Krauthammer: A Travesty Of A Report

Charles Krauthammer offers his take on the Senate's CIA interrogation report in his Washington Post column.

The report by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding CIA interrogation essentially accuses the agency under George W. Bush of war criminality. Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein appears to offer some extenuation when she reminds us in the report’s preamble of the shock and “pervasive fear” felt after 9/11.

It’s a common theme (often echoed by President Obama): Amid panic and disorientation, we lost our moral compass and made awful judgments. The results are documented in the committee report. They must never happen again.

It’s a kind of temporary-insanity defense for the Bush administration. And it is not just unctuous condescension but hypocritical nonsense. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was nothing irrational about believing that a second attack was a serious possibility and therefore everything should be done to prevent it. Indeed, this was the considered opinion of the CIA, the administration, the congressional leadership and the American people.

Al-Qaeda had successfully mounted four major attacks on American targets in the previous three years. The pace was accelerating and the scale vastly increasing. The country then suffered a deadly anthrax attack of unknown origin. Al-Qaeda was known to be seeking weapons of mass destruction.

We were so blindsided that we established a 9/11 commission to find out why.

And we knew next to nothing about the enemy: its methods, structure, intentions, plans. There was nothing morally deranged about deciding as a nation to do everything necessary to find out what we needed to prevent a repetition, or worse. As Feinstein said at the time, “We have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.”

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-torture-report-is-a-travesty/2014/12/11/53fedf80-8168-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html

Current And Former U.S. Intelligence Chiefs Fire Back At 'Biased, Inaccurate, And Destructive' CIA Enhanced Interrogation Report

Julian Hattem at thehill.com offers a piece on the reaction of current and former intelligence chiefs to the Senate's CIA enhanced interrogation report.

Current and former heads of U.S. spy agencies are criticizing a Senate report’s claim that the CIA tortured detainees and misled the public about its "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

In separate statements on Tuesday, multiple current and former intelligence agency officials defended the work of the agency during the George W. Bush administration and said that agents were doing their best while defending the nation.

George Tenet, who was CIA director through much of the Bush administration, said the report is "biased, inaccurate, and destructive" and said it "does damage to U.S. national security, to the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency, and most of all to the truth."  

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/226465-spies-push-back-on-senate-report

Note: The Senate report, written exclusively by partisan Democratic congressional staffers, without the benefit of interviews with current and former CIA officers involved in the program, is, in my view, dubious.    

Fox News Lands First Interview With Bin Laden Shooter

The Hollywood Reporter offers a piece on Fox News' announcement that the cable news channel will be the first to interview the U.S. Navy SEAL who killed the man responsible for the horrific 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Fox News has landed the first interview with the man who killed Osama bin Laden, which will be part of a two-night documentary airing on Nov. 11 and 12.

In the special, titled The Man Who Killed Usama Bin Laden, the Navy SEAL who says he fired the shots that killed Bin Laden, also known as "The Shooter," will reveal his identity and speak out publicly for the first time.

 The shooter will describe the events leading up to and during the raid that took place in May 2011, including his elite training and involvement in Operation Neptune Spear, the mission that killed bin Laden. He'll also offer his first-hand account of what happened during the SEAL Team 6 raid. Fox News promises that the documentary will include never-before-shared details.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fox-news-lands-first-interview-744824

Surveillance Stopped More Than 50 Terror Plots, Says NSA Chief

Nick Simeone at the American Forces Press Service offers the below piece:

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2013 - The director of the National Security Agency told Congress today more than 50 terrorist plots worldwide have been prevented since the 9/11 attacks through the classified surveillance programs the government uses to gather phone and Internet data, programs he said are legal and do not compromise the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who also commands U.S. Cyber Command, told the House Intelligence Committee he plans as early as tomorrow to provide lawmakers with classified details about the plots that were foiled in an effort to show how valuable the programs are to national security.

Alexander and other senior U.S. officials were called to testify in response to unauthorized disclosures to the media by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed details about the agency's gathering of telephone numbers and the monitoring of Internet activity by foreigners overseas, leaks that Alexander said have caused irreversible and significant damage to the security of the United States and its allies.

Testifying alongside Alexander, Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce discussed two terrorist plots that he said the surveillance programs helped to prevent. In one, emails intercepted from a terrorist in Pakistan helped to stop a plot to bomb New York City's subway system. Another involved a failed attempt by a known extremist in Yemen who conspired with a suspect in the United States to target the New York Stock Exchange. Both cases led to arrests and convictions, Joyce said.

"These programs are immensely valuable for protecting our nation and the security of our allies," Alexander said, and added that they may have helped to prevent the 9/11 attacks themselves if the government had the legal authority, as granted by the Patriot Act, to use them at the time.

The disclosure of the NSA programs has generated a nationwide debate over what techniques the government can legally use to monitor phone and Internet data to prevent terrorism without violating the privacy and civil liberties of Americans. Alexander and other senior U.S officials emphasized that the gathering of phone numbers that already are being collected by service providers as well as the tracking of U.S-based Internet servers used by foreigners are legal and repeatedly have been approved by the courts and Congress.

"These programs are limited, focused and subject to rigorous oversight," and their disciplined operation "protects the privacy and civil liberties of the American people," Alexander said.

The details of the foiled terror plots that he plans to provide to Congress will remove any doubt about the usefulness of the surveillance in keeping the homeland safe, the NSA director told the House panel.

"In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation," he said. "That security is a direct result of the intelligence community's quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks."

To prevent another damaging leak such as the breach caused by Snowden's disclosures, Alexander told lawmakers, the NSA is looking into where security may have broken down and for ways to provide greater oversight for the roughly 1,000 or so system administrators at NSA who have access to top secret information.