Time To Disband The CIA And Start Over Again?

This morning I was trying to figure out what would be least depressing to blog about, Miss McConnell, fresh from endorsing fellow hypocritical closet queen Charlie Crist, swishing onto the set of CBS' Face the Nation to declare, when not being hysterical about health care reform, that the GOP is still weighing whether or not it will be more advantageous to fillibuster Judge Sonia Sotomayor; President Kent Conrad, along with 2 other conservative presidents, President Ben Nelson and President Susan Collins, telling CNN talking head John King on State of the Union that Obama can't pass a public option because he doesn't have 60 votes; or Jane Mayer's troubling examination of the C.I.A. in the New Yorker. If you read DWT with any regularity, you probably know we harbor quite a few misgivings about the nature of the C.I.A., the role it has played internationally and domestically, and that we are open to the premises in Russ Baker's magnificent new book, Family of Secrets, that implicates the C.I.A. in removing two American presidents whose policies they didn't agree with, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. I chose Door #3.

Mayer asks in her subtitle whether Obama's C.I.A. chief, Leon Panetta can succeed at Langley without confronting the agency's past-- and she's not talking about Dealey Plaza or Watergate.

For Mayer, Obama is somewhat heroically attempting to restore the rule of law, so thoroughly savaged by the Cheney Regime, without sacrificing national security, safety and the support of conservative Democrats. He's been trying "to recalibrate the agency’s policies without investigating past mistakes or holding anyone responsible for them," infuriating the left and the right about equally. Panetta, somehow, "has to ride the tiger without being eaten," a particularly vicious tiger that certainly has no moral compass whatsoever. They don't want any investigations-- and they mean it.

A confidential Red Cross report has come into public view, along with formerly classified government documents, leaving no doubt that the agency subjected scores of terror suspects to prolonged physical and psychological cruelty. Officers shackled prisoners for weeks in contorted positions; chained them to the ceiling wearing only diapers; exploited their phobias; propelled them head first into walls. At least three prisoners died.

Torture is a felony, and is sometimes treated as a capital crime. The Convention Against Torture, which America ratified in 1994, requires a government to prosecute all acts of torture; failure to do so is considered a breach of international law... The C.I.A.’s role in providing misleading intelligence about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has also provoked calls for reform. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the new chairman of the Intelligence Committee, told me, “There’s no vote that I regret more than the vote to authorize war with Iraq”; her vote was based on intelligence that she describes as “flat wrong.” Feinstein went on, “I am absolutely determined to reform the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence.”

Those are two things the C.I.A. isn't eager to see the covers drawn back on. Panetta is surrounded by incestuous Tenet operatives who claim Bush and Cheney were the bad guys but that they themselves weren't. And Obama seems to be playing ball with C.I.A. elements of dubious loyalty (to him and to the United States). On April 16th he promised immunity from prosecution to any C.I.A. officer who relied on the advice of legal counsel during the Bush years, i.e., torture cheerleaders like Mormon fanatic Jay Bybee and Korean fascist John Yoo. Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel to the C.I.A., points out that this is a low standard, given that “what the Justice Department approved was outrageous.”

Needless to say, those implicated in torture adamantly oppose anything and everything that would expose them in any way and the media has made much of claims that release of documents and photos "could spark an anti-American backlash." Where-- in the blogosphere?

Several well-respected former C.I.A. officials-- including Fred Hitz, a former inspector general, and Paul Pillar, a former Middle East analyst-- told me that they saw no harm in releasing the documents. Dennis C. Blair, the director of National Intelligence, who oversees the U.S. intelligence establishment, including the C.I.A., also supported the release of the documents, after his staff concluded that the disclosures would likely do no damage.

Some C.I.A. agents seem to have learned absolutely nothing from the generally mild outrage over the torture disclosures-- which have come with no accountability-- and are still adamant that they need "preventive detention" and rendition. Panetta favors a kinder and gentler rendition-- and one that, presumably, will make fewer mistakes in kidnapping innocent people and arbitrarily torturing them for months on end. There have been at least 7 but possibly many more.

The C.I.A. has apparently done nothing to penalize the officer who oversaw one of the most notorious renditions-- that of a German car salesman named Khaled el-Masri. He was abducted while on a holiday in Macedonia, and flown by the agency to Afghanistan, where he was detained in a dungeon for five months without charges, before being released. From the start, the rendition team suspected that his case was one of mistaken identity. But the C.I.A. officer in charge at Langley-- the agency asked that the officer’s name be withheld-- insisted that Masri be further interrogated. “She just looked in her crystal ball and it said that he was bad,” a colleague recalls. Masri says that he was chained in a freezing cell with no bed, and given water so putrid that he could smell it across the room. He was threatened and stripped, and could hear other detainees crying all around him. After several weeks, the C.I.A. officer in charge learned that Masri’s German passport was not a forgery, as was originally suspected, and that he was not the terror suspect the agency thought he was. (The names were similar.) Even so, the officer in charge refused to release him. Eventually, Masri went on a hunger strike, losing sixty pounds. Skeptics in the agency went directly over the officer’s head to Tenet, who realized that his agency had been brutalizing an innocent man. Masri was released after a hundred and forty-nine days. But the officer in charge was not disciplined; in fact, a former colleague says, “she’s been promoted-- twice.” Masri, meanwhile, has been unable to sue the U.S. government for either an apology or damages, because the courts consider the very existence of rendition a state secret-- a position that the Obama Justice Department has so far supported.

No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as the result of mistreatment. In the first case, an unnamed detainee under C.I.A. supervision in Afghanistan froze to death after having been chained, naked, to a concrete floor overnight. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. In the second case, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died on November 4, 2003, while being interrogated by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that he had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide. A third prisoner died after an interrogation in which a C.I.A. officer participated, though the officer evidently did not cause the death. (Several other detainees have disappeared and remain unaccounted for, according to Human Rights Watch.)

There has been no accounting, let along accountability. Short of passing universal health care, there's probably nothing Obama could do that would be more beneficial to this country than abolishing the C.I.A. and starting over again from scratch.