Who’s Going to Run C.I.A.?
08 December 2008 1:11 pm by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
 |
| via Glenn Greenwald |
The Bush administration’s nod to torture, while denying reality, certainly has set the C.I.A. in for a rough transition period under Obama. It’s not going to make the president-elect’s job any easier either.
For C.I.A., it just might mean Mike Hayden. No, I’m not kidding. One word: FISA.
Make that three words, adding Thin
Thread …and “the left” thought Brennan was bad?
Since John
Brennan removed his named from consideration there has been a noticeable
and pronounced silence on this subject from Obama’s team. That hasn’t kept a rhetorical
war from breaking out with fingers being pointed at “the left,” now in the target zone from inside the C.I.A. Jeff
Stein from CQ caused a ruckus with his reporting below, ending up in Glenn
Greenwald’s sights today.
Anyone connected to post-Sept. 11 “enhanced interrogation measures,”
no matter at arm’s length, is apparently disqualified to run Barack
Obama ’s spy agency. … The left-wing hit job on Brennan showed that
liberals may have a taste for covert action after all, the spooks chuckle.“Almost anyone working at the agency since [Sept. 11] is tainted,”
says retired CIA veteran Milt Bearden, a former Pakistan station chief, expressing
the facts of life.“If he wants experience, get an old-timer who left before that. Or
go with a completely new face, maybe someone like a [Richard] Holbrooke, though
I doubt he’d take it.”Or get it. The veteran diplomat’s vice-chairmanship of a hedge fund
is said to be problematic.Can anybody who could do the job, get the job?
“Beats me,” said a well-wired former senior intelligence official.
“Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently
thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were
[dirty] and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that
they were wrong.”
I was not involved in the firestorm that erupted over John Brennan (see here,
here).
My opposition to him revolved around his viewpoints on rendition, as well as
his defense of them.
In a 2005 interview on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Brennan defended rendition
as “an absolutely vital tool.” In 2007 on CBS News, he said the
CIA’s harsh interrogation program, which included waterboarding on at least
three prisoners, produced “life saving” intelligence. Waterboarding
is a form of simulated drowning.
However, if President Obama stops the practice of rendition the ties to Bush’s legacy are cut, with anyone heading C.I.A., including Brennan, made to enforce Obama’s policies.
Watching the
clip with Brennan, his description of rendition is less than transparent,
talking about warrants getting in the way of questioning suspected terrorists,
etc. The process of “rendering somebody from one place to another place” hardly the end of the story.
“I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as
producing intelligence that have saved lives.” – John Brennan
At what cost?
The fact is that by rendering someone the U.S. wants answers from to another
country we lose control over the process. That’s the problem. …it’s also the
point of doing it. Deniability when someone is tortured became important
to Brennan and others during the Bush era, where “doing all they could to keep us safe” meant shredding the Geneva Conventions and America’s moral authority. It’s how the C.I.A. got in trouble in the past, getting its wings cut and ruining its reputation. The Bush administration has brought us back to the bad old days. That’s the problem that needs correcting. However, it doesn’t mean throwing the spooks out with the torturers, or even lumping them in with them, especially when the lawyers told the operatives they were in the clear and following orders that made them protected by the law.
But when Brennan made such a public statement he did it for a reason. It was
a set up to people critical of him, asking what they expect of the C.I.A. while challenging
the understanding the critics have of what the purpose of C.I.A. is in the first
place. They do work in the dark, dangerous places that needs to get done
and often is done in the gray areas of law, morality and culpability. We need
C.I.A. for that very reason, especially in a world of asymmetric threats. The
wide wielding arguments of C.I.A. critics don’t seem to take into consideration the culture and their mission, which set Brennan’s critics up for their own flaying.
Brennan sent
a message on behalf of the entire clandestine culture at C.I.A.
It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent
of many of the policies of the Bush Administration such as the preemptive
war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding.
The fact that I was not involved in the decisionmaking process for any of
these controversial policies and actions has been ignored. Indeed, my criticism
of these policies within government circles was the reason why I was twice
considered for more senior-level positions in the (Bush) Administration only
to be rebuffed by the White House.
However, this section of Brennan’s letter is quite amusing. He’s an opponent
of coercive interrogation, but by supporting rendition he has no
problem what others may do, including waterboarding. The duplicitousness
of the moral cherry picking is the issue. The irony is obviously lost on Brennan.
But the critics of Brennan used machete rhetoric when a scalpel was required.
The contradiction in Brennan’s self defense a real issue. However, many of Brennan’s
critics seem to be insinuating that the C.I.A. no longer has a job
to do on U.S. national security policy. Otherwise, why not at least draw out
the importance of having spooks gathering intel in places where none of us would
dare tread? There is no defense whatsoever for what the C.I.A. can accomplish that
no other agency can, with part of the because they operate in the gray zone.
The Bush era set this inevitable conflicting dynamic up.
The reason I’m against rendition is because it gives people like Brennan a
way to explain he’s against waterboarding, but by condoning rendition we’re
to believe he’s unwitting that it’s done by others. We are
responsible for our prisoners and terrorist suspects. Period. This wink and nod
to torture at someone else’s hands has got to end. That’s the point of disagreement
I have with Brennan. The next person at the top of C.I.A. has to send a different signal than Bush-Cheney.
But we absolutely need case officers who’ll do dirty work in far off dangerous
places where law changes with the tribes. Central and South Asia, FATA, NWFP
and areas beyond still live in a world of moral relativism and practical application
to find the enemy. We need a C.I.A. director that refuses duplicitous language
that leaves him free from guilt while handing the job over to people in other
countries that do what he says he won’t, but who understands the job of his
agents and will back them up.
As history proves, the only use the wingnuts see in the C.I.A. is their unlawful
tactics, no matter the loss of life. Bush-Cheney is example A-Z. Liberals seem
to support the egg head analysts, but when it comes to the spooks in the field
the left wants to wash their hands. No one came to the C.I.A.’s defense over
Bush-Cheney cherrypicking intel on Iraq more vociferously than “the left.” But right now that’s getting lost.
The arguments against Brennan where rendition is concerned are justified, but
the hyperbole threading through the case against him cut across the entire C.I.A.
and sent the wrong message to career intelligence officers. It needs to be fixed.
That is unless “the left” believes in the 21st century there
is no purpose for the C.I.A.
