Former CIA leaders, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and George Tenet have sent a letter to President Obama asking him to reverse Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to investigate interrogation abuses allegedly committed by CIA personnel. (Joining these three were also former Directors John Deutch, James Woolsey, William Webster, and James Schlesinger.) These seven have expressed concern that the investigation will discourage CIA operatives from doing their job in the future. So I guess torture is ok if you are simply trying to do your job.

From an organizational morale perspective, these former CIA Directors have a legitimate point. Their subordinates are intentional put in the difficult position of gathering intelligence where the rules of the road are not always clear or at a minimum, vary greatly from what US law allows. In these post 9/11 suspected abuses, the CIA had, to its credit, consistently sought clarification from the Administration on what they could legally do. Thanks to patriotic chicken hawks like Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and Jonathan Yoo, the CIA got the nod to stray way over the line. So there is a certain logic to the genesis of this letter.

Pursuing CIA operatives who may have tortured is pursuing the symptoms and not the disease. The investigation and prosecution should focus upon Goss, Tenet, and Hayden, and those who requested, formulated, or promoted enhanced interrogation. Waterboarding and violations of the Geneva Convention can not be justified as legal by any Executive Branch directive, and Goss, Tenet, and Hayden should have been expected to know this.

So for Goss, Tenet, and Hayden to sign this letter and claim the basis as hurting morale, we are seeing disingenuous words at their best, These three blind mice are really concerned about any investigation and the possibility of being included in the sweep themselves.

Ex-CIA Chiefs Decry Holder Interrogator Probe in Letter to Obama

Seven former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency on Friday urged President Obama to reverse Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to hold a criminal investigation of CIA interrogators who used enhanced techniques on detainees.

The directors, whose tenures span back as far as 35 years, wrote a letter to the president saying the cases have already been investigated by the CIA and career prosecutors, and to reconsider those decisions makes it difficult for agents to believe they can safely follow legal guidance.

“Attorney General Holder’s decision to re-open the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute,” they wrote.

“Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions,” the seven added.

The letter was signed by former directors Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, George Tenet, John Deutch, R. James Woolsey, William Webster and James R. Schlesinger.

. . .

in their letter to Obama, the directors wrote that not only is there a significant personal burden put on agents forced to defend themselves, “but this approach will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country.”

They added that the president has the authority to decide which legal recommendations to permit for interrogation methods, but at no time is public disclosure helpful for intelligence officers trying to protect the U.S. from further attacks.

The directors also warned that if the investigations are opened up, they fear that the assistance given to the United States by foreign intelligence agencies may jeopardize future cooperation.

“Foreign services are already greatly concerned about the United States’ inability to maintain any secrets. They rightly fear that, through these additional investigations and the court proceedings that could follow, terrorists may learn how other countries came to our assistance in a time of peril,” they wrote. “As a result of the zeal on the part of some to uncover every action taken in the post-9/11 period, many countries may decide that they can no longer safely share intelligence or cooperate with us on future counter-terrorist operations.

See also:
Text of Letter (PDF)
Ex-CIA chiefs seek halt to interrogations probe
Former CIA Chiefs Ask Obama to Stop CIA Probe
Former C.I.A. Chiefs Protest Justice Inquiry of Interrogation Methods
Ex-CIA chiefs urge Obama to drop abuse investigation
CIA chiefs: Obama’s partisan witch hunt will compromise national defense
Former CIA chiefs promote a cover-up
Holder Declares War On The CIA

Let’s recap, these imnterrogations were already thoroughly investigated years ago by carreer prosecutors. Reopening these investigations will demoralize CIA employees, devestate morale at the agency, and compromise national security. Foreign intelligence agencies will be hesitant to cooperate with the CIA for fear any resulting U.S. legal proceedings will reveal their sources and methods.

/in light of this letter from 35 years worth of CIA directors that was delivered today, it should be a no-brainer for Obama to do the right thing and end Holder’s investigaton, but seeing as how we’ve gotten to this point in the first place, I have my serious doubts that the welfare of the United States will be Obama’s first priority

Following reports the CIA hired private parties to be assassins, former U.S. intelligence officials estimate one out of three intelligence workers is on contract.

Such former bosses as Michael Hayden, who headed the CIA from 2005-2009 and the National Security Agency from 1999-2005, Michael Chertoff, who ran the Department of Homeland Security, and Jack Devine, a 32-year CIA veteran and former director of operations, won’t talk about specifics.

The New York Times was first to report that the CIA spent millions of dollars to hire private security employees who worked for controversial Blackwater USA (now Xe Services) to find and kill al-Qaida operatives in 2006. Despite the millions spent, not a single terrorist, insurgent or Jihadist was killed as a result of the program.

CIA Director Panetta’s revelation has caused an uproar.

The CIA gets more than 130,000 annual applications. Why is it still hiring so many contractors, some of whom have gone off the reservation on renditions, detentions and interrogations?

When the government hires private contractors for intelligence gathering and analysis, is the government legally responsible if they run amok, exceeding their authority, committing crimes, providing false evidence or violating international laws?

Aren’t we risking alienating allies by paying private contractors under secret contracts to kill foreigners?

The CIA has also been wrong about the intelligence it needed. Thus it missed the 9/11 plot, the Indian underground nuclear testing, the 1983 attack in Lebanon that killed 250 Marines, the Soviet breakup, North Korea’s first missile tests, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The list is depressingly long.

[From an Opinion by Ann McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service]

by Daily.Pk

Sever Plocker in his December 21, 2006 column in Israeli daily, titled Stalin’s Jews, wrote: “We mustn’t forget that some of the greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish”.

I think he was being modest in his statement. Though he mentioned Lenin, Stalin, Genrikh Yagoda, Yezhov, Leonid Reichman, Trotsky, etc. – but he missed many others on the world scene. According to 1934 statistics, 38.5% of all top homicidal staff and beautiful women looking after Stalin’s sexual needs – were Jewish. Some historians estmate that close to 100 million Christians were slaughtered by the Jewish dominated communist regime in Russia and Ukraine – excluding two million Muslims murdered.

Anthony Sutton in his book ‘Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler’ claims that Adolf Hitler was a Jewish operative. Hitler also had 150,000 Jewish soldiers in the Nazi Army. Both of Hitler’s girlfriends (Stefanie Isak and Eva Braun) were Jewish.

Former US President Eisenhower, son of a Swedish Jewish parents, was responsible for the death of 1.7 million Germans Christians after the end of WW II. Peter Worthington, a reputed Canadian reporter – wrote in his column for the Ottawa Sun (September 12, 1989): “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal of epic proportion. His DEF policy killed more Germans in peace than killed in the European Theatre..”

All prime ministers of Israel could be classified as mass murderers – but Ariel Sharon would come out with flying colors. He is known as ‘Butcher of Sabra and Shatila’ refugee camps in Beirut on September 16, 1982 – for the murder of 3,000-3,500 innocent people.

The founder of the secularist-regime in Turkey’, Gen. Mustafa Kemal Pasha, also had Jewish roots. He was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Turks especially the religious ones. He outlawed Islam in Turkey, which has 99.7% Muslim population.

David Swanson has compiled a list of 50 Top US War Criminals. He has listed only those Americans who have committed war crimes after September 11, 2001. The names read like, Henry Kissinger, Jack Landman Goldsmith, Nicholas E. Calio, Michael Mukasey. Karen Hughes, Paul Bremmer, David Addington, George Tenet aka David Cohen, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Elliot Abram, Lewis Libby, John Bolton, Michael Chertoff, Jonathan Fredman, Gen. Tommy Franks – and of course Jewish Lobby’s favourites, such as Bush, Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Rumsfeld, and Gen. Colin Powell.

CIA Director Leon Panetta’s emergency testimony to Congress about an illegal assassination program has set off a crisis at the spy agency. The Daily Beast’s Joseph Finder exclusively reports that:

• The secret assassination ‘program’ wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation, a task force and a collection of schemes—it never got off the ground

• Panetta’s three immediate predecessors—George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden—have spoken to him, and that he now sees that no laws were broken.

• Panetta has frantically tried to rectify his gaffe, but now faces increased Congressional oversight.

(more)

If used on intelligence director, waterboarding ‘would be torture’
Article
Associated Press – featured in San Fransisco Chronicle
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Pamela Hess, Associated Press

“The nation’s intelligence chief says waterboarding “would be torture” if used against him or if someone under interrogation actually was taking water into his lungs.”

I recently found an interesting 9/11 Commission document about the NSA in the National Archives. The handwritten note from one of the commission’s staffers, Gordon Lederman, shows that one of his acquaintances had lunch with NSA Director Michael Hayden on May 7, 2003. Before the lunch, the acquaintance called Lederman and asked him whether he had any questions he wanted put to Hayden. According to the note, Lederman’s reply was, “I suggested that [the acquaintance] ask what the 9/11 Comm could do in its investigation that would be most useful to DirNSA [Hayden].”

The note was written the next day by Lederman and sent to his boss, Kevin Scheid, the leader of the commission’s team that investigated the US intelligence community. It was found in the National Archives by History Commons contributor paxvector and posted to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd.

Although the commission had subsidiary tasks such as commenting on the structure of the US intelligence community, its main job was to document the 9/11 plot and work out why the US failed to prevent it, despite the numerous opportunities. The NSA intercepted calls to and from the hijackers for years, including calls made when the hijackers were in the US that the NSA could have used to trace their location. The calls were intercepted because they were made to al-Qaeda’s global operations center in Yemen, which fell under NSA surveillance in 1996.

Contradictory explanations have been offered as to why the NSA failed, but the commission had little to say about the issue in its final report. The calls between the hijackers in the US and the operations centre in Yemen were mentioned, but they commission did not point out the NSA was intercepting them.

Hayden’s reply to the lunch query was to indicate “that he would rather the 9/11 Comm not exist.” Given the commission’s apparent lack of interest in the NSA–it did not take public testimony from any high-ranking NSA officials, and the agency only rated a few dozen mentions in the commission’s final report–it seems that whatever Hayden was worried about did not come to pass. Exactly what he was worried about, and why the commission outwardly showed little interest in the agency is still to be explained.

Philip Shenon’s 2008 book The Commission gave the impression that the commission simply lacked interest in the NSA, implying that Executive Director Philip Zelikow’s greater enthusiasm for the CIA part of the investigation contributed to this. However, there are several documents in the commission’s files about the NSA, hinting that the issue may be more complex.

Full text of the note:

To: KS [Kevin Scheid]

From: GL [Gordon Lederman]

Date: 5/8/03

Re: Bruce & DirNSA

Bruce called me yesterday to ask me whether I had any questions Bruce should ask DirNSA [Hayden] at today’s lunch. I suggested that Bruce ask what the 9/11 Comm could do in its investigation that would be most useful to DirNSA. Bruce agreed.

Bruce called me today to report on his lunch. He said that DirNSA indicated that he would rather the 9/11 Comm not exist and that he took issue with Philip’s [Philip Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission's executive director] charge that NSA did not completely co-operate with the JI [Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 failings]. DirNSA said he supported a DNI [Director of National Intelligence]. I asked Bruce why NSA supports a DNI – Bruce responded it is because NSA thinks the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] is controlled by CIA & DO [the CIA's Directorate of Operations]. I asked whether NSA thought a DNI would compete with SecDef [Secretary of Defense]– Bruce said that issue did not come up and that we should discuss it.

Additionally, Zelikow’s apparent charge that the NSA did not completely co-operate with the Joint Inquiry is interesting. I wonder what was meant by that?

I was happy to read Michael Hayden’s counter criticism:

The program was crucial in addressing one of the most stinging criticisms of the 9/11 commission — the need to reduce the gap between foreign intelligence and domestic security. This was an especially difficult task, which helps explain both the program’s importance and its sensitivity. The program was lawful, effective and necessary.

The best part:

There is also one very large finding in the report that hasn’t received the attention it deserves: “No evidence of intentional misuse” of the program was discovered.

Knowing civilian and military members that work for the NSA, I have always admired their level of professionalism and dedication to keeping America safe from another terrorist attack.

Even though our political and social clout is partially unrivaled in the social and political realm, we have lost before, such as the time we threw our weight behind the Freak Power ticket at the tail end of the 60’s in Colorado…

U.N.I.T.Y.

Turn Central Park into something useful: The Manhattan Airport Foundation is finally stepping up to the plate and making a decidedly steady go at turning that superfluous waste of space called “Central Park” (Have you ever thought about how banal and painfully mundane that name is?) into an airport and thus finally creating in Manhattan a completely sustainable bio-experiment that we never have to leave… and if we want to than we can do it via plane and not have to travel outside of the island with poor people on the subway.

Imagine all the jobs it will create!

You can have a bench dedicated at the new airport and you can also sign the petition here.

I know some of you might be thinking, “But that’s where there is all that green stuff and you know you can go sit there and not really do anything but its sort of relaxing except for all the fucking people lying around half naked and gross.”

But we say most of it will be a runway anyway so you can hang out by the side of that.
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Here is something else that we support: Healthcare plans proposed by powerful black men or Presidents that matter.

We have no links or anything of the sort… but know this: A vote against this proposed reform is a vote for legal organized crime, racketeering, greed, corruption, profiteering and general Southern craziness. We’ll leave you with one link, an article written by a smart man who is also a surgeon, though we doubt you’ll take the time to read it as we can already tell, by the smell, that your nose is buried in Michael Hayden’s conservative butt.

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We support the latest fashions and you should too. We aren’t quite sure why, as this is not our area of expertise, but we are assured that this is legit, and we just like the way it looks, ok?
Jaunt

Elegant and comfortable... yes we tried it on.

From the website: Jaunt was conceptualized to exude simplicity of thought and comfort, a certain transcendent calm of the aesthetic soul for the modern day woman. This comfort, coupled with the ability to interchange almost all of the stand-alone pieces in the collection intend to create a canvas on which a woman can paint an outfit quickly and effortlessly, while still retaining her elements of individual style. The pair want their patrons to have the option to focus on their lives , assured of their beauty, both inner and outer. Certain of the fact that when they wear Jaunt they know the clothing they wear represents the same intelligence and passion for life that guides them in their everyday activities.

We aren’t quite sure what any of that means but this stuff looks good and its different than what we’ve noticed before… We’ll take ingenuity over the tired ramblings of some miserly diva any day of the week.

These are things we support. And you should too… Why? Because our judgement is perfect and can never be disputed ever… again… ever.

Tenet Canceled CIA Hit Teams

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090715/ap_on_go_ot/us_cia_secret_program;_ylt=At_k791WDvWvEg60ZS4UeyRxieAA;_ylu=X3oDMTM1am9jZzVpBGFzc2V0Ay9hcC8yMDA5MDcxNS9hcF9vbl9nb19vdC91c19jaWFfc2VjcmV0X3Byb2dyYW0EY3BvcwM1BHBvcwM1BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDYXBzb3VyY2VzdGVu

C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of a program from 2001 until the his first day that was kept from Congress, revealing the C.I.A. withheld information from, misled, and deliberately lied to the Congress.

“Leon Panetta, the head of the C.I.A., came up to a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee to inform us that a program — which I can’t discuss, obviously — had been in operation from 2001 until the day before he came to meet with us and he had ended,” Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”, today. “He was there to tell us that no member of Congress had ever been informed.”

Ms. Eshoo reiterated that she couldn’t discuss the program, but said, “The Committee was actually stunned.”

The C.I.A. is saying that there are no programs deliberately kept from Congress, Mr. Panetta says the program is no longer in place. Of course, it takes a lot of work to believe that the C.I.A. lying to Congress is rare, meaning that the program Mr. Panetta revealed could be anything from re-supplying factions of the mujahideen in the Af-Pak region to a detailed destabilization effort in Venezuela. What we know is that the Intelligence Committee was “stunned” after years of rendition, torture memos and torture photos being released, with virtually no accountability for such crimes.

Could Mr. Panetta mean that the C.I.A. has exported this program elsewhere in the U.S. military apparatus as a means to a different short-term endgame? Sam Stein at The Huffington Post asks: “Was the C.I.A. hiding Cheney’s ‘executive assassination ring’” that The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh discussed in March? (6:04):

Top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Mr. Hersh reports to be the Bush-Cheney “executive assassination wing”. “[Gen McChyrstal] is implicated in allegations of torture, assassinations, and general disregard for rules,” Amy Davidson wrote in The New Yorker last May. “Is this how we think we will win in Afghanistan? And, if JSOC is ever properly investigated, will McChrystal come to inhabit the same rhetorical role that the Republicans would assign Nancy Pelosi — a disincentive to investigate, because the trail might lead to your own guy? Because McChrystal is now Obama’s own guy.”

Protecting Gen. McChrystal keeps him using tactics to further infuriate Af-Pak region militants to better proselytize non-combatant villagers. As violence increases, so do the chances of Afghan President Hamid Karzai of losing the upcoming election.

Mr. Panetta says this program is over, Dr. Gareth Porter asked if the choice of this lieutenant-general is to enhance “unconventional” counterinsurgency tactics in an article at AntiWar.com – 12 May 09:

[T]hese explanations for the choice of McChrystal equate his command of the Special Operations forces with expertise on counterinsurgency, despite the fact that McChrystal spent his last five years as a commander of Special Operations forces focusing overwhelmingly on counter-terrorism operations, not on counterinsurgency.

Whereas counterinsurgency operations are aimed primarily at influencing the population and are primarily non-military, counter-terrorism operations are exclusively military and focus on targeting the “enemy”….

It was under McChrystal’s command, in fact, that JSOC shifted away from the very mission of training indigenous military units in counterinsurgency operations that had been a core mission of Special Operations Forces….

McChrystal and JSOC carried out targeted raids and other operations against suspected Taliban in Afghanistan which were not coordinated with the commander of other U.S. forces in the country….

U.S. air strikes, which have caused hundreds of civilian deaths, have become a major political issue in Afghanistan and the subject of official protests by Afghan President Hamid Karzai as well as by the lower house of the Afghan parliament. Many of the air strikes and commando raids that have caused large-scale civilian deaths have involved Special Operations forces operating separately from the NATO command.

Special Operations forces under McChrystal’s command also engaged in raiding homes in search of Taliban suspects, angering villagers in Herat province to the point where they took up arms against the U.S. forces, according to a May 2007 story by Carlotta Gall and David E. Sanger of The New York Times.

After a series of raids by Special Operations forces in Afghanistan in late 2008 and early 2009 killed women and children, to mounting popular outrage, McChrystal’s successor as commander of JSOC, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, ordered a temporary reduction in the rate of such commando raids in mid-February for two weeks.

However, the JSOC raids resumed at their original intensity in March. Later that month Gen. David Petraeus issued a directive putting all JSOC operations under McKiernan’s tactical command, but there has been no evidence that the change has curbed the raids by Special Operations Forces.

Dr. Porter goes on to note the air strike on May 4 in the Farah province which killed up to 150 civilians. Saeed Shah at McClatchy has reported extensively that the U.S. is leading air strikes in regions that the U.S. and Pakistan are seeking allies, but Gen. McChrystal knows from his experiences that such tactics have resulted only in “angering villagers… to the point where they took up arms against the U.S. forces”.

“There have been at least six such strikes in the area since June 23, when a drone bombardment killed 80 people at a militant’s funeral in South Waziristan,” writes Mr. Shah, yesterday. “There also was a missile attack Tuesday in South Waziristan, reportedly killing 12 militants, including five foreign insurgents.”

“Experts” are calling these strikes “successful”, but it begs the questions: to what ends and compared to what?

We can’t get into the heads of President Obama, the Pentagon, the State Dept., etc., but Afghan civilians know first hand that these attacks on South Waziristan — with the Pakistan Army’s ‘preventative effort’ near the Afghan border — mobilizes the violence deeper into Afghanistan. Afghan civilians — already angered by the increase of U.S. air strikes and its toll on civilians — will look in one of two directions: militarize or elect a new leader because it’s clear that Mr. Karzai can’t put their voices and will into action.

What we know is that the Clinton family and top Democratic Party political strategist, James Carville, is being exported to advise Mr. Karzai’s primary opposition candidate, Ashraf Ghani. The U.S. State Dept. hasn’t directly endorsed a candidate, but Mr. Obama is growing increasingly “unhappy” with Mr. Karzai, so he needs to go. I’m hard-pressed to believe that Mr. Carville would commit to such an action without the encouragement of Hillary Clinton, the top U.S. diplomat as its secretary of state.

The U.S. message is clear: this operation of raining death will be escalated more than it always has been and nobody in the Afghan government — nor the U.S. Congress — will consider stopping it unless you elect the “right guy”.

Such means toward ends would be directly parallel to the U.S. government’s own legal definition of ‘international terrorism’.