I Knew...

that when John Brennan was in the news again it would be for some annoying conservative bullsh*t (hence the title). And here it is:

"But some former and current Central Intelligence Agency officials say a rush to
release classified material could expose intelligence methods and needlessly
offend dedicated counterterrorism officers. Some administration and
Congressional officials said John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who now serves as
President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, has urged caution in disclosing
interrogation documents."

IOW, don't release the torture memos, because they describe what I oversaw as no.4 figure in the CIA.

And seriously, don't release them because it would hurt torturers' feelings?

It's unbelievable, this crap. Thank God for the courts - people (from the Executive Branch) want to bury this, and we can't let them.

Conflicts of Interest & the Intel Community

In anticipation of Leon Panetta's confirmation hearing today, questions have been raised in the media about Panetta's business relationships and finances. In the context of Obama's rules and the recent problems with Daschle and others, these may present a problem for Panetta. The AP runs a story with details - and Mark Silva at The Swamp has even more information. The most interesting charges to me are these: "a $28,000 honorarium from the Carlyle Group" and "a $60,000 'governmental advisor fee' from the Pacific Maritime Association."

Mark Silva has a quote from the Carlyle Group: "Chris Ullman, told Bloomberg that Panetta spoke at an annual investors' conference, 'which is unrelated to any of our portfolio companies,' such as Booz Allen Hamilton, an intelligence contractor for the government."

Well, we shall see how true that is. I'd like to see the topic of discussion, a list of the investors' present, etc.

Silva also says the Pacific Maritime Association "lobbies the federal government on terrorism laws." Although my knowledge of which laws the PMA is trying to influence is nonexistent, a look at their organization suggests they would be very homeland-security specific. Their site says "The principal business of the Pacific Maritime Association is to negotiate and administer maritime labor agreements with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
Our member companies are cargo carriers, terminal operators and stevedores that operate at West Coast ports, where overall cargo movement supports 8 million U.S. jobs." PMA is not, for example, a defense contractor. Questions should be asked of course.

Now let's compare Panetta to the candidate scorned, John Brennan. I have documented in various posts his extremely intimate dealings with intelligence businesses. And by extremely intimate, I mean that in November of 2008 he was still the CEO of The Analysis Corp., an intelligence contractor! And not only that, as of November 2008, Brennan was the chairman of the most influential trade association in intelligence contracting - the Intelligence and National Security Alliance! Read more about TAC (The Analysis Corp.) and INSA here and here.

To excerpt from my diary at Talkleft on INSA:

"INSA's joint programs with the DNI have alarmed some intelligence veterans, who
wonder if INSA has become a way for contractors and intelligence officials to create policy in secret, without oversight from Congress. 'Evidently, DNI McConnell has made it an early priority to stand up INSA as the preeminent nonprofit association serving the ODNI,' an industry insider told me, on condition of anonymity. 'While INSA has created multiple levels of memberships and a large connected board of both government and industry leaders, the real control remains with the big-dollar founding primes. I wonder if it's even legal for these officials to sit on an actual board of an industry trade association.'

"That is not entirely clear. Scott Amey, the counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a public interest group that monitors federal contracting, said the DNI's relationship with INSA certainly raises serious ethical questions. If government officials are attending INSA meetings on a regular basis, he said, those meetings may be subject to open meeting rules, which would require them to be open to the public. The fact that contractors and intelligence officials are meeting under the cover of a business association - despite the fact that they are supposedly there as individuals - points to the need to expand the oversight of intelligence to include contracting." Tim Shorrock, "Spies for Hire," p.70-71 [emphasis supplied]

Now that's a real scandal. This may be why Brennan actually stepped away from the D/CIA position. Who knows. But I am glad at least that Panetta is farther removed than Brennan from this culture which made big bucks on the Bush terror regime.

Frank Naif Rocks

(h/t freedetainees.org)

This week, Frank Naif recently wrote about torture investigations/prosecutions in the Huffington Post. He echoes The Washington Monthly's Charles Homans' suggestion that interrogators receive immunity from the government, presumably in exchange for cooperation and testimony. And he denounces the high-level officials, including those in the CIA, for their role in implementing Bush policy. Again, this WSJ chart is illuminating.



From Naif:

"Outside of the halls of government, the public and opinion makers are also
clamoring for truth and reconciliation. On Obama's change.gov web site, the most often-asked citizen question (22,000 or so!) was whether the new president intends to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture and warrantless wiretaps.
Observers as disparate as Thomas Ricks and Arianna Huffington have called for some form of truth and reconciliation commission, not unlike those set up in South Africa after apartheid and in Chile after Pinochet.

Presumably, such a commission would be independently empowered to elicit testimony and could offer amnesty to anyone who testifies before it. Therein lies the Obama administration's opportunity to lead, and not merely follow or get out of the way of investigations and commissions.

The Obama administration ought to make at least one meaningful and practical gesture of leadership regardless of what form an inquiry assumes. That action would be to emulate past truth and reconciliation commissions by granting amnesty or some form of legal immunity for the mid- and junior-level personnel who were on the front lines of these odious Bush-era policies.

Such a move will be absolutely vital to getting to the bottom of the program of abuses of the past eight years. Failing to protect from prosecution or civil actions the ground-level national security drones who carried out these policies will:
--Destroy morale in the national security workforce;
--Force the people who can least afford it to 'lawyer up;' and
--Probably bury forever any chance of understanding what happened at Guantanamo and countless foreign and US-run detention facilities worldwide.

Flag-level military officers (admirals and generals), senior executive service civilians, c-level contractor executives, political appointees, and elected officials, however, are the rightful targets of investigation into alleged intelligence and detention misdeeds. These are the individuals whose implicit responsibility was to not only carry out executive branch policies, but also to professionally guide policy in accordance with US law, applicable international law pertaining to warfare, and accepted norms of human rights.

In other words, these are the senior officials who chose not to fall on their metaphorical swords when they were asked to break the law, forgo human decency, and expose their Lieutenants and Sergeants and Petty Officers and GS-13 civil servants and junior contractors to future prosecution and litigation.

These senior officials didn't resign or protest in '02 or '03 or '04, and they should now come forward to explain themselves, and if necessary, take the fall for subordinates who didn't have the prerogative or power to thwart policies that are against American honor and tradition.

To be sure, Obama faces enough of an uphill battle in taking an inventory of the national security wrongs of the Bush years. Perhaps the biggest showdown looms between the White House and Capitol Hill: Senior Democrats in the House and Senate were aware of torture and domestic surveillance programs. Jane Mayer, who delved into Bush-era intelligence abuses in her book The Dark Side, said via a Washington Post online chat last July that legislators 'in both parties would find it
very hard at this point to point the finger at the [Bush] White House, without
also implicating themselves.'

The Obama administration will have its hands full with its own Democratic colleagues -- and lots of other adversaries -- if the badly needed cataloging of Bush-era national security blunders manages to get underway. Making sure that ordinary national security drones aren't vilified or set up to take the fall for their bosses today will strengthen tomorrow's national security."

Too often, the dynamic involvement of our intelligence services in the torture regime is dismissed out of hand - Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein's comments are a great example: "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," continuing "We're going to continue our looking into the situation and I think that is up to the administration and the director." That is extremely misleading from someone who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. For example, it was policy that extraordinary renditions be approved by several levels of CIA command, but not approved by the White House (Chicago Tribune) although it has been suggested that the White House was informed of these renditions. So knowledge is divorced from policy - the CIA undoubtedly has masses of information to share with us. That's one of the reasons we need their involvement in any sort of fact-finding commission or investigation. For example, from Der Spiegel, ex-CIA Europe chief Tyler Drumheller:

"I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief
concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president
would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about
whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros
and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the
threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention.
This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take
extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any
discussion about their value and morality."

Yet the way it sounds, the total irresponsibility of the White House didn't stop the CIA from conducting the rendition. In Mayer's "The Dark Side," it is suggested that Tenet agreed to hosting a detention program because he was simply too eager to please. So the CIA runs the risks, the executive branch is clueless, and they bend over backwards anyway? Surely someone could've said, hey, this is a really dumb idea? In representing the executive branch's desires more than reality (in terms of operational strategy and intelligence), the CIA has made itself very much part of the problem.

Naif is also eloquent in establishing what I have written about as "The Broader CIA Critique." Really, it's simple - the concept of command responsibility. What did the top 5 people (including John Brennan) at the CIA know about Bush's attempts to make them torture? What did they know and how did they act?

Those questions are simple, and could be addressed in a fact-finding commission. But it's embarrassing that even as former CIA staff fight legal battles over renditions in Italy, now ex-CIA chief Hayden parades around, asking "If the techniques used are said to be legal, should they not be used?" It's clear that many, including our current President, do not think those techniques are legal, and that justice systems around the world are prepared to challenge the legality of our torture operations, and relabel them criminal. If a technique is said to be legal, but flies completely in the face of international law, you better double-check. If the CIA kicked that legal process to the side, they like the other government agencies deserve thorough investigation.

Amped Up American Exceptionalism

Hi everyone. I have been out of town for a few days. I still have to catch up on my reading. But I caught this AP article from Big Tent Democrat over at TalkLeft:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques by ordering the CIA to follow military rules for questioning prisoners, according to two U.S. officials
familiar with drafts of the plans. Still under debate is whether to allow exceptions in extraordinary cases.
The proposal Obama is considering would require all CIA interrogators to follow conduct outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the officials said. The plans would also have the effect of shutting down secret "black site" prisons around the world where the CIA has questioned terror suspects — with all future interrogations taking place inside American military facilities.
However, Obama's changes may not be absolute. His advisers are considering adding a classified loophole to the rules that could allow the CIA to use some interrogation methods not specifically authorized by the Pentagon, the officials said. They said the intent is not to use that as an opening for possible use of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.

A loophole? No, no no. More:

The CIA also banned waterboarding in 2006 but otherwise has been secretive about
how it conducts interrogations. In the past, its methods are believed to have
included sleep deprivation and disorientation, stress positions and exposing
prisoners to uncomfortable cold or heat for long periods. It's also believed
that some prisoners have been forced to sit in cramped spaces with bugs, snakes,
rats or other vermin as a scare tactic.

And this is completely illogical:

For Obama, who repeatedly insisted during the 2008 presidential campaign and the
transition period that "America doesn't torture," a classified loophole would
allow him to follow through on his promise to end harsh interrogations while
retaining a full range of presidential options in conducting the war against
terrorism.
The proposed loophole, which could come in the form of a classified annex to the manual, is designed to satisfy intelligence experts who fear that an outright ban of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques would limit the government in obtaining threat information that could save American lives. It would also preserve Obama's flexibility to authorize any interrogation tactics he might deem necessary for national security.

The conflict appears to be between Eric Holder and the John Brennans on Obama's team. Both are powerful:

Senate Democrats aren't likely to support a classified annex. Holder on Thursday
said the interrogation methods outlined in the Army manual would be just as
effective as those used by the CIA.
"I'm not convinced at all that if we restrict ourselves to the Army field manual that we will be in any way less effective in the interrogation of people who have sworn to do us harm," Holder said.

BTD makes a good point, borrowing from Glenn Greenwald: war crimes via loopholes are still...war crimes.

But I also find it interesting that the CIA wants to apply public pressure to so many aspects of Obama's policy, yet take none of the blame for the creation of that policy. John Brennan goes on TV and defends rendition - but he reassures the Obama team that he had nothing to do with "enhanced interrogation" policy construction, and they nod their heads in agreement. The CIA doesn't want to be investigated - they were just following orders (which as BTD says, does not excuse war crimes as per Article 2 - "3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture. . . ."). They nonetheless openly condone and put pressure on the Obama administration to continue torture and rendition. From the AP article:

Speaking with reporters Thursday, outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden said
harsh interrogation tactics have been needed to get information from the most
hardened terror suspects. He and some other U.S. intelligence
officials oppose limiting the CIA to the Army manual, which was written
specifically for military interrogations and may not be effective on the most
dangerous detainees.

"It is an honest discussion to talk about what techniques we should use,
but to assume automatically that the Army Field Manual would suit the needs of
the republic in all circumstances is a shot in the dark," Hayden said.
[emphasis mine]

Are we really supposed to believe that the U.S. intelligence community bears no culpability for the torture regime? Everytime Hayden, Brennan, and others open their mouth to cheerlead for the Bush administration's policies, they put the lie to that theory and suggest that things may've been more complicated than they seem.

Mark Lowenthal's B.S. is a little tired. And apparently Obama's hedging on This Week was intentional. If Obama somehow continues any aspect of the Bush torture regime, I would be hardpressed to see how pressure from the intelligence community was not largely to blame.

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]

John Brennan Finds A Place

Reports about John Brennan withdrawing his candidacy for DNI or D/CIA occassionally carefully noted that it didn't mean he was withdrawing from all possible positions - just those two. It appears that that was a rather astute observation.

John Brennan, according to the NYT, is set to take over as deputy national security adviser, a new position the Obama administration intends to create. Quoting from the NYT:

"WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to scrap the way President Bush oversaw domestic security in the White House and name a former Central Intelligence Agency official to coordinate counterterrorism, people close to
the transition said Wednesday.

The plan being discussed would eliminate the independent homeland security adviser’s office and assign those duties to the National Security Council to streamline sometimes overlapping functions. A deputy national security adviser would be charged with overseeing the effort to guard against terrorism and to respond to natural disasters.

Democrats close to the transition said Mr. Obama’s choice for that job was John O. Brennan, a longtime C.I.A. veteran who was the front-runner to head the spy agency until withdrawing in November amid criticism of his views on interrogation and detention policies. His appointment would not require Senate confirmation."

If Brennan's position is actually deputy national security adviser - no.2 to Jim Jones - he will have a fair amount of power in the administration. The way the article is written suggests his influence will be limited to the domestic sphere - but his job title suggests room for growth into international affairs. My initial reaction was at least he is far away from rendition and interrogation policy. Now I wonder. I think his voice will have a great deal of influence over the Obama administration.

Here is a little wikipedia article on the office that Brennan's new office will be replacing.

If you think of Brennan as in charge of homeland security, the threat of his affecting foreign policy seems minimalized (after all, to our "credit" we do try our best not to torture in the 50 states) though his views on wiretapping are absurdly legitimized. But if you think of him as Jim Jones' deputy and a member of the National Security Council, his views on detention and interrogation are suddenly much more relevant.

What his position will look like, when it is created, is still murky.

Fran Townsend was recently in the position that Brennan's new position is going to replace. She seems happy to have stuck her nose into detention/interrogation. Here's some noise from her, from CNN:


BLITZER: we're joined by the White House Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend. She's joining us from the White House. You just heard this former inmate, this former detainee at Guantanamo Bay say I was beaten, shackled, spat at, kicked, punched, stripped naked, left in isolation, sometimes naked, hog-tied. What do you say to that charge that he's making, in effect, experts say, that amounts to torture?

FRAN TOWNSEND, W.H. HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER: Ok, let's back up and be very clear. You have heard Dana Perino say it today, you've heard the president say it numerous times, the United States does not torture. Do we have a program? Yes, we do. It is very limited. There have been fewer than 100 people in it, and the people who participate in that program are carefully trained with more than 250 hours of training. The average age of an interrogator is 43. They're not just interrogators who are part of the team. There are also subject matter experts and individuals who are there to monitor that the health and psychological well-being of the detainee himself. We start with the least harsh measures first. It stops after -- if someone becomes cooperative. And let's be clear, Wolf, this is a program that was used when Abu Zubaydah was in custody and not being cooperative. He had clearly been trained in resistance techniques to interrogation -- wait a minute, Wolf, these techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah, it produced actionable intelligence that resulted in the capture of Ramzi Binalshibh. These programs stop attacks.

BLITZER: All right, well let's go through some of the specifics and you'll tell us if you're doing that. For example, "The New York Times" says these memos authorize not only slaps to the head, but hours held naked in a fridge itself, days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music, long periods manacled in stress positions. Or the ultimate water-boarding. Never in history "The Times" says had the United States authorized such tactics." Is that true?

TOWNSEND: Wolf, obviously, I'm not going to talk about each individual specific technique that we use. The director of central intelligence has talked to members of both intelligence committees in the House and the Senate. What he did was he understood this was not just a legal question, but there was a policy issue and there is a political willingness question. Frankly, Wolf, if Americans are killed because we fail to do the hard things, the American people would have the absolute right to ask us why.

BLITZER: Let me rephrase the question. Without confirming that you were actually doing those things, but those things as described in the "New York Times" today, if someone were doing those things, would that be torture?

TOWNSEND: Wolf, we adhere to the law, and the president has made clear his expectation that we will do that. No one has ever suggested that, say Miranda or the army field manual went to the limits that were legally permissible. The constitution does that, which is why we seek legal opinions from the office of legal counsel, but we don't talk about the specific techniques because we know they train against those techniques that they know we use.

BLITZER: Would it be appropriate if other governments captured Americans and used those techniques against Americans?

TOWNSEND: The fact is, Wolf, these are not people who wear a uniform or represent a state. And quite frankly, I'm a little bit baffled by the suggestion that somehow, if we didn't use harsh interrogation tactics that somehow, if our men and women in uniform were captured, they'd be treated better by al Qaeda --

BLITZER: That's what John McCain who himself was tortured when he was a POW in Vietnam, he says that if the United States uses these harsh interrogation techniques, then others will be encouraged to follow suit.

TOWNSEND: John McCain was tortured. We do not torture. And the fact is, no matter how we treat detainees, al Qaeda, when they capture our soldiers in uniform will still torture and behead them. How we treat detainees is not going to affect that.

BLITZER: How many detainees were given these kinds of harsh interrogation techniques? Are we talking about a handful? Are we talking about dozens, hundreds, thousands?

TOWNSEND: Well, we know from the director of central intelligence that fewer than -- there have been fewer than 100 CIA detainees in any type of program, and less than a third of those have ever used techniques against them. But I will say to you though, that less than a third produced 8,500 intelligence reports on threat information. We don't even consider putting somebody into this program, the director of CIA doesn't, unless we think one of two things is a factor -- either they have timely information about location of al Qaeda leadership or they have information about an imminent or a real threat to the United States and our interests.

BLITZER: You heard Paula Newton's report, saying that some of these detainees, some of these people who face these kinds of techniques, these harsh interrogation techniques, in the end, they'll say anything to simply stop the pain. And in the end, you really can't buy what they're saying. Some other foreign intelligence services say, you know what, torture really doesn't work because you're just going to get these guys to say whatever they think you want to hear.

TOWNSEND: We begin, as I said, Wolf, we begin with the least harsh methods first. There has to be an interrogation plan, it has to be approved by senior folks in the CIA. There's got to be reports and monitoring after each interrogation session, and when detainees are cooperative, the interrogation tactics stop and it turns into a debriefing.

BLITZER: We've got to wrap it up, but are these techniques, whatever they are -- and I know you don't want to describe them -- are they still being used?

TOWNSEND: Wolf, I'm not going to talk about the operational activity of the CIA. I will tell you that when we capture someone who is in a position to have location data on al Qaeda leadership or information about a relevant threat, we will operate within the limits of the law.

BLITZER: Was the "New York Times" story accurate?

TOWNSEND: Look, I'm not going to go through which parts of it were accurate and not. I will tell you, as I've said to you before, I think it is incredibly irresponsible to leak classified information that threatens our national security and the effectiveness of the techniques that we do have at our disposal. If we want the men and women of the intelligence community to be successful, we've got to give them the tools they need.

BLITZER: Fran Townsend is the president's homeland security adviser. Thanks for coming in.

TOWNSEND: Thanks Wolf.

Update: CBS reports "Brennan's appointment is expected to be made public Friday. Brennan, who has led Obama's intelligence-transition team, was originally a leading candidate to head the CIA, but withdrew his name from consideration after critics accused him of supporting the Bush Administration's harsh interrogation techniques. Brennan also served as the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and will be part of Obama's National Security Council and will be the point man for all counterterrorism issues." [emphasis mine]

I guess Obama will announce Brennan's appointment with that of Panetta's. I guess that's one way to say "suck it."

A Valuable Tidbit

Digby quotes an exchange on CNN that is pretty interesting

TODD: Analyst says, if Brennan didn't support harsh interrogation, his
overall ties to the post-9/11 era at the CIA, with the prewar intelligence flap
and all the controversial tactics in the war on terror, would have made him
tough to confirm.Human rights officials are throwing down their gauntlet.
ELISA MASSIMINO, CEO AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST: It really is incumbent on the incoming administration to choose people for those slots who don't have any baggage from the previous policies and can demonstrate a clear break from those policies.
TODD: Elisa Massimino says that doesn't mean everyone who served in the CIA then should be automatically disqualified. But analysts say it will be hard to find a really qualified spy chief who doesn't have some tie-in to that period.A former CIA officer says, if the Obama team can find someone like that:
TYLER DRUMHELLER, FORMER CIA CHIEF OF
EUROPEAN OPERATIONS: They have a unique opportunity to make changes now in the agency, the way the agency fits in to the intelligence community, get back to the real core mission of the service, to recruit agents and have -- collect
intelligence through classic espionage.(END VIDEOTAPE)
TODD: Tyler Drumheller says the ideal person for that would be, not a former analyst, but someone from the operations side of the CIA, the division that actually carries out missions in the field. So, the challenge right now for Obama's team, find someone like that who is not associated with the controversies of the past eight years. Suzanne, it's going to be a very tall order. That really narrows the
field.
MALVEAUX: OK, Brian Todd, thank you so much.

As I wrote in the comments of digby's post, this is actually kind of a good sign - a veteran CIA operative like Drumheller backing up a liberal group like Human Rights First.

I wonder how widespread Drumheller's thinking is. After all, the CIA was not always a jailer & principal interrogator - and Drumheller has made this point before (from Jane Mayer's article The Black Sites):

The C.I.A. knew even less about running prisons than it did about hostile
interrogations. Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of European operations at the
C.I.A., and the author of a recent book, “On the Brink: How the White House
Compromised U.S. Intelligence,” said, “The agency had no experience in
detention. Never. But they insisted on arresting and detaining people in this
program. It was a mistake, in my opinion. You can’t mix intelligence and police
work. But the White House was really pushing. They wanted someone to do it. So
the C.I.A. said, ‘We’ll try.’ George Tenet came out of politics, not
intelligence. His whole modus operandi was to please the principal. We got stuck
with all sorts of things. This is really the legacy of a director who never said
no to anybody.”

Having someone as CIA Director who really believes the CIA needs to redefine its mission and get out of the business of breaking the Geneva Conventions would certainly be positive. Drumheller's criticism is a substantial one - let's remake this place. It synchs up nicely with the stated aims of Obama's administration (end torture, shut down Guantánamo) and the general tendency of his thinking. I would imagine that getting away from his crap would be a relief to a lot of people in the CIA.

Maybe Drumheller is auditioning for the positon. I hope not - like Brennan, he believes renditions have their purpose - they are a "vital tool." This is an interesting interview with Drumheller from Spiegel Online:

SPIEGEL: The renditions program saw the kidnapping of suspected Islamist
extremists to third countries. Were you involved in the program?
Drumheller: I would be lying if I said no. I have very complicated feelings about the whole issue. I do see the purpose of renditions, if they are carried out properly.
Guys sitting around talking about carrying out attacks as they smoke their pipes
in the comfort of a European capital tend to get put off the idea if they learn
that a like-minded individual has been plucked out of safety and sent elsewhere
to pay for his crimes.

SPIEGEL: We disagree. At the very least, you need to be certain that the
targets of those renditions aren't innocent people.
Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences.

SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called
"war on terrorism"?
Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert
the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once
had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern
was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think
about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed
with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We
should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he
presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no
way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary
measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion
about their value and morality.

It is unfortunate that Drumheller believes this, especially in light of his comments elsewhere regarding the countries we rend suspects to - "You can say we asked them not to do it, and they do say that, but you have to be honest with yourself and say there's no way we can guarantee they are not going to do that."

Um, at least his eyes are wide open, I guess.

Ideally the CIA Director will not be trying to incorporate the failures of the Bush administration into the Obama administration. If we insist upon playing by our own rules, it becomes much harder to play with others. Drumheller references this issue in his Spiegel interview - "The guys who attacked the World Trade Center didn't fly from Kabul to New York. They came from Hamburg. So the value in befriending the local intelligence services in Europe instead of alienating them is clear: We need to ensure that they are telling us everything they know."

Again, this is why we need fresh leadership that American citizens and our many allies can trust. If we continue to jeopardize our allies by carrying out illegal renditions on their soil, we are not going to have that trust. As I wrote in yesterday's article, important intelligence leaders in Italy were arrested for kidnapping Abu Omar. Do you think if our guys are never punished, and our "host country" is, that we will continue receiving their help?

The answer - from Michael Hayden of all people - is NO.

From John Prados at TomPaine.com:

General Michael V. Hayden, the current CIA director, was asked a few months ago
about the agency’s foreign intelligence partnerships, given the mounting
investigations of CIA activities. Without touching the controversial U.S.
operations at all, his response was, “If an ally believes—fears—that we can’t
keep such activities private, then that ally is going to be much more reluctant
to deal with us.”

The EU has condemned rendition. It is evidently important to our interests that we condemn it as well.

Stephen Kappes & The Rendition of Abu Omar

It has been reported (here and here) that Stephen Kappes, current Deputy Director of the CIA, is a leading candidate for Director of the CIA under President-Elect Barack Obama. The NY Daily News goes so far as to say that "Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have strongly advocated" the nomination of Kappes.

Critics of the bloggers who were against John Brennan's nomination to a top intelligence position frequently whined that he was getting a bad rap (see Greenwald's article "The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash"). One critic goes so far as to say "Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty] and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that they were wrong.” (as quoted by Greenwald from Jeff Stein's CQ article).

Let's see how they choose to defend Stephen Kappes. There can be no vague denials that Kappes had dirty hands - at his feet rests the responsibility for the bungled and unnecessary rendition of Muslim cleric Osama Mustafa Hasan Nasr aka Abu Omar.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

Under guidelines established after Sept. 11, each proposed rendition must be
approved at several levels within the CIA, but not by the White House itself.
The veteran senior CIA official said one of those who signed off on the Abu Omar
abduction was Stephen Kappes, at the time the agency's associate deputy director
for operations and currently its No. 2 official.

The Abu Omar rendition is among the few renditions we know quite a few details about (Jeralyn covered aspects of his rendition here and here). That Kappes' signed off on the rendition of Abu Omar suggests he may've signed off on other renditions - which contradicts the rather strange and weak defense his "backers" granted him in Newsweek, that he "was working on counterintel issues—uncovering moles—when the CIA set up its 'secret prison' network."

If Kappes' signature is on the rendition approval, he may have a lot of explaining to do to our allies in the European Union.

According to Matthew Cole in GQ [PDF], at the time of Abu Omar's abduction, the CIA was working alongside Milan's antiterrorism police - known as DIGOS - to collect enough evidence to arrest and convict Abu Omar. CIA officer Bob Lady, then Milan's CIA station chief, believed they would be able to accomplish this in a few months.

But a rendition plan was pushed forward by Bob Lady's superior, Rome's CIA Chief of Station officer Jeff Castelli. According to Cole, Castelli moved ahead with the rendition even against the recommendations of Bob Lady and the Counterterrorist Center, and the plan "was approved by the brass at Langley and SISMI, the CIA's Italian counterpart." In other words, approved by Stephen Kappes.

The legal troubles resulting from this rendition have been widely reported. 26 Americans, most CIA employees, among them Bob Lady, went on trial in absentia in Italy for kidnapping in April of 2008 (source: Jeff Stein, CQ). As reported by Tim Shorrock and Frank Naif the trial has now halted over secrecy privilege issues and the "CIA kidnapping trial [is] expected to resume in March." Reports of the trial's halt made it all the way to page A16 of the NYT.

What exactly prevents Stephen Kappes from being sucked into this trial? He was the one who approved this rendition. Will he even acknowledge the legal & diplomatic issues surrounding it - which the CIA has yet to do? Would Kappes be able to earn the trust of other crucial allied intelligence agencies as head of the CIA with this behind him? High-level intelligence officials in Italy, including Marco Mancini, the head of the SISMI anti-terrorism and counterespionage efforts, and Gustavo Pignero, SISMI chief for Northern Italy, were arrested for their involvement in the rendition[see also wiki]. But Kappes and Jeff Castelli remain in positions of power, with no consequences for their actions.

Shamefully enough, according to Stein and Matthew Cole, the CIA has not provided Bob Lady with a lawyer nor helped him pay for one. Lady's wife left him and his house in Italy stands to be confiscated if he is convicted. Cole reports in his GQ article:

"Yet another former CIA officer, who knows Lady well, says the agency threw Lady
under a bus. 'Bob got screwed because he was a good soldier, a perfectly
subservient CIA officer. The agency could have given him some funds so he could
get his own lawyer. He’s retired, so they didn’t have to do anything. But they
could have done something. He got f***** big-time.'”

Pretty big morale-booster, huh? That is some great CIA leadership!

As I have done before, I echo Shorrock and Naif's message:

"Ignoring allied complaints about heavy-handed renditions is not an
option--senior career and appointed officials who greenlighted these operations
should step forward for the inevitable reckoning on behalf of their country, and
on behalf of the brave men and women whose intelligence careers and personal
lives have been turned inside out by foreign indictments."

The lead prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, described the rendition of Abu Omar as follows:

"'The kidnapping of Abu Omar was not only a serious crime against Italian
sovereignty and human rights, but it also seriously damaged counterterrorism
efforts in Italy and Europe,'" said Armando Spataro, the lead prosecutor in
Milan. "'In fact, if Abu Omar had not been kidnapped, he would now be in prison,
subject to a regular trial, and we would have probably identified his other
accomplices.'"

Contrast what Matthew Cole writes:

"'After we grabbed Omar, senior management went around the seventh floor of
Langley bragging about this op,' the former senior CIA official involved told
me. 'They’re not bragging anymore.'"

Even though this completely embarrassing rendition can be laid at Kappes' feet, when it comes to Kappes, prepare to be triangulated. Again, even though he signed off on arguably one of the most disastrous renditions of the entire Bush administration, Newsweek's Mark Hosenball tells us:

"Democratic sources have indicated nonetheless that a leading candidate still
being considered by Obama for CIA chief is the agency's current deputy director,
Stephen Kappes--a veteran but media-shy spy who almost certainly was
involved in the agency's handling of terrorist suspects while serving as Number
Two in the Operations Directorate between 2002 and 2004. Kappes was
driven out of the agency when Republican Congressman Porter Goss and a coterie
of hyper-partisan Capitol Hill aides took control at Langley in 2004; he was
invited back after Goss and his team were forced out by John Negroponte, then
serving as Intelligence Czar. Kappes' willingness to stand up to the Republicans
may well have endeared him to Democrats who follow intelligence issues closely,
and may be why Kappes' candidacy for CIA chief hasn't yet foundered on the same
shoals that damaged Brennan's prospects. One person close to the
transition said that Kappes' overall qualifications for CIA chief were so
formidable that confronting left-wing critics over him was a fight that Obama
not only ought to join but that the new president would have little difficulty
winning."

Watch the defenders of Brennan, who upheld his moral goodness, find new reasons to defend Kappes - a guy whose hands are without question dirty.

Kappes is a very troubling candidate. My hope is that he does not get tapped for CIA Director and gets flushed away with the rest of the status quo leadership responsible for implementing our abuse of terror suspects. But perhaps the only way we will be able to prevent his appointment is by drawing attention to his record, and forcing people to examine his involvement in the rendition of Abu Omar and countless others. And to continue demanding prosecutions and Congressional investigations of our torture regime. Investigations of the CIA by Congress will obviously be damning to Kappes...and if he is the head of Obama's CIA, they will in turn be embarrassing for Obama.

For more info on renditions, please check out the Human Rights Watch report here on suspects rendered to Jordan (h/t The Moderate Voice). For more info on Abu Omar, check out Peter Bergen's Mother Jones reporting here that describes Abu Omar's treatment in Egypt.

[crossposted at TalkLeft]

The broader CIA critique

In Glenn Greenwald's recent Salon article, "Some observations after being involved in a Fox News report," he discusses his attempt to set the record straight when it comes to the left blogs' John Brennan critique. I believe he is mostly right when he says:

"Specifically, the case against John Brennan as CIA Director - from the
beginning - was based almost exclusively on comments he made on television,
after he left the CIA, in which he supported rendition and what he called
'enhanced interrogation tactics.'" [bolding Greenwald's]

That was indeed the basis for the Brennan critique. John Brennan, basically, did this to himself - he was the one who stood up and acted as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration's tactics. The mass media doesn't understand this for some reason. Despite the fact that Brennan's statements are out there for the world to see, the MSM did little to present them to their viewers/readers. But even if Brennan hadn't put his foot in his mouth, I believe he would've been, by virtue of his former place in the chain of command, disqualifed for the CIA Director position.

No blogger I've read is demanding a massive purge of CIA staff. But I personally think it is important to both make and accept as legitimate a broader critique of Obama's CIA candidates based on chain of command.

Mel Goodman did this a little bit regarding John Brennan in his Democracy Now! appearance. From the transcript:

"MEL GOODMAN: OK. John Brennan was deputy executive secretary to George Tenet
during the worst violations during the CIA period in the run-up to the Iraq war,
so he sat there at Tenet's knee when they passed judgment on torture and abuse,
on extraordinary renditions, on black sites, on secret prisons. He was part of
all of that decision making."

Goodman is right to hold Brennan accountable for decisions made in and by the CIA. Brennan was one of the leaders - as were Steve Kappes and John McLaughlin, both of whom have been floated for the CIA Director position. I don't think we should punish the lower-level officers in the CIA who carried out specific operations - the Kirakous of the intelligence world. But we do need to ensure that the honchos of the Bush administration's CIA are held accountable for the decisions they made and that they will not now lead Obama's CIA.

To construct this critique, we need to understand the chain of command in the CIA (esp. before the 9/11 commission report and the establishment of the DNI position). According to espionageinfo.com :

The "director of Central Intelligence (DCI) oversees the four directorates
(Administration, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Operations), as well
as numerous other offices."
"Under DCI is the deputy director of Central
Intelligence (DDCI), who assists DCI as head of the CIA and of the Intelligence
Community. DDCI also exercises the powers of the DCI when the holder of that
position is absent or disabled. Within the CIA and the Intelligence Community as
a whole, the offices of the DCI and the DDCI are intended to function virtually
as a single unit."

The very top. The buck stops with the DCI and the DDCI. In other words, these two guys, both floated as Obama administration CIA Directors, DCI Hayden and DDCI Steve Kappes, are literally in this together.

Continuing from espionageinfo.com:

"By far the largest chain of command within the CIA, however is the one
that runs through the offices of the Executive Director (EXDIR) and Deputy
Executive Director (D/EXDIR).

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. Also under the EXDIR aegis are several
independent functions, including the Center for the Study of Intelligence,
Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, Ombudsman/Alternative Dispute
Resolution, and the Executive Secretary. Finally, the Executive Director's
office is in the line of authority between DCI/DDCI and the four
directorates."

The Wall Street Journal also has a chart that lays out these relationships nicely. Note this chart is not the same as the current CIA chart which takes into account the various reforms made in 2004 and onward.

The EXDIR's office has authority over Operations. You know, that directorate where particular rendition and interrogation plans are hatched and carried out. And those in charge of Operations are the Deputy Director of Operations and the Associate Deputy Director of Operations. Pertinently, from June 2002 on Kappes was the Associate Deputy Director of Operations (for more on Kappes, please see here).

Considering that John Brennan served as the Deputy Executive Director, his line about not being "involved in the decisionmaking process for any of these controversial policies and actions" is a little weak. Until March 2003 (when he left) he had authority and oversight over Operations. Based on the job description alone he was involved in the implementation of these controversial policies. And I think that is fair game.

Why is it fair game? Because we hold our leaders accountable for their actions. If people are kidnapped, if people are held in black site cells without a clue as to why, if someone is tortured, we look to those leaders for an explanation as to why - and why these things continued.

Based on their positions of authority alone, I find Kappes and McLaughlin unfit to serve in the CIA - and Brennan too. I would find Jim Pavitt, former Deputy Director of Operations until June 2004, unfit as well.

Why is all this important? How about this - a point of Tim Shorrock's and Frank Naif's. Their point is in response to the bundles of international legal trouble the CIA's rendition and interrogation policies have gotten the agency into. To quote Shorrock and Naif:

"Ignoring allied complaints about heavy-handed renditions is not an
option--senior career and appointed officials who greenlighted these operations
should step forward for the inevitable reckoning on behalf of their country, and
on behalf of the brave men and women whose intelligence careers and personal
lives have been turned inside out by foreign indictments."

By virtue of their place in the chain of command, the Brennans and Kappes of the intelligence world need to offer an explanation for how these renditions happened, how they went so wrong, and why they were allowed to happen at all. They will be able to offer either useful testimony or they will themselves be targets of these international investigations. Because whether we think it's legal or not, other countries have discovered our operations in their territory, and have found them illegal.

In the domestic arena, the logic is similar. As Senator Levin said on the Rachel Maddow Show on Dec 17, 2008:

LEVIN: "What I think is our role to do is to bring out the facts which we
have to state our conclusions, which we have, which is where the origin of these
techniques began. And then to turn over to the Justice Department of the next
administration - because clearly this Justice Department is not willing to take
an objective look - to turn over to the next Justice Department all the facts
that we can, and we have put together, and get our report, the rest of it
declassified.

But then it seems to me it is appropriate that there be an outside
commission appointed to take this out of politics, that it would have the clear
subpoena authority to get to the parts of this which are not yet clear, and that
is the role of the CIA.

We looked at the role of the Department of Defense, but the role of the
CIA has not yet been looked at, and let an outside commission reach the kind of
conclusions which then may or may not lead to indictments or to civil action.
But it is not our role, it's not appropriate for us to make those kinds of -
reach those kinds of conclusions." [bolding my own]

By virtue of their positions alone, we know who had responsibility. Now is the time to find out what happened, from them. Keeping these officials in the CIA is not an option. We need them to take responsibility for the decisions they made, and the policies that we as a nation need to leave behind.

[crossposted at TalkLeft]

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.

Steve Kappes

I don't know what it takes to end up on the shortlist of an AP article for top CIA post. But let's assume there's a reason I'm not on it.

Steve Kappes:

"currently Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DDCIA), having
assumed this position on July 24, 2006.

...He has held a variety of operational and managerial assignments at CIA Headquarters and overseas, serving as assistant deputy director to former Deputy Director for Operations (DDO) James Pavitt, and later as DDO after Pavitt stepped down in August 2004. At the time of the September 11 attacks, Kappes was the associate deputy director for operations for counterintelligence.

Kappes was named Deputy Director for Operations (DDO) for the CIA in June 2004 and took office in August 2004 while the appointment of Porter Goss as the next Director of Central Intelligence was still pending in the Senate. Kappes succeeded James Pavitt, who resigned in June 2004..."

Democratic Underground gives us more specific dates:

"March 2002-Abu Zubaydah is captured in Pakistan. George Bush is briefed
regularly by George Tenet on the details of Zubaydah's interrogation (see p. 22,
State of War by James Risen). Cofer Black is in charge of the CIA's
Counterterrorism Center and oversees the CIA's hunt for the terrorists. Zubaydah
is interrogated in Thailand, where the sessions were filmed. He was waterboarded
sometime in the May-June 2002 time frame. Enhanced interrogation methods were
used and approval for them came from Jim Pavitt (see p. 21 of ABC News interview
of former CIA case officer, John Kiriakou). Pavitt was the DDO (i.e., Deputy Director of Operations). Stephen Kappes, who currently serves as the Deputy Director of the CIA, was named Assistant Deputy Director of Operations in June 2002. Ron Suskind confirms Risen's report that the President and his National Security team were regularly briefed on the results of Zubaydah's
torture sessions (see The One Percent Doctrine, pp. 111-115)."

Considering KSM was captured in 2003, and waterboarded, Kappes was obviously intimately involved with that.

Ron Suskind in the "One Percent Doctrine" introduces us to Kappes thusly:

"He was, at that point, associate deputy director for operations - number two in the DO - and being groomed to take Jim Pavitt's job." [p.223]

(You will note the discrepancy in the exact description of Kappes' job - "associate" versus "assistant" deputy. Based on other sources compared to Suskind, I can say they are describing the same position over the same period - Kappes was no.2 to Pavitt from June 2002 onward.)

Now Pavitt is pretty much bottom of the barrel as far as the CIA goes. This is a guy whose job duties literally included approving every single coercive technique used against detainees, as they happened -

"Kirakou made the interrogations sound almost like a game of 'Mother, May I?' He
said, 'It was not up to the individual interrogator to decide 'I'm going to slap
him' or 'I'm going to shake him.' Each one of these, though they're minor, had
to have the approval of the Deputy Director for Operations, who during most of
this period was James Pavitt. 'Before you could lay a hand on him, you had to
send a cable saying, 'He's uncooperative. Request permission to do X.'...There
was, however, no known instance of the supervisors denying a request to use more
force." ["The Dark Side," Jane Mayer, p.167].

It is pretty astonishing that the No.2 to all this is in any way in contention for the top CIA job.

Now, these rumors are not quite as intense as those surrounding John Brennan, and Kappes does not AFAIK have any official role in the Obama transition process as he is currently at the CIA. But Kappes does earn a mention in the Dec 2 Post-Brennan NYT Article by Mazzetti & Shane:

"It is widely expected that Mr. Obama will replace Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A.
director. Among those mentioned as possible candidates for the job are Stephen
R. Kappes, a C.I.A. veteran who is the deputy director; Tim Roemer, a former
congressman from Indiana who was a member of the Sept. 11 commission; Senator
Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who is retiring from the Senate in January;
and Jack Devine, a former head of the agency’s clandestine service who left the
C.I.A. before the Sept. 11 attacks."

Kappes appears not to have left a bloody trail of quotes like Brennan did. Good for him, but his record speaks for itself.

You can get legal clearance from somebody else...but how do you successfully implement a new torture policy? Can you do it if your brass hates it? Something about two to tango?

As Pavitt himself said:

"Pavitt, who declined to talk about specific CIA authorities or legal
memos, said the activities recently in the news were 'done in consultation with
the executive at all levels, the National Security Council and such. . . . Any
impression that we were operating high, wide and handsome, without appropriate
congressional oversight, I think would also be, incorrect.'"

I doubt this will surprise anyone, but John Yoo thinks it's all the CIA's fault:

"In early January 2002, soon after the CIA took custody of Al-Libi, a handful of
CIA officers at a high-level legal meeting in the Situation Room voiced a
problem they were facing. 'The CIA guys said, "We're going to have some
real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees" if the
Agency's interrogators were required to respect the limits for treatment
demanded by the Geneva Conventions," John Yoo told the Washington
Post. In Yoo's version of events, the impetus to break out of
Geneva's strictures thus came from the CIA." ["The Dark Side," Jane Mayer,
p.120]

I have little doubt that Yoo's account is a crock of crap. But still, what about this?

"The Pentagon and CIA needed Uzbekistan as a forward base. If that
meant joining forces with a torture regime, known on ocassion to literally boil
political prisoners alive, he [Cheney] was ready...Craig Murray, the former
British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, complained that he tried to warn the CIA
station chief in Tashkent that much of the intelligence out of Uzbekistan was
derived from torture, most of which he said was 'rubbish.'...But he said that
while the station chief did not dispute that intelligence was being obtained
under torture, the CIA did not consider this a problem. 'There was no
reason to think they were perturbed,' Murray said."
"The new way of thinking was reflected by Tenet at a closed-door meeting of
top intelligence officials of the English-speaking world, gathered on March 10,
2002, in Queenstown, New Zealand. 'Gentlemen,' Tenet had reportedly said
with a dramatic pause, 'we are at war.' What this meant, he had gone on to
explain was "As for the CIA, I can tell you this. There's nothing we won't
do, nothing we won't try, and no country we won't deal with to achieve our
goals-to stop the enemy. The shackles, my friends, have to be taken off.'
...."
"Other top American officials in attendance included Lieutenant General
Michael Hayden, then head of the NSA; Mueller, the Director of the FBI; and the
CIA's head of covert operations, James Pavitt. Pavitt evidently amplified
the tough talk, noting, 'We're going to be working with intelligence agencies
that are utterly unhesitant in what they will do to get people to talk.'"
["The Dark Side," Jane Mayer, p.131-132].

Check out the timeline at Torturing Democracy. Though this meeting is after Bush issues his first executive order authorizing denials of Geneva Convention protections, [Feb 7 2002] it is before they capture Abu Zubaydah, the first torture experiment [March 28 2002].

Who started this thing? And why didn't anyone stop it? Clearly some of the top brass in the CIA were willing to go along and to effectively lead. I have issues with any of those people working in an Obama CIA which would simultaneously mean an acceptance of ills past and the ability to haggle your way out of a serious investigation into government-wide torture related wrongdoing ("Who, me? Your CIA head? Look, it's not our fault, let's not make this embarrassing...").

And that's not even addressing the existential, if you will, question of why Kappes' name is even getting thrown around. And what is a centrist intelligence policy after Bush?

I have some questions. I hope that Obama will set up a process to answer them.

Brennan: "The Big Torture Opponent"

Hmm...

From CBS Evening News, Sept 18 2006:

COURIC: All right, Bob Schieffer. Bob, thanks so much. Well, all of the political back and forth may have obscured the real issue here: How far exactly can CIA interrogators go when it comes to extracting important information from suspected terrorists? We asked national security correspondent David Martin to find out. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID MARTIN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): CIA Director Michael Hayden has briefed members of Congress on so-called stress-inducing techniques used to extract information from high-level terrorists -- tactics the president has called tough. Tactics former CIA official and now CBS News consultant John Brennan says would still be used.
(on camera): What are the tough tactics that the CIA wants to use?

JOHN BRENNAN, CBS NEWS TERRORISM ANALYST: Sleep deprivation, you know, long periods of standing, other types of things that will try to wear down a detainee`s resistance to questioning.

MARTIN (voice-over): Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch says that depending on how harshly the techniques are applied, they would violate the Geneva Conventions ban on cruel treatment, which now applies to prisoners held by the CIA.

TOM MALINOWSKI, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: Extended sleep deprivation, forced standing, where a prisoner is forced to stand motionless for up to 40 hours at a time, induced hypothermia, in which a prisoner is subjected to extremely cold temperatures, and also the technique of using all of these techniques at the same time.

MARTIN: The CIA has used its most aggressive techniques, including waterboarding, in which the prisoner is made to feel like he`s drowning, against a handful of terrorists like Khalid Shaik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. But Brennan says the CIA now recognizes it went too far.

BRENNAN: I think the increasing consensus is that waterboarding and some of the more aggressive tactics like that are something that may be beyond what that line should be.

MARTIN: But human rights activists like Malinowski argue that any technique for inducing stress ends up being cruel.

MALINOWSKI: A little bit of cold, a little bit of discomfort isn`t going to cut it with a hardened prisoner like a Khalid Shaik Mohammed. If you apply these methods, you are always going to apply them beyond the point of a prisoner`s tolerance.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

Brennan does not like waterboarding by most accounts, but it is unclear as to what he finds appropriate - and it is well documented that extended isolation and sleep deprivation are as tortuous and painful as other techniques.

What is also interesting is that Brennan seems unable to say the CIA has even used waterboarding from one moment to the next. Check out his CBS interview of Nov 2007:

BRENNAN: Yes, and a sort of classic water boarding, and I'm not saying the CIA has ever used water boarding, but there would be a constant stream of water
and a volume of water that is going to be continuous. Here they stop in between on
occasions.

So what makes the difference here between Brennan acknowledging or not acknowledging it? I think an investigation of the political moment would be interesting. But I do not think this is the stance of a big torture opponent. On top of everything else of course.