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Secret CIA Program Revealed?
In an effort to take Obama’s economic failures off the front page, democrats once again resurrected an issue that so far has also been a failure — CIA witch hunts.
CIA Director Leon Panetta supposedly told Congress about a CIA program last week that up until that point had been kept from Congress at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Liberals in Congress predictably ran to the press and pointed to Panetta’s disclosure as proof that the CIA lies to Congress, which means Nancy Pelosi was telling the truth when she made that accusation some weeks ago.
You can’t tell the media about a “secret” program they can’t know about, because like a child they’ll keep digging and begging until they find out the secret.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting today new details on the secret program that Panetta disclosed to Congress.
Apparently, the program involved the assassination of top Al-Qaeda leaders.
Amid the high alert following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al Qaeda operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.
"It was straight out of the movies," one of the former intelligence officials said. "It was like: Let’s kill them all."
I hope liberal democrats are not hanging their hat on this one. If the left thinks Americans are going to be upset about a program to kill Al-Qaeda terrorists, they’re wildly mistaken.
Terrorists should be hunted down and killed. Not arrested, not brought back for Eric Holder to give rights to, but killed on the spot.
The most troubling aspect of this latest revelation is not that such a program was being discussed, but that such a program was not immediately implemented.
More troubling still, is the fact that Director Panetta’s knee-jerk reaction to learning of the program was to cancel it.
As usual, this latest CIA dust-up is more about politics than anything else. Like Eric Holder’s determination to prosecute the very people who’ve kept us safe, Democrats are determined to play politics with our national security.
ABC News Outs CIA Contractors Behind Interrogation Program
ABC News has done what I’m sure they consider some kind of public service by outing two CIA contractors who allegedly designed the enhanced interrogation program.
Let’s face it, there’s no such thing as a secret anymore. People flap their gums about everything now regardless of our national security and regardless of consequences.
The media are a bunch of anti-American scumbags. They do more to damage this country than any single institution in the world. ABC News is a disgrace.
When the hell are we going to start prosecuting people who blab classified information to reporters?
The first time some paper pusher with a security clearance gets 10 years in federal prison for flapping his lips to reporters we might finally put an end to this crap.
We are in the middle of a fucking war and nobody seems to give a damn.
-Chris Jones
Yemeni Man Says He Was Imprisoned At CIA Black Sites
Read my latest column in BlogCritic Magazine. It’s in response to an article on The Huffington Post by a Yemeni man who says he was kidnapped by the CIA and held without trial. He was released after 19 months and is now being represented by all the usual human rights groups. He wants the people responsible for his detainment to be identified and prosecuted. Obviously, I don’t share that sentiment.
-Chris Jones
CIA Station Chief Accused Of Multiple Rapes
This from ABC News:
The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
Officials say the 41-year old CIA officer, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.
Cue the “America is evil”, “America is the real terrorist”, “America is raping Islam” stories. Let the America bashing commence.
-Chris Jones
Report: Inside A 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation
The International Herald Tribune has a detailed account of how 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was captured and interrogated. Learn about a soft-spoken CIA analyst named Duece Martinez who became instrumental in the interrogation of high profile terrorists.
The article offers some amazing insight into how the War on Terror was conducted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and how we’ve managed to prevent new attacks. The men and women who work behind the scenes both in the U.S. and around the world to keep our country safe are true heroes.
White House Not Involved In Destruction Of CIA Tapes
As much as all the Bush haters in this country would just love it, there is no evidence to suggest that the White House had anything to do with the destruction of the CIA tapes.
Congressional investigators have turned up no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration openly advocated the tapes’ destruction, according to officials familiar with a set of classified documents forwarded to Capitol Hill. “It was an agency decision — you can take it to the bank,” CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview on Friday. “Other speculations that it may have been made in other compounds, in other parts of the capital region, are simply wrong.”
It was the head of Clandestine Services, Jose Rodriguez who acted against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved.
Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.
I’m betting that after all is said and done that Mr. Rodriguez will be seen as having acted lawfully when he ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes.
Mr. Rodriguez is a patriot and deserves a great deal of thanks. He knew it was only a matter of time before some traitor at the agency got a hold of those tapes and presented them to the NY Times with a big red bow on them.
Those tapes should have never been made in the first place, because our government is incapable of keeping secrets. The very existence of those interrogation tapes placed our interrogation program and national security at risk.
The anti-American/anti-Bush crowd would have given anything to get their grubby, liberal, mitts on those tapes and used them to do great damage to this country.
-Chris Jones
Witch Hunt: Mukasey Orders Criminal Probe Over CIA Tapes
Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed an outside prosecutor Wednesday to lead a criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes.
“The Department’s National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation,” Mukasey said in a statement released Wednesday.
Mukasey named John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, to oversee the case. Durham has a reputation as one of the nation’s most relentless prosecutors. He served as an outside prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the FBI’s use of mob informants in Boston and helped send several Connecticut public officials to prison.
What this entire episode represents is yet another example of the CIA’s inability to keep a secret. The concept of “State Secrets” obviously died along with the cold war.
The decision to tape any interrogation of Al-Qaeda suspects especially any enhanced interrogations was probably the most horrible idea ever conceived. A tape like that is the equivalent of a loose nuke in political terms and should never have been made.
Now of course this whole thing is going to play out like a textbook, and someone is gonna have to be thrown under the bus. I suspect the sacrificial lamb at the CIA already knows who he or she is and is just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Mukasey has to prove to Congress that he’s running a different kind of Justice Department than Gonzales, so he’s obligated to hang someone out to dry.
The larger and more troubling question than anything goes back to the intelligence community’s inability to keep a secret. Leaking State Secrets has become business as usual and the leaker or leakers are never caught and never prosecuted.
I don’t care if the CIA destroyed one tape or a thousand tapes, or if they torture terrorists, or if they send terrorists to be tortured by someone else. What I do care about is why I know about any of it?
Contrary to what the NY Times thinks, I don’t need to know about NSA wiretapping, tape destruction, waterboarding, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, torture, or any of the rest of it.
I want the CIA to do whatever they deem necessary to prevent any future attacks. I don’t care how they do it, or where they do it as long as it gets done.
We should not know as much as we do, because everything we now know our enemies now know. If leakers were sentenced to 20 years in federal prison, I’m betting the vast majority of leaks would dry up overnight.
Who in the hell is ever gonna want to join the CIA or NSA, DIA, if they run the risk of being prosecuted for doing their job if a political scapegoat is needed?
Americans need to decide if gathering intelligence and conducting clandestine operations is something that’s important to our National Security. If we don’t believe intelligence is important then let’s just close down the CIA and other agencies.
If we do think that gathering intelligence is indeed vital to our national security, then we should just shut-up and let the CIA do their job. That means not asking how information was obtained, where it was obtained, or under what conditions.
Playing “gotcha” with America’s most important intelligence agency during a time of war is despicable, disgraceful, and outrageous.
Judge Appears Reluctant To Investigate Destruction of CIA Tapes
Much to the bitter disappointment of left-wing types, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy appeared reluctant today to open his own investigation into the destruction of interrogation tapes by the CIA.
U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy heard arguments from both sides on whether he should hold a hearing on the CIA’s controversial destruction of the videotapes in November 2005, five months after he had issued an order specifically ordering the government to preserve “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees now” at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Lawyer Joseph “Jody” Hunt, representing the White House, told the judge that Zubaydah and al-Nashiri were not being held at Guantanamo when the judge issued his order, noting that President Bush announced their transfer to the facility in September 2006. He also said the tapes destroyed by the CIA had no bearing on the case of the Yemeni men because, “It is inconceivable that the destroyed tapes could have been about abuse, mistreatment or torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.”
And Hunt asked the judge to refrain from conducting his own investigation because the Justice Department and CIA inspector general are already looking into the controversy, including whether the government violated any court orders to preserve evidence. He said that the Justice Department and the administration would notify the judge if the inquiry concludes that the court order was violated.
Judge Kennedy did not say when he would officially rule on these issues, but observers believe he will ultimately allow the Justice Department to conduct their own investigations without interfering.
Destruction of C.I.A. Tapes Cleared by Lawyers
The NY Times is reporting today that lawyers within the clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency gave written approval in advance to the destruction in 2005 of videotapes documenting interrogations of two Al Qaeda terrorists.
The involvement of agency lawyers in the decision making would widen the scope of the inquiries into the matter that have now begun in Congress and within the Justice Department. Any written documents are certain to be a focus of government investigators as they try to reconstruct the events leading up to the tapes’ destruction.
The former intelligence official acknowledged that there had been nearly two years of debate among government agencies about what to do with the tapes, and that lawyers within the White House and the Justice Department had in 2003 advised against a plan to destroy them. But the official said that C.I.A. officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the C.I.A. was never given a direct order not to destroy the tapes.
“They never told us, ‘Hell, no,’” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘You cannot destroy them,’ we would not have destroyed them.”
I have my doubts that anyone would have destroyed the tapes unless they felt the legal justification for doing so was iron clad. Destroying those tapes does not only run the risk of ruining your career, but could also land you in prison. So I believe that they believed they had the legal authority to destroy the tapes.
Whether or not that turns out to be the case (I’m betting it will) remains to be seen.
-Chris Jones
CIA Agent: Waterboarding Is Torture, But Necessary
Check this little gem out from ABC News:
A leader of the CIA team that captured and interrogated the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.
In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.
“The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate,” said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News With Charles Gibson” and “Nightline.”
“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
Kiriakou says he did not know that the interrogation of Zubaydah was being secretly recorded by the CIA and had no idea the tapes had been destroyed.
I’m not sure what planet the anti-torture crowd is living on, but the argument that a person will say anything to make the torture stop just doesn’t hold up.
For every military person that says torture doesn’t work, I can point to two who says it does. A truly innocent person might make stuff up, but a guy who really knows something will usually start with the truth.
Waterboarding is the least painful torture technique available. Zubaydah was waterboarded for a whole 35 seconds and that’s it. There’s no reason to get hysterical and act like America is the new “torture” capital of the world.
Watch the full report tonight on “World News With Charles Gibson” at 6:30 p.m. ET and on “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m. ET.
THEORY:
What if when Allah supposedly came to Zubaydah in the night and told him to cooperate, it was really a hologram the CIA designed? Meaning they were able to create a hologram of Allah that floated above Zubaydah compelling him to cooperate.
Be honest, would you really be that surprised if the CIA tried something like that?
-Chris Jones
Right On Cue: Democrats Call For Investigation Into CIA Tape Destruction
It was a foregone conclusion that Democrats would call for dog and pony shows hearings and investigations after the CIA admitted to destroying interrogation tapes. So right on cue that’s exactly what they did, complete with “faux” outrage and references to Richard Nixon.
From The Huffington Post:
Congressional Democrats Friday demanded a full Justice Department investigation into whether the CIA obstructed justice by destroying videotapes that documented the harsh 2002 interrogations of two alleged terrorists.
A day after CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden told agency employees the tapes were destroyed in 2005, members of Congress, human rights groups and lawyers for accused terrorists said the tapes may have been key evidence that the U.S. government had illegally authorized torture…
In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, asked for a probe of “whether CIA officials who destroyed these videotapes and withheld information about their existence from official proceedings violated the law.”
In a Senate floor speech Durbin dismissed the CIA’s explanation that it was trying to protect the identities of the interrogators. “We know that it is possible and in fact easy to cover the faces” of those who appear on camera, Durbin said. “This is not an issue that can be ignored.”
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., accused the CIA of a coverup. “The agency was desperate to cover up damning evidence of their practices,” he said in floor remarks. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the tapes of President Richard Nixon.”
-Chris Jones
Thank God The CIA Destroyed Interrogation Tapes
Liberals are howling this morning about the recent NY Times article and subsequent admission by CIA that 2 tapes showing the harsh interrogation of terrorists were destroyed.
The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.
In a statement to employees on Thursday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that the decision to destroy the tapes was made “within the C.I.A.” and that they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.
General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk” and that if they had become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”
I don’t blame C.I.A. for destroying the tapes. Leaving those tapes lying around where some turncoat within the agency could possibly turn them over to the NY Times was not worth the risk.
Republicans are interested in fighting the war on terror, meanwhile Democrats (minus Joe Lieberman) are more interested in undercutting those fighting the war on terror.
If we didn’t live in a country infested with cowards who would just love to prosecute a C.I.A. agent for doing what’s necessary to keep us safe, then it wouldn’t be necessary to destroy tapes.
It’s a great victory for America that those tapes never saw the light of day. Thankfully, the C.I.A. no longer records interrogation sessions so after the a few rounds of pointless Senate hearings this whole story will most likely just fade away.
-Chris Jones
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