CIA Torturers Running Scared

For the CIA supervisors and operatives
who were responsible for torture, the chickens are coming home to roost.
That is, if President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
mean it when they say no one is above the law - and if they have the
courage to stand up to brazen intimidation.

Unable to prevent Attorney General
Eric Holder from starting an investigation of torture and other war
crimes that implicate CIA officials past and present, some of those
same CIA officials, together with what in intelligence circles are called
"agents of influence" in the media, are pulling out all the stops
to quash the Department of Justice's preliminary investigation.

In what should be seen as a bizarre
twist, seven CIA directors-including three who are themselves implicated
in planning and conducting torture and assassination- have asked the
President to call off Holder.

Can someone please tell me how could
the whole thing be more transparent?

The most vulnerable of the Gang of
Seven, George Tenet, is not the brightest star in the heavens, but even
he was able to figure out years ago that he and his accomplices might
end up having to pay a heavy price for violating international and U.S.
criminal law.

In his memoir, At the Center of
the Storm, Tenet notes that what the CIA needed were "the right
authorities" and policy determination to do the bidding of President
George W. Bush:

"Sure, it was a risky proposition
when you looked at it from a policy maker's point of view. We
were asking for and we would be given as many authorities as CIA had
ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them, could
end up spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before
congressional overseers our new freedom to act." (p. 178)

Tenet and his masters assumed, correctly,
that given the mood of the times and the lack of spine among lawmakers,
congressional "overseers" would relax into their accustomed role
as congressional overlookers. Unfortunately for him, Tenet seems
to have confined his concern at the time to the invertebrates in Congress,
not anticipating a rejuvenated Department of Justice that might take
its role in enforcing the law seriously.

Taking the Gloves Off

Tenet proudly quotes his former counterterrorism
chief, Cofer Black (now a senior official at Blackwater): "As Cofer
Black later told Congress, 'The gloves came off that day.'"
That day was September 17, 2001, when "the president approved our
recommendations and provided us broad authorities to engage al-Qa'ida."
(p. 208)

Presumably, it was not lost on Tenet
that no lawmaker dared ask exactly what Cofer Black meant when he said
"the gloves came off." Had they thought to ask Richard Clarke,
former director of the counterterrorist operation at the White House,
he could have told them what he wrote in his book, Against All Enemies.

Clarke describes a meeting in which
he took part with President George W. Bush in the White House bunker
just minutes after his TV address to the nation on the evening of 9/11.
When the subject of international law was raised, Clarke writes that
the president responded vehemently: "I don't care what the
international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." (p. 24)

It took Bush and Cheney only six days
to grant the CIA the "broad authorities" the agency had recommended.
It then took White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, Vice President Dick
Cheney's lawyer David Addington, and William J. Haynes II, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's lawyer, four more months to advise the
president formally that, by fiat, he could ignore the Geneva Conventions
on the treatment of prisoners of war.

This gang of lawyers so advised at
the turn of 2001-2002, beating down objections by William Howard Taft
IV, Secretary of State Colin Powell's lawyer. Bush chose to
follow the dubious advice of those imaginative lawyers in his and Dick
Cheney's employ; namely, that 9/11 ushered in a "new paradigm"
rendering the Geneva protections "quaint" and "obsolete."

We Need to Tell You Also...

Addington and Gonzales did take care
to warn the president, by memorandum of Jan. 25, 2002, of the risk of
criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 2441, the War Crimes Act of 1996.
The memo said:

"That statute, enacted in 1996,
prohibits the commission of a 'war crime' by or against a U.S. person,
including U.S. officials. 'War crime'...is defined to include
any grave breach of the GPW [Geneva] or any violation of Article 3 thereof
(such as outrages against personal dignity)...Punishments for violations
of Section 2441 include the death penalty....

"...it is difficult to predict
the motives of prosecutors or independent counsels who may in the future
decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your
determination [that Geneva does not apply] would create a reasonable
basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a
solid defense to any future prosecution."

With that kind of pre-ordered reassurance,
President Bush issued a two-page executive directive [ see https://tinyurl.com/dl6u9s ],
in which he states, "I accept the legal conclusion of the Department
of Justice and determine that common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply
to either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees..."

This is the smoking gun on Bush's
key role in the subsequent torture of "war on terror" prisoners.
It turns out that he was the "decider" after all, as Dick Cheney
has taken pains to make clear (telling Bob Schieffer recently that Bush
"signed off" on abusive techniques). The Senate Armed Services
Committee issued a report, without dissent, last December stating that
that Feb. 7 memorandum "opened the door" to abusive interrogation
practices.

Unhappily for Bush and for those who
carried out his instructions, on June 29, 2009 the Supreme Court ruled,
in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Geneva DOES apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban
detainees. One senior Bush administration official is reported
to have gone quite pale at the time, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
raised the ante, warning that "violations of Common Article 3 are
considered 'war crimes,' punishable as federal offenses."

What about U.S. criminal law?
Despite the almost laughable attempts by lawyers like Addington and
John Yoo to get around the War Crimes Act by advising that only the
kind of pain accompanying major organ failure or death can be considered
torture, those involved are now in a cold sweat-the more so, since
those dubious opinions have now been made public.

The Justice Dept. Memos and CIA
IG Report

In releasing the sordid, torture-approving
memoranda written by Department of Justice lawyers and major portions
of the CIA's own horse's-mouth Inspector General "Special Review"
on interrogation and torture, President Barack Obama and Holder had
to face down very strong pressure from those with the most to lose.
Again, these include former CIA directors and the functionaries (some
of them in senior CIA positions to this very day) who were responsible
for seeing to it that "the gloves came off."

Now, out in the public domain is all
the evidence needed to show that war crimes were committed-"authorized"
as legal by Justice Department Mafia-type lawyers recruited for that
express purpose-but war crimes nonetheless. Torture, kidnapping,
illegal detention-not to mention blatant violations of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) outlawing eavesdropping on Americans
without a court warrant.

The stakes are high. No wonder
the CIA and its "agents of influence" are going all out (see Saturday's
lead story in the Washington Post. https://tinyurl.com/mdrjff )

No Surprise, But Sad Nonetheless

It should have come as no surprise
that Attorney General Eric Holder would run into a buzz saw when he
decided to do his constitutional duty and investigate whether crimes
have been committed. Certainly Cheney and Fox News had made that
abundantly clear. CIA seniors and functionaries with the most
to lose are now pulling out all the stops.

In their Sept. 18 letter to the President,
seven former CIA directors asked him to "reverse Attorney General
Holder's August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation
of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September
11."

This is the saddest commentary on CIA
covert action operatives' continuing power and their disdain for the
law since their predecessor creeps loudly applauded former Director
Richard Helms for lying to Congress about the CIA role in the overthrow
of Salvador Allende on 9/11/73. The largest CIA cafeteria was
bulging with welcoming supporters of Helms, when the court got finished
with him. They then took up a collection on the spot to pay the
fine the court had imposed after he was allowed to plead nolo contendere.

Among the most transparent parts of
the letter from the Gang of Seven is their worry that "there is no
reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain
narrowly focused."

Their concern is well founded.
Evidence already on the public record shows that the first three listed,
Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and George Tenet could readily be indicted
for crimes under U.S. and international law, including:

--Illegal eavesdropping by the National
Security Agency (Hayden was NSA director when he ordered his
employees to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which
requires warrants from a special court before electronic eavesdropping
is undertaken.)

--Assassination planning without
notification to Congress (Goss, whose uncommonly abrupt departure
in May 2006 was never looked into by the Fawning Corporate Media [FCM]);
and

--Tenet's long list of substantive,
as well as operational misdeeds carried out for the President and Cheney.
("Slam-dunk Tenet" turned out to be right about at least one thing-that
"things could blow up.")

The Other
"Distinguished" Signatories

John Deutch: Arrogant to the
point of criminality, Deutch disregarded the most elementary rules governing
protection of classified information, and had to be given a last-minute
pardon by President Bill Clinton.

R. James Woolsey: the
man who outdid himself in trying to tie Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and
in pushing into the limelight spurious intelligence from the fabricator
known as "Curveball." Remember those fictitious biological
weapons labs for which Colin Powell displayed "artist renderings"
to the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003?

William Webster: Known
mostly at Langley for his handsome face and his devotion to his late-afternoon
matches with socialite tennis partners. (Folks like Webster should
recognize that, once they have reached what my lawyer father used to
call "the age of statutory senility," they should be more careful
regarding what they let themselves be dragged into.)

James R. Schlesinger:
"Big Jim" launched his brief stint as CIA director by warning us
all that his instructions were "to ensure that you guys do not screw
Richard Nixon." To give substance to this assertion, he told
us that the White House had said he was to report to political henchman
Bob Haldeman-not Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor.
More recently, Schlesinger led one of the see-no-evil Defense Department
"investigations" of the abuses of Abu Ghraib.

Quite a group, this Gang of Seven.

Their letter is also distinguished
by a condescending tone, instructing the President: "As President
you have the authority to make decisions restricting substantive interrogation...
But the administration must be mindful that public disclosure about
past intelligence operations can only help al-Qaeda elude US intelligence
and plan future operations."

The seven then proceed to repeat the
canard alleging that such collection "have saved lives and helped
protect America from further attacks."

It reads as though Dick Cheney did
their first draft. Actually, that would not be all that surprising,
given his record of doing quite a lot of CIA's drafting for eight
long years.

Holder, hold that line.

Image: "Dont Shoot Me, I'm Just The Piano Player", by Michael Parenti (2009) is used with permission by the artist and is licensed under a Creative Commons License. You can visit Michael Parenti's blog, Artificial Eyes, here.