Richard Whalen

In 1947, when the Central Intelligence Agency was created, President Harry S. Truman, who had seen first-hand the operations of OSS, the CIA’s precursor, condemned it as “the American Gestapo” and said it had no place in our nation’s life. He said the CIA would poison us and would have to be removed from our government.

The CIA is now actually only a small part of America’s overall intelligence community comprised of 16 spy agencies. Like an iceberg, most of the community’s budget is submerged, concealed within the Pentagon’s vast spending and under the control of the military services.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York had a rare, sympathetic understanding of the fundamental difficulties of operating an effective intelligence and espionage community within a democratic government under the rule of law.

In his book, Secrecy, Moynihan tells how using unclassified information, he came independently to the view years in advance that Russia was falling apart. Yet, if the intel community’s armies of classified analyses had been published, reviewed and critiqued by outside peers and experts in academia, Moynihan speculated their misconceptions could have been challenged and corrected, to the nation’s benefit. As it was, they had a vested interest in supposing the Soviet Union was a permanent threat – and therefore they had a permanent career.

Moynihan understood that secrecy exerts all kinds of human appeal, separating the knowing few from the unknowing many. Secrecy prevents accountability. When the secrets at stake are of the highest national importance and urgency, as in efforts to head off terrorism, even very smart people can err and fail.

The 9/11/01 terror attacks on the U.S., according to informed senior insiders, ought to have been detected by the comprehensive “signals intelligence” (“SIGINT”) of the “ear in the sky” – the National Security Agency (NSA), which dwarfs the CIA. Prior to 9/11, the FBI and CIA also had “human intelligence” (“HUMINT”) clues, signs and potential warnings, but failed to connect the dots.

A guilty sense of this failure and a desire to compensate hung over the intelligence community in the months and years immediately after the attacks. So it was that in March 2002, the CIA captured and secretly sent to Thailand (remember the movie Rendition) for “harsh” interrogation two suspected operatives of al Qaeda. The first detainee in CIA custody was Abu Zubaydah; the other detainee’s name was not disclosed. The CIA videotaped the interrogations.

Afterward, the CIA lied repeatedly to Congressional intel committees and the 9/11 Commission, denying the existence of these tapes. In 2005, as Congress investigated reports of CIA rendition of terrorism suspects, secret prisons and use of torture, the CIA’s head of the Directorate of Operations (covert operations), Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., made the decision to destroy the tapes. (Rodriguez has since retired.)

A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, between 2004 and 2006, says that he was “never briefed or advised that these tapes existed or that they were going to be destroyed.” Representative Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the intel committee between 2004 and 2006, says she told CIA officials several years ago that destroying any interrogation tapes would be “a bad idea.”

Representative Harman continued: “How in the world could the CIA claim that these tapes are not relevant to a legislative inquiry? This episode reinforces my view that the CIA should not be conducting a separate interrogations program.”

Congress learned belatedly that the U.S. military conducted counter-terrorism interrogations, subject to the rules laid down in the Army’s Field Guide, while the CIA conducted separate interrogations under murkier rules. CIA Director General Michael Hayden said December 7th the agency had acted “in line with the law.” Hayden said the tapes were destroyed because, if they had been made public, they would have posed “a serious security risk” to the interrogators and their families from retaliation by al Qaeda and its sympathizers. What does “in line with the law” mean?

Tom Malinowski, Washington Director of Human Rights Watch, said General Hayden’s claim “is not credible,” noting that “millions of documents in CIA archives, if leaked, would identify CIA officers.” The only difference here is that these tapes portray potentially criminal activity. They must have understood that if people saw these tapes, they would consider them to show acts of torture, which is a felony offense.”

Senator John McCain, who was brutally tortured as a POW by the North Vietnamese, rejects any rationalization of the use of torture to “fight terrorism.” He says it would be certain to blowback on U.S. servicemen who became captives.

After 60 years and recurrent scandals, the CIA survives, but only through the vigilance of Congress, demanding full accountability from this alien entity. The fading Bush Administration is the political target of the slowly unfolding Congressional investigation into the CIA’s anti-terrorism excesses. The agency itself, with General Hayden’s admitted cover-up, is the permanent institutional target. Sources within the intelligence community’s hierarchy say Hayden is the hand-picked spymaster selected by Vice President Dick Cheney.

It is interesting that Abu Zubaydah gave us the information we needed, not under torture, but when he confided to a fellow Arab prisoner whom he mistook for an ally -- that underscores the success of “false flag” techniques to get captives to talk.

To win the War on Terror, Americans must be true to our values in the weapons and tactics we use – or we lose.