Unlike previous reform proposals, the Brookings study manages to overlook the serious systemic issues that face the world of intelligence analysis and to propose a full slate of boilerplate steps. The author of the study is the well-known China scholar, Kenneth Lieberthal, who is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings.
Since Lieberthal was a senior director for Asia on the National Security Council and a special assistant to President Bill Clinton for national security affairs and therefore a consumer of the government’s most sensitive intelligence analysis, his study is a particular disappointment.

What the CIA should be, what it should do, and what it should prepare to do is less clear than at any time since the beginning of the Cold War. There should have been major reform of the CIA and the IC with the end of the Cold War, but there was none. Sen. David Boren and Rep. David McCurdy, both Democrats, made attempts in 1992 and 1994 to reform the CIA, but there was great resistance from Republicans who were under the influence of the Pentagon, and there was no support from their Democratic colleagues.

The politicization of intelligence on the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the intelligence failures that contributed to the 9/11 attacks created other opportunities for reform, but the flawed thinking of the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional rush to judgment, and unwise pressures from the families of the 9/11 victims led to changes that made a bad situation worse.

The creation of a new bureaucracy under a Director of National Intelligence (DNI or the so-called intelligence tsar) beholden to the White House led to a more centralized system of intelligence that stifles creative thinking and runs the risk of more politicized intelligence. Lieberthal’s failure to critique the role of the DNI is one of the major shortcomings of his work.

The congressional, political, and academic critics outside of the intelligence community simply have no idea of the decline and despair within the CIA that has led to a major deterioration in the ability to prepare strategic intelligence and to inform the policy community. There is no consensus whatsoever on what is needed to reform the world of intelligence. The Congress is an unlikely source for conducting a reform effort; its modus operandi calls for throwing money at problems, but the needed reforms have nothing to do with additional funds.

There has never been a time in the nation’s history when so much money has been spent on intelligence with so little accountability and so few beneficial results. We learned today that the intelligence budget is $75 billion, which more than doubles the budget for the State Department and the Agency for International Development.

The serious problems that Lieberthal fails to address include the militarization of the IC, which must be reversed; the absence of congressional oversight over a flawed intelligence product that paved the way to the Iraq War, which must be ended; the ability of the National Clandestine Service to politicize intelligence analysis, which must be stopped; and the inability of CIA to tell truth to power, which finds the Agency without a moral compass.

The Bush administration boasted of a “marriage” between the Pentagon and the CIA, which indicated its support for an intelligence community subordinated to Pentagon priorities. The current intelligence tsar, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, has strengthened this marriage, which finds the Defense Department the chief operating officer of the $75 billion intelligence industry. The Pentagon controls more than 85 percent of the intelligence budget and nearly 90 percent of the 200,000 intelligence personnel.

Most collection requirements flow from the Pentagon, and deference within the policy and congressional communities for “support for the warfighter” has elevated tactical military considerations over strategic geopolitical considerations. The Pentagon has also moved into the fields of clandestine collection and covert operations, without the constraints of oversight that limit the covert actions of the CIA.

The decline of the CIA over the past two decades coincides with the end to oversight of the IC by the Senate and House intelligence committees. These committees have become advocates for the CIA—particularly for the clandestine world of spies and covert operations. In doing so, Congress has failed to make the CIA accountable for its transgressions and has ignored the major decline in the production of strategic intelligence. It took the Senate intelligence committee more than five years to issue a report on the Bush administration’s misuse of intelligence information, and even then it merely issued a majority-only written report.

Every congressional “reform” movement on CIA has started with the need for greater clandestine collection, particularly greater assets and personnel for the National Clandestine Service, which ignores the limits and myths of clandestine collection and exaggerates the value of human intelligence. The current CIA director, Leon Panetta, has been captured by the clandestine culture and cadre, and is unlikely to lead a reform movement. It is time to separate the CIA’s directorate of intelligence from the National Clandestine Service, but Lieberthal merely notes that there “strong arguments” for and against separation. Once upon a time, we counted on “independent” studies to resolve these arguments.

Unfortunately, Lieberthal takes the easy way out with a series of thumb sucking recommendations that do not address the problem of the decline of strategic intelligence. He calls for the creation of a National Intelligence University (!) with its own campus and faculty as well as “periodic formal training opportunities.” I would expect a distinguished academic such as Lieberthal to understand the difference between education and training.

He calls for greater hiring of “people who are in their late twenties or early thirties who have had extensive experience related to the country of concern,” which ignores the need to cross-fertilize the CIA with experienced analysts from the academic and think-tank worlds who have a little more grey hair than the average 20 or 30-something and more time overseas. These senior analysts would also be able to mentor the CIA’s analytic community, which is extremely young and inexperienced.

He calls for adding another layer of review, without acknowledging the petty tutelage that already exists in the review process and without endorsing the need for protecting contrarian and out-of-the-box thinking in the analytic process. Finally, Lieberthal recommends IC briefings to incoming policy makers in order to determine how policy makers “might best be served by the IC.”

Unfortunately, the CIA already spends too much time determining the interests of the policy maker and, as a result, often skews intelligence to serve those interests.
CIA directors Richard Helms, James Schlesinger, George H.W. Bush, William Casey, Robert Gates, George Tenet, and Porter Goss were guilty of politicizing intelligence, but Lieberthal doesn’t deal with the problem. The only protections against politicization are the integrity and honesty of the intelligence analysts themselves, as well as the protection of competitive analysis that serves as a safeguard against unchallenged acceptance of conventional wisdom.
The creation of a centralized director of national intelligence and the placement of key IC positions in the hands of the military do not augur well for the restoration of CIA’s moral compass.
_____

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

This op-ed was first published Sep. 14th at The Public Record and is reprinted with the express permission of Mel Goodman.

Although Holder’s inquiry will only target those who acted beyond so-called legal guidelines, Broder is concerned that we will ultimately see Vice President Dick Cheney “standing in the dock.” Broder should be concerned with the need to explicitly repudiate the policies and actions of President George Bush and Cheney that violated domestic and international law. These actions require a public hearing and an open record of some kind. Holder’s inquiry is the first step in what Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books called a “complicated political process.”

Broder’s lamest and most disingenuous reasons deal with CIA director Leon Panetta and the methodology of the Post’s news staff. Broder calls Panetta a “conscientious director” of the CIA, but Panetta has surrounded himself with the ideological drivers of the policies of detention and interrogation, Steve Kappes and Michael Sulick, and has fought every effort of the Obama administration to bring transparency and accountability to the Bush-Cheney policies.

Broder adds that Panetta’s “judgment” is supported by the reporting of Ignatius and others with “excellent sources inside the CIA.” Their sources, of course, are Kappes and Sulick, the very officers who seek to cover-up their own activities and have the freedom to talk to reporters. Good reporting and journalism require an honest effort to seek all sources and not merely those who reify one’s own positions.

Broder echoes Panetta when he argues that any investigation will have a “harmful effect on the morale and operations of his agency.” No, morale was compromised by high-level CIA officials such as George (“slam dunk”) Tenet, who tailored intelligence to go to war against Iraq, and Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, who used outside contractors to build secret prisons, conduct extraordinary renditions, and engage in torture and abuse.

The CIA Inspector General (IG) responsible for the 2004 report on interrogations and torture told Der Spiegel this week that he decided on preparing a report because “some agency employees involved with the program…were uneasy about it; he told the Washington Post last week that he “could not walk through the cafeteria without people walking up to me, not to complain but to say ‘More power to you.’”

CIA torture and abuse as well as extraordinary renditions also compromised valuable liaison relations with European intelligence services that are needed to combat international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As a result of CIA’s illegal activities, intelligence services in Germany, Italy, and Spain were refusing to cooperate with their CIA counterparts. Nevertheless, the CIA is still resisting the release of hundreds of pages of internal documents on detentions and interrogations, arguing that national security is at stake. No, national embarrassment is involved and not national security.

At some point, Broder and his colleagues should be forced to read the 2004 IG Report on detentions and interrogations; the 2004 CIA report on interrogation techniques; the 2004 Taguba report on military abuse of detainees; the 2005 collection of “secret” documents by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel in their The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib ; the 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross Report on CIA’s treatment of detainees; the 2008 Senate Armed Services report on U.S. treatment of detainees; and Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side.

Then, they need to compare the treatment of the detainees, some of whom were totally innocent or erroneously detained, with what the Justice Department memoranda on interrogations permitted. Of course, Broder believes that the Justice Department torture memoranda demonstrate that the Bush administration engaged in a “deliberate, and internally well-debated policy decision, made in the proper places…by the proper officials.” Meanwhile, the Post has presented no evidence of policy debates on torture and abuse, extraordinary renditions, and secret prisons.

Broder and his colleagues could also try to interview those individuals who watched some or all of the 92 torture tapes before they were destroyed by high-ranking officials from the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. This destruction of evidence has been investigated for the past two years by John Durham, who will conduct the current inquiry for Attorney General Holder.

Broder, Ignatius, Hiatt, and Cohen have relied entirely on those CIA operatives who are trying to put the best possible face on CIA transgressions; the ethics of good journalism requires that they seek sources to learn about the details of the sordid and sadistic activities that put the nation at risk. President Barack Obama should be credited with closing the secret prisons and ending the practice of torture and abuse, but the nation still needs to confront and understand the evidence and the events of the past six years.

Finally, the news and editorial reporters of the Washington Post need to compare their findings of the evidence with the laws that govern the illegalities that have taken place. They could start with the 8th amendment of the Constitution against “cruel and unusual punishments” (it has the virtue of being short); the War Crimes Act of 1996; the Convention against Torture of 1984 (yes, the United States is a signatory); and of course Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions.

Broder and his colleagues do not understand that the stature of international and domestic law is diminished when a nation violates it with impunity. The stature of a nation is diminished when it commits crimes against humanity. And the national leadership and the nation itself are diminished when it ignores the need for accountability and explicit repudiation. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., had it right when he called for a “truth commission” to gather information on the CIA programs that the Bush administration endorsed and protected.

This would represent a good start in restoring our moral compass on the crimes of the post-9/11 era. The judgment of history will be harsh if we choose not to do so.

***
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

This op-ed was first published Sep. 3rd at The Public Record and is reprinted with the express permission of Mel Goodman.

President Barack Obama is permitting CIA Director Leon Panetta to weaken the Agency’s’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). The OIG has produced the only official and authoritative study of the abuses of the CIA detentions and interrogations program; it also has published seminal studies of the CIA’s involvement in the shoot down of a missionary plane in Peru in 2001 (and the subsequent cover-up of its role) as well as the controversial 9/11 accountability study.

These reports angered senior CIA managers and led to efforts by three successive directors (George Tenet, Porter Goss, and General Michael Hayden) to restrict the investigative work of the office. Panetta is continuing the campaign they began. Although John Helgerson, the inspector general who produced these reports, announced his retirement seven months ago, Panetta and the White House have not named a replacement. They clearly prefer that the OIG remain without the strong leadership it requires to pursue difficult investigations in the face of management resistance.

The creation of an independent, statutory OIG at CIA resulted from the Agency’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s. CIA’s internal investigation of its role in that scandal was inadequate, particularly in comparison with congressional and independent investigations. CIA had an administrative inspector general, but he was appointed by the CIA director, had limited access to sensitive information, and had no more than a handful of professionals on his staff.

The congressional oversight committees were not given full access to his reports and not even the Justice Department received all IG reports of suspected illegalities. In fact, it was the efforts of CIA director William Casey to prevent the Attorney General from receiving reports on Iran Contra illegalities that led Senators Arlen Specter and John Glenn to sponsor a bill to create an independent IG, appointed by the President and responsible to Congress.

CIA director William Webster opposed the bill, and President George H.W. Bush signed it reluctantly in 1989; as a former CIA director, Bush feared that an independent IG would be “out of control,” a junkyard dog that could not be controlled by the bureaucracy. Bush waited a year before appointing Frederick Hitz, a lawyer and former CIA operations officer, as the first statutory IG. Hitz and his successors did perform independently, producing reports critical of the Agency’s performance in a number of areas.

Helgerson, appointed in 2002, proved more tenacious than many expected, even criticizing CIA director Tenet and other senior CIA leaders in the 9/11 report. His tenacity angered Agency directors, however, and they have subsequently tried to weaken the office, primarily by attacking the professionalism of its work.

If the Agency’s director believes the work of the OIG is flawed, he has several options. He can go to Congress, the president’s intelligence oversight board, the President’s Commission on Integrity and Efficiency—the watchdog of the government’s inspectors general—even to the president himself. Instead, CIA’s leadership chose to mount an unprecedented attack on the OIG.

In 2006, in an effort to intimidate the OIG, Goss ordered a leak investigation that led to the unprecedented polygraphing of the IG himself and the firing of a senior OIG official for having unreported conversations with journalists—even though the conversations had nothing to do with the leak investigation.

Hayden, seeking to rein in the OIG, appointed a special assistant, Robert Deitz, to ”investigate” the office, an action that infringed on the IG’s independence and that Congress should have stopped immediately. (Deitz was Hayden’s General Counsel at the National Security Agency when Hayden was director there, and crafted the internal legal opinions to justify warrantless eavesdropping.) Deitz’s so-called investigation was designed to intimidate the OIG.

Hitz, who had served as IG from 1990 to 1998, labeled Hayden’s internal investigation an effort to “call off the dogs.” He said that it would “lead to an undercutting of the IG’s authority and his ability to investigate allegations of wrongdoing.” It is difficult enough to gain cooperation from the rank and file for an IG investigation; once Agency officers understand that their leadership is not respectful of the office, the OIG’s ability to ferret out the truth becomes far more difficult.

Hayden’s intimidation campaign ignored provisions in the 1989 law that required the CIA director to inform the Congress of any attempt to hinder the IG in the execution of his duties. His efforts were consistent with the Bush administration’s campaign to weaken the role of the IG throughout the government, including trying to limit a bill in the House of Representatives to strengthen the independence of IGs by giving them seven-year terms and to permit the White House to fire them only for cause.

Helgerson announced his retirement the same week Panetta was confirmed as CIA director. Panetta, however, has not named a new IG and has continued to convey disapproval of the work of the office by his defense of actions that were criticized in the IG’s report on detentions and interrogations. Perhaps as a result, Helgerson has started talking to journalists. This is an unusual step for a CIA officer, even one who is retired; it is particularly surprising for Helgerson, who is extremely discrete.

In a statement last week, Helgerson emphasized that the CIA had conducted waterboarding in a manner inconsistent with the understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department and that the CIA had reneged on its assurance that repetitive use of this technique would “not be substantial.” Helgerson concluded that the CIA was “abusing this technique.”

Helgerson also questioned whether it had been necessary to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” and recommended the creation of a panel of experts to “evaluate the quality of intelligence gained as related to the specific techniques used.” Helgerson took issue with Panetta’s claim that the CIA itself had commissioned the OIG’s 2004 study, stating that he had initiated the 2004 report because many officers had told him that CIA techniques were “fundamentally inconsistent with long established U.S. Government policy and with American values, and were based on strained legal reasoning.”

Helgerson added that he “could not walk through the cafeteria without people walking up to me, not to complain but to say ‘More power to you.’” He emphasized that it is the mission of the IG to make sure that CIA operations are “efficient, effective, and run in a manner that is consistent with law and regulation, and to recommend improvements as appropriate.” He expressed particular disappointment with the fact that all ten of the OIG’s recommendations had been redacted.

The fact that Panetta and President Obama have not nominated an individual to replace Helgerson is not surprising. It is surprising, however, that both Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee and Congressman Silvestre Reyes, chairman of the House intelligence committee, have ignored the issue. The weakening of the OIG by CIA leadership is an affront to Congress, particularly to Feinstein and Reyes; they are demonstrating a dereliction of duty.

Panetta and the White House are obviously slow rolling the appointment, leaving a weak acting IG in place as long as possible, probably searching for just the right candidate to acquiesce in their campaign to weaken the only effective oversight body that exists to investigate CIA activities.

***
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA .

This op-ed was first published Sep. 2nd at The Public Record and is reprinted with the express permission of Mel Goodman.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was photographed shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

The lead story in today’s Washington Post, headlined “How a Detainee Became An Asset,” provides a one-sided and distorted account of the torture and abuse of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM) and demonstrates the need for a blue ribbon bipartisan commission to create a comprehensive and authoritative narrative of the misgovernment of the Bush administration over the past eight years.

The prosecution of low-level CIA officials and government contractors for resorting to torture and abuse beyond the sordid guidelines of the Justice Department will allow the major players of the Bush administration as well as the lawyers of the Justice Department to escape retribution and judgment. Since President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would never be held accountable, the entire nation would be better served by a full understanding of the war crimes that they authorized in our name.

Today’s article argues that the techniques of torture and abuse turned KSM into the CIA’s “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda. Citing an intelligence assessment by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which was presumably prepared for Vice President Cheney, the Post article argues that waterboarding was the key to breaking KSM’s spirit and eliciting valuable intelligence on the “inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology, and operatives.”

This view contradicts the findings of the authoritative 2004 report on detainees and interrogations of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) as well as the personal views of the Inspector General (IG) himself.

As the Post acknowledges, John Helgerson, the former IG who commissioned the 2004 study, said that the work of the OIG did not permit “definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods.” Helgerson acknowledged that waterboarding and sleep deprivation “elicited a lot of information,” but the OIG didn’t “do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out.”

As a result, Helgerson recommended (but the Post article chose to omit) the creation of an independent panel of experts to “systematically evaluate the quality of the intelligence gained as related to the specific techniques used, or not used, in particular cases. This would clarify the value of the information and the utility of various approaches.” This recommendation was one of ten recommendations in the 2004 IG report; unfortunately, the Justice Deparment (presumably due to the importuning of the CIA) chose to redact all ten IG recommendations from the declassified report.

There is ample testimony to challenge the view that torture and abuse worked. There were FBI agents at the site where KSM was held who testified that torture and abuse didn’t lead to eliciting valuable intelligence. And a CIA operative has noted that KSM was willing to talk before being tortured, noting that “tea and crumpets” were all that was needed. The former head of U.S. Army intelligence, Gen. John Kimmons, remarked in 2006 that “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that.

I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.” And more recently, several veteran FBI and military interrogators called for an investigation of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT),” because of their concerns about the legality, morality, and effectiveness of EITs.

It is important to remember that the 2004 IG report emphatically stated that the information elicited by torture and abuse “did not uncover any evidence that [any] plots were imminent.” Other CIA memoranda stated that information gained from detainees led to “arrests [that] disrupted attack plans in progress,” but did not attribute this information to the use of torture and abuse.

The IG study could not even determine if the 83 waterboardings given to Abu Zubaydah were the reason for his increased willingness to talk. The study noted, moreover, that torture was contrary to the Eighth Amendment against “cruel and unusual punishments;” the 1984 UN Torture Convention, which the United States took the lead in drafting and ratifying; and domestic law.

Finally, it is more important to remember that torture and abuse are evil. Illegal, immoral, counter-productive, but most importantly evil. George Bush told a press conference in 2005 that “this country does not believe in torture,” but the fact is we conducted torture on those who were guilty and those who were innocent.

And Dick Cheney, who has fanatically been waging his own personal jihad in defense of torture and abuse, told Fox News in an interview that will air tomorrow that CIA interrogators were justified in exceeding even the broad authorizations provided by the Justice Department, suggesting that the ends justify the means. Perhaps the Washington Post could give front-page coverage to the 18-page memorandum that the CIA gave to the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2004, which provides extraordinary details of the interrogations in plain, but sordid and sadistic, language.

Two years ago, then CIA director Michael Hayden released a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detailed domestic spying, assassination plots, and other CIA misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s. In releasing the documents, known as the “family jewels,” Hayden told a group of historians who had been pressing for greater disclosure from the Agency, that the documents provided a “glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.” He also stated that, when the government withholds information, myth and misinformation “fill the vacuum like a gas.”

In order to prevent the Washington Post and others from adding to the myths and misinformation of torture and abuse, it is time to appoint a blue ribbon commission to study all aspects of the CIA’s detentions and interrogations policies.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius simply cannot get off the wheel he spins for the Central Intelligence Agency. Only two days after the release of the 2004 CIA study of the detention and interrogation program, which provides sordid and sadistic details of an illegal and immoral program, Ignatius still opposes any criminal review of the conduct of CIA officers and echoes the CIA line that it is “glad to be out” of the interrogation business. He even cites deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, one of the key ideological drivers for the policy of detention and interrogation, as someone who “doesn’t want to have anything to do with interrogation.”

Ignatius strongly believes that it is time for the CIA to “get on with it,” which was the signature line of former CIA director Richard Helms, who Ignatius considers the “savviest spymaster this country has produced.” Let’s forget that Helms lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1973 on the overthrow of the elected government in Chile and that a grand jury was called to see if he should be indicted for perjury. Let’s forget that the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms, who pleaded nolo contendere, and was fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended prison sentence. And let’s forget that Helms was the major supporter of James Jesus Angleton, the crazed head of CIA counterintelligence for 20 years, who believed that the KGB had successfully penetrated the Agency. We called Angleton “The Ghost” when I was at the CIA because no one had ever seen the man. And it was “The Ghost” who befriended Kim Philby, the Soviet spy from British intelligence, introduced him to high-level CIA officials, and defended him to the end. So much for counterintelligence.

In his efforts to prevent any investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program, Ignatius has also forgotten the lessons of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946. The International Tribunal taught us that crimes committed by individuals for state purposes were the responsibility of those individuals and punishable by state law. And, most importantly, following orders was not a defense. But Ignatius believes that all of the relevant evidence on torture and abuse was seen by “career prosecutors, who decided against bringing cases.” So, let’s forget that the career prosecutors were employed by the politicized Justice Department of the Bush administration and that they reported to a politically-appointed assistant attorney general.

Ignatius believes that investigation and accountability will hurt the Agency. It will actually restore the credibility of the Agency and lead to greater cooperation from important foreign intelligence services, which is essential to combating terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It was CIA crimes such as secret prisons and extraordinary renditions that hurt the Agency, and led to reticence about sharing intelligence. For example, there is no intelligence service within the European Union that would assist in a rendition by the CIA; no EU country that would permit the CIA to transport a prisoner by aircraft; no EU country that would agree to a secret prison or “black site” within its borders.

Ignatius also reveals that he knows nothing about loyal dissent. He argues that “questioning presidential orders isn’t really the job” of the CIA leadership, “especially when those orders are backed by Justice Department legal opinions.” This country has fought two unnecessary wars in the past 45 years with the deaths of more than 60,000 American men and women simply because high-level officials failed to expose the deceptions and manipulations of the Johnson and Bush administrations. In supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ignatius and the Washington Post appear enamored with U.S. military power, with the Post providing few opportunities for contrarian voices to be heard. The mainstream media, particularly the Post, has been far too complacent in holding the Bush and Obama administration’s feet to the fire in the case of these wars.

Finally, Ignatius claims that the CIA resorted to independent contractors for help in “waterboarding” and assassination programs because of a lack of expertise. In fact, the CIA turned to outside help in these egregious areas because it was trying to avoid accountability and there was internal resistance to both programs. There were many officers in the National Clandestine Service opposed to the renditions and detentions program; the Office of Medical Service had serious problems with the waterboarding program, which is outlined in the 2004 Inspector General Program. Presumably, there were some greybeards around who mentioned that resorting to Blackwater to run an assassination program resembled the CIA’s contacts with the Mafia in the early 1960s to kill Castro. The CIA assassination program led to the Church Commission hearings in the 1970s, which placed restrictions on covert action programs and created a congressional oversight process that has fallen into disarray.

It is unbelievable that Ignatius could read the chilling and appalling 2004 IG report and not temper some of his views. His continued support of the CIA points to fanaticism and reminds me of Stalin’s reference to Western journalists who defended Soviet policy—he called them “useful idiots.”

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA http ://www.amazon.com/Failure-Intelligence-Decline-Fall-CIA/dp/0742551105.

The Washington Post continues to campaign against any accountability for the detentions policies of the Central Intelligence Agency, using its own editorials and oped writers as well as outsiders who support the efforts of the newspaper.

Today, one day after the release of the 2004 CIA inspector general report that documented the use of torture and abuse, a Post editorial actually claimed that “it’s impossible to say, on the basis of information made public so far, whether prosecution is warranted” and that, since the Bush Justice Department already declined prosecution, it would be “unsettling” to pursue even those CIA operatives who used “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” techniques.

The Post is willing to exonerate these operatives because they were “clamoring” constantly for guidance about what it should and should not do; in fact, CIA director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin were more interested in protection than guidance.

On Monday, the paper went judge-shopping in the courthouse and published an oped by Jeffrey H. Smith, who is a well-known lawyer with Arnold & Porter, one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms, and the CIA general counsel from 1995-1996. Smith created the most fatuous argument of all for not prosecuting the interrogators and apparently has no understanding of the Nuremberg Laws, which declared that following orders was no defense and that crimes committed by individuals for state purposes were the responsibility of individuals and were punishable under law.

Smith concedes that “we lost our bearings” after the 9/11 attacks and “squandered our credibility,” but fails to acknowledge the sordid and sadistic activities that the nation sponsored and the CIA implemented. His six reasons range from the disingenuous to the downright unconscionable.

Reason #1: The CIA techniques were authorized by the president, approved by the Justice Department, and briefed to the proper congressional committees. Since the techniques were “legal,” it will be “very difficult” to pursue prosecutions. The fact is we simply don’t know if all techniques were actually authorized, which is a major reason for an investigation, and the Justice Department is emphasizing those techniques that went beyond authorization. The level of difficulty of the prosecution is not a reason to stand down in this case, particularly since U.S. laws and Constitutional amendments were broken. The fact that high-level CIA officials destroyed the torture tapes suggests that there were actions that went beyond the Bush administration’s mandate and that sordid and sadistic acts were committed.

Reason #2: Since the CIA provided its 2004 report to the Justice Department and the department refused to prosecute any CIA officers, it would be “dangerous to settle policy difference at the expense of career officers. This, of course, is arrant nonsense! Bush’s Justice Department was a politicized government agency that has come under intense scrutiny because of its handling of the firing of U.S. attorneys as well as issues related to interrogation policy. The decisions on the 2004 report were made by prosecutors and lawyers who reported to a politically-appointed assistant in the Attorney General’s office. John Ashcroft was the attorney general and he lied to congressional committees.

Reason #3: After the Justice Department declined to prosecute, the CIA took administrative action, including disciplinary action against those officers whose conduct it deemed warranted such responses. This is a misinformed statement or an outright lie! No high-level Agency official has suffered as a result of the conduct of torture and abuse, which conforms to previous CIA misdeeds. High-level officials who politicized intelligence for Deputy Director Robert Gates in the 1980s did not suffer; officials who crafted Secretary of State Colin Powell’s phony speech to the UN prior to the Iraq War did not suffer; analysts who lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not suffer. In fact, the record clearly states that guilty parties in all of these affairs saw their careers prosper.

Reason #4: “Prosecuting CIA officers risks chilling current intelligence operations. Such prosecutions are likely to create cynicism in the clandestine service, which is deeply corrosive to any professional service.” This is Smith’s most fatuous argument and the one that CIA director Leon Panetta is peddling to the congress and the American people. The fact is that the failure to hold wrongdoers accountable is corrosive to morale and that CIA directors Tenet and Goss had to resort to independent contractors because so many professional Agency officers refused to take part in illegal activities. IG John Helgerson commissioned the 2004 study because so many Agency officers “expressed to me personally their feelings that what the Agency was doing was fundamentally inconsistent with long-established US Government policy and with American values, and was based on strained legal reasoning.”

Reason #5: Prosecutions could deter cooperation with other nations. Smith could not be more wrong! It was the CIA’s policies of secret prisons, erroneous renditions, and torture and abuse that corroded the liaison efforts of the Western intelligence network, which is the key to a successful campaign against international terrorism. European agencies became reticent to share intelligence with the United States because they were opposed to CIA’s abusive practices. The evidence is ample here and presumably even Smith must know this.

Reason #6: President Obama does not want to be distracted by looking backward and coping with congressional investigations and grand jury subpoenas. We as a nation must know the full extent of the Bush administration’s misuse of government agencies and government personnel. We need to know what happened in order to make sure that this kind of activity can never happen again.

Smith’s exculpatory brief on the behalf of his putative clients, the Washington Post and the CIA, is particularly disgraceful in view of the unconscionable activities that have taken place over the past decade. In order to restore the credibility of our intelligence services, permit foreign intelligence agencies to cooperate with us, and reverse the damage that has been done to U.S. foreign and national security, we must know the full extent of the role of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA .