What agenda lies behind the latest defense of “enhanced interrogation”?
Former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jose Rodriguez has written a book with the assistance of former Agency press officer Bill Harlow. Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives is largely a defense of Rodriguez’s role in the CIA’s use of torture on suspected terrorists in the aftermath of 9/11. Rodriguez argues that what he describes as “enhanced interrogation techniques” were necessary to obtain information on terrorist activities. His employment of the euphemism underscores his argument that these procedures were found to be legal by Bush administration lawyers and that they do not constitute torture, which is a war crime.
In November 2005, Rodriguez, who was a classmate of mine at CIA, ordered on his own authority and contrary to Agency general counsel advice the destruction of 92 videotapes that recorded interrogation sessions in a secret prison in Thailand. This was done, he says, to protect the identities of CIA interrogators from possible reprisals by terrorists, not to cover-up waterboarding being used to obtain information, a procedure he claims was both an acceptable interrogation technique and one that was subject to congressional oversight before it was employed. He does not explain exactly how terrorists could obtain the tapes or be able to make identifications from them; perhaps the idea is that someday the recordings might leak to the public. Whatever its plausibility, or lack thereof, his argument might just as well be a deliberate deception if the primary purpose of his actions was to eliminate evidence of what many would consider a war crime. I leave it up to the reader to decide what explanation is most likely. For what it’s worth, Amazon reviews are running about five to one in praise of the book rather than condemning what it describes.
To promote Hard Measures, Rodriguez has been appearing on a number of television programs. I have seen him on “60 Minutes” with Lesley Stahl and on Bill O’Reilly’s program. He has also appeared with Sean Hannity. Stahl failed to push Rodriguez on the illegality of torture and frequently allowed him to drift into the kind of mumbo-jumbo tradecraft language that we former spies use when we don’t want to answer a question. Rodriguez stated that we (CIA) are part of the “dark side — that’s what we do.” That was the end of the story for “60 Minutes.”
O’Reilly’s interview was somewhat different. Rodriguez seemed unsure of himself, sometimes inarticulate, and was helped along to make the point that the information obtained from enhanced interrogation could not have been obtained any other way. O’Reilly walked him through his assertion that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew all about the waterboarding, but then brought up the account of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah presented by FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan. Soufan, a member of the interrogation team and Arabic speaker, maintains, with considerable credibility backed up by documents, that the only good information obtained came through established interrogation techniques employed before any torture took place. Rodriguez denied that was so to O’Reilly and became hung up on a discussion of who played the lead role in the interrogation, the CIA or the FBI, before questioning Soufan’s personal history and his reliability as a source.
Agency operations in Afghanistan in 2001-2 were superbly conceived and executed by its Counterterrorism Center, where Rodriguez was deputy, but his book inevitably focuses on trying to defend the indefensible practices that followed. There has been considerable speculation over why the book, with its attendant media blitz, has come out now, in light of the fact that the manuscript had to be approved by the Agency’s Publications Review Board. Was there CIA collusion in its release? Though the review is only supposed to prevent security violations, the Agency tends to be very friendly and helpful to books depicting it in positive terms and hostile to anything perceived as critical. Given the upcoming presidential elections, Hard Measures is also being seen by some as a preemption of any attempt to turn the torture issue into a political football, particularly as Mitt Romney has explicitly approved of the practice. Rodriguez (and the Agency) might be attempting to backstop the Romney position, which otherwise could be difficult to defend.
Another theory is that the long-awaited Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA interrogation techniques is about to come out and will conclude that the enhanced procedures were, in fact, ineffective. Rodriguez’s account might be intended to stake out a position in advance implying that the Senate report, written by a Democratic majority committee, is politically motivated and therefore “flawed.”
What is most disturbing to me about the book and the interviews is that Rodriguez is apparently seen by some in the media as the “new normal” and even some kind of hero. CIA officers overseas are indeed operating on the “dark side,” in that spying overseas is illegal in the countries where one is operationally engaged. But that does not mean all gloves are off in terms of international and U.S. law, especially in the case of war crimes. It is worth noting that Japanese Army officers were executed in 1946 for waterboarding Allied prisoners, while the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution explicitly forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” The United States is also a signatory to the International Convention on Torture and to the Geneva Conventions. And then there is the War Crimes Act of 1996, which requires the United States Justice Department to prosecute anyone involved in torture, no exceptions. President Obama has refused to permit justice to be served, making him as complicit in war crimes as his predecessor was.
Rodriguez presents himself and his “dark side” persona as representative of CIA thinking about the proper way to fight terrorism, but that is just not so. The assumption that there is broad support inside the Agency for the use of torture presumes that anyone working there was ever actually asked for an opinion. The CIA undoubtedly has a peculiar culture that breeds an us-against-them mentality, but I would guess that few employees would have supported waterboarding if they had known it was occurring. The procedure was top secret inside the Agency, a clear indication that even the upper echelons of CIA management knew that it was at best questionable. The impression that CIA, which has something like 20,000 employees, marches in lockstep as some kind of secret army is ridiculous. Nobody checks his or her conscience at the door when entering the building. Agency analysts resisted endorsing the false intelligence used to justify war with Iraq, and they continue to hold the line against a conflict with Iran. I would also note the large number of former intelligence officers who have become outspoken in the antiwar movement: Ray McGovern, Michael Scheuer, Paul Pillar, Bill and Kathleen Christison, and Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.
Rodriguez might find comfort in his apologia pro vita sua, but I rather suspect his is a voice in the wilderness. Thankfully, I do not know anyone inside the intelligence community who considers torture morally acceptable under any circumstances, and most intelligence officers would regard its use ipso facto as an egregious failure. Secret prisons, renditions, and enhanced interrogations are characteristic of police states, not constitutional republics. Thirty-six years ago Rodriquez and I together took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Today he would be well advised to remember that moment.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
May 26, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ali Soufan, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Enhanced interrogation techniques, Jose Rodriguez, Lesley Stahl, Nancy Pelosi |
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This past week, U.S. President Barak Obama announced a plan to displace 11 percent of U.S. oil consumption with biofuels by 2022, offering $786 million in subsidies to energy corporations for new refineries in an ethanol industry that is far from being economically viable.
Under the new Obama plan the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will require fuel refiners and importers to guarantee that a percentage of their fuel is from renewable sources. The percentage will increase each year until the country is using 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022.
“It’s another opportunity for producers to profit” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says, but the fact that the plan is being marketed as such might suggest cause for caution in an industry that exists almost wholly due to federal mandates.
“Our economy is at the mercy of foreign oil producers, and everybody feels that when it hits us at the pump,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in support of the new plan. In fact though, recent events in the oil markets reveal that it was market activity rather than suppliers that caused the oil price bubble. Just as with real estate, there never was a lag in supply and prices were boosted by speculative trading with some shipments exchanging hands dozens of times while en route to their destinations. Hedge funds gambled with highly leveraged portfolios of oil futures in a bubble market fed by alarmist fears of ever compounding rates of growth in oil demand balanced against projected future oil production data that didn’t recognize unconventional oil (offshore production for example).
The reality is that energy producers, whose economies are reliant on exports for as much as 95% of their income, are much more at the mercy of the demand driven market. Entire national government budgets are composed of nothing but oil receipts. Energy production and supply is an industry that is characterized by interdependence between importer and exporter, this is why Europe and China are engaging in long term (up to ten years) supply contracts that offer stability for all involved.
Left unaddressed by the Obama team is the harsh reality of globalized commodity markets which will see basic food prices sustain price rises that result in starvation for hundreds of thousands or as many as tens of millions of the world’s poorest, often landless, populations. It takes 232 kilos of maize to fill a standard gas tank with fuel. In this case, supply and demand are actually at work affecting market prices and economic choices such as which type of use land is put to.
Hilaire Avril of Inter Press Service writes:
Responding to European hunger for biofuel, many African countries have expanded single-crop farming surfaces. But only large businesses have the resources and capital to reach the critical size that allows for economies of scale which make the venture profitable.
Smallholders, which in countries like Benin account for the majority of land use, and up to 80 percent of employment opportunities, do not benefit from the biofuel windfall. In addition, land, water and other limited resources are being diverted from scarce food-producing crops.
Several international institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, have acknowledged in recent years that the increasing demand for biofuel crops has catastrophic social, economic and nutritional impacts on developing countries and their already tense food resources.
In Senegal, which was affected by food riots a year ago, up to 200,000 hectares (10 percent of the country’s arable lands) might be set aside for jatropha crops for biofuels.
Second and third generation biofuels are supposed to limit environmental and social impacts because of either the use of non food-producing crops or biomass such as algae and fungus.
“That’s a sham,” insists Ambroise Mazal of the Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development, “because second generation fuels made from non-edible crops still take up arable lands and the research is far from developing sustainable biomass in laboratories.”
Why did Obama choose to exceed both the Bush and E.U. mandates? Even the Congressional Budget Office has reported that ethanol mandates drive food prices higher. While Obama’s connections with corporate agriculture are well documented and widely reported, less discussed is the Israel lobby’s interest in “energy independence”. It seems that as in so many other crucial areas of U.S. policy, the Israel lobby has been influencing the energy agenda as well. Nancy Pelosi perceives a need (for America?) to “achieve independence from Middle East oil.” Even though imports from Middle East sources account for only a small percentage of U.S. oil imports. One wonders just what scenario of hers results in a cessation of oil exports from the Middle East, Israeli aggression on Iran perhaps?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a 2007 AIPAC conference:
“With innovation, we broaden our horizons, and expand our vision, in order to create a better world. That is why House Democrats have introduced our Innovation Agenda: A Commitment to Competitiveness to Keep America Number One. I know this is an area where the United States and Israel can work together.
“At the end of February, the House passed legislation to foster joint projects between the United States and key allies such as Israel, which offer the promise of using the best new innovation to improve security for all of us.
“In energy policy, the United States and Israel have another opportunity to combine our best innovative ideas. The U.S.-Israel Energy Cooperation Act would help fund joint ventures between United States and Israeli businesses and academic institutions for the development and commercialization of alternative renewable energy sources.
“American and Israeli ingenuity can be put to work to achieve energy independence from Middle East oil. A sustained investment in research and development is crucial to creating cutting-edge technologies to develop these clean, sustainable alternatives and capitalize on vast renewable natural resources, including solar energy and wind power.
At the recent AIPAC conference the program featured Mr. Andy Karsner Former Assistant Secretary of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and Mr. Jonathan Baron Founder and Principal, Baron Communications LLC giving a report titled:
Middle East Spotlight – Energy Independence: How National Energy Policy Impacts Our Security
The majority of the world’s oil sits beneath the sands of unstable nations and under the control of hostile authoritarian leaders. Is there still an American appetite for energy independence? If so, what will it take to achieve, and can such a move secure our nation? [emphasis mine]
Are biofuels really a sensible way for the U.S. to address the “hostility” of Middle Eastern leaders or would it be more in America’s interests to remedy the cause of anger? The biofuels “energy independence” policy offers a grim view of a future so warlike that America’s trade relations with entire, economically significant, regions are shut off. Is this Obama’s “forward looking” vision?
Articles written by Atheo:
January 9, 2012
November 13, 2011
September 19, 2011
March 8, 2011
January 2, 2011
October 10, 2010
July 5, 2010
February 25, 2010
February 7, 2010
January 5, 2010 – Updated February 16, 2010:
December 26, 2009
December 19, 2009
December 4, 2009
September 26, 2010
Posted by aletho |
"Hope and Change", Author: Atheo, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Africa, Biofuel, Energy, Human rights, Israel, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, Tom Vilsack, United States |
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