December 08, 2007

C.I.A. Destroyed Tapes of Interrogations -- and CIA chief faces credibility test as a result. More, on the CIA's "legacy of mistrust." At least the Democrats aren't letting this one slide (at least so far). U.S. NewsFilter.
posted by HawthorneWingo 16 years ago
  • >>At least the Democrats aren't letting this one slide (at least so far). Give them time.
  • This article gives some idea of what might have been on those tapes: Rorschach and Awe
  • Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and malfeasance. And in come cases there really is no important difference.
  • In 1996 the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released the report IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century. Buried amid hundreds of pages is this unequivocal admission: The CS [clandestine service] is the only part of the IC [intelligence community], indeed of the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world in the face of frequently sophisticated efforts by foreign governments to catch them. A safe estimate is that several hundred times every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO [Directorate of Operations] officers engage in highly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk political embarrassment to the US but also endanger the freedom if not lives of the participating foreign nationals and, more than occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself. The report presents this information without further digression. They break foreign laws several hundred times a day, people. In light of that, it's no stretch to imagine that they also frequently break US law. The amount by which one imagines they do so is no doubt proportional to one's personal acquaintance with aluminum cranial attire. I think it was James J. Angleton who I read quoted as saying something like 'the CIA perforce employs some of the worst kinds of people,' meaning criminals & presumably psychos. I forget if it was him or one of the other early CIA honchos. It's a particularly malevolent organisation.
  • I unleash'd my wordhoard, mofos. Fear my fuggin' wordhoard!
  • They break foreign laws several hundred times a day, people. In light of that, it's no stretch to imagine that they also frequently break US law. I don't want to be a knee-jerk contrarian, here, but I don't think that necessarily follows. The OD of the CIA necessarily breaks foreign laws because it's remit involves such things as spying on people and suboring foreign nationals to treason. That doesn't mean that it necessarily breaks US laws in order to do so. Indeed, much of what we know about the clandestine service suggests that they're pretty bureaucratic and rules-obsessed. That's not to say the CIA has clean hands. There's been some very bad stuff done within that organisation over the years, MKULTRA springing to mind, but we're talking about a very big organisation here. I wouldn't say that there's anything like the institutional culture of criminality that outsiders assume. Most CIA people are ordinary folks, many deeply patriotic and idealistic, doing relatively ordinary jobs with little sensationalism involved. They certainly don't make a habit of hiring criminals and thugs. Indeed, they work pretty hard to keep such people out of the Agency through their vetting process. That's not to say that they don't consort with criminals and thugs, and even pay them, but there's a big fat line between people who work for the CIA, and people the CIA use as agents. As for James Angleton... well don't believe a word people say about that man. Yes, he was an eccentric, but there's so much crap floating around about this figure that it's very difficult to sort out the truth from the myth, unless you really, really know what you're talking about.
  • "They certainly don't make a habit of hiring criminals and thugs." Sounds like you are trying to manufacture a separate category of CIA employees vs assets to avoid addressing the CIA's rather unethical practices. It doesn't matter if you try to categorize the sociopaths into some group that they merely 'consort with'. They have a known history of hiring criminals and thugs. The list of criminals known to have been used by the CIA domestically and abroad is as long as your arm and getting longer. Alright, if you want to pick out a single name off the top from the last 30 years, try Frank Sturgis. He was a gunrunner before he was employed by the CIA. And he was definitely a CIA operative, not just some shadowy asset manipulated by noble but aloof gents in G-men suits and homburg hats. He's a very dramatic example, true, but there are other far more prosaic crims on the lists. Not everyone in the CIA is a thug or psycho, of course. It could be argued that the institutionalised bureaucracy and compartmentalisation might cause many ordinary functionaries to begin to resemble such after an extended tenure in the organisation. But on point, it is certain that a criminal element are sought out for certain jobs, simply because they are very good at certain activities that people with functioning ethics circuits have difficulty in doing without significant inhibition. And according to the IC21 report mentioned above, the CIA definitely commits crimes in its usual business. That document is from the government, it's not some conspiracy screed. MKULTRA is kid's stuff compared to some of the shit the CIA has gotten up to, as well you know. I Think MKULTRA only has one confirmed death, Frank Olson. I guess it depends on what your definition of a criminal is. Someone who has actually been sentenced in a court of law vs someone who is criminally minded.
  • Also they are beaming messages into my skull.
  • -heavy sigh-
  • Very personal opinion: the CIA's incompetence has been proven again and again, such that it's close to worthless as an agency. More specifically, they fucked up on Iraq before, Iraq during, and Iraq after. Honestly, why bother lads? If you can't get any of this shit right, just shut the fuck up? Leave the work to those involved. But no, we see again these CIA reports on the situation in Iraq...
  • Come on, the CIA's not all bad is it? They help the sick!
  • Sounds like you are trying to manufacture a separate category of CIA employees vs assets to avoid addressing the CIA's rather unethical practices. Well, to be honest I'm not trying to manufacture a separate category for agents and 'employees'. That separate category was manufactured many, many years ago, and pre-dates the CIA itself. They are, in fact, separate categories in every intelligence agency in the world, and that separation is a very important one. It's important psychologically, for the business of human intelligence, because (whether agent is aware of it or not) it defines the relationship between the agent runner who manipulates and the agent who is manipulated. It is important on a theoretical/doctrinal level for the agency itself, because it defines chains of control and accountability. Just because CIA people wear 'G-man suits', as you say, rather than uniforms, that doesn't make the split between CIA officers and agents of the CIA any less 'real' than the split between police officers and police informants. Now are the CIA people who do this either noble or aloof? Well in my previous comment I used the terms patriotic and idealistic. That doesn't actually necessarily mean that they're good people striving to do what is good and noble. I know that, in the US these days, terms like this have been imbued with a strongly positive political connotation, but I draw your attention to the many, many bad things done by patriotic idealists (aka chauvinistic ideologues) throughout history. I simply mean that these people frequently do what they do for reasons and reasons more powerful and also more comprehensible than mere malice or sadism.
  • it is certain that a criminal element are sought out for certain jobs, simply because they are very good at certain activities that people with functioning ethics circuits have difficulty in doing without significant inhibition This is not certain, and in fact it is false. The CIA, no Western intelligence agency, would do this. These are people for whom informational security is everything, and these people simply don't trust people they perceive to be 'criminal'. I'll give you a concrete example of this: Back in the sixties, Bobby Kennedy lead an inter-agency effort to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is usually studied, today, as a classic example of strategic tunnel-vision (if you assassinate Fidel, you get his much more pro-Moscow brother Raúl on the throne), but it's also studied for another reason: since the CIA had, as yet, no experience in assassination, they tried bringing in the mob who, it was assumed, knew all about how to do that sort of thing. If you talk to CIA people about this today (or at least that small sub-set of them who actually know their own agency's history), they always talk about this episode with incredulity. Such a thing would never be allowed today for the simple reason that hired guns are far too liable to spill the beans, blow the operation, embarrass the government and endanger field operatives.
  • Now that isn't to say that people working in HUMINT aren't sometimes psychopaths. I do, seriously, suspect that some people I have met in the HUMINT business are actually psychopaths, which is how they get to be so glib and manipulative and ruthless. But that is not the same thing as saying that intelligence organisations set out to recruit and develop psychopaths as officers.
  • MKULTRA is kid's stuff compared to some of the shit the CIA has gotten up to, as well you know. Ok, maybe my own ethics are warped and terrible, but I think MKULTRA is pretty damned bad. I guess there's something about conducting twisted medical experiments on your own people that makes me ick in a special way. Very personal opinion: the CIA's incompetence has been proven again and again, such that it's close to worthless as an agency. Well I guess this won't be much of a surprise, but I strongly disagree with this. Yeah, they screwed up over WMD's, and the Iraq interrogation stuff is both terrible and against the advice of every knowledgeable advisor, but to condemn the whole 60 years of the CIA's existence based on this... that stretches the facts beyond the breaking point. It's both 'temporally parochial' and it focusses the blame too strongly on the CIA for something that was and is government-wide in the US at the moment. I think the best research currently available on the subject would say that the CIA was ready and willing to be spun in the period following 9/11, but that means there had to be somebody willing to spin them. It really does seem like the people doing the spinning were high level political apparatchiks who subsequently lead the charge to focus the blame on the CIA for everything that went wrong. Was the CIA blameless? No. Does that mean that you should shut it down? Perhaps, but you should first shut down the DoD, the White House and the Republican Party.
  • ...you should first shut down the DoD, the White House and the Republican Party. I'm all for that!
  • ::boggles at Dreadnought's apologetics::
  • Or, was it what was said that needed to be destroyed? The CIA's Destroyed Interrogation Tapes and the Saudi-Pakistani 9/11 Connection
  • boggles at Dreadnought's apologetics I don't think I'm being an apologist. I'm not a pacifist. I see a role for intelligence organisations as well as military organisations. I don't think I'm rightly in a position to tell the Americans to shut down their intelligence organisations just because they are occasionally called upon to do horrible things. I think I would be having this exact same argument if somebody said 'we should shut the army down because they kill people.' Actually, no, on second thought that isn't actually the argument we're having. The argument we're having is more like: 'Wow, I heard that a couple of times there were these people who were shot to death by soldiers in the Army. And when the Army was asked about it, they totally said that they did it and they didn't even deny it. It must be that the Army specifically recruits murderous criminals to support the eventual Army goal of killing as many random people as they can including people from their own country.' Of course, I know people who actually do make this argument, but I would put it to you that they are relying on a very partial and distorted understanding of what military organisations do, and how they think and operate. I think the same partial understanding is being displayed here about the CIA. I mean, if there's anything specific that I wrote that you have an issue with, please let me know and I can elaborate further. Please note, though, that we're getting stuck in the format of a 'debate' here, where because other people are condemning the CIA it looks like my role, here, is to defend them. Actually, I would much rather be putting forward the position that we should have a complex, nuanced, understanding of the CIA. We shouldn't uncritically praise them, but we shouldn't just condemn them as a criminal organisation as one might the SS.
  • no, no, no. Don't characterise this as a semi-literate emo-kid tirade on the 'soopa evils' of government or something. This is an intelligent discussion with cites to current news events and government documents, specific issues which you appear to be avoiding addressing, as it happens. Sure, modern States need intelligence agencies. Do they need those intelligence agencies to torture and kill people, do illegal stuff, then cover it up? That's the question. A complexed, nuanced understanding of the CIA requires years of study, and access to documents that are currently unavailable to the general public. However, a reasonably unbiased overview of the publically available stuff on the history of the CIA shows that it has many times engaged in risky high-stakes politically-motivated activities that are frequently unethical, illegal, and which often fail. It could be said that the CIA does not appear to be very competent. Chinese moles, Israeli moles, failed foreign coups, torture, cover-ups, leaks ... There are some very efficient intelligence organisations in the world. The CIA is famous. Spot the difference.
  • A complexed, nuanced understanding of the CIA requires years of study, and access to documents that are currently unavailable to the general public. Well, Dreadnought has put in years of study on the CIA, perhaps a couple more than his degree was suposed to be :) -- but the documents are actually available to the public. Declassified documents (all that academics, etc have access to) are available through the CIA Electronic Reading Room.
  • Don't characterise this as a semi-literate emo-kid tirade on the 'soopa evils' of government or something. Actually, I don't think I'm characterising it that way at all. I'm sure that if Gandhi were here he'd be telling us that we don't need intelligence agencies or militaries at all, and Gandhi was not an emo-kid, as far as I know. Do they need those intelligence agencies to torture and kill people, do illegal stuff, then cover it up? That's the question. With respect, I don't think that is the question. I think that's several, independent questions, and not questions that can simply be answered by 'no, they are incompetent and should be shut down'. Let's break it down: Torture: absolutely not. Torture is bad, bad, bad, and the people who authorised torture and advocated for it should be drummed out of the service and put in jail. Torture was a bad idea, and morally wrong, when they did it during the Cold War, and it's a bad idea and morally wrong today. Note, though, that the recent incidents of torture have been driven from the highest political levels and deeply involve (some would argue primarily involve) the DoD. This is bad, bad, bad, but it's an American problem, not a CIA problem. Kill People: well most intelligence agencies don't kill people, at least not directly. The CIA does do so because it's not just an intelligence agency: it's also a covert-action paramilitary force. Should they have this role? No, I think 'direct action' should be split off into a separate organisation and probably put under the SecDef. But killing people, itself, is not something I think should be beyond the remit of governments, and in this I respectfully (I mean, genuinely respectfully) disagree with Blue Horse and with Gandhi. Do illegal stuff and cover it up: Well, yes, they should be doing exactly that. That's what they get paid to do, and if you want an intelligence agency, then that is the compromise you make. Can you come up with a way to run a HUMINT operation that doesn't involve breaking laws and keeping it secret? There are some very efficient intelligence organisations in the world. The CIA is famous. Spot the difference. Well, the difference is that the CIA is very open about what they do. The opposite of fame is not 'efficiency'. The opposite of fame is 'lack of democratic oversight'. Would you rather that the CIA be like Mossad or the MSS?
  • lack of democratic oversight.. hmmm. Well, I would argue that the CIA has plenty lack of democratic oversight, but that's par for the course in most Western governmental agencies anyway. Other than that, yousa point is well seen. I bow to the academic. However, I wish they would STOP BEAMING MESSAGES INTO MY BRAIN
  • While we're on the subject of what the Americans call 'comparativism', we should briefly touch upon the British model. The Americans have no equivalent of MI5, the Security Service. Many people, here, think that this makes them less safe, but it is a trade-off that they seem willing to make. One of the founding slogans of the CIA was 'no American Gestapo', and plenty of Americans would think that a US MI5 comes uncomfortably close to this. With the establishment of the CS, the CIA has come pretty close to having its own MI6, the SIS, within the framework of the CIA. The CIA is a huge and sprawling organisation that contains many almost completely unrelated elements. Such is the nature of the US Government: a strange creature if ever there was one.
  • Oh please don't stop talking about this just because I'm an academic. For all you know I could be a paid CIA stooge! :-)
  • No American Gestapo.. well, until Homeland Security, anyway.
  • I already knew you were a paid CIA stooge. I just hope they pay you more than what ASIO are paying me.
  • Ok, now lack of democratic oversight... well one of the things I think you should take note of is that democratic oversight has got much better in recent years, in part due to the terrible abuses that took place before the '70s. One of the reasons we know so much about the CIA's screw-ups is precisely because politicians have traditionally taken such a vigorous interest in them. Now, what's been happening during the 'War on Terrorism' is rather unaffected by such democratic oversight as does exist because the politicians themselves have been deeply complicit in not just preventing the mistreatment of detainees, but have often been actively pushing for it. This has been the subject of great... frustration in the observer community. Incidentally, in lieu of kittens, there is a blackbird playing in a puddle outside my window. It is very sweet.
  • We have Aussie Magpies which come right up to the screen door at the back patio and squawk for food, they are amusing. Pictures of the two fledglings to be posted on my flickr set soon.
  • The Americans have no equivalent of MI5 What does MI5 do? By its own account: protecting the UK against threats to national security from espionage, terrorism and sabotage, from the activities of agents of foreign powers, and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means. In the US, they only have, for instance, the FBI, whose role, by its own account includes: to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats I grant you the two organisations are far from being twins, but you surely don't think no-one is doing in the USA what MI5 is doing in the UK? Myself, I think I'm sort of with Gandhi on this. So far as I can tell, the contribution of both intelligence services during the Cold War, when they were supposed to be really important, was zero: they appear to have been completely irrelevant. At the time, no doubt,everything had to be secret, but you know, guys, you could tell us about your achievements now. And then, of course, there was all this stuff about how we mustn't cut their budget because now they were going to take on the IRA (what, you weren't doing anything about that before?) And now that's over, too, and what was the contribution of secret intelligence? Oh, lots of stuff, but can't quite think of any actual examples at the moment? In short, my problems with these people are not ethical, it's just that I have no evidence with which to refute people who say they are an ugly waste of space.
  • Also, their contribution to the fight against IRA terror included Kitson and his pseudo-gangs, the Miami Show Band massacre and the rest. Secret policemen have a bad habit of creating work for themselves. Protect your state from enemies within and without by having robust values that people will stand up for when they're threatened. Hopelessly naive perhaps, but I don't think the ends justify the means if half of what I've read is true.
  • >>Do illegal stuff and cover it up: Well, yes, they should be doing exactly that. That's what they get paid to do Well, if they get PAID to do it...then it MUST be okay!
  • > their contribution to the fight against IRA terror Quite possibly also the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
  • If watching X-Files has taught us anything, it's that there are good people in the CIA, too. I'll go back to the kiddie table now...
  • I grant you the two organisations are far from being twins, but you surely don't think no-one is doing in the USA what MI5 is doing in the UK? This is going to sound like a very finicky distinction, but MI5 is an intelligence organisation, while the FBI is a police force. What does that mean? It means that MI5's focus is collecting and processing information that gets used by other organisations. They don't actually do anything with that information (whatever you see on TV!), in terms of breaking down doors and making arrests. All that stuff gets done by the police. One upshot of this is that the police get mighty chagrined when they end up holding the bag for mistakes made by the Security Service. This stuff 'ain't simple. The FBI is a police agency. This means that their entire focus is on collecting evidence to secure convictions. If somebody is doing something bad, and there's no chance to convict them, the FBI frequently says 'we're not interested; nothing to do with us.' This is totally legitimate, but many people think that it means American domestic security intelligence doesn't play a sufficiently long game. They're just not interested in, for example, turning enemy agents against their employers for disinformation. A very good example of how this distinction plays out in practice is, interestingly enough, Irish republican terrorism. Now I don't know much about this, I'm just repeating what I'm told by experts second hand, but I'm told that things started really improving in Northern Ireland when the British government handed the IRA brief to MI5 rather than to the police. The police were interested only in bringing terrorists to justice, leading to the constant and apparently unending mess that we saw for years and years. MI5, on the other hand, started negotiating with them, finding ways to accommodate them and (very probably) manipulating them to their own ends. By taking a non-confrontational approach, and by being not particularly bothered about the fact that they were cooperating with people they didn't like, the Security Service was able to start turning a corner that the police had never been able to. ... the contribution of both intelligence services during the Cold War, ... was zero Ok, good example: Cuban Missile Crisis. The CIA takes the lead in conducting near real-time intelligence gathering and analysis that allows the Executive Branch to manage the crisis in such a way as to avert WWIII. How about the VENONA programme, that allowed the West to catch all those Soviet deep-penetration agents that were playing hell with Western security interests? The U-2 programme was also a success. As were the recruitments of Penkovsky and Gordievsky, and the exfiltration of the latter. Spy satellites... very useful. The rigging of the 1948 Italian election? Well you may not find that ethical, but it would be hard to argue it didn't have an effect on history. And this is just a list of highlights. The Cold War was a long, long conflict and a lot of stuff happened, most of which is still secret. Ultimately, the General War balloon didn't go up, so we never saw the effect of CW intelligence playing out on the battlefield of Europe, as people expected it would. But that doesn't mean that intelligence didn't make a 'contribution' to the military effort, or that it didn't have an affect on the unfolding crises as they happened. but you know, guys, you could tell us about your achievements now Man... if they could my job would be a whole lot easier. And less fun. There would also be a guy called Ivan in an apartment building somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow getting an interesting visit from the FSB.
  • Well, if they get PAID to do it...then it MUST be okay! Point well taken. I think it's perfectly reasonable to argue that we shouldn't dirty our hands with such morally dubious stuff. Personally, I think that in this cruel, unfeeling world we probably have to actually make that sacrifice, but I wouldn't hold it against you if you drew the opposite conclusion. All I meant was that if we're going to pay them all this money to go out and spy on people and suborn foreigners to betray their country, we shouldn't act all shocked when they do so.
  • There is also a good case to be made against "dirtying our hands" in such a manner on pragmatic grounds (e.g. torturing for confessions, many arms sales or giveaways, Noriega, bin Laden, Hussein). The problem is that there are people who LIKE these dirty ops, and they not only tend to gravitate toward (and be recruited for) organizations where they are permitted or encouraged to use such methods but also will choose to use them not only in cases where they may be justified and/or most effective but in others where they are clearly inappropriate/illegal/immoral. By focusing on these approaches, the intelligence-gathering erodes to crap (as we have seen).
  • > I'm told that things started really improving in Northern Ireland when the British government handed the IRA brief to MI5 rather than to the police. I think MI5 was active in Northern Ireland from the early 1970s. However, I'm a bit confused as to where MI5 ends and the intelligence branch of the British army (Force Research Unit) begins. I wouldn't say that either service had a stellar record in NI.
  • Christopher Hitchens weighs in.
  • We live in a time of insanity.
  • ...What videos?
  • 'We don't videotape' - G. W. Bush.
  • 'We do.' - Dennis John Kucinich and Elizabeth Jane (Harper) Kucinich. Tapes on sale at www.wewillwinthisanywaywehaveto.com
  • The thing that mos disturbed me from the retelling of that man (saw it on Mefi I think) was the fact psychiatrists and psychologists are involved. Not a new thing, for sure, but disturbing still.
  • weasels
  • I can't but suspect that somehow Mukasey'll get his hand up Durham's ass and become puppetmaster on this one. *crosses fingers*