Former CIA clandestine chief in memoir to explain why interrogation videos destroyed
Jose Rodriguez, the former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service who landed in controversy over ordering the destruction of videotapes of terrorism suspects being interrogated, is writing a book in which he will explain why for the first time.
Rodriguez is unabashed that enhanced interrogation techniques used on top al Qaeda operatives produced information that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. forces last weekend.
“The actions we took in the aftermath of 9/11 were harsh but necessary and effective. These steps were fully sanctioned and carefully followed. The detention and interrogation of top terrorists like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi yielded breakthroughs which have kept this country safe,” Rodriguez said in a press release.
The Justice Department decided last year that no CIA personnel would face criminal charges for the 2005 destruction of hundreds of hours of videotapes of harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding and it was believed that the tapes included footage of that.
“Hard Measures” is scheduled for release in spring 2012 and is to be co-authored by former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, who also co-authored former CIA Director George Tenet’s book.
“Osama Bin Laden’s death is the culmination of years of covert operations and tactics largely overseen by Rodriguez from 2001 to late 2007. During Rodriguez’s at times controversial tenure, CIA officers captured and detained senior al Qaeda operatives and implemented Enhanced Interrogation Techniques as an integral tool in the War on Terror,” a press release from publisher Threshold Editions said.
Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (lobby of CIA headquarters)
Could Petraeus be too shiny for the CIA?
An agency all about cloak-and-dagger tends to be wary of the limelight.
So President Barack Obama’s choice of General David Petraeus for CIA director has raised some questions in intelligence and military circles.
How will a four-star general who has repeatedly been the subject of speculation as a possible future presidential candidate, and who doesn’t shy from the media spotlight, run an agency that prefers to stick to the shadows?
Will his boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a retired three-star general, be uncomfortable with a subordinate who has a much higher public profile that threatens to outshine him?
Will Petraeus secretly harbor resentment at not getting the “ultimate job” for a military officer – Joint Chiefs chairman? Admiral Mike Mullen is expected to retire later this year and there had been some speculation about Petraeus being a contender to replace him.
“Is this a consolation prize?” one former U.S. official said.
Petraeus is not likely to make too many friends at CIA if he comes in with a restructure and fix-it mentality. “They’ve got a little fix-it fatigue,” a former U.S. intelligence official said.
Petraeus is a brilliant and thoughtful man with strong leadership ability. He will undoubtedly flourish at the CIA. My only concern is that this appointment is meant to shelve Petraeus as a candidate for 2012. All of the characteristics that make Petraeus a good commander and will make him a good CIA director would also make him a great president.
http://americansforpetraeus2012.org
CIA on WikiLeaks — WTF
The CIA gets the prize for the most entertaining acronym in Washington, a city that cannot speak without using at least one in every sentence.
The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) has formed the WikiLeaks Task Force which is being referred to in-house as WTF.
(If you don’t get it, ask a teenager).
TWP (The Washington Post) said the irreverence might be understandable since the agency was fairly unscathed by the WikiLeaks document extravaganza.
UPDATE: A USO (unidentified U.S. official) tells us: “Some might say the acronym is regrettable. Perhaps we should consider that the CIA has a sense of humor after all.”
The revelation of WTF sent us ISO (in search of) other Beltway initials that might top it in amusement value — NFY (none found yet — OK we made that one up).
But it brought back some oldies, like the super secret spy agency NSA (National Security Agency), informally known in some circles as No Such Agency.
One more secret at CIA – next week’s Top Chef winner and loser
The Central Intelligence Agency has one more secret to keep this week — who won the Top Chef challenge in next week’s episode.
The TV cooking competition at the end of Wednesday’s episode, in which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a guest judge and declared herself a “foodie,” previewed the coming week when the competing chefs do their thing at the intelligence agency. A smiling CIA Director Leon Panetta was shown in the snippet tasting an entry at a white-tablecloth table.
Having been to the CIA on occasion while covering intelligence and remembering being required to leave my cellphone and BlackBerry in my car because they weren’t allowed inside, I wondered whether the chefs were able to take their famous cooking knives into the secure facility.
Attempts to pry the winner of the competition out of the CIA failed. But we did gather some intelligence about Panetta — his Italian immigrant family ran a restaurant in California and so he knows a little something about food. (Pelosi is also from California, foodie coincidence?)
“He had fun, and he was happy to talk up the talents of the CIA’s own chef, Fred DeFilippo, a graduate of the other CIA—the Culinary Institute of America,” one U.S. intelligence foodie source tells us.
“The show’s crew went through standard security procedures, as you would expect, and with no burps or hiccups. The signature Top Chef knives paired nicely with the agency’s own china. The diners used all their senses to carefully analyze—and enjoy—the terrific dishes that were served up.”
Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Panetta at the State Department in May)
Iranian scientist saga has message for defectors: big bucks in U.S.
Five million dollars is a lot of money for most people on this planet.
So the revelation by unnamed U.S. officials that Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri was paid that amount for providing information about Iran may actually end up encouraging others thinking of defecting – that’s one train of thought among some experts.
“It is a great advertisement to folks that if they have good information — $5 million or more may be theirs. They just need to make up their minds that when they come here — there is no going back,” a former senior U.S. official tells me. “The message to me seems to be: don’t screw with Uncle Sam. We can be a very good friend, but a worse enemy.”
What has been surprising is that U.S. officials seem to have decided to play hardball (instead of going the silent route) by speaking out (anonymously of course) and saying that Amiri started giving information to the United States while living in Iran, that he was paid $5 million to show he was an important defector, and he disliked his wife and didn’t want to bring his family to the U.S.
Matthew Cole of ABC News, who first reported in March that Amiri had defected to the United States, has an interesting piece about what U.S. officials are now saying about the Iranian scientist.
“Amiri agreed to take the money and offer of resettlement, but told the CIA he would leave his family behind. When asked why he would go alone, Amiri told the CIA he disliked his wife and felt that his son would be better off in Iran believing his father had disappeared, according to the officials briefed on the matter,” Cole writes.
The view from Tehran is quite different. Amiri on his return to Iran said he was abducted by the CIA and pressured to lie about Iran’s nuclear program.
The mystery of the homesick Iranian nuclear scientist
The facts are few: Shahram Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist, disappeared in June 2009 during a pilgrimage to Mecca. He turned up this week at the Iranian interests section in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington wanting to go home.
What happened during the year inbetween is quite murky and even a timeline of what is publicly known requires much reading between the lines and connecting circumstantial dots.
ABC News reported in March that Amiri had defected to the United States. That would be quite a catch.
Tehran had accused the CIA of abducting Amiri and Iran’s state television showed a video in June of what it said was Amiri declaring he had been kidnapped and taken to the United States where he was “tortured.”
All of this bubbled up on Tuesday prompting U.S. officials from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on down to declare that Amiri had been in the United States of his own free will and was free to leave anytime.
But why would an Iranian scientist who apparently defected to the United States turn around and very publicly announce loudly that he was going back to Iran where he is likely to be viewed with suspicion by some among the ruling powers?
God, I hope you are 12 Roger. And if you are kidding … not funny. He feels pressure because he has a family. Knowing they may be torturing them is got to him.
Obama admits security “screw up,” but some wonder who’ll pay
President Barack Obama may have hoped to limit the political fallout from last month’s attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by admitting there was a “screw up.” Will firings follow? Some think Obama’s unusually sharp rhetoric raises the odds that heads will roll.
One such observer is U.S. Rep. Peter King, an influential New York Republican. “If the situation is as bad as the president says it was, as far as so many dots not being connected, so many obvious mistakes being made … I would think once the president set that stage, that to show that he’s serious, someone will have to go now,” King told ABC’s Good Morning America.
But the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee says he can’t tell which official should pay because the Obama administration hasn’t let Congress know who did (or didn’t) do what, when.
“There are so many moving parts here,” King said. “The president has not disclosed anything.”
According to King, that means the ax could fall on anybody at the top of the U.S. national security leadership: the secretary of homeland security; the directors of national intelligence, CIA, NSA, NCTC; or various White House advisers.
Whatever happens on the firing front, Obama won’t see the real political fallout until November when the congressional elections decide who controls Congress in 2011 and 2012 — a period that runs straight through the next presidential election.
Republicans are already using the attempted bombing to make voters think the president and Democrats are soft on security.
Dealing with “bad guys” in intelligence gathering, OK or not?
Since the September 11 attacks, CIA officials have made it clear that to get the intelligence needed to stop terrorism attacks, U.S. intelligence agencies sometimes have to deal with “bad guys.”
The issue is again in the public eye again after The New York Times reported that the CIA has been regularly paying Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for at least eight years for services that included helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force. The newspaper report says that Ahmed Wali Karzai is a suspected player in the illegal opium trade, which he denies.
Senator John McCain told CBS “Early Show” yesterday: “I’d heard that rumor before. I think it’s wrong. It’s wrong of the CIA to do it and I’m sure our military commanders there would disagree with it.” Watch CBS News Videos Online
One former intelligence official, who was not commenting specifically on the Karzai brother situation, said in general it would be worrisome if the debate restarts over whether the CIA should or should not do business with “tainted individuals” when trying to prevent harm to U.S. interests.
“I’ve seen that movie too many times before,” the former official said behind a cloak of anonymity.
People cannot criticize the CIA on the one hand if it fails to get critical information in societies marked by corruption and, on the other, “express shock and dismay that it might deal with less-than-saintly individuals,” the official said.
What do you think? Is it OK for the CIA to deal with unsavory characters if it means U.S. interests are protected? Or is this a slippery slope?
Former AG Gonzales: what I really meant to say was…
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales threw folks for another loop on Thursday by saying he doesn’t really support further investigation of CIA prisoner abuses after all.
That was after the earlier loop when he said he did not see a problem with investigating interrogation methods that ran over set boundaries.
He explained in a second interview with the Washington Times that what he really meant in his first interview was that he doesn’t really back the decision last week by current Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a review.
“I don’t support the investigation by the department because this is a matter that has already been reviewed thoroughly and because I believe that another investigation is going to harm our intelligence gathering capabilities and that’s a concern that’s shared by career intelligence officials and so for those reasons I respectfully disagree with the decision,” Gonzales told the newspaper.
(Sounds like the rollercoaster ride is back on the conservative track.)
Just three days ago, Gonzales said on the newspaper’s radio program “America’s Morning News” that the Bush administration set rules and parameters for interrogating terrorism suspects and that Holder appeared to only be focused on the 1 percent of those who went beyond the approved techniques.
Brian, that’s assuming that the all powerful office of vice president Cheney allowed the justice department access to the documents in the first place.
Obama’s summer holiday no walk on the beach
President Barack Obama began his summer vacation by sending a specific message to the White House press corps.
”He wants you to relax and have a good time,” Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton said as Air Force One carried the first family to the Massachusetts island where they are spending a week-long holiday. “Take some walks on the beaches. Nobody is looking to make any news, so he’s hoping that you guys can enjoy Martha’s Vineyard while we’re there.”
“I asked him if he had a message for the press corps, and that’s what it is,” Burton said.
Right.
No president really leaves the news behind when he takes time off, but Obama’s 7-day break would be a busy news week, even if it ended now — just halfway through.
On Monday, the Obama administration said it was setting up a new group to interrogate terrorism suspects in accordance with established rules, to be overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, rather than the Central Intelligence Agency. His attorney general, Eric Holder, named a special prosecutor to probe CIA prisoner abuse cases.
On Tuesday, Obama broke the news perhaps most keenly awaited by financial markets. He announced that he would nominate Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The decision on whether Obama would retain the central banker as the economy struggles to recover from recession had been widely expected, but not until later in the year.
All this talk about the dreadful things the CIA did to the terrorists and the inquires that they hope will prove that what they did was unamerican is a charade. Their motive is for one reason ,to appease their hatred of dick cheney, and because this hatred is so intense they have developed a sympathy for these murders. The one aspect of this conspiracy that they have underestimated is that Cheney is no PUSHOVER,their threats against him are not bothering him in the least,he will face them head on. Another miscalculation on their part is that the vast majority of the american pubic are not at all bothered about their indignity.
Jose Rodriguez is an American HERO.