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Obama Picks a Conscience for The CIA
At long last. Change we can believe in.
In choosing Leon Panetta to take charge of the CIA, President-elect Barak Obama has shown he is determined to put an abrupt end to the lawlessness and deceit with which the administration of George W. Bush has corrupted intelligence operations and analysis.
First and foremost, the appointment gives hope that torture and "rendition" (a euphemism for kidnapping people for delivery to foreign torture chambers) is over - or will be in less than two weeks.
Character counts. And so does integrity.
With those qualities, and the backing of a new President, Panetta is equipped to lead the CIA out of the wilderness into which it was driven by sycophantic directors with very flexible attitudes toward truth, honesty and the law - directors who deemed it their duty to do the President's bidding - legal or illegal; honest or dishonest. In a city in which lapel-flags have been seen as adequate substitutes for the Constitution, Panetta will bring a rigid adherence to the rule of law.
For Panetta this is no battlefield conversion. On torture, for example, this is what he wrote a year ago:
"We cannot simply suspend [American ideals of human rights] in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.
"We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that."
Please tell those of your friends who rely solely on the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) that torture is a crime - not only under international law, but also under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441) passed by a Republican-dominated Congress in 1996. And besides that, torture can never be counted upon to yield trustworthy intelligence-never.
As for integrity, this is nothing new for Leon Panetta. As head of President Richard Nixon's Office of Civil Rights, he insisted on enforcing laws to protect minorities even under pressure from Nixon to get in line with the Republican "southern strategy" of neglecting civil rights. Rather than buckle to these demands, Panetta resigned and later became a Democrat.
How Did We Get Here?
Political courage -- like that demonstrated by Panetta as a young man -- was what was lacking as the Bush administration turned America's principled repudiation of torture inside out, from the top down.
Unfortunately for President Bush, he cannot feign ignorance of this process, since the White House itself has released a Memorandum for the President dated Jan. 25. 2002, in which his lawyers apprised him of the seriousness of the War Crimes Act and even noted, "punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death penalty."
That memorandum, signed by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales (but drafted by Vice President Dick Cheney's lawyer, David Addington) warned specifically of "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441."
They then told Bush not to worry; that all he needed to do was to make a "determination that the GPW [Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War] does not apply." They added cheerily, "Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
It is a safe bet that Bush now wishes he had gotten a second opinion. Instead, he went ahead and signed an executive memorandum on Feb. 7, 2002, incorporating the Mafia-style advice of his lawyers. He then sent it to Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Chief of Staff to the President Andrew Card, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Condoleezza Rice, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers.
It seems strangely appropriate that it bore the Orwellian title: Humane Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban Detainees. In the memorandum, Bush lifts language verbatim from the Gonzales/Addington memo of Jan. 25 and makes it his own. He claims, for example, "the war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm [that] requires new thinking in the law of war."
He then attempts to square a circle, directing (twice in the two-page memo) that "detainees be treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva."
Exegesis by the Senate
On Dec. 11, 2008, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a report on the abuse of detainees - a report 18 months in the making and approved by the committee by voice vote without dissent.
Not surprisingly, every organ of the Fawning Corporate Media draped a smokescreen around President Bush's own role, by blaming everyone's favorite bête noire, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. [For a non-FCM approach, see Consortiumnews.com's "Torture Trail Seen Starting with Bush."]
It was not as though the President's own fingerprints were missing. The first subhead was: Presidential Order Opens Door to Considering Aggressive Techniques, and the first words of the first sentence of the first paragraph were, "On Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating..." Later in that same paragraph the committee report again refers to "the President's order," adding that "the decision to replace well-established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees."
"Conclusion 1" of the Senate Armed Services Committee report states:
"Following the President's determination [of Feb. 7, 2002], techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions ... were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody."
Consequences
Participants in detainee interrogations understood that the basis for the harsh tactics stemmed from policies approved by Bush.
According to a report by a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq, instituted a "dozen interrogation methods beyond" the Army's standard practice under the Geneva Convention. Sanchez explained that he based his decision on "the President's memorandum," which he said allowed for "additional, tougher measures" against detainees, the Schlesinger report said.
In addition, an FBI e-mail of May 22, 2004 from a senior FBI agent in Iraq stated that President Bush had signed an Executive Order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation, and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.
In the e-mail, the FBI official sought guidance in confronting an unwelcome dilemma. He asked if FBI personnel in Iraq were required to report the U.S. military's harsh interrogation of detainees when such treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential Executive Order.
Thus, what happened in many of the jail cells and interrogation chambers stemmed directly from of Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, memo and other presidential and vice presidential decisions.
No doubt it has long since occurred to Bush that he was mistaken to have put his fate in the dubious hands of his sadistic lawyers; foolish to sign his name to an executive order clearly in violation of international law as well as the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996; and foolish in the extreme to continue to let Gonzales roam the White House without adult supervision.
Shifting Blame
Ironies abound. In June 2004, after the obscene photos surfaced from Abu Ghraib, Gonzales screwed up again - royally.
Casting about to show that the President never authorized torture, Gonzales came up with the bright idea of adducing the Feb. 7, 2002, executive order as proof! No, I'm not kidding.
Gonzales apparently thought no one would read beyond the overly clever, first-word adjectival euphemism in the memo's title: Humane Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban Detainees.
So on June 22, 2004, the White House had the Feb 7, 2002, memorandum, together with other memos, declassified and released. At a press conference that day, Gonzales said the release was motivated by a desire to address "confusion" over whether the torture techniques on display in the Abu Ghraib photos had been approved by higher-ups.
Gonzales explained that the government felt that the confusion "was harmful to this country, in terms of the notion that perhaps we may be engaging in torture. That's contrary to the values of this President and this administration. And we felt that was harmful, also."
Harmful in more ways than one. It appears that the chickens may now be coming home to roost, as those who are informed by alternative media, including many supporters of President-elect Obama, are demanding accountability for Bush's torture policies and are objecting strongly to any appointments tainted by complicity in those policies.
That sentiment led Obama to look for a CIA director outside the usual list of intelligence professionals who had carefully positioned themselves - and their careers - so as not to offend the Bush administration the past eight years.
Placing managerial skills and personal integrity over direct intelligence experience, Obama made the surprise choice of Leon Panetta, who followed up his resignation from the Nixon administration with a varied career as a congressman, federal budget director, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and a member of the Iraq Study Group.
Opposing Panetta
It was no surprise that the current and former intelligence officials on the Washington Post's contact list have been upset at the naming of Panetta and the imminent cleaning and disinfecting of the Augean stables in Langley. A lot of horse___ and bull___ is to be found on the ground there, and Panetta will need heavy equipment-and some time-to clean it up.
As flagship of the FCM, the Post seldom checks with us in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, so let me simply state that those in our movement are virtually unanimous in welcoming the naming of Panetta.
The clean-up is likely to begin before the end of the month, and the Post will be losing many of its inside sources, since they will no longer be in the swing of things. Those tightly tied to torture will be gone. And good riddance.
Understanding the importance for change, Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the European Division in the operations directorate, has warned that "the problem with the agency is that people will be defending what they've done" in the realm of interrogations and detentions.
Drumheller, who was not directly involved in those activities, said he thinks Panetta will make a fine director. Still, by force of habit, he used the collective "we" in stating matter-of-factly: "We did what we did because we were told to by the President."
That is clearly the case. It is also the case that Nuremburg put the kibosh on the we-were-only-following-orders defense. People shall have to be reminded of that. And I mean people on "both sides of the house," as the CIA saying goes - analysis as well as operations.
To "justify" Bush's Iraq War, CIA Director George Tenet - along with his deputy John McLaughlin and the malleable managers in the CIA's analysis directorate - supervised the "fixing" of intelligence. The head of State Department intelligence at the time, Carl Ford, later said, "They should have been shot" for the way they served up "fundamentally dishonest" intelligence to please the White House.
Over at the Washington Post's editorial section, however, the big worry is that the CIA (and, gosh, maybe even the Post) will be held to account for complicity in, and minimizing the significance of, the many misdeeds.
One of the Post's neoconservative columnists, David Ignatius, has pleaded for someone to "protect the agency and help rebuild it after a traumatic eight years under George Bush, when it became a kind of national pincushion." Sorry, David. Under the direction of Cheney and Bush, the CIA became more like a kind of Gestapo than pincushion, doing the White House's bidding - while the co-opted leaders of the House and Senate "overlook committees" sat by silently. It is high time your editorial page commented on that sorry story.
The Take From Torture
One of the high ironies in all this is the fact that, as Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, head of Army intelligence, put it publicly on Sept. 6, 2006:
"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."
Now if it's inaccurate "intelligence" you're after - to "justify" a preordained policy like invading Iraq - well, that's another story. Then, torturing captives on your own or rendering them to countries skilled in torture practices can be quite effective indeed.
Take Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for example, who was captured and rendered to Egyptian intelligence. And, wouldn't you know, he "confessed" to knowing that Iraq was training al-Qaeda members in the use of terror techniques and illicit weapons, just the "evidence" the Bush administration was looking for. Al-Libi became a poster child for the Cheney/Bush propaganda machine - that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he knew they wanted to hear, in order to stop the torture.
Covert Action
Without proper congressional oversight -- or a strong ethos among intelligence professionals -- a rogue President and brown-nose director can use the CIA at will-all of this enabled by an ill-starred sentence that was inserted into the National Security Act of 1947 to find a home for "covert action."
The inserted language charged the CIA director with performing "such other functions and duties related to intelligence" as the President might assign.
Reflecting on this after he left office, President Harry Truman, in a Washington Post op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, publicly bemoaned that the CIA had been "diverted from its original assignment ... from its intended role." Mincing few words, Truman argued that the CIA's "operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere."
That was a good idea in 1963. And today, 45 years later, it is still a good idea.
Whether or not President-elect Obama decides to curtail or move the covert action functions of the agency, it is a truly encouraging thought that the country will soon have a President well versed in the Constitution and respect for the law, a President whose most recent appointments also spell the end of a corrupted Department of Justice.
Fair warning: Obama can expect little if any help from the co-opted chairpersons of the intelligence overlook committees in the House and Senate - Silvestre Reyes and Dianne Feinstein, respectively. Obama and Panetta will have to do it themselves.
The incoming President has his work cut out for him, but he has an excellent model in the late Barbara Jordan, an African-American educator and member of Congress from Texas. Jordan made an extremely valuable contribution on the House Judiciary Committee during the hearings on impeaching President Nixon-at a time when that committee was not the lamentable laughingstock it has now become.
I will not soon forget Jordan's words on July 25, 1974, two days before articles of impeachment of Nixon were approved and sent to the full House:
"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution... [As was said at] the North Carolina ratification convention, 'No one need be afraid that [government] officers who commit oppression will pass with immunity.'"
Obama and Panetta will have to devote attention to repair work on the CIA at first. But part of that process, sooner or later, will have to include holding accountable those guilty of war crimes as well as corrupting both the analysis and operations functions of U.S. intelligence.
This article first appeared on Consortium News.
- Posted in
27 Comments so far
Show AllThe Glue That Holds Chaos Together
"On Dec. 11, 2008, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a report on the abuse of detainees - a report 18 months in the making and approved by the committee by voice vote without dissent."
I would just like to add that Carl Levin has been under investigation for his corruption in the "Growler" program, and he has yet to answer for his misdeeds in sending our troops to die in defective vehicles, while outsourcing Michigan jobs.
Stand by. One moment, please. Leon Panetta is a politician, not the Messiah. He is as subject to bureaucratic inertia and the gravitational pull of empire as Jesus Christ or Joe The Plumber.
CIA directors who don't have a background in the intelligence community have a history of being abject failures. He won't survive a first Obama term. The rank and file at CIA won't respect him and will sabotage him at every opportunity.
snydly
I don' think so. I think they will be relieved to not have their professional and patriotic efforts prostituted by criminals like B and C.
Other thought:
HOW ABOUT RALPH NADER FOR COMMERCE SEC'Y?!
George's defence, if he ever needs one, will be that he either he didn't read the things, or that he did, but couldn't understand them.
A little history, he worked under Nixon as he was a Republican back then. He's a big green guy, but not sure he's got any more stuff for the job than the bush picks.
_____________________________________
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies. " Groucho Marx
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
H. L. Mencken
Torture was far from the only abuse of America’s intelligence agencies during the Bush administration. Under Bush there was a pattern of deliberately destroying intelligence gathering capabilities so bogus intelligence could be used to advance the political agenda of the neocons.
Most notable was the outing of Valerie Plame to discredit Joseph Wilson.
The Plame outing also compromised Brewster Jennings and Associates, a covert weapons of mass destruction intelligence gathering organization. No specific details have been released on the impact of destroying the covert cover operation but informed sources suggest that a very large and important intelligence gathering organization was destroyed and deaths of covert operatives or their contacts ensued in the aftermath of Robert Novak’s public disclosure.
The Valerie Plame-Brewster Jennings and Associates is but one of MANY EGERGIOUS BREACHES OF VITAL INTELLIGENCE GATHERING CAPABILITIES BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION THAT ALL FIT TWO SIMILAR PATTERNS.
THE BREACHES OF INTELLIGENCE GATHERING SOURCES;
Breach # 1; In December of 2001 the Bush administration released a video tape of Osama bin Laden talking with a crippled Saudi Sheik about the attacks of 9/11/2001. The stated purpose of the release of the tape was to prove to the Islamic world that bin Laden was indeed responsible for the attacks. The tape had been filmed by a Saudi Arabian agent that was attempting to set up an operation to take out bin Laden. By releasing the tape the Bush administration tipped bin Laden of the Saudi operation causing bin Laden to change security methods preventing bringing bin Laden to justice. bin Laden became the Bush administration's perpetual boogeyman
Breach #2; The Plame outing.
Breach # 3; To justify a bogus amber terror alert* a few weeks before the 2004 elections National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice disclosed information on an arrest in Pakistan that lead to the disclosure in the press of the identity of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani computer expert and communications agent for the highest levels of al Qaeda. After Khan’s arrest the Pakistanis had turned Khan into becoming a double agent, giving them a direct window into the inner workings of al Qaeda. Imagine had this source been allowed to come to fruition bin Laden’s location might well have been determined and the plans of al Qaeda could have been disrupted. *(The alert on financial centers in New Jersey and New York was based on information that was over two years old found on one of Khan’s captured computers.)
Breach #4: A drunken member of the Bush administration told neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi that the NSA had broken the Iranian diplomatic code and the code breakers at the NSA were reading the diplomatic dispatches to their embassies around the world. Chalabi, who sat with Laura Bush during the 2003 State of the Union address, promptly told the Iranians who then stopped using the system we’d compromised. I have little doubt that the combination of hardware, software and human input in cracking the Iranian diplomatic code cost the American taxpayers many BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. What’s Chalabi’s most recent job, aside from being Iraq’s Oil Minister? Promoting President Bush’s Baghdad surge.
There is also no doubt that when news of the Iranian diplomatic code intercepts broke into the news every other nation on the planet also reviewed their communication and encryption systems.
Like in the Valerie Plame, Brewster Jennings breach, not one person has been disciplined for the breaches in the Khan case, the Chalabi case, or the bin Laden tape case. All of these breaches of national security advance the cause of Bush’s endless Global War on Terrorism, and all of these breaches have reduced America’s abilities to gather accurate and timely intelligence on America’s adversaries.
Advancing the neocon foreign policy agenda of regime change requires faulty intelligence that another nation presents a dire threat to America’s security. The Bush administration pattern of compromising America’s intelligence gathering capabilities to advance their unAmerican neocon agenda crosses the threshold of treason.
And these are just the breaches that the public knows about...
Since NineOneOne has become an 800 lb gorilla... lets forget about all the breaches of national security that occured prior to and during and after that false flag operation took place...
Bingo, GoldenMean. Even Ray McGovern has hinted that he doesn't believe the official nineoneone story, and he has expressed his fear at various points that other such operations could occur. Is all forgiven now?
If Leon Panetta is good enough for Ray McGovern, he is good enough for me.
OK, that's one agency in good hands.
snydly
AND RALPH NADER FOR COMMERCE SEC'Y!
CHANGE.ORG
Why not simply repeal the language in the 1947 National Security Act that forms the ambiguous basis for the CIA's "covert action" activities like carrying out assassinations and destabilizing foreign governments? How are our national interests furthered by doing these illegal things in the first place? If there is ostensible value in such clandestine activities, has anyone ever sat down and tallied up the benefits of CIA black ops violence overseas compared to the harm generated by botched operations and blowback?
Panetta is a great choice, in my opinion, precisely because he is not a product of the spy culture of Langley. The James Bond 007 wannabes have been in need of adult supervision for decades. Now these cowboys even have Predator drone technology at their disposal, along with getting the green light from Bush to engage in torture.
In addition to squarely addressing the continued use of murder as a tool - an "option on the table" - for conducting foreign policy, Obama's new national security team ought to conduct a thorough examination of the CIA's front corporation network, the agency's ties to international drug trafficking, and the open invitation to large scale BCCI-style financial corruption that the National Security Act's veil of secrecy creates.
We all know that the CIA's primary means for gathering valuable human intelligence information in foreign countries is through bribery of public officials (ie., turning them into "assets"). Don't you think the temptation might be irresistable for some agents to apply the same techniques on the home front?
Bill from Saginaw
Well and good that Panetta has a "conscience," but aren't there other "conscientious" people (like Ray McGovern or Scott Ritter, for example, who ALSO have some intelligence experience? Is it just me, or have others been astonished at the frequency with which men and women who were Clinton administration functionaries have been selected by Obama for posts in "his" government (or is it a Bill and Hillary government)?
Picking a conscience for the CIA is an oxymoron.
Second only to "military intelligence"!
Deepa
Through the years, the CIA has been functioning as a global terrorist organization, ousting democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and key officials, propping up friendly dictators, and funding, training and equipping secret paramilitary armies, death squads and terrorist organizations.
Philip Agee, a CIA officer for 12 years and the whistleblower of CIA criminal activities, has mentioned criminal activities of CIA in his book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" published in 1975. In this book he wrote:
"When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence…After 12 years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports."
He also gave in detail the methods and procedures employed by the US in its pursuit and maintenance of its self-interests in other countries. "Inside the Company" was a political bombshell, coming amid widespread revelations of CIA assassination plots, involvement in military coups, and illegal surveillance against the American people, particularly those opposed to the Vietnam War. Among other things, Agee gave a detailed account of how he and his colleagues had organized the downfall of Ecuador's President Velasco in 1961. He also informed how he, as a CIA agent, closely worked with the then Mexican Interior Minister Luis Echeverría to subdue student opposition to both the Mexican government and the Olympic Games in 1968. Human Rights groups estimate that about 300 people were killed when government forces opened fire on students gathered at Tlatelolco Plaza. In 1987, Agee published a memoir, "On the Run" , which gIveS more details of his break with the Agency and the CIA’s efforts to retaliate. He wrote:
"It was a time in the ’70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador—they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government. That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries."
The terrorist activities of the US through the CIA is confirmed in July of 2006 by Edward Peck, former US Ambassador to Iraq and Deputy Director of Reagan’s Task Force on Terrorism: "In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us - this is a Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism; I was the Deputy Director of the working group - they asked us to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities."
Edward Peck has termed the US activities as terrorism. He said: "U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331[1], and read the U.S. definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says • one of the terms, “international terrorism,” means “activities that,” I quote, “appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping”…Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them."
A concerned Peck in an interview on CNN Crossfire on October 8, 2001 retorted, "Why it is that all of these people hate us. It's not because of freedom…They hate us because of things they see us doing to their part of the world that they definitely do not like."
SO, CIA NEEDS A TOTAL TRANSFORMATION, NOT JUST A CHANGE AT THE TOP. IT SHOULD PUT A STOP TO ITS TERRORIST ACTIVITIES AROUND THE WORLD.
snydly
AND RALPH NADER FOR COMMERCE SEC'Y!
CHANGE.ORG
Enough with the all caps multiple postings for Nader for any job in the Obama admin...
It is not gonna happen...
The CIA IS Wall Street, nothing less, nothing more!
One wonders why Diane Feinstein doesn't like the Panetta nomination? Has she, like so many in Congres been so thoroughly compromised by the work of the secret domestic intelligence operations that she has no choice but to vote as she's told?
Why is McGovern speaking as though it's a done deal?
And why does he believe the CIA can be reformed?
And if Panetta does a face lift on the CIA, what effect will that have on the over all malignant influence of secret intelligence activities? The CIA is, after all, but one agency among 16 or so, not including the private agencies. We, the public, know almost nothing about the intelligence apparatus hidden within our own government. We don't know how much money they have to spend ( our money ) nor how they spend it.
David Ignatius at the Post most likely supplements his income with funds covertly supplied via the intelligence community. And it is a community, a faceless, nameless ( except for certain figureheads ) community that provides cover for pedigreed liars and scoundrels. There is not a single genuine patriot in the intelligence community, though they all justify their existence as patriots. This is because they all serve the national security state, which is not the government by and for the people as defined by the US Constitution.
Patriots of the National Security State, then. Not the republic bequeathed to us.
And Ray McGovern? Nice guy? Yes. Honest? Probably. As a defender of the secret intelligence apparatus he is not to be reverenced too much. He has credibility as a reformer, but this begs the question. Can the intelligence community be reformed? Can agencies that operate in secret with minimal accountability, and black budgets be reformed?
NO!
But it's nice, I suppose, that a nice guy like Leon Panetta will head one of the most visible intelligence agencies and it's nice that he believes he can reform the incorrigible. All the rats will scurry back to their hiding places for a while as he strides around babbling about change we can believe in.
And nothing fundamental will change.
I beg to differ with Ray. DCIA isn't the only important official. Criminals from BushCo will remain and even elevated in Obama's administration. Those interested in this and why it's important ought to read The Torturer Elect for it confirms what many of us are saying that nothing of substance will change with Obama. Clearly, Panetta's nomination is just another smokescreen, a charade, to make it seem some things are changing.
I heard Ray McGovern this week on Hugh Hamilton's show on WBAI www.wbai.org "Talk Back" speak about Panetta, who sounds good. BUT, McGovern also confirmed my thought that Panetta's boss will be the new NSA chief, Blair. Admiral Blair was troubling to McGovern and he gave some reasons. The same reasons have been explored in more detail on DemocracyNow www.democracynow.org this morning, and earlier in the week in an interview with Allan Nairn, long time expert on Indonesia. He has been working on exposing Blair's record in re E. Timor and it's an ugly record. I remember the story from "real time", as I was listening regularly to Amy Goodman on WBAI in 1992, when she was news director for the station. DemocracyNow started at WBAI. So, if Blair is Panetta's boss, which has McGovern and Nairn very concerned, how much will that hamper Panetta at the CIA?
I'm not sure the CIA is repairable. Too many skeletons in their closet. Kennedy was murdered for wanting to fix it.
9/11 and oligarchy fearmongering gave the CIA license to torture and extort. It still is the Bush's private company.
Only a rare few political observers are as knowledgeable and honest as Ray McGovern.
It appears that Obama has finally made his first good appointment. The campaign-slogan "change" may actually become real change in this instance: an end to Bush's torture policy.
‘Now if it's inaccurate "intelligence" you're after - to "justify" a preordained policy like invading Iraq - well, that's another story. Then, torturing captives on your own or rendering them to countries skilled in torture practices can be quite effective indeed.’
This is basically Cheney’s definition of “actionable intelligence” - truth or accuracy was never the goal, as long as they had “actionable intelligence” to justify their war and war profiteering.
I had hoped that they would bring in Ray McGovern as part of the stable cleaning process and give him a very sharp hatchet.I have a deep fear that the new administration will not do a broad purge of the DOD, State, and CIA to root out those who are still there and guilty of complicity in war crimes. They have also been waffling over the question of potential war crimes trials. The real shocker came when they used the same statement as Senator Roberts when he refused to hold hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence over how the White House manipulated bad intelligence to lead the nation to war; "We need to concentrate on the future problems, not dwell on the past". The Main stream media is also complicit in making certain that the war crimes of the Bush administration are not known. I sent a list of books and other shorter articles to some newspapers and pointed out that any reader would have to justify that the Bush adminstration was guilty of war crimes. It didn't even mention the attempts by Cheney to get us into a shooting war against Iran on behalf of the Israelis. Books:Hubris,Fiasco,The Price of Loyalty,Against All Enemies,The One Per Cent Doctrine,The Terror Presidency,On the Brink, Worse Than Watergate. Articles, which are easily found on the Internet: "The Torture Memo" Nation Magazine;The Downing Street Memo; "Bush's Pentagon Papers:The Urge to Confess" Tom Dispatch.com; "The New Pentagon Papers" Salon.com; "Mild Penalties in Military Abuse cases" LA Times; "The Court Martial of Willy Brand" CBS News; "Taxi to the Dark Side" (movie); "Tortured Reasoning" Vanity Fair. Robert Mueller, head of the FBI, admits in the Vanity article that he knows of no terrorist attack that was prevented by "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture). OF course, the papers refused to print that information. All readers of Common Dreams, send this list to all your local newspapers and see what happens? Then send it to your members of Congress and hopefully something will happen.
The CIA has been nothing but a terrorist's headquarters ever since the Cold War ended. It's a complete waste of taxpayer money and deserves to be ABOLISHED !