The American Bear

› A “Roadmap” to Restoring Our Constitutional Liberties | Translation Exercises

The CIA … is a qualitatively different problem [than the NSA]. The reason is that they field what is essentially a small army. The problem with this force is that it is solely and exclusively accountable to the President. That Presidents like having a small army that they can use on a whim should not come as a surprise. Nevertheless, an army that can be deployed at the behest of a single individual goes strongly against every known or imagined notion of “checks and balances.” To make matters worse, our experience with CIA special operations has in no way or manner validated this Constitutional loophole. The record has not fluctuated between good and bad. On the contrary, it has been a continuous string of disasters. The blowback and loss of moral authority that the United States has experienced from CIA misadventures in Guatemala, Iran, the Bay of Pigs, Cambodia, Afghanistan, El Salvador, the Iran-Contra scandal, “Black Site” prisons, rendition programs, ongoing Drone Wars in at least a dozen nations, etc., have been individually and collectively intolerable. It must end.

The CIA’s record of repeated failure suggests a problem, one that runs to the core of that institution and its lack of accountability. Which is the reason that it must go. In 1991, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced the “End of the Cold War Act” that would have abolished the CIA altogether while moving its (very) few useful functions into the State Department. He tried again in 1995 with the “Central Intelligence Agency Abolition Act.” Now would be an excellent time to revisit this wonderful idea. Moreover, the successful closing of that agency would send a clear message – one that is nicely designed “pour encourager les autres.” To repeat, the CIA does not need to be reconfigured or reformed, and its leadership does not need to be reviewed or reshuffled. It needs to be shut down. Period. It is of particular importance that its special operations branch be closed. Again, not reformed or recalibrated, but closed. If the President wishes to have a war with another nation, or a particular group within another nation, let him or her argue for and receive explicit Congressional authorization.

› We Are So Disappointed With the Corrupt Afghan Government | A Tiny Revolution

I’m sure it’s tough for many reasons to work for the Sulzbergers and Carlos Slim at the New York Times. But I’d have an especially hard time coming into the office every day and being forced to write paragraphs like this in today’s story about Afghanistan:

American and NATO officials in Kabul…said that [development] aid would continue, although the amounts given were likely to be reduced over time. And the Afghan government would have to live up to its commitments to battle corruption and run a more open government for the aid to keep flowing.

It’s not just that the New York Times itself uncovered the story of the CIA giving the Karzai government millions in bags of cash one week ago. It’s that the bags of cash article was written by the same reporter, Matthew Rosenberg.

Yet here he is today, faithfully passing along the news about how anonymous American officials sincerely want Karzai to be less corrupt. It’s like breaking the Eliot Spitzer prostitution story, and then quoting him a week later explaining how he’s going to continue paying Ashley Dupré as long as she lives up to his longstanding demand that she be less of a prostitute.

(I have much more sympathy for the payee in both situations. In Karzai’s case, he likely remembers that after the Soviets left, their last puppet was castrated, dragged through the streets of Kabul behind a jeep, and then publicly hanged. So you can understand if he wants to keep some cash on hand.) [read]

› CIA selects new head of clandestine service, passing over officer tied to interrogation program | The Washington Post

For background, here’s a post I put together on this topic about a month ago.

Here’s where we are now:

A CIA officer who was the first woman to lead the agency’s clandestine service, but was also closely tied to the agency’s interrogation torture program, will not get to keep that job as part of a management shake-up announced Tuesday by CIA Director John “the priest” Brennan, U.S. officials said.

The woman had served as director of the National Clandestine Service on an interim basis over the past two months and was seen by many in the agency as a front-runner to keep the post, which involves overseeing the CIA’s spying operations around the world.

But the woman, who remains undercover, faced opposition from senior lawmakers over her ties to an interrogation torture program that critics have said employed torture to get information from “al-Qaeda” captives after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Instead, Brennan has given the job to a 57-year-old veteran male officer who served multiple overseas tours in Pakistan, Latin America and Africa, according to public records. He is also undercover, U.S. officials said.

[…] The female officer, who is in her 50s, had broad support within the agency and had previously served as deputy director of the clandestine service. But her background posed significant political [not moral, ethical, or legal, obvy] problems for Brennan.

She had run one of the so-called “black site” secret prisons that the CIA set up after the Sept. 11 attacks, and was one of just two officials who signed off on the controversial decision to destroy a collection of videotapes, some of which depicted detainees being subjected to brutal interrogation measures torture.

and, regarding the SSCI report on the torture program, expect more pushback:

[…] It was unclear whether the female officer would be moved into a new position. The transition comes at a time when the agency is assembling what is said to be a defiant response to a recently completed report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that is sharply critical of the interrogation torture program and its results.

› Newly Declassified Memo Shows CIA Shaped Zero Dark Thirty's Narrative | Adrian Chen

Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden revenge-porn flick Zero Dark Thirty was the biggest publicity coup for the CIA this century outside of the actual killing of Osama bin Laden. But the extent to which the CIA shaped the film has remained unclear. Now, a memo obtained by Gawker shows that the CIA actively, and apparently successfully, pressured Mark Boal to remove scenes that made them look bad from the Zero Dark Thirty script.

The CIA’s whitewashing effort is revealed in a cache of documents newly released under a Freedom of Information Act request about the CIA’s cooperation with Bigelow and Boal. The documents include a 2012 memo—initially classified “SECRET”—summarizing five conference calls between Boal and the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs in late 2011. “The purpose for these discussions was for OPA officers to help promote an appropriate portrayal of the Agency and the Bin Ladin operation,” according to the memo. (Hundreds of pages of CIA documents about the film were released last year; the memo obtained by Gawker was approved for release late last month.)

During these calls, Boal “verbally shared the screenplay” for Zero Dark Thirty in order to get the CIA’s feedback, and the CIA’s public affairs department verbally asked Boal to take out parts that they objected to. According to the memo, he did. [continue]

› C.I.A. Delivers Cash to Afghan Leader’s Office | NYT

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”

The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.

At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is. [continue]

Jim White adds:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these cash payments is that they seem to have been designed in large part to pay off Afghan warlords:

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

And it’s not just any warlords who are being funded by this cash. We learn in the article that the current corruption pay for Rashid Dostum, who committed the largest single war crime in the Afghan war, is now $80,000 per month.

And in the funding of warlords, keep in mind that they form the backbone of David Petraeus’ Afghan Death Squads Local Police under the “direction” of US special operation forces and the CIA.

› Origins of C.I.A.’s Not-So-Secret Drone War in Pakistan | NYTimes.com

Blockbuster story from the Times today:

Nek Muhammad knew he was being followed.

On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.

That was a lie.

Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

read more →

› Yoo Go Girl: Torture Memo Author Criticizes Liberals For Not Supporting Female CIA Official Implicated in Torture Program On Diversity Grounds | Jonathan Turley

Law Professor John Yoo has avoided criminal prosecution and bar charges for his now discredited defense of the Bush torture program. Even the Bush Administration ultimately rejected his infamous torture memos as poorly reasoned and unreliable. Undeterred, Yoo is back in the press condemning liberals for caring more about torture than diversity in not supporting a woman for the head of the CIA’s clandestine service. The woman was reportedly implicated in the torture program and is one of those officials who effectively got a “get out of jail free” card by President Obama when he pledged that no CIA employees would be prosecuted for torture at the start of his first term. Yoo is denouncing liberals for failing to support a woman simply because of a little thing like torture.

Yoo took to the National Review to cry foul at the treatment of the official, who was also reportedly implicated in the decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners being tortured to prevent their use as evidence against CIA officials like herself.

Yoo denounces “the hypocrisy of the diversity-crazed Obama administration’s blocking the first woman for this most sensitive and important of intelligence positions.” He adds “Brennan is blocking the most qualified operative to head the CIA’s key division because of her involvement in interrogations. Clearly, diversity only goes so far for the Left.”

Of course, Yoo would not be able to make such absurd claims if Obama did not insist on CIA officials being protected from prosecution in the first place. Notably, this official who was reportedly tied to the torture program and the destruction of the tapes has widespread support within the agency.

Yoo’s point is absurd. No principled person would support an official with this record simply because of her gender. That is itself a form of sexist blindness. The fact that this person is a female is irrelevant. Diversity begins with a determination that candidates are equally qualified. A person with this record should be barred from any employment in the federal government — let alone a promotion — as a threshold matter. The fact that such officials remain employed and in good standing within the Obama Administration is itself shameful. Even if these officials were not to be prosecuted due to Obama’s sweeping announcement, they could have been pushed to leave federal employment in light of their record. Yet, we have previously seen those implicated in the scandal thriving at the CIA. Indeed, Yoo’s former colleague and an author of the torture memo, Jay Bybee, was given lifetime tenure as a federal judge and continues to sit in judgment of others from the bench. [++]

I posted some thoughts on this issue last week, ICYI.

› Where Were These Dems Asking about CIA-on-the-Hudson During Brennan’s Confirmation? | emptywheel

I have always been a huge fan of what Thomas Perez has done in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. But this sentence, from Adam Serwer’s query on what happened to DOJ’s review of the CIA-on-the-Hudson, ought to give pause.

Since taking office, the special litigation section of the civil rights division has investigated more local police departments for unconstitutional policing than ever before, but never on behalf of American Muslims profiled by law enforcement.

But the rest of Serwer’s piece barely touches a big missed opportunity — and, potentially, an explanation for why DOJ has slow-walked its investigation of the profiling of Muslims in NYC. Serwer notes that Brennan complimented the program, in contrast to Eric Holder’s stated concerns about it.

Although Holder referred to the reports of the NYPD’s actions as “disturbing,” that’s not the view of everyone in the Obama administration. CIA Director John Brennan, formerly a top White House counterterrorism adviser, praised the NYPD’s surveillance program in April 2012. “I have full confidence that the NYPD is doing things consistent with the law, and it’s something that again has been responsible for keeping this city safe over the past decade,” Brennan said.

Brennan is not just the former White House counterterrorism [and homeland security] czar, but he’s also the guy who, when CIA-on-the-Hudson was being set up in the days after 9/11, was in charge of logistics and personnel at the CIA. Which means there’s a pretty decent chance he had a role in dual-hatting the CIA guy who operated domestically to help NYPD spy on Americans.

But Brennan’s role in finding a way to use CIA tactics domestically barely came up in his confirmation hearings. As I noted, he was asked whether he knew about the program (and acknowledged knowing about it), but he was not asked — at least not in any of the public materials — whether he had a role in setting it up.

Sort of a key question for the guy now in charge of the entire CIA, whether he thinks the CIA should find loopholes to get around prohibitions on CIA working domestically, don’t you think?

Serwer names several House Democrats — Rush Holt, Mike Honda, Judy Chu — who have been asking about this investigation. Obviously, they didn’t get a vote on Brennan’s nomination. But it seems the nomination period would have been a very good time to ask questions about how and why, at a time when Brennan played a key role in logistics and personnel at the agency, the government decided to set up this workaround. Asking at that time might have clarified why it is that the Administration seems uninterested in investigating this program.

As it is, we’re now left with a guy who publicly applauded such work-arounds — and CIA involvement through cooperation in fusion centers — in charge of the entire CIA.