--Jewish folklore
_____________

The WaPo's David Ignatius offered a "Fix-It List for The Spies" following a recent Washington conference on how to fix the intel community.

President Bush broke the Central Intelligence Agency's credibility with Rice, Cheney and Rumsfeld's policies, which allowed Defense Department (DoD) agencies and non-intelligence offices to co-opt the functions of the CIA. The agency was buried with Tenet's infamous "slam dunk," the famous end-run to war.

While the agency had failures in the lead-up to war, they occurred due to our leaders' insistence on designer intelligence favoring their predetermined plans. The President, Vice President, DoD, National Security Adviser and Department of State wanted a war, so they produced intel to justify and validate that decision, rubber-stamped by Congress.

Ignatius says the next president, "will see the power of intelligence reporting but should also understand how the CIA has declined as an effective (and secret) arm of the commander in chief." This is the crux of the intelligence problem.

Both Porter Goss and William Tenet felt that they worked solely for the President -- faulty logic. The CIA doesn't work solely for the President. The CIA works for the U.S. policy makers and taxpaying citizens. We taxpayers can't read their reports but our lawmakers should assuredly read CIA intelligence briefs before voting on issues of war and peace. Briefings to the intelligence oversight committees are not sufficient to fulfill the requirements of a democracy.

What is the value of a vote based upon emotion versus facts, or at least predictive estimates based upon intelligence indicators? The President is not the Decider when it come to declaring war. Congress must be in the intel loop or its powers will be usurped and will osmose into the actions of an imperial President.

Ignatius says the the impending reorganization "should be rationalized." However, before rationalization a realistic mission for the CIA should be defined. The CIA was the premier civilian intel agency of the U.S. government until it became a subsidiary of the DoD under Hayden's stewardship. But the CIA does not work for the Secretary of Defense.

There needs to be a clear demarcation between civilian and military intelligence functions, as the two are not necessarily the same. A reorganization should address the areas of intersection.

Notably absent from discussions on reorganization is discussion of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's counter-intelligence mission. The FBI used to be the tool that protected the homeland from the terror threat. Where does this function reside now, and what is the action agency?

The FBI was and is the best tool to address domestic threats. The Department of Homeland Security is a redundant make-work project addressing a function that was already adequately addressed. The only FBI deficiency was in the area of resource allocation and interface with state and local law enforcement.

Ignatius reports,

"Art Brown, a longtime CIA case officer in Asia, said that when he finally came in from the cold, he realized that '99 percent of what we were producing overseas, nobody was reading.' That's got to stop."

Intel estimates must be declassified and disseminated to members of Congress. Reports and estimates are useless unless they are read by the key players in our government. Keeping congressmen out of the loop is not democracy.

Washington should learn from what's working in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Out in the field, you can see one intelligence community. The kids operate together -- analysts and collectors, military and civilian," said one former top DNI official. David Kilcullen, an Australian who is a counterinsurgency adviser to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, explained how soldiers and spies who understand tribal cultures are putting al-Qaeda on the run.

But why should Washington learn from what is working in Afghanistan and Iraq? In the long-term, nothing is working. Despite operational successes, winning or losing is not determined by one good capture in a chess game.

What is happening to America while we guard street corners in Kabul and Baghdad?

Military intelligence as it applies to the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) should not determine the reorganization of intelligence assets in the U.S. Intel is either civilian or defense in orientation, predictive or useless. These are the yardsticks.

Iraq and Afghanistan will come and go. Meanwhile the long-term interests of America are a constant needing to be addressed by the intelligence community. The definition of these interests and the implementation of policy to address and safeguard those interests are the function of intelligence.

Operational in-theatre military actionable intelligence does not equate to predictive national level intelligence. Military nuts and bolts, on-the-ground intel is separate from that required by national command authority. Intel in theatre is tactical; CIA intelligence is strategic -- two different animals.

Our leadership must define the collection requirements and the government must act upon these estimates once the intelligence is interpreted.

We must also remember that intelligence agencies are not action agencies. Strip the paramilitary direct action function from the CIA and put it in DoD where it most appropriately belongs.