Tag: cia

A Waste of Money and Time

Bruce Schneier gives a cogent opinion:

Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we’re done. Take all the rest of the money and spend it on investigation and intelligence.

This is exactly right, though it clearly elides the cesspool that our investigation and intelligence apparatus currently is, a critical problem that the government shows zero interest in taking on.
The 9/11 Commission pointed it out and the reaction has been to add another layer or two of middle managers and most definitely not to drain the swamp and rebuild a reactive and reasonably transparent national intelligence apparatus. Easier just to scan our junk, I guess. Kick all other cans down the road and then roundly blame the other party when the next big (but plainly avoidable) intelligence failure happens.

A Waste of Money and Time

Old News

Thanks to Wikileaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.

Memo to all assignment editors still employed in the American media apparatus: If you posit that Wikileaks file dumps are inevitably “old news” and thus nothing worth covering, then why aren’t you asking yourself the question that clearly follows: why were those 400,000 documents of “old news” classified in the first place? Where’s an ongoing series about reflexive, pervasive classification and its poisonous impact on any ostensibly free society?

For the American Republic to operate, we ought to expect that a smallish filing cabinet will ultimately be full of the truly dangerous secrets that must be kept. Nuclear bomb designs, the plans for the invasion of Normandy beach next year, and other sensitive documents of that sort are all that should be in there. Instead, “our” government routinely classifies everything, almost certainly still including many aspects of the Normandy beach invasion of 1944. How is a citizen supposed to know anything about the operation of their government? How is a citizen supposed to understand the wages (or even benefits) of these secret decisions, carried out in secret, reported on in secret, and then bundled away inside of another secret which might, just might, show up in heavily redacted form 50 years later, only to be greeted as “old news” by a media all too eager to please its governmental “adversary.”

The answer, of course, is: they are not supposed to.

Step one in any national recovery, any reemergence of sensibility and civic attention is going to have to be: no more blanket secrecy. Period. It’s very easy to know what should be classified as secret in a democracy, and that’s almost nothing. Classification as a general tool (and an inevitable bulwark used to hide the rampant lawlessness of administrations from both parties) obfuscates the outcomes of our own often poisonous and self-defeating policies, the very ones many of us claim to hold dear (while knowing next to nothing about them), and it has got to stop.

Old News

The Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to kill him and he is captured alive in Yemen.

Matt Apuzzo, writing for the Associated Press.
Nothing defines America more than these core Constitution protections: Kill first, then charge. Thank God the Founders had the foresight to put that in writing once and for all; truly a boon for citizens living some 225 years later.
Yet, one would assume, a poll of Tea Partiers and other Strict Constructionists would be broadly supportive of this kind of nonsense and would wonder after the squeamishness of questioning it at all.

Dr. Sean Maguire Alert

The Wall Street Journal uncritically (and unsurprisingly) runs this rather idiotic op-ed from former CIA official Herbert Meyer:

By authorizing Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to determine whether a full criminal investigation of CIA employees and contractors is warranted for the manner in which they interrogated captured terrorists, the President has thrown his power and support behind those far-left ideologues

Indeed, Obama has, by instructing his Justice Department to enforce the law, thrown his power behind those dreaded far-left ideologues. Remember when the GOP was the “law and order” party? Now they’re the Two Society Party: one, for our Leadership Caste, is utterly without law, restraint, or control. Do whatever you want. The other, for everyone else: unremitting and inflexible enforcement of the fullest possible extent of the law for even the most minor infractions. In America, you see, it’s critically important to be born well. Anybody else: go fuck yourself.

At any rate, these interrogators, even if and when they did break the laws, were only doing so with the best of intentions:

[they’d rather suffer torture than] be thought of as anything other than honorable patriots doing their best, under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, to protect our country from its enemies

I see. That is a compelling and well-reasoned defense. So torturing KSM some 180 times inside of a month was indeed some kind of extraordinary, ticking time-bomb type circumstance. Over a month. The United States barely escaped disolution by torturing this man repeatedly over the course of a month. Said torture, of course, providing no actionable intelligence whatever. But, somehow, that Saved America. Of course, we’re meant to forget that the CIA’s own inspector general has reported:

there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe

So neither safe nor effective. In fact, we got the only useful information from seized computers and voluntary statements. Everything gotten under torture was, apparently, either wrong or already known. Big surprise there.

But Meyer closes with a point we actually agree on:

By launching this latest attack on the CIA, the President has done more than merely throw a bone to his base. He has removed all remaining doubt about how the US now plans to confront the global threat of radical Islam.

Indeed, we plan to confront radical Islam by outreach, by education, and, when force is required, by following our own longstanding legal and military doctrines to the fullest extent possible.

And, lest we follow Cheney down the “only following orders” and “it’s not their fault, it’s not their fault, it’s not their fault!” rabbit hole, let’s remind ourselves of this particular outcome of our own Nuremberg Trials, a result of a defense so utterly discounted that it’s since become known as “The Nuremberg Defense”:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

Darkseid

Time reports what is essentially the only possible explanation for the sudden concern on the part of the as-yet-briefed:

[…] two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there’s another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA’s purview -– it’s usually the FBI’s job – and it’s easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress. Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they’re only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

Let’s face it, were it just some legally questionable assassination orders for high ranking al Qaeda folks operating, say, inside an ostensibly friendly country (er, Pakistan?) and carrying out said orders would be a violation of various treaties and maybe even a few international laws…there’d be no significant dust-up whatsoever over this. Instead, even GOPers apprised of the situation are well off their normal “partisan witch hunt!” game and actually showing some sober adult sides to themselves that Our Staff never knew existed. And, in fact, that sort of program would hold no real reason to order the CIA to keep it off the books.
The only possible explanation that rises to the occasion (and explains the barely concealed outrage at its outing) is that they were planning to engage in plainly illegal acts, which probably includes but is not limited to: wide scale surveillance of US citizens as well as clearance to execute same without prior authorization. There is no doubt in my mind that the details, should they ever emerge, will fall loosely along these lines. No other reason to conceal at this level. Even for Cheney, whose first impulse is always: conceal.

For far too long now, the CIA has been the go-to agency when illegal acts are called for. Time to shut that agency down. We have far, far too many agencies competing in the spying and secrets arena as it is. Clear the slate and start over with a single, well regulated, and clearly delineated agency. And, just to make this move politically realistic: put John McCain in charge of the panel that lays it all out.