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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern09212009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern09212009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">September 21,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>The Terrified
Seven <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">CIA
Torturers Running Scared
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By RAY
McGOVERN <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">S</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>even CIA directorsincluding three who are
themselves implicated in planning and conducting torture and
assassination have asked the President to call off Holder.<br><br>
Unable to prevent Attorney General Eric Holder from starting an
investigation of torture and other war crimes that implicate CIA
officials past and present, CIA officials, together with what in
intelligence circles are called “agents of influence” in the media, are
pulling out all the stops to quash the Department of Justice’s
preliminary investigation.<br><br>
The most vulnerable of the Gang of Seven, George Tenet, is not the
brightest star in the heavens, but even he was able to figure out years
ago that he and his accomplices might end up having to pay a heavy price
for violating international and U.S. criminal law.<br><br>
In his memoir, <i>At the Center of the Storm</i>, Tenet notes that what
the CIA needed were “the right authorities” and policy determination to
do the bidding of President George W. Bush:<br><br>
“Sure, it was a risky proposition when you looked at it from a policy
maker’s point of view. We were asking for and we would be given as
many authorities as CIA had 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.” (p. 178)<br><br>
Tenet and his masters assumed, correctly, that given the mood of the
times and the lack of spine among lawmakers, congressional “overseers”
would relax into their accustomed role as congressional
overlookers. Unfortunately for him, Tenet seems to have confined
his concern at the time to the invertebrates in Congress, not
anticipating a rejuvenated Department of Justice that might take its role
in enforcing the law seriously.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Taking the Gloves
Off<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Tenet proudly quotes his former
counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black (now a senior official at
Blackwater): “As Cofer Black later told Congress, ‘The gloves came off
that day.’” That day was September 17, 2001, when “the president
approved our recommendations and provided us broad authorities to engage
al-Qa’ida.” (p. 208)<br><br>
Presumably, it was not lost on Tenet that no lawmaker dared ask exactly
what Cofer Black meant when he said “the gloves came off.” Had they
thought to ask Richard Clarke, former director of the counterterrorist
operation at the White House, he could have told them what he wrote in
his book, <i>Against All Enemies.<br><br>
</i>Clarke describes a meeting in which he took part with President
George W. Bush in the White House bunker just minutes after his TV
address to the nation on the evening of 9/11. When the subject of
international law was raised, Clarke writes that the president responded
vehemently: “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we
are going to kick some ass.” (p. 24)<br><br>
It took Bush and Cheney only six days to grant the CIA the “broad
authorities” the agency had recommended. It then took White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales, Vice President Dick Cheney’s lawyer David
Addington, and William J. Haynes II, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s
lawyer, four more months to advise the president formally that, by fiat,
he could ignore the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of
war.<br><br>
This gang of lawyers so advised at the turn of 2001-2002, beating down
objections by William Howard Taft IV, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s
lawyer. Bush chose to follow the dubious advice of those
imaginative lawyers in his and Dick Cheney’s employ; namely, that 9/11
ushered in a “new paradigm” rendering the Geneva protections “quaint” and
“obsolete.”<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>We Need to Tell You
Also…<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Addington and Gonzales did take
care to warn the president, by memorandum of Jan. 25, 2002, of the risk
of criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 2441, the War Crimes Act of
1996. The memo said:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>“That statute, enacted in 1996, prohibits the commission of a ‘war
crime’ by or against a U.S. person, including U.S. officials. ‘War
crime’…is defined to include any grave breach of the GPW [Geneva] or any
violation of Article 3 thereof (such as outrages against personal
dignity)…Punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death
penalty….<br><br>
<dd>“…it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors or
independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted
charges based on Section 2441. Your determination [that Geneva does
not apply] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does
not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future
prosecution.”<br><br>
</dl>With that kind of pre-ordered reassurance, President Bush issued a
two-page executive directive [see
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/dl6u9s">http://tinyurl.com/dl6u9s</a>], in
which he states, “I accept the legal conclusion of the Department of
Justice and determine that common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to
either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees…”<br><br>
This is the smoking gun on Bush’s key role in the subsequent torture of
“war on terror” prisoners. It turns out that he was the “decider”
after all, as Dick Cheney has taken pains to make clear (telling Bob
Schieffer recently that Bush “signed off” on abusive techniques).
The Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report, without dissent,
last December stating that that Feb. 7 memorandum “opened the door” to
abusive interrogation practices.<br>
Unhappily for Bush and for those who carried out his instructions, on
June 29, 2009 the Supreme Court ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Geneva
DOES apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees. One senior Bush
administration official is reported to have gone quite pale at the time,
when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy raised the ante, warning that
"violations of Common Article 3 are considered 'war crimes,'
punishable as federal offenses."<br><br>
What about U.S. criminal law? Despite the almost laughable attempts
by lawyers like Addington and John Yoo to get around the War Crimes Act
by advising that only the kind of pain accompanying major organ failure
or death can be considered torture, those involved are now in a cold
sweatthe more so, since those dubious opinions have now been made
public.<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">The Justice Dept. Memos and
CIA IG Report<br><br>
</b></font>In releasing the sordid, torture-approving memoranda written
by Department of Justice lawyers and major portions of the CIA’s own
horse’s-mouth Inspector General “Special Review” on interrogation and
torture, President Barack Obama and Holder had to face down very strong
pressure from those with the most to lose. <br><br>
Again, these include former CIA directors and the functionaries (some of
them in senior CIA positions to this very day) who were responsible for
seeing to it that “the gloves came off.”<br><br>
Now, out in the public domain is all the evidence needed to show that war
crimes were committed“authorized” as legal by Justice Department
Mafia-type lawyers recruited for that express purposebut war crimes
nonetheless. Torture, kidnapping, illegal detentionnot to mention
blatant violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
outlawing eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant.<br><br>
The stakes are high. No wonder the CIA and its “agents of
influence” are going all out (see Saturday’s
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/mdrjff">lead story</a> in the Washington
Post.)<br><br>
It should have come as no surprise that Attorney General Eric Holder
would run into a buzz saw when he decided to do his constitutional duty
and investigate whether crimes have been committed. Certainly
Cheney and Fox News had made that abundantly clear. CIA seniors and
functionaries with the most to lose are now pulling out all the
stops. <br><br>
In their Sept. 18 letter to the President, seven former CIA directors
asked him to “reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to
re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations that took place
following the attacks of September 11.”<br><br>
This is the saddest commentary on CIA covert action operatives’
continuing power and their disdain for the law since their predecessor
creeps loudly applauded former Director Richard Helms for lying to
Congress about the CIA role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende on
9/11/73. The largest CIA cafeteria was bulging with welcoming
supporters of Helms, when the court got finished with him. They
then took up a collection on the spot to pay the fine the court had
imposed after he was allowed to plead nolo contendere.<br><br>
Among the most transparent parts of the letter from the Gang of Seven is
their worry that “there is no reason to expect that the re-opened
criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused.”<br><br>
Their concern is well founded. Evidence already on the public
record shows that the first three listed, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss,
and George Tenet could readily be indicted for crimes under U.S. and
international law, including:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>--Illegal eavesdropping by the National Security Agency (Hayden was
NSA director when he ordered his employees to violate the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires warrants from a special
court before electronic eavesdropping is undertaken.)<br><br>
<dd> --Assassination planning without notification to Congress
(Goss, whose uncommonly abrupt departure in May 2006 was never looked
into by the fawning corporate media); and<br><br>
<dd>--Tenet’s long list of substantive, as well as operational misdeeds
carried out for the President and Cheney. (“Slam-dunk Tenet” turned
out to be right about at least one thingthat “things could blow
up.”)<br><br>
</dl>John Deutch: Arrogant to the point of criminality, Deutch
disregarded the most elementary rules governing protection of classified
information, and had to be given a last-minute pardon by President Bill
Clinton.<br><br>
R. James Woolsey: the man who outdid himself in trying to tie
Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and in pushing into the limelight spurious
intelligence from the fabricator known as “Curveball.” Remember
those fictitious biological weapons labs for which Colin Powell displayed
“artist renderings” to the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003?<br><br>
William Webster: Known mostly at Langley for his handsome face and
his devotion to his late-afternoon matches with socialite tennis
partners. (Folks like Webster should recognize that, once they have
reached what my lawyer father used to call “the age of statutory
senility,” they should be more careful regarding what they let themselves
be dragged into.)<br><br>
James R. Schlesinger: “Big Jim” launched his brief stint as CIA
director by warning us all that his instructions were “to ensure that you
guys do not screw Richard Nixon.” To give substance to this
assertion, he told us that the White House had said he was to report to
political henchman Bob Haldemannot Henry Kissinger, the national
security advisor. More recently, Schlesinger led one of the
see-no-evil Defense Department “investigations” of the abuses of Abu
Ghraib.<br><br>
Their letter is also distinguished by a condescending tone, instructing
the President: “As President you have the authority to make
decisions restricting substantive interrogation… But the
administration must be mindful that public disclosure about past
intelligence operations can only help al-Qaeda elude US intelligence and
plan future operations.”<br><br>
The seven then proceed to repeat the canard alleging that such collection
“have saved lives and helped protect America from further
attacks.”<br><br>
It reads as though Dick Cheney did their first draft. Actually,
that would not be all that surprising, given his record of doing quite a
lot of CIA’s drafting for eight long years.<br><br>
Holder, hold that line.<br><br>
Ray McGovern</b> was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 year.
He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity.<font size=3> </font><font face="Verdana" size=2>He is a
contributor to
<a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html">
Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia</a>, edited by
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:rrmcgovern@aol.com">rrmcgovern@aol.com</a><br><br>
<br><br>
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