The CIA, America’s Scapegoat
By Larry Johnson on May 15, 2009 at 4:29 PM in Current Affairs
Who started the AIDS virus? The CIA. Who killed Kennedy? The CIA. Who caused the heartbreak of psoriasis? The CIA of course. And who started the war in Iraq? The CIA. Of course, while the CIA was misleading the Congress into the quagmire of Iraq, the CIA, in the person of Valerie Plame, was busy sabotaging the Administration’s effort to lead us into the quagmire (in reality Valerie was Chief of Ops for the Iraq Task Force and developed extensive sources that ended up reinforcing other reports that Saddam had not revived his effort to build chemical, biological and nuclear weapons).
Do we have this straight? The CIA promoted and opposed the war in Iraq.
HUH?
If your head is spinning, welcome to the reality of the CIA. I discovered the reality of CIA scapegoating back in 1986 when I began working as the Honduran analyst just as the Iran-Contra scandal broke.
Lest you think I am making up my previous work at the CIA, here is one of the Exceptional Performance Awards I received during my last year at the Agency:
I learned at the CIA that political leaders who are invested in a particular policy do not like to hear bad news from the intel community. It is probably helpful at this point to help you understand that the CIA is not a monolith. The two principal arms of the CIA, at least during the run up to the war with Iraq, are Ops and Analysis. Ops refers to CIA case officers who go overseas and recruit foreigners who will be our agents (note, an agent is a foreigner who has agreed to be a traitor to their country or cause). The Ops side of the house collects intelligence and carries out covert operations. Almost all of the people who work on the Ops side of the house are undercover. Valerie Plame, for example, spent her career as an Ops officer and was undercover the entire time.
The Analysis side of the house, at least in the pre-DNI days, had the primary task of analyzing the raw intelligence and keeping policymakers informed about existing and developing threats. During my career I spent about one year working on the Ops side of the house and the rest working as an analyst. Most of the analysts are not undercover. However, because I was a member of the Career Trainee program and trained with Operations officers I was undercover until I left the CIA in October 1989.
I discovered that the CIA is a convenient whipping boy when a controversial policy runs into problems. During the Vietnam War CIA analysts (Sam Adams and George Allen) received enormous pressure from Lyndon Johnson’s White House for not cheerleading the Administration’s policy in Vietnam. They were accuse of “not being team players.”
I experienced the same phenomena during the Contra war. We were under pressure to exaggerate Soviet influence, terrorist activity in Central America and Contra capabilities. The efforts to manipulate intelligence were strong but generally, CIA managers resisted efforts to shade intelligence analysis to create a message the White House wanted to hear.
So now we have a leader of the Democrats accusing the CIA of lying. Of course she is accusing Ops officers of not telling her that waterboarding was on the table for interrogating terrorist suspects. So what happened? Based on folks I know who worked there at the time here’s what went down:
In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks George Tenet sent a message to the Ops side of the house detailing a variety of ways the “gloves” should come off, but nobody was getting waterboarded or tortured. The CIA was too busy trying to get control of the situation in Afghanistan.
By January 2002 the CIA was getting more terrorist suspects off the battlefield of Afghanistan and was struggling to figure out how to interrogate them. The CIA and its officers–Ops and Analysts alike–are not trained as interrogators nor did the CIA have an interrogation course at the time. Ops officers are trained to recruit people through friendship, not the threat of violence. Analysts rarely are taken to the field and given a chance to debrief a living, breathing human source. Accordingly the CIA reached outside to contractors–guys with military experience–to find people who had been trained as interrogators. Why? Because the military does train interrogators and has a specific program of instruction for such activity.
When I went thru the hostage interrogation course in CIA (i.e., we were taken hostage and subjected to many of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” methods) the “terrorists” were military personnel who were going thru their own training program as interrogators.
As Jane Mayer shows conclusively in her book, The Dark Side, the people who brought the waterboarding and other messages to the CIA were involved previously in training U.S. military personnel to resist interrogation (i.e., SERE School).
The decision at CIA to use waterboarding was signed off on ultimately by CIA Director, George Tenet, and the Director of Operations, James Pavitt. Other people likely consulted in this decision were Cofer Black, head of the Counter Terrorism Center, and the head of the Office of General Counsel at CIA.
Here is a critical unanswered question–the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah in March 2002 but did not do any substantive interrogation until September 2002? What happened to the frigging “ticking” time bomb theory? We have heard Cheney and other supporters of the Bush Administration insist that by God, we got to waterboard or Americans will die. Yet the Department of Justice did not issue its legal opinion authorizing/excusing waterboarding until August 2002. Those guys waited, apparently, five months to put the screws to Zubaydah.
Here’s what George Tenet wrote in his book (see p. 241):
Now that we had an undoubted resource in our hands–the highest-ranking al-Qa’ida official catured to ate–we opened discussions within the National Security Council as to how to handle him, since holding and interrogating large numbers of al-Qa’ida operatives had never been part of our plan. But Zubaydah and a small number of other extremely highly placed terrorists potentially had information that might save thousands of lives. We wondered what we could legitimately do to get that information. Despite what Hollywood might have you believe, in situations like this you don’t call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers. It took until August to get clear guidance on what Agency officers could legally do. Without such legal determinations from the Department of Justice, our officers would have been a risk for future second-guessing.
We know from Ali Soufan, an FBI agent, that he was able to question Zubaydah without the use of torture from March until June of 2002 and got results:
Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.
We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
Why was August 2002 so important? As Larry Wilkerson pointed out earlier today, in a a piece first posted at Steve Clemens’ site, the impetus for waterboarding Zubaydah was not preventing terrorism, it was a frantic effort to prove the false premise that Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were in cahoots. They were not, but with the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq set to hit the streets in October 2002, the pressure was on by the White House to persuade the Congress that we needed to go to war with Iraq.
It was at the end of 2002 when the CIA briefed Congress on the Iraq NIE that they told them there was NO EVIDENCE that Iraq was trying to acquire yellow cake uranium from Niger. What was left? Getting evidence to convince folks of the Saddam/Osama hook.
Here is what is so bizarre about this timeline. When you go thru Hostage Interrogation Resistance training the very first lesson is to delay giving up information. You want to string it out as long as possible. Why? The more time that passes from the time you are taken into custody until you cough up the goods the more time your parent organization has to alter plans and do damage control. Here’s the truth about Abu Zubaydah–after five months in custody his “current” intel value was exhausted and not very relevant.
I think Nancy Pelosi is in big trouble. Panetta threw down the gauntlet today in a message to the troops at Headquarters:
“Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.”
I do not think Congress wants to play this game–i.e., put everyone under oath and find out the truth. As I noted at the outset, the CIA is not a perfect organization but when it comes to covering its ass when it is being asked to do things that skirt the law they are very good and they make sure they have a group photo. You don’t make up lies about members of Congress who have free access to the press. If you are going to do some sheep fucking with members of congress make sure you have a happy snap of naked Nancy and Randy the Ram. Otherwise you get to be the scapegoat.
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