Americans Side With the CIA

The New York Post offers an editorial that points out that most Americans support the CIA's enhanced interrogation program.

To the likely astonishment of Senate Democrats, it turns out the American people aren’t as horrified by the CIA’s interrogations of terrorist suspects as they were supposed to be.

To the contrary, two recent polls confirm that Americans overwhelmingly endorse interrogation methods Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Dianne Feinstein, denounced as torture in their recent report.

It’s not even close.

Two recent polls — one by The Washington Post/ABC News and one by the Pew Research Center — report Americans overwhelmingly support what the CIA did to keep us safe.

In the Pew survey, slightly more than half of Americans say the CIA’s methods were justified, against only 29 percent who said they were unjustified.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll found Americans endorsing the tactics by a two-to-one ratio.

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

http://nypost.com/2014/12/19/americans-side-with-the-cia/

Note: Over the course of my more than 37 years doing security work in the U.S. Navy and the Defense Department, I received numerous CIA briefngs and I received CIA training. As a writer, I've covered the CIA and I've interviewed a good number of current and former CIA officers.

I found CIA people to be as patriotic and dedicated as the military and civilian employees I worked with in the Defense Department.

While under normal circumstances I would not approve of the enhanced interrogation methods - called "Torture-Lite" by one CIA wit. But one must remember that the days and months following the horrific 9/11 terrorists attacks were a time of uncertainty and there was a realistic fear that the terrorists would follow up with an even greater attack on America.

Like most Americans, I thank the CIA, along with the U.S. military, other goverment agencies and law enforcement, with keeping us safe both then and now.

CIA's Jose Rodriguez: Democrats Fully Briefed On Waterboarding

Geoff Earle at the New York Post offers a piece on former CIA officer Jose Rodriguez's response to the Senate's CIA report.

WASHINGTON — The former head of the CIA’s interrogation program says the agency gave its congressional overseers specific information about the tactics it used — including waterboarding — after Sept. 11.

“All of these people knew exactly what we were doing,” said Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw the program from 2002-2004 and gave the high-level briefings to Congress, to “Fox News Sunday.”

He said he personally briefed House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on “all of the techniques … she never objected to the techniques at all.”

He said specifically that he told her about waterboarding and sleep-deprivation.

“She knew, back in September of 2002, every one of our enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rodriguez said.    

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

http://nypost.com/2014/12/14/democrats-fully-briefed-on-waterboarding-after-911/

Note: You can read an earlier post on Jose Rodriguez vai the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/06/former-cia-official-reveals-truth-about.html

Was Ron Kessler A CIA Journalism Asset?

Emily Greenhouse at bloomber.com offers a piece on veteran journalist and author Ronald Kessler and the Senate's CIA report.

In 2003, Ronald Kessler, the writer known today for breaking the news that U.S. Secret Service agents solicited prostitutes while in Colombia, published a book called The CIA at War. It included an impressive trove of classified information—of the sort that can launch federal investigations, followed by journalist subpoenas (as to the New York Times’ James Risen), and sometimes ending with leakers (like former CIA agent John Kiriakou) in jail.

Kessler wrote, for instance, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the 9/11 commission named the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks, “told the CIA about a range of planned attacks—on U.S. convoys in Afghanistan, nightclubs in Dubai, targets in Turkey, and an Israeli embassy in the Middle East.” He wrote that Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner from Al Qaeda, offered intelligence on “planned plots.” (The detainee was “singing” with information, Kessler said.)

But the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture, released Tuesday, called these statements “incongruent” with CIA records. It noted that CIA officials had “provided assistance” with Kessler’s book, in order to “shape press reporting on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.” The Senate report quotes then-Senior Deputy General Counsel John Rizzo saying that the Director of the CIA “blessed” Kessler with agency cooperation. It seems to paint Kessler as something of a chosen mouthpiece, the person in whom the CIA put its faith.

Kessler believes that the Senate report’s implication that he is any kind of preferred journalist, an asset and dissemination tool, is outrageous. “I’m not some kind of patsy,” he said by phone on Wednesday evening. He said that he followed “standard operating procedure for journalism. They tried to make it into some nefarious plot to bamboozle me. It’s not.”

“I think this report is bogus, bogus, bogus,” Kessler continued. “Some rant on the Internet. It’s just totally off base, and motivated by some desire to push this point of view. They dishonestly spin things, and in this case they present it as though the CIA was looking for some reporter to post about their program.”

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

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-11/was-ron-kessler-a-cia-journalism-asset

Note: I interviewed Ron Kessler about his book Secrets of the FBI for Counterterrorism magazine. You can read the interview via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/02/q-with-ronald-kessler-author-of-secrets.html

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.