Brennan's B.S.

The Washington Post turns in a remarkably loving portrayal of John Brennan here. It's not all their fault though - apparently the Obama staffers love them some Brennan too. And love is blind.

Is it really too much to ask that writers actually report the full extent of John Brennan's resume? From the Post article cited:

"His remarks and his tenure -- he was chief of staff to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet from 1999 to 2001 and director of National Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2005 -- provoked an open complaint against his nomination as CIA director from 200 psychologists."

Really? Why not tell your readers that Brennan was D/EXDIR, no.4 in the CIA between 2001 and 2004? You know, when they decided to torture and accelerate the rendition program? Not relevant to you that he oversaw all that?

And this is completely laughable:

"Obama aides said the president-elect accepted Brennan's assurances that he
played no role in setting abusive interrogation practices at the CIA and that he
had expressed some private dissent about the practices. They said Obama also
accepted the judgment of transition team advisers that Brennan was separated
from any questionable practices by Global Strategies, which formally purchased
Brennan's firm in 2007.

'No one has been more critical of private security contractors than Barack Obama,' said Denis McDonough, a senior foreign policy adviser to the president-elect. McDonough said transition aides looked closely at the governing structure of Brennan's company and its parent and concluded that there was no way Brennan was involved with or 'could be accountable' for the actions of Global Strategies' London-based division."

Let's think about this. Brennan says he played no role in setting the interrogation practices. Despite being no.4 in the CIA - and in the direct line of command between Operations and the Director of the CIA. Well, that is pretty creative. And expressing dissent internally? We have, again, no proof of that (unless we get a Congressional investigation) and damningly enough, he expressed SUPPORT for Bush policy - after he left the CIA! "Rendition is a vital tool." What an appallingly low bar set by the Obama administration.

It's unfortunate that the Obama transition team didn't apply its keen eye to the CIA's "governing structure." Because the CIA's governing structure puts Brennan right in the thick of things. And Global Strategies aside, it should be enough, if I interpret the Obama transition team correctly, that he was involved with a business with current contracts with the US government's intelligence agencies. From change.gov:

Close the Revolving Door on Former and Future Employers: No political appointees
in the Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or
contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two
years. And no political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch
after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration.

According to this source, Analysis Corp (TAC) has entered into several long-term contracts:

Last October [in 2005] TAC won a contract from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to add its terrorist data base to that of NCTC. The FBI awarded it a $60 million, long-term contract in 2004 to provide technical support to its Terrorist Screening Center.

Here is a summary of their 2007 contracts.

And this is kind of weird - but it is the nature of the new private/public intelligence community:

Since the election, Brennan -- who retains all his top security clearances
-- has been conducting briefings for Obama on the CIA's ongoing covert actions,
and aides said he won Obama's support in those meetings as a "straight shooter"
whom agency officials trust. He has "unrivaled integrity" and a "great
understanding of how all the parts of official Washington are affected by
intelligence," McDonough said.

Shadow intelligence community come to life, I guess. And here is another damning paragraph:

Brennan, who has been on unpaid leave from the firm, plans to resign Jan. 19 and
will have no further financial ties to it, according to a transition official.
Two months ago, the firm won a large five-year contract to provide "intelligence
expertise and support services" to the FBI.

Obama has wantonly betrayed his principles - unless of course Brennan spends the next 22 months avoiding all contact with the FBI in his role as deputy national security adviser. Honoring in that ascetic way the Obama principle that one must not work "on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years."

The media will say what they will, but they are wrong, and Obama is wrong, on Brennan.

If Obama at all falters in keeping his promises regarding torture and rendition, as he has faltered in keeping his public/private lobbying promises, we'll know where to look. We may not be able to prevent Brennan's appointment - but we can certainly try to drive him out of Washington, if Obama does not deliver on his promises.

[crossposted at TalkLeft]

The Need for an Inquiry into the CIA

The New York Times, in writing about the appointment of Leon Panetta, captures some of the internal sentiment regarding an investigation into the CIA:

On the day he walks into his seventh-floor office, if confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Panetta will be managing employees who are under federal investigation for participating in the destruction of videotapes recording the interrogations of two prisoners suspected of being members of Al Qaeda. The prosecutor in the case, John H. Durham, recently told a federal judge that he would need until the end of February to interview witnesses as he considers whether to bring criminal charges in the case.

Beyond that inquiry, Mr. Panetta is facing the prospect that Democratic lawmakers might establish an independent commission tasked with looking into the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, including the roles played by C.I.A. employees.

The number of employees who would be targets of such a commission is relatively small, and many within the agency were never comfortable with C.I.A. officers acting as jailers. Still, some experts said any public fact-finding inquiry could be perceived within the C.I.A. as a witch hunt.

“If Panetta starts trying to feed people to that commission, his tenure at C.I.A. will be over,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior C.I.A. official and an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

“If it happens, C.I.A. people are not going to start plotting against the president, but they are going to withdraw from taking risks, and then the C.I.A. becomes useless to the president,” Mr. Lowenthal said.

It is fairly astonishing, coming weeks after the publication of the Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody, that the CIA is this threatened by an independent commission. Or that it might seem at all avoidable. Let's look at the way the CIA is described in the Senate Armed Services Inquiry Report:

From page 5:


(U) Mr. Haynes was not the only senior official considering new interrogation techniques for use against detainees. Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials attended meetings in the White House where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was then the National Security Advisor, said that, "in the spring of 2002, CIA sought policy approval from the National Security Council (NSC) to begin an interrogation program for high-level al-Qaida terrorists." Secretary Rice said that she asked Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to brief NSC Principals on the program and asked the Attorney General John Ashcroft "personally to review and confirm the legal advice prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel." She also said that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld participated in the NSC review of CIA’s program.

from page 6:


(U) The other OLC opinion issued on August 1, 2002 is known commonly as the Second Bybee memo. That opinion, which responded to a request from the CIA, addressed the legality of specific interrogation tactics. While the full list of techniques remains classified, a publicly released CIA document indicates that waterboarding was among those analyzed and approved. CIA Director General Michael Hayden stated in public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 5, 2008 that waterboarding was used by the CIA. And Steven Bradbury, the current Assistant Attorney General of the OLC, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on February 14, 2008 that the CIA’s use of waterboarding was "adapted from the SERE training program."


(U) In fact, Jay Bybee the Assistant Attorney General who signed the two OLC legal opinions said that he saw an assessment of the psychological effects of military resistance training in July 2002 in meetings in his office with John Yoo and two other OLC attorneys. Judge Bybee said that he used that assessment to inform the August 1, 2002 OLC legal opinion that has yet to be publicly released. Judge Bybee also recalled discussing detainee interrogations in a meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft and John Yoo in late July 2002, prior to signing the OLC opinions. Mr. Bellinger, the NSC Legal Advisor, said that "the NSC’s Principals reviewed CIA’s proposed program on several occasions in 2002 and 2003" and that he "expressed concern that the proposed CIA interrogation techniques comply with applicable U.S. law, including our international obligations."

An entire section of the Report is entitled, "JPRA and CIA Influence Department of Defense Interrogation Policies (U)"

from page 7:


(U) JPRA was not the only outside organization that provided advice to GTMO on aggressive techniques. On October 2, 2002, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA’s CounterTerrorist Center, attended a meeting of GTMO staff. Minutes of that meeting indicate that it was dominated by a discussion of aggressive interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, death threats, and waterboarding, which was discussed in relation to its use in SERE training. Mr. Fredman’s advice to GTMO on applicable legal obligations was similar to the analysis of those obligations in OLC’s first Bybee memo. According to the meeting minutes, Mr. Fredman said that "the language of the statutes is written vaguely… Severe physical pain described as anything causing permanent damage to major organs or body parts. Mental torture [is] described as anything leading to permanent, profound damage to the senses or personality." Mr. Fredman said simply "It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong."

from page 16:

Conclusion 2: Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. National Security Council Principals reviewed the CIA’s interrogation program during that period.

Conclusion 6: The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) interrogation program included at least one SERE training technique, waterboarding. Senior Administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and David Addington, Counsel to the Vice President, were consulted on the development of legal analysis of CIA interrogation techniques. Legal opinions
subsequently issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) interpreted legal obligations under U.S. anti-torture laws and determined the legality of CIA interrogation techniques. Those OLC opinions distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws, rationalized the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody and influenced Department of Defense determinations as to what interrogation techniques were legal for use during interrogations conducted by U.S. military personnel.

[emphasis supplied]
+++++

The Inquiry report contradicts the somewhat passive role of the CIA forwarded by CIA folks and people like Senator Feinstein (who is rapidly emerging as an enemy of change). The AP quotes Feinstein today:

"Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein told The Associated
Press in an interview this week that there is a clear distinction between those
who made the policies and those who carried them out.
'They (the CIA) carry out orders and the orders come from the (National Security Council) and the White House, so there's not a lot of policy debate that goes on there," she said. "We're going to continue our looking into the situation and I think that is up to the administration and the director.'"

There are at least three issues I have with that statement. One - the Senate Armed Services Committee's report suggests that the CIA played an active role - perhaps it was the CIA who sought permission to use torture on detainees. The CIA requested a legal opinion on its interrogation techniques. And the report says that, according to Condoleezza Rice, "in the spring of 2002, CIA sought policy approval from the National Security Council (NSC) to begin an interrogation program for high-level al-Qaida terrorists." And someone must have authorized CIA lawyer Fredman's meeting with GTMO staff. The Report makes it seem at least plausible that the CIA actively crafted policy with the administration.

My second issue is with those who developed and approved Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs) for interrogation within the CIA ranks. The Senate Armed Services' report describes the process on the military/GTMO end on page 10:

Following the Secretary’s December 2, 2002 authorization, senior
staff at GTMO began drafting a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
specifically for the use of SERE techniques in interrogations. The draft SOP
itself stated that "The premise behind this is that the interrogation tactics
used at U.S. military SERE schools are appropriate for use in real-world
interrogations."

[emphasis supplied]

Obviously to ensure the success and "legality" of their maneuvers, CIA staff would have had to create a set of rules and routines for case officers and their staff to follow. In doing so, the staff involved should have appreciated their serious level of responsibility. We need to find out who wrote SOPs for the CIA and who approved them. We have a meager understanding of how this happened in the military; if only in the spirit of fairness, we must discover how similar events transpired in the CIA.

My third issue is with the complete unwillingness of Feinstein to apply the "command responsibility" standard. If the Executive Branch suggests an entire agency should ignore international law, is no one in that agency to be held responsible for the agency's complete capitulation? If a military commander is responsible for the behavior of her unit, is not SOMEONE in the CIA responsible for the behavior of an entire agency?

The principle of command responsibility "holds a superior legally responsible for human rights abuses by subordinates if the official knew or should have known about them and failed to prevent them or punish those who committed them." (Foreign Policy in Focus). Examine this chart of the CIA's chain of command (pre 9/11 commission reforms). This chart suggests that we lay all that happened under the umbrella of Operations at the feet of the Executive Secretary, the Deputy Executive Director and the Executive Director, and the Deputy Director and Director of the CIA. They implemented Bush policies, and they monitored their failures and successes.

Finally, it is in the long term political interest of the CIA to support a Congressional inquiry into their involvement in Bush interrogation policy. You may've noticed the source that suggests the CIA came to the NSC looking for approval was Rice. Cheney's narrative is similar, in recent interviews:

Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, the CIA "in effect came in and
wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well
as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

If the CIA would like its view that it was ignored and abused by the Bush admin. to be supported by anything more than wishful thinking, it will encourage an official investigation into how we went to war in Iraq and how our interrogation and detention policy developed. Otherwise the CIA's political enemies will make whatever claims they wish to make - and no official record will be there to call them out.

A full investigation of the CIA is necessary. It should begin early this year, and we must demand that it begins early this year.

The Washington Times

Why bother debating the editorial section at the Washington Times? I don't really know. But there are some pretty amazing statements in today's Washington Times editoral from Morton Kondracke that I thought I would highlight anyway.

"But there's no need to investigate whether Mr. Bush - or Mr. Cheney -
authorized the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques or warrantless
terrorist wiretapping or renditions ("snatching") of terrorist suspects. They
have admitted it and defended it as being necessary to defend the nation in the
aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks - and justified it by pointing out that
the homeland has not been attacked since."
"In an interview with The Washington Times on Dec. 17, Mr. Cheney said, "There were a total of about 33 [persons] who were subjected to enhanced interrogation. Only three of those who were subjected to waterboarding," including Sept. 11's top planner, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Intelligence officials claim his subjection to simulated drowning produced important information about the al Qaeda organization and future plans."

Wow. No need to investigate whether it was right or wrong. No need to investigate the numbers given by Cheney, which I believe are gross underestimates. No need to wonder what Cheney's "enhanced interrogation" means compared to what others think it means. And even worse, no need to investigate to see if the claims that it works are true. Many intelligence officials say torture does NOT work. And anyone familiar with KSM's case knows that under torture he said an astonishing amount of untruths. One of the reasons we need an investigation is to put to bed once and for all the idea that torture works. It does not. We need to commit against torture on legal, moral, and practical levels.

Of course Kondracke has no problems at all with torture, rendition, etc.:

"The fact is, Mr. Obama does have "many problems to solve." Among them is the
possibility raised by a congressionally mandated commission - that terrorists
will use a nuclear or biological weapon somewhere in the world by 2013."
"To prevent that catastrophe, Mr. Obama might well want to order an "enhanced
interrogation," wiretap a terrorist or even kill one. If he issues the order, he
will want someone to carry it out."

Note how in support of his ideology Kondracke can summon up his own Obama. Here is the leader the conservatives are willing to like, at least when the fates of their war criminal heroes are uncertain:

"Mr. Obama should make it clear right now that he opposes such action - and also
that he opposes the "compromise" idea of a "truth commission" to investigate
alleged Bush-era wrongdoing.
The main reason has less to do with "turning the page," uniting the country and letting bygones be bygones - all good Obama impulses - than with preserving the morale of intelligence professionals in wartime.
Were a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate possible
criminality involved in detainee interrogations, "extraordinary renditions" or
terrorist surveillance, it's not only Bush-era top officials who would have to
hire lawyers to defend themselves but lower-down intelligence operatives as
well."

Some of these "lower-down intelligence operatives" have already hired lawyers to defend themselves against the consequences of discovered renditions (ref: the case against Abu Omar). Their superiors of course have not - they have actually been promoted. One of them is currently the Deputy Director of the CIA and a candidate for CIA Director.

The country needs and deserves prosecutions and intelligence commissions. We hold our leaders accountable.

CIA: the Chain of Command

The CIA has a mania for titles and a rather complicated chain of command. Figuring out accountability in the CIA means figuring out who reports to who, and what responsibilities those positions have. This info is taken from espionageinfo.com.

[Zoom on up to my other post ("The Broader CIA Critique") to learn more about the chain of command - complete with official CIA charts! This post has been trimmed in light of the more comprehensive recent post.]

The DCI/DDCI are accountable for three separate chains of command. (NB - this info predates the Sept 11 commission/intelligence reorganization. I think it is still of value considering it helps us evaluate candidates for Obama's administration and potential future criminal investigation).

The third chain is the largest and of most interest for this article.

This chain runs through the Executive Director (EXDIR) and Deputy Executive Director (D/EXDIR). [During important periods in the Bush Administration, formerly Buzzy Krongard EXDIR and John Brennan D/EXDIR] To quote espionageinfo:

The EXDIR oversees five centers that collectively enable the CIA to carry out
its mission: the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Officer,
Global Support, Human Resources, and Security, each of which have
numerous subordinate offices and bureaus...Finally, the Executive
Director's office is in the line of authority between DCI/DDCI and the four directorates.

So John Brennan's line - "I was not involved in the decisionmaking process for any of these controversial policies and actions" - is a little difficult to understand. His office was in the line of authority between Operations and the DCI.

Here is a glimpse of the kind of trouble you can get into as Executive Director of the CIA. From Laura Rozen:

As court documents laid out in 28 charges, the man known to
colleagues as "Dusty," a former logistics officer, served as the CIA's number
three official and effectively day to day manager when he badgered the Agency to
hire one of his mistresses, identified in the indictment as "E.R.": "On or about
March 19, 2005," the indictment reads, "Foggo sent the CIA Acting General
Counsel an email stating, in part, that his staff would tag E.R.'s conditional
offer of employment as 'ExDir Interest' in order to 'zip her to the top of the
pile.'" (E.R. was indeed hired, to a position in the CIA general counsel's
office. "ExDir" refers to Foggo's position as CIA Executive Director.)

But former Executive Director Kyle Dustin Foggo is involved in more ominous affairs than that:

No, what truly worried Agency brass were the darker secrets their former top logistics officer was threatening to spill had his case gone to trial as scheduled on November 3. They included the massive contracts Foggo was discussing with Wilkes, estimated by one source at over $300 million dollars. "Wilkes was working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source familiar with Foggo's discussions with Wilkes told me. What kinds of deals? According to the source, they included creating and running a secret plane network, for whatever needs the CIA has for secret planes now that the network it used for extraordinary rendition flights has been outed. "In or about December 2004," the Foggo indictment says, "Foggo discussed with Wilkes and J.C. the idea that Foggo might be able to get Wilkes a classified government contract to supply air support services to the CIA…. In or about January 2005, Wilkes directed various ADCS employees to begin developing an air support proposal that would be designed to answer the CIA's classified needs as outlined by Foggo." The indictment continues: "On or about February 3, 2005, an employee of Wilkes' corporation emailed J.C. with an offer to update him on their work developing the air support proposal. …" (J.C.,
the indictment explains, is Wilkes' nephew, whom I've identified as Joel G.
Combs, the nominal head of a Wilkes' front company, Archer Logistics.) The
"classified air support contract" and its implied purposes for renditions are
among the truly damaging national security secrets, along with the methods the
CIA uses to create front companies and dole out black contracts, that the CIA
and Bush White House would have been anxious not to have exposed, especially in
a trial set to take place the day before the election in a suburban DC courtroom
within a ten-minute drive of the entire national security press corps.

And here is a glimpse of the tricky legal manuveurs a senior official can make if they do not get their way:

"Greymail" is the term of art for an old legal defense technique employed by
those in possession of classified information: The accused and his lawyers will
demand the revelation of so many government secrets in order to get a fair trial
that prosecutors come under pressure to make the case go away. And in
Foggo, the official responsible for the logistics of much of the
administration's war on terror, federal prosecutors met their greymail match. Foggo threatened "to expose the cover of virtually every CIA employee with whom he interacted and to divulge to the world some of our country's most sensitive programs—even though this information has absolutely nothing to do with the charges he faces," prosecutors howled in an early September court filing, before they were evidently compelled to extend Foggo the lenient plea deal; Foggo's lawyers, the filing continued, were attempting to "portray Foggo as a hero engaged in actions necessary to protect the public from terrorist acts."

Now Brennan did not have any record of such wildly irresponsible abuse of power. But it is really remarkable/galling, again, that he was no doubt involved in the logistics of rendition and interrogation and yet he claims to have clean hands.