Leon Panetta Makes Nice

"I am a creature of Congress,"
said Leon Panetta with a broad smile, which was returned by equally
wide smiles from members of the Senate intelligence committee meeting
yesterday to consider his nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence
Agency.

I really wish he hadn't said that.
For that sobriquet fits the worst of the worst, so to speak, of former
CIA directors-the tarnished Medal of Freedom awardee, George Tenet.
He too mastered the art of grinning in Congress.

When nominated to lead the CIA, his
distinctive cachet was said to be that, as staff director of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, George was "equally popular on both sides
of the aisle." Those of us who had been around a while knew
this to be no cachet, but rather the kiss of death for intelligence
work. His insatiable need to please his masters famously led George
in Dec. 2002 to yell "slam dunk," when former president George W.
Bush asked about evidence of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

That same desire to please, bordering
on the obsequious, showed through Panetta's performance at his nomination
hearing on Thursday and Friday. There was little sense that the
man who nominated him, Barack Obama, had won a decisive election victory
and was determined to exorcise the flock of evil spirits possessing
the White House of Bush and Cheney, in whose abuses many of those same
Senators had acquiesced.

Obama did set the stage for the hearing
by issuing executive orders against torture and other crimes. And, to
his credit, Panetta did stand firm in defending the new policies and
exposing as a false choice the one between greater security and preserving
our nation's values.

Otherwise, though, the nominee appeared
unnecessarily deferential. Worse still, he let a number of familiar
lies fly by without challenge.

"Everyone Thought There Were
WMD"

There was no real need for him to let
the unreconstructed partisan Orrin Hatch (R, Utah) browbeat him into
supporting one of the familiar canards promoted by the late Bush administration.
Hatch insisted, twice, that Panetta subscribe to the bromide that CIA
analysts "were relying on world-wide intelligence at the time,"
and that "every major intelligence community" in the world shared
the view of U.S. intelligence regarding WMD in Iraq.

Can we not, at long last, dispense
with this canard? Repeating it does not make it true. And
were it to have been true, then how does one explain why Bush and U.K.
Prime Minister Tony Blair could not get the U.N. Security Council approval
they knew would be required in order to make an attack on Iraq legal.

Those foreign intelligence services
that chose to give credibility to the "intelligence" coming from
the U.S. and U.K. did so because they had little or no independent evidence
of their own, and their governments wished not to alienate Washington.
And some intelligence analysts-in the Australian and Danish services,
for example-did warn their governments about what the British press
ended up calling the "dodgy dossier" of U.S.-U.K. faux intelligence
on WMD in Iraq.

Did You Do
Your Homework, Leon?

At the risk of damning with faint praise,
Panetta is clearly twice as bright as the folks he will replace as CIA
director. So, it should have been easy-had he been paying closer
attention, or had he insisted upon being adequately briefed-to cite
the Senate intelligence committee's own report, released on June 5,
2008, on prewar intelligence on Iraq.

That study, five years in the making,
was approved by a vote of 10 to 5, with Sen. Chuck Hagel (R, Nebraska)
and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R, Maine) joining the majority. It concluded
that the public statements of the highest Bush administration officials
on WMD were not supported by the intelligence.

In releasing the report, then-chair
Jay Rockefeller (D, West Virginia) stepped out of character and spoke
plainly: "In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly
presented intelligence as fact, when in reality it was unsubstantiated,
contradicted, or even non-existent." And Diane Feinstein (D, CA),
who is now committee chair, attached this note to the report:
"The results are now in...this administration distorted the intelligence
in order to build its case to go to war."

Thus, it was hardly the case that "everybody"
believed there were WMD in Iraq, but rather just those who chose to
acquiesce in the distortion of intelligence and those countries that
used to trust the intelligence coming from Washington. It is a
safe bet that Feinstein and Rockefeller were disappointed by Panetta's
inability or unwillingness to cite the committee's own official findings
as a way to squelch Hatch.

Kit (alias James) Bond

Committee ranking member, Christopher
Bond (R, Missouri) met no challenge from Panetta when Bond enlisted
another familiar canard; i. e., that the Bush-era harsh interrogation
programs-described by Bush as an "alternative set of procedures"-helped
to prevent future attacks. There is not a shred of evidence to
support this claim. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence
that those same interrogation programs have been the most effective
recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and other terrorists.

Again, Panetta's ignorance on this
key issue, or-more likely-his bending over backwards to be conciliatory,
can hardly have impressed committee members.

Replying Thursday to a question from
committee chair, Sen. Diane Feinstein, Panetta gave assurance that the
CIA would perform no more extraordinary "renditions for torture."
The very suggestion that this might have been the case in the past raised
hackles with Sen. Bond, who went off in dogged pursuit. And at
Friday's session, Bond was able to squeeze a retraction out of Panetta,
who would not stick to his guns.

Rendition Can Be
Useful

It took Sen. Levin to adduce on Friday
the quintessential example of the "effectiveness" of extraordinary
rendition. "When you mistreat or torture people, particularly
with waterboarding, then they can give you false information and you
can end up taking action on the basis of false information," said
Levin-a little too subtly for the TV audience. With tongue in
cheek, Levin referred to the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda
functionary who was captured and "rendered" to Egypt, where, under
torture, he told his interrogators what he knew they wanted to hear.

Levin duly noted that al-Libi's "false
information was part of the reason adduced for going to war."
But then-too much the gentleman to risk causing unpleasantness with
Bond and his colleagues on the other side-Levin pretended not to remember
whether al-Libi had been tortured.

Al-Libi had been identified by the
Defense Intelligence Agency as a likely fabricator months before the
Bush administration began to use his statements to "prove" that
Iraq had been training al-Qaeda. Without mentioning al-Libi by
name, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-Secretary of State
Colin Powell and other administration officials repeatedly cited information
from his interrogation as credible evidence that Iraq was training al-Qaeda
members in the use of explosives and chemical weapons.

So, you see, torture can indeed provide
the information you may lust after to grease the skids for war. Al-Libi
was the poster boy for the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until
he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators
the magic words he knew would stop the torture.

Where's Your Homework, Leon?

A pity that Panetta appeared completely
unaware of the case of al-Libi and how the proceeds of his extraordinary
rendition and interrogation in Egypt had been used. Or perhaps
he was aware, but reluctant to feed Bond's distemper.

A pity, too, that the nominee did not
consult with former intelligence officers like Milt Bearden, a 30-year
veteran of CIA's operations directorate who rose to the most senior
managerial ranks. He has written:

"The administration's claims
of [torture] having 'saved thousands of Americans' can be dismissed
out of hand because credible evidence has never been offered
... It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible
story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture
has served some useful purpose ... this is not just because the old
[intelligence] hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn't work
- it doesn't - but also because they know that torture creates
more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly
neutralize."

Bearden argued that if the claims of
the Bush White House were true, it ought to stop hiding always behind
the all-too-readily-adduced need to protect sources and methods. He
noted that in 1986 after the U. S. bombed Libya in retaliation for a
Libyan operation that killed U.S. servicemen in Berlin, there was worldwide
skepticism and consternation.

The Reagan administration decided it
owed the world an explanation and decided it would be worth sacrificing
a very sensitive method; namely, the ability to intercept Libyan encoded
messages. Ironically, the Libyan message that was made public bragged
that the operation had been carried out "without leaving a trace behind."

Prosecution Worries

In his opening remarks Thursday, Sen.
Bond expressed concern that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) has said,
as Bond put it, "certain people associated with the interrogation
program should be prosecuted." Bond wondered aloud if Panetta
would agree with Pelosi, but then droned on and did not afford him a
chance to answer.

But the possibility of prosecution
quickly moved front and center in a line of questioning from Sen. Carl
Levin (D, Michigan). Here Panetta did some squirming in trying
to square a circle. In an obvious effort to avoid fouling the
nest he is about to occupy at CIA, he tried mightily to argue that individuals
who were told that torture techniques like waterboarding were legal
"ought not to be prosecuted or investigated" for following the guidelines
from the attorney general and department of justice.

Pursued by Sen. Bond like a junkyard
dog at Friday's session, Panetta went further, disavowing any intention
to "go into the past." Bond tacked on a gratuitous warning
to the effect that, were Panetta to delve into the past, he (Bond) could
"not imagine anything more detrimental to morale at the CIA."

But Sen. Levin would not let Panetta
off the hook. "Can torture be made legal by a legal opinion?"
he asked. Panetta replied that, as a lawyer, his view was that
those guidelines were "a stretch."

Levin extracted a commitment from Panetta
to cooperate with the committee in looking into past practice.
(It remains unclear which promise Panetta intends to keep-the Thursday
one to Levin, or the Friday one to Bond.)

The nominee eventually conceded under
Levin's questioning that, as both Obama and newly confirmed Attorney
General Eric Holder have emphasized, "no one is above the law."
Panetta added that, for those eventually shown to have deliberately
violated the law, "obviously in those cases there should be prosecutions."
But that was Thursday.

Horton and Ratner: Shedding Some
Light

Thursday turned out to be a full day
of pondering what happens when Mafia-style lawyers are cited by the
actual "deciders" on issues like torture. On Amy Goodman's
Democracy Now, human rights lawyer Scott Horton noted that both
Bush and Cheney have acknowledged on TV their involvement in decisions
on torture, justifying their decisions (on waterboarding, for example)
thusly: "We talked to the lawyers, and the lawyers told us it
was okay."

Horton noted that the most senior Bush
administration official responsible for dealing with the Guantanamo
tribunals, Susan Crawford, had concluded that detainee al-Kahtani had
in fact been tortured. Since his treatment had been approved by
Cheney and Bush, "Both are linked to a case that their own principal
agent considers to have been torture," said Horton.

He and Michael Ratner, president of
the Center for Constitutional Rights, stressed that Attorney General
Holder thus has "an absolute obligation to begin a criminal investigation,"
under Articles 4 and 5 of the Convention Against Torture.

Ratner offered the following as "the
best argument as to why you need criminal prosecutions." Referring
to the prominent photo showing Obama signing the executive orders prohibiting
torture, Ratner said all he could think of was that the next president
might sign executive orders going the other way. Ratner:

"Our fundamental rights, the right
to be free from torture, should not be dependent on the length of the
president's arm. The only real deterrent is prosecution."

"Looking Forward."
Not Back

Michael Ratner added that he found
it difficult to listen to the president suggesting we have to look forward
and not backward, because to him (Ratner) prosecutions are precisely
the things needed to look forward. "They tell you why we are
not going to have torture in the future." He and Horton called
for the immediate appointment of a special prosecutor who can begin
to open investigations; Ratner also noted "the Obama administration
is in violation of the Convention Against Torture if it does not commence
an investigation."

Now this is the last thing the James
and Kit Bonds of this world wish to see, for then their efforts to muzzle
potential whistleblowers would founder on the rocks of subpoena and
oath. Meanwhile, though, we can expect the Bush-Cheney apologists
to do all they can to intimidate those in the ranks who may be prompted
to come forward voluntarily.

On the Hunt for Whistleblowers

Sen. Bond has done all he can to put
a price on the head of whistleblowers in the intelligence community.
On Aug. 2, 2006, for example, he actually suggested that leakers be
Guantanamo-ized: "There is nothing like an orange jumpsuit
on a deliberate leaker to discourage others from going down that path,"
said Bond.

At the recent confirmation hearings
for Dennis Blair for the post of Director of National Intelligence,
Bond pressed the nominee on whether he would try to prosecute leakers
of classified information. Blair passed Bond's test: "If
I could ever catch one of those [leakers], it would be very good to
prosecute them; we need to make sure that people who leak are held accountable,"
said Blair

It is a measure of what Washington
has become that there is bipartisan consensus on the need to prosecute
leakers but not torturers.

Panetta, Blair, and others may wish
to consider this: had there been some real teeth in whistleblower
protection for members of national security agencies, chances would
have increased that some courageous soul would have come forward and
exposed the lies that led to catastrophe in Iraq-and might conceivably
have headed it off. Perhaps most would now agree that this kind
of person would truly merit a Medal of Freedom-not an orange jumpsuit.

A shorter version of this article appeared on Consortium News.