What's CIA Director Hayden Hidin'?

Outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden
is going around town telling folks he has warned President-elect Barack
Obama "personally and forcefully" that if Obama authorizes an
investigation into controversial activities like waterboarding, "no one
in Langley will ever take a risk again"

Upon learning this from what we former intelligence officers used to
call an "A-1 source" (completely reliable with excellent access to the
information), the thought that came to me in the face of such chutzpah was from Cicero's livid oration against the Roman usurper Cataline: "Quousque, tandem, abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra!" - or "How long, at last, O Cataline, will you abuse our patience!"

Cicero
had had enough. And so, apparently, has Obama, who has been confirmed
once again of the wisdom of his vote against Hayden's becoming CIA
director.

It was striking that
Obama did not even mention Hayden on Jan. 9, when the President-elect
formally named Leon Panetta as his choice to run the CIA and Dennis
Blair to be director of national intelligence.

Obama
did announce that Mike McConnell, whom Blair will replace after he is
confirmed, has been given a sinecure/consolation prize - a seat on the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Hayden, an Air Force
general, should be given a seat in the military prison in Leavenworth
(see below).

It is not only a
bit cheeky, but more than a little disingenuous that Hayden should
think to advise Obama "personally and forcefully" against investigating
illegal activities authorized by President George W. Bush, since Hayden
himself might already be described as an unindicted co-conspirator
based on publicly available information.

Hayden
has loudly bragged about the crimes in which he was directly involved,
and defended others, like what he has called "high-end" interrogation
techniques - waterboarding, for example.

Could
it be clearer? "Waterboarding is torture," said President-elect Obama
last Sunday to George Stephanopoulos. Torture is a crime. Obama added,
twice, that no one is "above the law," although also citing his "belief
that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backward."

Despite
the President-elect's equivocations, it seems that President Bush and
the current CIA director may have a problem. And apparently Hayden's
palms are sweaty enough to warrant, in his view, a thinly veiled threat.

In the outrage category, that threat/warning goes well beyond chutzpah.
What an insult to my former colleagues at the CIA to suggest that they
lack the integrity to fulfill their important duties in consonance with
the law; that they would treat the new President like a substitute
teacher!

Assessing Hayden

"Should
have been court-martialed" was the judgment of the late Gen. Bill Odom
about Hayden when Odom was interviewed on Jan. 4, 2006 by George
Kenney, a former Foreign Service officer and now producer of
"Electronic Politics." And President Bush "should be impeached," added
Odom with equal fury.

Odom ruled out discussing during the interview the warrantless eavesdropping that had been revealed by the New York Times
just a few weeks earlier. In a memorandum about the conversation,
Kenney opined that Odom appeared so angry that he realized that if he
started discussing the still-classified issue, he would not be able to
control himself.

Why was Gen. Odom so angry?

Because
he, like all uniformed officers, took an oath to protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and
domestic; because he took that oath seriously; and because, as head of
the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, he did his best to
ensure that all employees strictly observed NSA's "first
commandment"-Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans Without a Court
Warrant.

Also disappointed was
former NSA Director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who led NSA from 1977 to
1981 and was one of the country's most highly respected senior managers
of intelligence and an author of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) of 1978.

At a public discussion at the New York Public Library on May 8, 2006, Inman took strong issue with Hayden's flouting of FISA:

"There
clearly was a line in the FISA statutes which says you couldn't do
this," said Inman. He went on to call specific attention to an "extra
sentence put in the bill that said, 'You can't do anything that is not
authorized by this bill.'"

Inman
spoke proudly of the earlier ethos at NSA, where "it was deeply
ingrained that you operate within the law and you get the law changed
if you need to."

Hayden the Martinet

In
contrast, Michael Hayden, who was NSA director from 1999 to 2005, chose
to salute when ordered by Vice President Dick Cheney to create and
implement an aggressive NSA program skirting the strict legal
restrictions of FISA.

Hayden
then proceeded to do the White House's bidding in conning the
invertebrates posing as leaders of the Senate and House intelligence
"oversight" (more accurately-"overlook") committees.

Sen.
Jay Rockefeller is a sorry example of the fox co-opted by the hens.
There is precious little the administration and intelligence community
did not get away with under his feckless tutelage of the Senate
intelligence overlook committee.

For
a discussion of how politicians like Rockefeller and other intelligence
"overseers" work hand-in-hand with the folks they are supposed to be
overseeing, see "Jay Rockefeller Awarded Intelligence Public Service Medal: For Telecom and Torture Immunity?"

Rockefeller
famously sent a handwritten note to Cheney expressing some misgivings
about warrantless eavesdropping, but then misplaced the copy he had
squirreled away in his safe.

Cheney
ridiculed him recently on TV, revealing that Rockefeller recently asked
him if he could please make him another copy and send it to him.

In
December 2005, when the NSA program of warrantless eavesdropping hit
the press, Hayden agreed to play point man on handling the smoke and
mirrors. Small wonder that the White House later deemed him the perfect
man to head the CIA.

A whiff
of conscience showed through during Hayden's nomination hearing,
though, when he flubbed the answer to what was supposed to be a soft,
fat pitch from administration loyalist, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Missouri, now
vice-chair of the Senate intelligence overlook committee:

"Did
you believe that your primary responsibility as director of NSA was to
execute a program that your NSA lawyers, the Justice Department
lawyers, and White House officials all told you was legal, and that you
were ordered to carry it out by the President of the United States?"

Instead of the simple "Yes" that had been scripted, Hayden paused and spoke rather poignantly - and revealingly:

"I had to make this personal decision in early October 2001, and it was a personal decision...I could not not do this."

Why
should it have been such an enormous personal decision whether or not
to obey a White House order? No one asked Hayden, but it requires no
particular acuity to figure it out.

This
is a military officer who, like the rest of us, swore to defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and
domestic; a military man well aware that one must never obey an
unlawful order; and an NSA director totally familiar with the FISA
restrictions.

That, it seems clear, is why Hayden found it a difficult personal decision.

Did
the new, post-9/11 "paradigm" - created by then-White House counsel
Alberto Gonzales and Cheney's lawyer David Addington - trump the
Constitution?

Was not illegal
electronic surveillance a key part of the second article of impeachment
against President Richard Nixon, approved by a 28 to 10 bipartisan
House Judiciary Committee vote less than two weeks before Nixon
resigned?

No American, save
perhaps Admiral Inman and Gen. Odom, knew the FISA law better than
Hayden. Nonetheless, in his testimony, Hayden conceded that he did not
even require a written legal opinion from NSA lawyers as to whether the
new, post-9/11 comprehensive surveillance program, to be implemented
without court warrants and without adequate consultation in Congress,
could pass the smell test.

Hayden
said he sought an oral opinion from then-NSA general counsel Robert L.
Deitz, whom Hayden has now brought over to CIA as a "trusted aide."

In
the fall of 2007, Hayden launched Deitz on an investigation of the
CIA's own statutory Inspector General, who had made the mistake of
being too diligent in investigating abuses like torture. Enough said.

Hayden Comfortable With Torture

As the Senate Armed Services Committee has now confirmed, President Bush, by executive order of Feb. 7, 2002, gave carte blanche to torture. That was four years before Hayden was confirmed as CIA director.

But
when asked to be chief apologist for abusive torture techniques, Hayden
again saluted. And after nearly two years as chief of CIA, Hayden
confirmed (on Feb. 5, 2008) that, in 2002-03, "9/11 mastermind" Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed and two other "high-value" detainees had been
waterboarded.

Waterboarding,
an extreme form of interrogation going back at least as far as the
Spanish Inquisition, has been condemned as torture by just about
everyone - except the legal experts of the Bush administration,
including Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who is still having trouble
making up his mind on this issue - for reasons that should be
abundantly clear.

Oddly,
Mukasey is on record as saying that waterboarding would be torture if
applied to him. And National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell told
Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker magazine, "Whether it is torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture."

McConnell
then let the cat out of Mukasey's bag, saying, "If it is ever
determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for
anyone engaging in it."

It is
a safe bet that this would be an extreme embarrassment, at least, for
anyone in charge of an agency engaged in torture. Small wonder that
Hayden has now summoned the chutzpah to warn the incoming President against launching an investigation into such matters.

Former
CIA head George "we-do-not-torture" Tenet who - with the President's
Feb. 7, 2002, executive order in hand - was responsible for
implementing torture policies, has evidenced some unease regarding the
possibility that he might be held to account for taking liberties with
national and international law.

Tenet included these telling sentences in his memoir:

"We
were asking for and we would be given as many authorities as CIA 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." (At the Center of the Storm, p. 177-178)

Protesting Too Much

As
the torture revelations piled up, Hayden again went front and center
defending waterboarding and offering pitiable excuses for the
destruction of tapes of the interrogation of high-value detainees,
including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

On
Fox News last June, for example, Hayden insisted that after 9/11, "it
was the collective judgment of the American government that these
techniques would be appropriate and lawful," including waterboarding,
which he referred to as a "high-end interrogation technique."

Hayden protested, "Now, if you ask me was it lawful, the answer is absolutely."

He
went on to explain, "Literally thousands of Americans" have been
waterboarded in training, and he suggested that this experience
provided "a body of knowledge as to what the transient and permanent
effects would be."

Hayden made it clear that he was prepared to instruct his torturers to waterboard again, if the President ordered it.

Never
mind that all those folks waterboarded in training knew it would stop
as soon as they cried Uncle; never mind that the "technique" is among
the most iconic and notorious forms of torture, for which American
officers as well as Japanese and Germans have been prosecuted and
convicted; never mind Hayden's dubious claims that valuable
intelligence has been gotten through waterboarding.

And
never mind the crystal-clear observation made on Sept. 6, 2006, by Lt.
Gen. John Kimmons, head of U.S. Army intelligence: "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."

Chalk
it up to my bias - and my experience as an Army intelligence officer -
but I'll take Kimmons's word over any blue-suited desk jockey - no
matter how many stars on the shoulder of the latter.

Sanctimonious Sam

What
brings up Cicero's outrage again is the aura of sanctity with which
Michael Hayden has attempted to envelop himself. His blind fealty in
implementing and then defending the administration's defiance of the
law on eavesdropping made him well qualified, in the administration's
eyes, for the job of CIA director.

And Hayden gave every evidence of eagerness to be in charge of waterboarding and other "high-end" interrogation techniques.

Hayden
likes to brag about his moral training and Catholic credentials. At his
nomination hearing, for example, he noted that he was the beneficiary
of 18 years of Catholic education.

That
set me to counting my own years of Catholic education - only 17. Seems
I missed the course on "Ethical High-End Interrogation Techniques."

The
sooner Hayden is gone (likely to join the Fawning Corporate Media
channels as an expert commentator, and to warm some seats on
defense-industry corporate boards) the better. His credentials would
appear quite good for that kind of work.

Quousque, tandem, abutere, Hayden, patientia nostra!

This article first appeared on Consortium News.