We are well and truly fucked

What the actual fuck?

So we now learn that the CIA confirmed that Russia wasn't just trying to undermine confidence in the election, they were actively trying to get Trump elected. Most people with half a brain could see this already, but of course, this confirmation didn't come out before the damn election.

According to the article, they secretly briefed a bipartisan group of Congressional leaders in September, but "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present." Well no shit he would! And now his wife has been chosen by Trump to be the next Secretary of Transportation. The motherfucker decided to put party before country. What a surprise! And, because President Obama refused to release this information without bipartisan support, it's only coming out now. (Sorry, Obama. You should have brought on the drama with this one.)

There was also that report by David Corn in Mother Jones on October 31st:

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer's conversations with Russian sources, noted, "Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance." It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." It claimed that Russian intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him." It also reported that Russian intelligence had compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on "bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls." 

The former intelligence officer says the response from the FBI was "shock and horror."

This was published just a couple of days after Comey's letter apprising Congress of new emails "that appear to be pertinent" to the investigation of Hillary Clinton. A letter which broke with all tradition, and the law, regarding the FBI interfering with elections. And, we know now, that while Comey had no problem slinging mud Clinton's way, the FBI and CIA were investigating Trump on far more serious matters -- like being a goddamn Manchurian Candidate!

So fuck this whole 'It's all Hillary's fault for fucking up with white working class males' meme. She had the Russians and our FBI actively fighting against her...and she knew it. And she still got 2.8 million more votes than Trump...and counting.

Fuck Мистер Trump. Fuck Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republicans. Fuck Putin and the KGB. Fuck Comey and the FBI. And fuck the certain set of so called progressives who said it didn't matter if it was the Russians who were behind the hacked emails, it was more important that some things in those emails could hurt Bernie's feelings, and then cried 'red baiting.'

I don't even know what country this is anymore.

Spokoynoy Nochi

Yep, We Did. We Tortured Some Folks.

From CBS News:

The United States tortured al Qaeda detainees captured after the Sept. 11,2001 attacks, President Obama acknowledged Friday, in some of his most expansive comments to date about a controversial set of CIA practices that he banned after taking office.

From the White House Transcript:

I have full confidence in John Brennan. I think he has acknowledged and directly apologized to Senator Feinstein that CIA personnel did not properly handle an investigation as to how certain documents that were not authorized to be released to the Senate staff got somehow into the hands of the Senate staff. And it’s clear from the IG report that some very poor judgment was shown in terms of how that was handled. Keep in mind, though, that John Brennan was the person who called for the IG report, and he’s already stood up a task force to make sure that lessons are learned and mistakes are resolved.

With respect to the larger point of the RDI report itself, even before I came into office I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.

I understand why it happened. I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.

But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And that's what that report reflects. And that's the reason why, after I took office, one of the first things I did was to ban some of the extraordinary interrogation techniques that are the subject of that report.

Let's start with Brennan.  What he acknowledged was, in fact, his own dishonesty.  But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.  Let's take a step back.

There's an ongoing dispute in DC about the CIA's Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program.  The Senate Intelligence Committee's written a report that's now circulating behind the locked doors of Official Washington and a summary of it is (supposedly) on its way to being declassified and released:

The White House in the next few days is expected to declassify the long-awaited summary of a U.S. Senate committee study of a CIA program that used "enhanced interrogations" and secret prisons to extract information from captured militants, several officials familiar with the matter said.

Over the last two weeks, former directors and deputy directors of the CIA have been invited by the Obama administration to review a still-secret version of the 600-page Senate Intelligence Committee summary at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Officials familiar with its contents say it concludes that the CIA's use of harsh "enhanced interrogation" methods such as waterboarding, or simulated drowning, on a handful of prisoners, and other stress tactics on a larger set of captured militants, did not produce any significant counter-terrorism breakthroughs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Human rights activists and CIA critics, including some U.S. politicians, have described the CIA's techniques as torture.

The officials said the report also alleges that CIA officials misstated or exaggerated the results of the program by claiming such methods had helped to foil terrorist plots.

So according to those who've seen the report, the CIA tortured and then lied about the effectiveness of that torture.  The point here is that while the Senate was investigating the CIA's torturous RDI program, the Senate Intelligence Committee was actually spied on by the CIA.

Here's what Brennan said early on to Andrea Mitchell of NBC News:

As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. That's just beyond the scope of reason.

And that turns out to be completely and unquestionably false.  From CNN:

CIA Director John Brennan apologized to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday and admitted the agency spied on computers used by its staffers who prepared an investigation of the controversial post 9/11 CIA interrogation and detention program.

So that's how the DCIA and the CIA lied to everybody about the RDI program.

Now that we've established that, what's the bigger issue?

Because no matter how the President frames it, torture is still illegal.  From the United Nations Convention Against Torture, Article I:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

And now something from Article II:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

See?  No matter how bad 9/11 was, no matter how scared the people were, there's no justification to torture.  It's simply against the law - international law.

Let me add a footnote.  Torture's illegal according to this more recent law as well.  This was introduced by Senator John McCain as an amendment to a larger appropriations bill.  (It was later signed into law by George W. Bush):

No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

And so on.

Of course, this was in the age of the previous (and oh-so Republican) administration, the age of the Unitary Executive, when a President could sign a bill into law and then claim that it didn't always have to apply to him. From the Boston Globe in 2006:

When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach ''will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

Meaning:

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

It's interesting that there wasn't much of a peep then from today's Impeachment crowd.  Back then a (Republican) President was claiming the authority to side step International laws barring war crimes and there's more or less silence from the right wing.  Now a (Democratic) President issues an Executive Order rearranging some parts of the implementation of a law getting more Americans affordable health care and BAM! suddenly there's a constitutional crisis on the (pro-life) Right.

The sad sad part about all this is that the current (Democratic) President is letting the previous (Republican) President get away with war crimes.

I'm just wondering when Fox News will call for Obama's impeachment for the crime of giving Bush's waterboarding a pass.

How About NOW? Can We Prosecute The Torture NOW?

From McClatchy:

A still-secret Senate Intelligence Committee report calls into question the legal foundation of the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists, a finding that challenges the key defense on which the agency and the Bush administration relied in arguing that the methods didn't constitute torture.

And:

The investigation determined that the program produced very little intelligence of value and that the CIA misled the Bush White House, the Congress and the public about the effectiveness of the interrogation techniques, committee members have said.

The techniques included waterboarding, which produces a sensation of drowning, stress positions, sleep deprivation for up to 11 days at a time, confinement in a cramped box, slaps and slamming detainees into walls. The CIA held detainees in secret “black site” prisons overseas and abducted others who it turned over to foreign governments for interrogation.

And here's where offensive gets offensiv-ier:

Some current and former U.S. officials and military commanders, numerous experts and foreign governments have condemned the harsh interrogation methods as violations of international and U.S. laws against torture, a charge denied by the CIA and the Bush administration.

They've based their defense on a series of top-secret legal opinions issued by the Justice Department beginning in August 2002. At that time, the agency sought advice on whether using the harsh techniques on Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a close aide to Osama bin Laden who went by the nom de guerre Abu Zubaydah, would violate U.S. law against torture.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found that the methods wouldn't breach the law because those applying them didn't have the specific intent of inflicting severe pain or suffering.

The Senate report, however, concluded that the Justice Department’s legal analyses were based on flawed information provided by the CIA, which prevented a proper evaluation of the program’s legality. [Emphasis added.]

Now remember, those legal "opinions" of August, 2002 and afterwards were later characterized by Jack Goldsmith, one time head of the Office of Legal Counsel, as tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed. and he withdrew them on the day he resigned.  The memos were reissued and then later formally withdrawn by the Obama Administration

So the CIA lies to Justice about the torture, the OLC within Justice issues a set of memos OK-ing the CIA's torture and then the CIA uses the memos as a "golden shield" to protect them against...prosecution.

But if it's all based on a lie, then when can we start prosecuting the torture?

Zero Dark Thirty and Torture

From Glenn Greenwald (who admits early on that he's not reviewing the movie just commenting on the reaction to it - specifically about its portrayal of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden):

Earlier this year, the film "Zero Dark Thirty", which purports to dramatize the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, generated substantial political controversy. It was discovered that CIA and White House officials had met with its filmmakers and passed non-public information to them - at exactly the same time that DOJ officials were in federal court resisting transparency requests from media outlets and activist groups on the ground that it was all classified.

With its release imminent, the film is now garnering a pile of top awards and virtually uniform rave reviews. What makes this so remarkable is that, by most accounts, the film glorifies torture by claiming - falsely - that waterboarding and other forms of coercive interrogation tactics were crucial, even indispensable in finding bin Laden.

The "waterboarding led to the raid on bin Laden" story showed up recently on Morning Joe.

Too bad it's completely wrong - back to Greenwald:

The claim that waterboarding and other torture techniques were necessary in finding bin Laden was first made earlier this year by Jose Rodriguez, the CIA agent who illegally destroyed the agency's torture tapes, got protected from prosecution by the DOJ, and then profited off this behavior by writing a book. He made the same claim as "Zero Dark Thirty" regarding the role played by torture in finding bin Laden.

That caused two Senators who are steadfast loyalists of the CIA - Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin - to issue statements definitively debunking this assertion. Even the CIA's then-Director, Leon Panetta, made clear that those techniques played no role in finding bin Laden. An FBI agent central to the bin Laden hunt said the same.

From Senator Levin's and Senator Feinstein's statement:

CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier from detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the agency discover the courier's identity from detainees subjected to coercive techniques. No detainee reported on the courier's full name or specific whereabouts, and no detainee identified the compound in which UBL was hidden. Instead, the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.

And if that's not good enough fer ya, here's what Panetta wrote in a letter to Senator John McCain:

Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. there was no one “essential and indispensible” key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence — including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources — led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier’s role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the “only timely and effective way” to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.

Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier’s nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier’s role were alerting.

In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means. [Emphasis from Washington Post reporting.]

So it's not the case that torture was the necessary component in gathering the intelligence necessary to find bin Laden - so this "ends justify the means" story is false.

Oh, and by the way, torture is still illegal.  The Bush Administration still ordered the torture and they still haven't been held accountable for it.  Until it is corrected, this one story will forever disgrace the Obama legacy - they let Bush get away with war crimes.

(h/t to Bob Mayo for posting Geenwald's piece on his facebook page)

They just can't help themsleves

Via Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

When House Republicans called a hearing in the middle of their long recess, you knew it would be something big, and indeed it was: They accidentally blew the CIA’s cover.  

The purpose of Wednesday’s hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee was to examine security lapses that led to the killing in Benghazi last month of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others. But in doing so, the lawmakers reminded us why “congressional intelligence” is an oxymoron.  

Through their outbursts, cryptic language and boneheaded questioning of State Department officials, the committee members left little doubt that one of the two compounds at which the Americans were killed, described by the administration as a “consulate” and a nearby “annex,” was a CIA base. They did this, helpfully, in a televised public hearing.

Hmm, Republicans leaking classified CIA info will trying to smear the opposition. Where have I heard that before?

Scaife Says Goodbye To An Old Friend

And in doing so leads us to some, shall we say, interesting connections.

From saturday's op-ed page:

Many of you likely have never heard of Brian Crozier. More’s the pity. For Mr. Crozier, who died Aug. 4 on his 94th birthday, was one of this nation’s most important educators.

No, Crozier wasn’t a teacher, per se. But he was a teacher nonetheless. In fact, he was a teacher extraordinaire.

The native Australian began his career as a music and art critic. Then he began a long and storied tenure as an international correspondent, first with Reuters in the Far East. He later would write for The Economist and National Review, among many others.

Oh, but he did so much more than that.  More on Crozier's bona fides:

Crozier’s insightful reporting was years ahead of the pack. He exposed the horrors of Lenin and Stalin and detailed how misguided were the efforts to live with Communism. Detente, he showed, only emboldened the spread of Communism, undermining leaders and nations all too willing to go along to get along.

So deep were Crozier’s sources and so accurate was his information that he became a de facto intelligence agency for British and U.S. leaders during the Cold War. As another legendary journalist, John O’Sullivan, put it, he did “more than most to bring about the collapse of Communism, and when it happened, it confirmed the truth of his brave and often unpopular criticisms.”

Note the part about how "he became a de facto intelligence agency for British and U.S. leaders" a few decades ago.

But the whole thing felt out of place.  Why this obituary now?  On the surface, it's obvious that it's an old man (Scaife) paying tribute to an old friend (Crozier) who's passed away.  And who can argue with that?

On the other hand, I was still curious about who this Brian Crozier was.  So I looked up Mr Crozier and found this obit at The Guardian.  This further piqued my interest:

In the 1960s, at MI6's suggestion, Crozier was approached by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded agency that financed publications around the world, including Encounter magazine in Britain. In 1966, with the help of CIA funds, he set up a British-based agency, Forum World Features, and later founded the Institute for the Study of Conflict.

Guess who has a connection to both the Forum World Features.

From the Washington Post in 1999:

Scaife undertook one unusual media enterprise in his own name. In 1968, he agreed to replace John Hay Whitney, last owner of the New York Herald Tribune, as the head of the parent firm of Forum World Features, a London-based news agency that received subsidies and guidance from the CIA. The proprietor of Forum, Brian Crozier, has said he was introduced to Scaife by the CIA. Scaife has never spoken about this.

Who knew that Richard Mellon Scaife once fronted a CIA Propaganda firm?

But this is nothing new, my friends, the Washington Post had the story in 1975.

CIA Experimentation on Detainees

A newly released white paper by Physicians for Human Rights reports that there is 'Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Program.'

According to the report:

PHR analyzes three instances of apparent illegal and unethical human subject research for this report:

1. Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop, and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures;

2. Information on the effects of simultaneous versus sequential application of the interrogation techniques on detainees was collected and used to establish the policy for using tactics in combination. These data were gathered through an assessment of the presumed “susceptibility” of the subjects to severe pain;

3. Information collected by health professionals on the effects of sleep deprivation on detainees was used to establish the “enhanced” interrogation program’s (EIP) sleep deprivation policy.

The report indicates, that not only were detainees tortured (which we already know), but that the initial torture was heavily monitored by health professionals in order to establish a fake new definition of torture to try to cover their asses legally for subsequent torture sessions.

Of course in experimenting to see just how far they thought they could go while torturing, they actually managed to perpetuate additional crimes as human experimentation without the consent of the subject is, as the report states, illegal:

[It's] a violation of international human rights law to which the United States is subject; federal statutes; the Common Rule, which comprises the federal regulations for research on human subjects and applies to 17 federal agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD); and universally accepted health professional ethics, including the Nuremberg Code. Human experimentation on detainees also can constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity in certain circumstances.

You can download the report here (.PDF)

UPDATE: The New York Times calls for an investigation.
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City Council Hearing Today on Ravenstahl's Honoring of Bush's NSA/CIA Dir. Michael Hayden (Updated 1x)

Michael Hayden seated at the center of the table
Of all the boneheaded moves by Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, this may be the most inexplicable and easily avoidable.

Here's a clue, Lil Mayor Luke: You don't honor a man who has a record of condoning torture, destroying evidence and misleading Congress about Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program which Hayden himself helped to implement.

Pretty simple, huh?

But that's precisely what Ravenstahl has done.

From WDUQ News:

A small nameplate honoring Gen. Michael V. Hayden at the corner of Allegheny Avenue and North Shore Drive will be the subject of what could be a big public hearing today before Pittsburgh Council. Greg Barnhisel of Pittsburgh’s Park Place neighborhood noticed the nameplate while visiting the Carnegie Science Center. Barnhisel says he does not question the debt of gratitude owed to the general for his service in the U.S. Air Force but he does question the wisdom of honoring him for his work after leaving the military. Hayden left the Air Force as a four-star general to become the Director of the National Security Agency and then the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. While in those post Hayden became a lightening rod for the left when he helped to implement the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program and then helped defined the CIA’s interrogation program that many have equated to torture. Hayden is a native of Pittsburgh and Mayor Luke Ravenstahl honored him with the plaque but did not get it approved by the city council. Something he did not have to do but is customary. Barnhisel Gathered the needed signatures on a petition to get the hearing scheduled. He says the way the mayor posted the nameplate should be part of the debate at today’s public hearing and so should an examination of the appropriateness of honoring Hayden. What he does not want is to have the public hearing devolve into a debate about Bush era policies. The hearing begins at 9:00am in Council Chambers.

And, if you're wondering about the illustration at the top, I created it back in 2006 for a post entitled Bush's Made Men. In that post, I quoted Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, on Hayden's nomination to CIA Director by George W. Bush:

As these shadowy figures multiply, you can understand why civil libertarians increasingly see the White House like a gathering at Tony Soprano's Bada Bing! club. In Soprano's world, you cannot become a "made man" unless you first earn your bones by "doing" some guy or showing blind loyalty. Only when you have proven unquestioning loyalty does Tony "open the books" for a new guy.

Hayden earned his bones by implementing the NSA operation despite clear federal law declaring such surveillance to be a criminal act. He can now join the rest of the made men of the Bush administration.

Heck of a job, Lukey!

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UPDATE:

WPXI coverage here.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette coverage here.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review coverage here.
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Jack Kelly Sunday

In this week's column (a column my friend Ed Heath calls "silly") Jack Kelly both attacks and defends the CIA.

And en passant he spins torture into a clumsy euphemism. Take a look:

Attorney General Eric Holder -- who before his confirmation hearings told senators he wouldn't -- has appointed a special prosecutor to pursue CIA interrogators who discomforted al-Qaida bigwigs to get them to talk.

Discomforted? Is that even a word? First off, let's rid ourselves of the clumsy. It was torture. Take a look at this is from January of this year:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

But even what Crawford calls torture won't be prosecuted (as the current investigation will only focus on the torture that wasn't authorized):

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said. [emphasis added.]

So what was that which "discomforted" those bigwigs? From the LATimes:

Reporting from Washington - The CIA staged a mock execution and brandished weapons, including a gun and a power drill, during interrogation sessions with detainees, according to a long-secret internal CIA report expected to be released Monday.

The episodes are part of a catalog of alleged abuses -- a 2004 report by the CIA's inspector general -- that has prompted Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to consider appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate cases in which the CIA strayed beyond its authorities.

Do we really need to look at the law again? Yea, I guess we do. Here's the US Code on Torture.

In it "torture" is defined as:

...means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

And includes:

(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality;

So, yea, I am guessing that showing a detainee a mock execution or brandishing a running power drill (leaving him to believe he'll be subject a similar fate if he doesn't cooperate) constitutes torture. And it's against the law.

That's what Jack calls "discomfort." If it's for a good cause, Room 101 is sometimes necessary, I guess.

But let's look at the rest of the column. He says of the CIA:

Most of the intelligence we collect is gathered by the National Security Agency (electronic intercepts) or by the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (spy satellites). The CIA's role has pretty much been restricted to human intelligence and analyzing intel gathered by others.

It's done a poor job of both. The most frighteningly funny book I've read in a long time is "The Human Factor," the memoir of "Ishmael Jones" of his career as a non-official cover officer (NOC) of the CIA.[emphasis added.]

Ishmael Jones may be in a bit of a pickle, however. Take a look at this from the Congressional Quarterly, July 2008:

A 25-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service has written a scathing — and unauthorized — account of the spy agency’s management, setting up an unprecedented legal test of former employees’ rights to pen tell-all books.

Writing under the pseudonym “Ishmael Jones,” the author says he wrote “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture” in order to “improve the system and help it defend ourselves and our allies.”

The CQ article compares Jones to another ex-CIA writer, Frank Snepp, who got in trouble with the CIA for, among other things, by-passing the CIA censors. CQ continues:

Jones did something far more dangerous, Snepp thinks, by submitting his manuscript for clearance then “thumbing his nose” at CIA censors because he didn’t like their censorship decisions. “God knows what the hell could happen to him,” Snepp said.

“I did the best I could,” Jones told me. “I sent it to them more than a year ago, and I said, ‘Please tell me what you want taken out of this, or re-written,’ repeatedly. But they disapproved all of it, with the exception of a few sentences. They approved maybe one percent of the book.”

So he went ahead without their clearance, he said.

So it was sent to the CIA sometime in 2007 and he published anyway?? And Jack condones this?

All that aside, I have to ask (rhetorically, for I already know the answer), who was President in 2007? Jack never quite gets around to saying. Though he does, of course, lay out some serious blame on the current AG.

Nor does Jack include this in the chronology:

The CIA has also misled Congress on its spending, he maintains, diverting billions of dollars that were supposed to bolster its spying operations overseas into a dramatic expansion of offices inside the United States.

“It’s been a constant promise to Congress since I joined in the 1980s that we’re going to get out of the embassies. It didn’t mean into the United States,” Jones said. “The billions given to the agency after 9/11 to get case officers out of the embassies were intended to put them overseas,” he said. “And what they’re doing is hiring a lot of people, putting them in training for a very long time, and then they’re stacking them up in U.S. offices.”

“We probably had more case officers in California than we did in Iraq,” he writes.

Tell me again who was President post-9/11 and pre-Eric Holder?

Jack doesn't.

Oh, any by the way: Torture is illegal. Always illegal.

So What WAS Cheney's Secret Program?

It might not be al-Qaeda assassinations. Why not?

From TPMMuckraker:

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization.

Since the war on terror began, said Cannistraro, the CIA has routinely conducted operations targeting top Qaeda leaders. "The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time," said Cannistraro, explaining that there's no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife.

Makes sense. But then there is this from the Guardian in the UK:

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel's Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.

So it's not necessarily assassinations, but secret assassinations in friendly countries. As TPM quotes, this is something Seymore Hersh wrote about something like this a while ago:

Under Rumsfeld's new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon's current interpretation of its reporting requirement.

TPM goes on with this nasty bit:

But Cannistraro cautioned that that DOD program has nothing to do with the secret, unidentified CIA program which Cheney is said to have hid from Congress, and which CIA director Leon Panetta ended last month.

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn't acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro.

This seems to be backed up by something Karen Tumulty reports in Time. She quotes her colleague Bobby Ghoush:

Speculation abounds about the nature of the secret program Dick Cheney asked the CIA to keep from the Congressional oversight committees. The most sensational reports suggest it was plan to find and kill top Al Qaeda leaders – like the covert Israeli campaign to take out the perpetrators of the Munich killings.

But two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there's another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA's purview -– it's usually the FBI's job – and it's easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they're only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

There's not enough information right now for this to be anything other than speculation but the fact that it made it this far says something.

Of course the wingnuts are still screaming about birth certificates.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Short late blog entry - I was up most of the night working on this.

In this week's column, Jack Kelly proves yet again that it's what he leaves out that's at least as important to a fuller understanding of his topic as what he actually says.

This time it's the DNI/CIA "turf wars." Jack begins with the story of President Obama at Five Guys:

While waiting for his burgers, the president chatted up a fellow named Walter, with whom Mr. Obama had this exchange:

Mr. Obama: "What do you do, Walter?"

Walter: "I work at NGA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency."

Mr. Obama: "Outstanding. How long you been doing that?"

Walter: "About six years."

Mr. Obama: "You like it?"

Walter: "I do, keeps me ..."

Mr. Obama: "So explain to me what this National Geospatial ... uh ..."

Walter: "We, uh, work with satellite imagery."

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is, after the National Security Agency and the CIA, America's most important intelligence agency. It's hard to imagine a daily presidential intelligence briefing that doesn't include at least some slides from the NGA.

When Ben Smith reported the conversation in his column at Politico.com, it set off a firestorm of comments.

"I teach an undergrad course on National Security," wrote Frederick somebody. "Any student who has passed my course knows exactly what the NGA is and what they do. It is frightening that our president apparently has no clue."

If Mr. Obama is as ignorant of the intelligence community as this anecdote suggests, he'll be a poor referee of the turf war that has broken out between his director of national intelligence and the CIA.

And that sets up the remainder of the piece.

I did want to point out the comment posted at Ben Smith's blog. You can find it here. In fact it looks like this:

Notice anything about this screen capture? If you look really really carefully you'll see that the "Frederik Something" Jack quotes didn't actually post what Jack says he posted. He got it wrong.

Teeny tiny point, I realize, but if you're fact-checking the President of the United States doncha think you should have ALL YOUR OWN facts straight? Kinda helps with the credibility issues, doesn't it?

My best guess is that Jack Kelly doesn't think so.

And since when are anonymous comments (even mis-attributed ones) valid sources of information at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette? If they are shouldn't this one from the same blog posting be just as valid? Here's what "Chris Something" posted (and Jack omitted):

Actually, they're probably called DOD in the daily briefing. Probally not NGA.

By the way, there are sixteen agencies that make up the US Intelligence Community. Exactly half of them found in the Department of Defense. The NGA is only one of those eight. My guess is that President Obama does have a clue about the NGA. Considering this from the White House last February:

President Obama will visit the construction site of Fairfax County Parkway connector, serving the new east campus of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). NGA is consolidating its eastern facilities with Fort Belvoir Engineer Proving Ground, and it is also under construction.

Why he asked about the NGA at the Five Guys is anybody's guess.

By the way Five Guys has great burgers. Not Red Robin great, but great nonetheless.

But all this is besides the point. What is at point is what Jack omits regarding the current DNI/DCI turf wars. Here's what he says:

A turf war was inevitable once Congress created the post of DNI -- who is supposed to coordinate the activities of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies -- in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Before the reorganization, that was the responsibility of the CIA director.

The two DNIs who served during the Bush administration assumed control over joint intelligence analysis centers, such as the National Counterterrorism Center, where data from various agencies are analyzed.

The Bush DNIs also took from the CIA director responsibility for liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services. As a result, the Central Intelligence Agency is no longer "central." Most technical intelligence is gathered by NSA and NGA, and is analyzed in the joint centers. That leaves the CIA responsible, chiefly, for the gathering of human intelligence.

Now, according to a report May 23 by Pamela Hess of the Associated Press, Mr. Obama's DNI, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, wants to impinge upon that remaining CIA niche.

Adm. Blair, Ms. Hess wrote, wants "to choose his own representatives at U.S. embassies instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs."

Here is Hess' reporting.

As always, Jack leaves something out. At issue, according to Jack, is that the DNI wants "to choose his own representatives" and so on. But look a few paragraphs down from what Jack quotes. Here it is:

From the DNI's perspective, the proposal would allow Blair to tap the most relevant intelligence officer in an embassy or foreign country to serve as his eyes and ears.

In most cases that would be the CIA station chief. The station chief system has existed for 50 years, allowing the CIA to call the shots on pursuing and managing relationships with foreign intelligence and security services, and coordinating _ and sometimes constraining _ the work of other U.S. intelligence agencies and military forces abroad.

But in some countries the United States has few if any spies on the ground, and relies instead mostly on electronic eavesdropping to collect intelligence. A former senior intelligence official said that in those cases, Blair might want to have the senior National Security Agency officer instead of the station chief at the embassy serve as his personal representative.

The CIA last year successfully derailed a similar effort by the national intelligence director's office, then headed by former Adm. Mike McConnell. [emphasis added.]

So then there's...huh? So this isn't a NEW turfwar? This isn't a NEW intelligence issue threatening the Homeland? No my children, it isn't. Take a look at what it says here at Homeland Security Today:

The latest dispute between DCI Leon Panetta and DNI Dennis Blair has its roots in inaugural DNI John Negroponte having designated an intelligence officer that answers directly to the DNI be installed at embassies, military commands and overseas posts – a position that ruffled the feathers of the traditional turf authority of the CIA’s Chiefs of Station (COS), the IC’s principal representatives abroad since 1947.

But despite Negroponte’s IC CEO authority, his plan was never fully achieved and the Bush administration eventually had to issue a presidential directive - the first executive-level overhaul of the IC’s powers in more than 25 years - to cement in place the authorities of the DNI that apparently were left much too unstable by Congress’s reform of the IC that established the office of DNI to begin with.

Like his predecessor, McConnell also tried to establish his own eyes and ears abroad answerable only to the DNI. Objections by the DCI left the matter still unresolved by the time Barrack Obama was elected President.

And now the issue has erupted all over again as Blair also is trying to install his own representatives at embassies instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs.

Huh. So Jack Kelly omits the part about how the Bush Administration could have/should have resolved this but didn't.

Go figure.

Yet another Bush Administration mess for the Obama Administration to clean up.

Jack Kelly Sunday

A little late. Sorry.

Jack Kelly takes on Leon Panetta in this week's column.

He doesn't like Panetta as CIA head:

There are, I suspect, quite a few jobs in government for which having no experience is not a liability. But few would list director of central intelligence among them. Which is why Barack Obama's pick of Leon Panetta is causing so much consternation.

A former congressman, Mr. Panetta, 70, served as budget director and then as chief of staff in the Clinton administration. But he's never spent a day serving in the intelligence community.

Then, a little historical revisionism regarding John Brennan:

Mr. Obama originally had planned to tap John Brennan, who was head of the National Counterterrorism Center at the time of his retirement in 2005. But the rumored appointment ignited a storm of protest from left-wingers who opposed the coercive interrogation techniques the CIA used on some high- level al-Qaida prisoners.

"The fact that I was not involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored," Mr. Brennan said in a Nov. 26 letter withdrawing his name.

As with most things Jack reports, reality is a bit different. Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan:

[The Atlantic] reports the Republican, former chief-of-staff for George Tenet (who authorized war crimes as CIA head), admirer of Dick Cheney, CEO of the company one of whose contract employees improperly accessed Obama's and McCain's passports, and defender of renditions and "enhanced interrogations" is still Obama's front-runner pick to head the CIA.

And this is what the Atlantic reported:

But, as George Tenet's chief of staff and deputy executive dierctor, Brennan was undoubtedly read into some of the Bush Administration's more controversial intelligence programs, although there is no evidence that he made decisions. In interviews since leaving the government, Brennan has expressed support for the government's rendition policy, calling it effective, "enhanced" interrogation techniques and immunity for telecommunications companies involved in government spying efforts.

More stuff Jack leaves out.

But then Jack takes an odd turn:

Many of those worried about Mr. Panetta have an outdated view of the importance of the CIA. After 9/11 a huge new layer of bureaucracy was imposed on the intelligence community. This was mostly stupid, because there was too much bureaucracy already. But it made the CIA much less important.

Most of the intelligence we gather is collected by the National Security Agency, through its electronic eavesdropping, and by the satellite photos taken by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

The CIA essentially got out of the HUMINT business (human intelligence) when the Clinton administration slashed its budget in the early 1990s. Most of such little intelligence as the CIA now gathers comes from the interrogation of prisoners. But most prisoner interrogations are done by the military.

The CIA still has its analysis branch, which has missed most of the major developments of the last 20 years. And analysis work has been migrating to the various multi-agency intelligence centers established after 9/11.

So the CIA, in Jack view, has a diminished level of importance. He goes on:

The real head cheese is the director of national intelligence. For this job Mr. Obama has selected retired Adm. Dennis Blair. He's a former commander of Pacific Command, a former associate director of the CIA and a Rhodes scholar who once water-skied behind the destroyer he was commanding.

So now I'm lost. The reduced CIA is headed by someone Jack feels isn't qualified. But "the real head cheese" (i.e. the person really in charge) is qualified?

So what's Jack worried about?

By the way one small fact check. Jack writes:

The CIA essentially got out of the HUMINT business (human intelligence) when the Clinton administration slashed its budget in the early 1990s.

You hear that often from the right wing media. But is it true? Hard to tell. Politifact has the story - starting from Rudy Giuliani making the charge that the CIA budget was reduced by Clinton. It's all based on the testimony of former CIA-head cheese George Tenet.

Things get more complicated after that:

It is true that Clinton oversaw decreases in the intelligence budget and that Tenet has described the budget situation when he became CIA director in 1997, four years into Clinton’s presidency, as a disaster. But Tenet has never placed blame on Clinton in the way Giuliani describes (which makes sense since Clinton made him director).

Likewise, Giuliani neglects to provide some important context: The CIA budget cuts began under the first President Bush and were reversed, under Tenet’s leadership, late in the Clinton presidency and before the 9/11 attacks.

And:

But Tenet doesn’t say whether Clinton accelerated the rate of decline or followed the trend begun by Bush, and proving it is impossible. That’s because, with the exception of the current fiscal year and fiscal years 1997 and 1998 — when Tenet agreed to release the overall budget figure after the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — the government has classified the intelligence budget on national security grounds.

And then finally:

In his testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Tenet said that he’d made considerable headway in boosting the agency’s resources prior to the 9/11 attacks. “Between 1999 and 2001, our human agent base against the terrorist target grew by over 50 percent,” he said.

Interesting what you can find once you actually look.

The P-G Weighs In On Torture

Here.

Historians will look back on the Bush years as either the beginning of America's Dark Ages or its end.

In conducting the war on terror, the administration of President Bush has not called upon "the better angels" of America's nature, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln. If anything, the nation has been encouraged to set aside previous moral convictions. Mr. Bush believes it makes more sense to mirror the ruthlessness of America's enemies than to honor the values that make us distinct from them.

According to this moral logic, a tough enemy requires the use of even tougher interrogation techniques. As long as al-Qaida remains in the shadows, qualms are a luxury Americans can't afford, according to Mr. Bush. This is the kind of reasoning that has led to outrages against human dignity throughout history.

We've also seen here (in the comments of various postings) the rather useless argument that goes something like:

Well, since we haven't been attacked since 9/11 it follows that the President HAS protected us. And if that protection includes any "enhanced techniques" necessary to protect American lives, I say go for it! Let's Roll! Bring it on!

First off, that argument assumes that there HAVE been attacks since 9/11 and that those attacks were in fact thwarted by this administration. Given the vast array of lies and deceptions spewed out by this administration since 9/11, how can we be sure that anything it says is correct?

Wasn't this an al-Qaeda cell?

The Associated Press is reporting that a federal jury in Miami has acquitted one defendant of charges of plotting to link up with al-Qaeda to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower.

The jury, however, could not reach agreement on the other six defendants, and a mistrial was declared.

Summed up:

The AP says Bush administration had seized on the case to illustrate the dangers of homegrown terrorism and underscore the government’s post-Sept. 11 success in infiltrating and smashing terrorism plots in their earliest stages.

Back to the P-G:

Last week, the House of Representatives voted 222-199 to outlaw waterboarding by the CIA. The legislation rejects waterboarding as an interrogation tool. The majority of Democrats who voted for the ban are trying to impose the same rules on U.S. intelligence that govern the conduct of the Army.

The bill also bans "techniques" that employ mock executions, attack dogs, sexual humiliation, starvation and the withholding of medical care. As if to remind everyone of his medieval bona fides, Mr. Bush has promised to veto the bill if it wins Senate approval.

Recently, though Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) put a hold on the legislation. His reason?

I think quite frankly applying the Army field manual to the CIA would be ill-advised and would destroy a program that I think is lawful and helps the country.

If it helps the country, then why not let the Army do it? Or as Spencer Ackerman put it in that same article:

So torture is counterproductive for the military but valuable for the CIA?

Absurd.

The P-G ends with a rhetorical question:

We need a leader who will chart a new path. Can the United States reclaim its place as a beacon of moral behavior, or will it follow Mr. Bush into the Dark Ages?

Only time will tell.

Happy Monday.

More Proof Plame Was COVERT

Saw this in the news yesterday (or "yesstiddy" as we'd say in New England).

It should, though I know it won't, finally end the ruckus about Valerie Plame's CIA status. Turns out she was COVERT. The Reality-Based Community already knew that, but it's nice to see it in court documents filed by a US Attorney.

An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame's employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was "covert" when her name became public in July 2003.

Ok raise your hands, how many of you on the right are now blushing red out of embarrassment? How many made the charge in the news or on your radio shows that Plame wasn't covert because you could call her desk at the CIA? How many claimed she was just a soccer mom?

Plame worked as an operations officer in the Directorate of Operations and was assigned to the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) in January 2002 at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The employment history indicates that while she was assigned to CPD, Plame, "engaged in temporary duty travel overseas on official business." The report says, "she traveled at least seven times to more than ten times." When overseas Plame traveled undercover, "sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias -- but always using cover -- whether official or non-official (NOC) -- with no ostensible relationship to the CIA."

You can read the court document here. Again, show of hands. How many right wingers out there based at least part of their incorrect assertion that Plame was not covert on the "fact" that she hadn't travelled overseas? That "fact" isn't a fact at all is it?

Will you be apologising for your error? Will you at least be pointing out that you were in error?

We're waiting...

More on Valerie Plame's Status

I see that someone calling himself "Honzman" has wished the Other Political Junkie a Happy Birthday.

Let's hope that it IS Fred "The Honzman" Honsberger who's checking out the blog - if he sticks around long enough, maybe he'll learn something. Hahahaha!

Fred, if it is you, you need to take a look at the transcript from The House Commmittee on Oversight and Government Reform Hearing on CIA Identity Leak on Friday the 16th. Henry Waxman opened said this:

This hearing is being conducted in open session. This is appropriate, but it is also challenging. Ms. Wilson was a covert employee of the CIA. We cannot discuss all of the details of her CIA employment in open session.

I have met, personally, with General Hayden, the head of the CIA, to discuss what I can and cannot say about Ms. Wilson's service. And I want to thank him for his cooperation and help in guiding us along these lines.

My staff has also worked with the agency to ensure these remarks do not contain classified information.

I have been advised by the CIA and that even now, after all that has happened, I cannot disclose the full nature, scope and character of Ms. Wilson's service to our nation without causing serious damage to our national security interests.

But General Hayden and the CIA have cleared these following comments for today's hearing.

During her employment at the CIA, Ms. Wilson was undercover. Her employment status with the CIA was classified information, prohibited from disclosure under Executive Order 12958.

At the time of the publication of Robert Novak's column on July 14, 2003, Ms. Wilson's CIA employment status was covert. This was classified information.

Ms. Wilson served in senior management positions at the CIA, in which she oversaw the work for other CIA employees and she attained the level of GS-14, Step 6, under the federal pay scale.

Ms. Wilson worked on some of the most sensitive and highly secretive matters handled by the CIA.

Ms. Wilson served at various times overseas for the CIA.[emphasis added]

Here we have the chairman of a powerful House committee declaring, in statements cleared by the CIA and the head of the CIA (and Pittsburgh native, by the way) Michael Hayden, that Valerie Plame was "undercover" her employment status was "covert" and that that information was "classified."

Finally, releasing that information was a violation of Executive Order 12958.

Fred, will you be stating anytime soon how wrong you've been for these last few years when you repeatedly said in no uncertain terms that Valerie Plame was not covert?

I mean, the frickin head of the CIA just said she was. What that means to you is, you're just plain wrong whenever you said she wasn't.

Aren't you?