13 July 2006

Excerpts from Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage, Joseph E. Persico, 2001.

[Pages 201-205.] - link to original post

On June 19 [1942] the President received an excited call from Francis Biddle, his attorney general. Six days before, Biddle told the President, “at 1:30 A.M. an unarmed Coast Guard patrolman near Amagansett, Montauk Point, Long Island, discovered two men placing material in a hole they had dug; one of them covered the patrolman with a gun, gave him $260 and told him to keep his mouth shut. I shall, of course, keep you informed.” As J. Edgar Hoover’s nominal boss, Biddle later recalled the FBI chief’s demeanor while describing the plan to track down the rest of the saboteurs: “His eyes were bright, his jaw set, excitement flickering around the edge of his nostrils,” Biddle remembered. The question now was how much to tell the public. Hoover wanted no announcement that might alert the men still at large. The President agreed, and the press was, for the moment, frozen out of the story.

FDR’s longstanding preoccupation with sabotage now seemed validated. Biddle admitted, “1 had a bad week trying to sleep as I thought of the possibilities. The saboteurs might have other caches hidden, and at any moment an explosion was possible.” [Saboteur] Dasch had, in fact, revealed that, along with their transportation and industrial targets, the Pastorius mission was supposed to spread terror by placing firebombs in department stores and delayed-action explosives in hotels and in crowded railroad stations.

On June 27, ten days after the Kerling team landed in Florida, the President, then at Hyde Park, took another call from Biddie. Hoover’s G-men had seven of the saboteurs in custody and were about to arrest the last one. Nearly $174,000 of their Abwehr stake had been seized. FDR responded with the habitual geniality that Biddle, a stiff Philadelphia Main Liner, envied. “Not enough, Francis,” Roosevelt said. “Let’s make real money out of them. Sell the rights to Barnum and Bailey for a million and a half — the rights to take them around the country in lion cages at so much a head.” Now the tale could be told, and in the ensuing publicity, Coast Guardsman Cullen became a national hero. Hoover played the capture of the ring as a case solved by the FBI, making no public mention of the fact that Dasch had turned himself in and squealed on his comrades.

Three days after all eight saboteurs were in custody, FDR sent Biddle a memo making clear his expectations. “The two Americans are guilty of treason,” he told the attorney general. “I do not see how they can offer any adequate defense. . . it seems to me that the death penalty is almost obligatory.” As for the six German citizens, “They were apprehended in civilian clothes. This is an absolute parallel of the Case of Major [John] Andre in the Revolution and of Nathan Hale. Both of these men were hanged.” The President hammered home his point once more: “The death penalty is called for by usage and by the extreme gravity of the war aim and the very existence of our American govemment.” Biddle had never quite overcome his awe in dealing with FDR. Still, the nation’s chief law enforcement official was troubled, finding himself trapped between the President’s questionable pressure and his own reverence for the law. The Germans had been apprehended so quickly, Biddle recognized, that “they had not committed any act of sabotage. Probably an indictment for attempted sabotage would not have been sustained in a civil court on the grounds that the preparations and landings were not close enough to the planned acts of sabotage to constitute attempt. If a man buys a pistol, intending murder, that is not an attempt at murder.” In a civilian court the Germans might at best be convicted of conspiracy, which Biddle estimated would carry a maximum sentence of three years. This outcome, he knew, would never satisfy Roosevelt.

FDR essentially took charge of the case. He told Biddle that he wanted the eight agents tried, not in a civilian court, but by a military tribunal, which he himself would appoint. They had forfeited any right to a civilian trial, as Roosevelt put it, because “[t]hese men had penetrated battlelines strung on land along our two coasts and guarded on the sea by our destroyers, and were waging battle within our country.” They fell under the Law of War. A military tribunal would be quick, not subject to the protracted appeals procedures of civilian courts. It would not be hog-tied by the criminal courts’ exacting rules of evidence. It could impose the death sentence, not as the civil courts required, by a unanimous verdict, but by a two-thirds vote. A military tribunal offered the advantages and the assured outcome that the President wanted. A civilian court was out of the question. FDR told Biddle, “I want one thing clearly understood, Francis: I won’t give them up . . . I won’t hand them over to any United States Marshall armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand!” Averell Harriman, FDR’s special envoy to Moscow, had once described Roosevelt’s “Dutch jaw — and when that Dutch jaw was set you couldn’t move him.” Biddle practically felt the jaw’s thrust, and dutifully followed the President’s instructions. Conviction should be simple, Biddle promised FDR, since “[t]he major violation of the Law of War is crossing behind the lines of a belligerent to commit hostile acts without being in uniform.”

The British, early in the war, had imposed the traditional penalty on captured spies and saboteurs, execution. Seven arrested German agents were hanged with numerous others awaiting the gallows within months of the war’s outbreak. Then, in 1940, a thirty-year-old Scottish major, energetic, articulate, imaginative Thomas A. “Tar” Robertson, assigned to MIS, proposed a new approach. What use to Britain were German spies moldering in anonymous graves? he asked his superiors. Instead, make an offer to them, turn or die. Thus was born the Double Cross, or XX, operation whereby most captured spies chose turning to dying. Some became double agents and sent false information back to Germany under British control. In other cases, British radiomen mastered “the fist,” the distinctive sending style of these agents, and convincingly transmitted Double Cross fabrications to Germany. Double Cross was a rousing success. Only one German spy is believed to have reached Britain during the war without being caught. The alternative of turning the eight captured Germans never entered FDR’s head. Their deaths were to serve notice to the Nazis of the certain fate of any other spies and saboteurs sent to America.

On July 2 the President announced that the eight accused would stand trial before a military commission composed of seven generals, and they would be charged with violating the eighty-first and eighty-second Articles of War dealing with espionage, sabotage, and conspiracy. Court-appointed lawyers for the defendants made a game effort to move the trial to a civilian court, taking the constitutional issue all the way to the Supreme Court, but the justices backed the legality of a military tribunal. Biddle himself was to prosecute, an unusual move, having a civilian serve as prosecutor in a military proceeding. But FDR was taking no chances. The Army’s Judge Advocate General was rusty and had not tried a case for over twenty years. FDR wanted his own man before the bar.

On June 8 the prisoners, held in the District of Columbia jail, were shaved by prison barbers, lest they put the razor to their own wrists or throats, and hustled into two armored vans guarded by gun-toting military police. Nine Washington motorcycle patrolmen roared alongside, escorting the vans to the Department of Justice. Enterprising vendors soon were doing a thriving business selling ice cream and hot dogs to the crowds that gathered outside the department’s iron gate every day to gawk at the enemy. The trial was held in Assembly Hall # 1 on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, the windows shrouded by black curtains. As the trial opened, Hoover, sitting next to Biddle, fed pages of evidence to the attorney general. During a recess, one of the defendants asked the presiding general for a cigarette. The general responded stuffily that Army regulations made no provision for such a request. A disgusted Hoover took out a pack of cigarettes and handed it to the German.

In twenty-six days it was over. All eight were sentenced to death. The generals sent their verdict to the President. Roosevelt, acting, in effect, as the court of last resort, confirmed six of the death sentences, but commuted Burger’s sentence to life and Dasch’s to thirty years for their willingness to betray their comrades. August 8 was set for the executions, which would take place in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail. Eight weeks had elapsed from the night the first saboteurs had landed on Long Island.

On execution day, FDR was at Shangri-la [now Camp David] , the presidential hideaway in western Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. The President liked to sit in the small screened porch playing solitaire or gazing by the hour out at the Catoctin Valley, lost in his private thoughts. This evening, he gathered his guests around him in the living room — Sam Rosenman and his wife, Dorothy, Daisy Suckley, Grace Tully, poet Archibald MacLeish and his wife, Ada. The First Lady was tied up in New York. The President settled into an easy chair and seemed in unusually fine fettle. He commenced his ceremonial role, mixing the cocktails. He was conceded to make a fine martini and an old-fashioned, though lately he had become enamored of a drink made of gin and grapefruit juice, which most guests found vile. As he mixed, he swapped jests with Rosenman and MacLeish while Daisy snapped photos.

Once more Rosenman was impressed by FDR’s gift for shedding the cares of office after hours, as if flipping a switch somewhere inside himself The President began reminiscing about his days in the governor’s office in Albany where Rosenman had served as his legal counsel, recalling stories of appeals for clemency on the eve of executions. Sam marveled at FDR’s memory, down to dates, places, offenses, and names of the condemned in a dozen New York capital cases. The President then segued into an Alexandre Dumas story about a barber who, during the 1870 siege of Paris, supplied delicious beef while thousands were starving. Gleefully, FDR related how a number of the barber’s clients had turned up missing, and the “veal” was suspected of originating in the barber’s chair.

What prompted FDR’s black humor this evening went unspoken until Dorothy Rosenman raised the subject. The six condemned Nazi saboteurs had been electrocuted beginning at one minute past noon. By 1:04 P.M., the work was completed, an average of ten and a half minutes per man. One witness reported that they had gone to their deaths stunned, as if in a trance. Where, Mrs. Rosenman asked the President, would the bodies be buried? He had not yet decided, FDR answered. His only regret was that they had not been hanged. He then launched into a story about an elderly American woman who died while visiting Moscow and had accidentally been switched in a casket meant for a deceased Russian general who was shipped back to the States. When her family complained, the Russian government cabled back, “Suggest you close the casket and proceed with the funeral. Your grandmother was buried in the Kremlin with full military honors.” The saboteurs were subsequently buried in a potter’s field near Washington.

Was the evening of gallows humor Roosevelt’s true mood or intended to mask the hard decisions he had had to make about six human lives? Mrs. Rosenman’s firsthand account describes nothing but Roosevelt’s humor and relaxed manner, but then, he was a consummate actor. In any case, the country was with him. Telegrams poured into the White House mail room. One read, “It’s high time that we wake up here in this country and show the world we are not a bunch of mush hounds.” It was signed, “Mother who has three loyal sons in the Army.” The Victory Committee of German American Trade Unionists telegraphed the President, “We endorse the imposition of the death penalty on any saboteur or traitor. We know that no loyal German American need have the slightest fear providing he obeys the laws of the country.” On Ellis Island, the execution of the six Germans was observed differently. Adolph G. Schickert and Erich Fittkau, Germans interned there, held a meeting of other internees. They announced the death of their countrymen, called for two minutes of silence, and then led the singing of the rousing Nazi anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied.”

By ALI H. SOUFAN

The New York Times - link to original

September 6, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

PUBLIC bravado aside, the defenders of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are fast running out of classified documents to hide behind. The three that were released recently by the C.I.A. — the 2004 report by the inspector general and two memos from 2004 and 2005 on intelligence gained from detainees — fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.

The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former produces useful intelligence, according to the report, the latter “is a more subjective process and not without concern.” And the information in the two memos reinforces this differentiation.

They show that substantial intelligence was gained from pocket litter (materials found on detainees when they were captured), from playing detainees against one another and from detainees freely giving up information that they assumed their questioners already knew. A computer seized in March 2003 from a Qaeda operative for example, listed names of Qaeda members and money they were to receive.

Soon after Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in 2003, according to the 2005 memo, he “elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow Airport.” The memo speculates that he may have assumed that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow member of Al Qaeda who had been captured in 2002, had already divulged the plan. The same motivation — the assumption that another detainee had already talked — is offered to explain why Mr. Mohammed provided details about the Hambali-Southeast Asia Qaeda network.

Mr. Mohammed must have likewise assumed that his interrogators already had the details about Al Qaeda’s organizational structure that he gave them. When I testified in the trial of Salim Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden’s personal driver, I provided many unclassified details about Al Qaeda’s structure and operations, none of which came from Mr. Mohammed.

Some of the information that is cited in the memos — the revelation that Mr. Mohammed had been the mastermind of 9/11, for example, and the uncovering of Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber — was gained from another terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, by “informed interrogation,” conducted by an F.B.I. colleague and me. The arrest of Walid bin Attash, one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted messengers, which was also cited in the 2005 C.I.A. memo, was thanks to a quick-witted foreign law enforcement officer, and had nothing to do with harsh interrogation of anyone. The examples go on and on.

A third top suspected terrorist who was subjected to enhanced interrogation, in 2002, was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the man charged with plotting the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole. I was the lead agent on a team that worked with the Yemenis to thwart a series of plots by Mr. Nashiri’s operatives in the Arabian Peninsula — including planned attacks on Western embassies. In 2004, we helped prosecute 15 of these operatives in a Yemeni court. Not a single piece of evidence that helped us apprehend or convict them came from Mr. Nashiri.

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

A lack of knowledge perhaps explains why so many false claims have been made about the program’s alleged successes. Many officials in Washington reading the reports didn’t know enough about Al Qaeda to know what information was already known and whether the detainees were telling all they knew. The inspector general’s report states that many operatives thought their superiors were inaccurately judging that detainees were withholding information. Such assessments, the operatives said, were “not always supported by an objective evaluation” but were “too heavily based, instead, on presumptions.” I can personally testify to this.

Supporters of the enhanced interrogation techniques have jumped from claim to claim about their usefulness. They have asserted, for example, that harsh treatment led Mr. Mohammed to reveal the plot to attack the Library Tower in Los Angeles. But that plot was thwarted in 2002, and Mr. Mohammed was not arrested until 2003. Recently, interviews with unnamed sources led The Washington Post to report that harsh techniques turned Mr. Mohammed into an intelligence “asset.”

This latest claim will come as news to Mr. Mohammed’s prosecutors, to his fellow detainees (whom he instructed, at his arraignment, not to cooperate with the United States) and indeed to Mr. Mohammed himself. He told the International Committee of the Red Cross that “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.”

The inspector general’s report was written precisely because many of the C.I.A. operatives complained about what they were being ordered to do. The inspector general then conducted an internal audit of the entire program. In his report, he questions the effectiveness of the harsh techniques that were authorized. And he slams the use of “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented detention and interrogation techniques.” This is probably why the enhanced interrogation program was shelved in 2005.

Meanwhile, the professionals in the field are relieved that an ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive program — one that may have given Al Qaeda a second wind and damaged our country’s reputation — is finished.

Ali H. Soufan was an F.B.I. special agent from 1997 to 2005.

BY TRUDY RUBIN

TRUBIN@PHILLYNEWS.COM

(C)2009 The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Miami Herald -link to original article

How could anyone release the only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103? Does anyone really believe that Scottish officials sent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi back to Libya for “compassionate” reasons? Yes, the former Libyan intelligence agent is purportedly dying of cancer. But as a London Times columnist asked: Would the same Scots release Robert Black, the Scottish serial killer of young girls, if he were on death’s door?

Clearly something is going on here that has little to do with compassion. Americans, who remember the Lockerbie tragedy with horror, deserve to know the real reason Megrahi was freed.

The most likely possibility falls under the heading “business and blackmail.” The Brits have extensive trade interests in Libya, and Megrahi had become an obstacle to them. (No one believes British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s claim that the decision rested solely with Scottish officials.)

As Saif Gadhafi, a son of Libya’s leader, put it last week, “In all commercial contracts for oil and gas with Britain, Megrahi was always on the negotiating table.” His father, the mercurial Moammar, went out of his way to embarrass Brown, along with Queen Elizabeth and her son Prince Andrew (a regular visitor to Libya on trade missions), by thanking them publicly for their alleged role in Megrahi’s release.

The British had been seeking to unload Megrahi for some time since Gadhafi’s renunciation of terrorism and his scrapping of Libya’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Gadhafi made clear that lucrative oil deals depended on Megrahi’s repatriation.

Moreover, Gadhafi has been using his oil and gas wealth to blackmail Europeans into accepting his unorthodox behavior. Over the past year, the Libyan leader waged economic war against the Swiss after his son Hannibal, a reputed playboy, was briefly arrested by police in a Geneva hotel based on complaints that he had been beating his servants.

In response, Gadhafi cut off crucial oil supplies to Switzerland and made two Swiss citizens living in Tripoli virtual hostages. After the Swiss president made a groveling apology, Libya promised to restore normal relations and to let the hostages go.

British expats were threatened with similar reprisals if Megrahi died in prison, according to The London Times. So home he went.

There is a second, but less likely, possible explanation for the Megrahi decision. Some argue the Brits knew that Megrahi wasn’t guilty, and Iran was the true culprit. So why not release him? (Never mind that a neutral Scottish court found him guilty.)

To lay that one to rest, I spoke by phone with Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism at the CIA who directed the agency’s Pan Am 103 investigation. Cannistraro told me the evidence at first implicated a Damascus-based Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command (PFLP-GC), which was working on behalf of Iran. Tehran had authorized and funded the bombing, he said, as a reprisal for the accidental U.S. shoot-down of an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf in July 1988.

But this operation was foiled in October 1988 by German intelligence, which broke up a PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt. The Lockerbie bombing happened two months later.

Cannistraro believes the PFLP-GC handed off the operation to the Libyans. The explosive device that destroyed Pan Am 103 was placed in a Toshiba cassette player — just like the bombs found in the Frankfurt bust.

“The methodology of the boom box was very coincidental,” Cannistraro said. “To me, this meant that Libya picked up the technology from the PFLP-GC, which had active members in Tripoli.” He added firmly: “There is no question in my mind that the Libyans carried this operation off.”

Among the other questions is what role, if any, the Obama administration had in it. After all, 180 of 270 passengers on Pan Am 103 were Americans. The British press claims Attorney General Eric Holder was informed in advance.

Once Megrahi was released, it was dumb for the Brits or the Americans to expect Gadhafi to refrain from giving him a big public reception.

Obama’s engagement policy can’t preclude serious consequences for Libya for continuing to glorify Megrahi. “The man who organized the hero’s welcome for Megrahi was the one who ordered the Lockerbie bombing — Moammar Gadhafi,” says Cannistraro. “He stuck his finger in our eye.”

Interrogations were carefully limited, briefed on Capitol Hill, and yielded information that saved innocent lives.

Wall Street Journal - link to original article

August 27, 2009

Whoever advised people to be skeptical of what they read in the papers must have had in mind this week’s coverage of the documents about CIA interrogations. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the reports, it’s clear the real story isn’t the few cases of abuse played up by the media. The news is that the program was thoughtfully developed, carefully circumscribed, briefed to Congress, and yielded information crucial to disrupting al Qaeda.

In other words, it worked—at least until politics got in the way.

That’s the essential judgment offered by former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson in his 2004 report. Some mild criticism aside, the report says the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the [program] quickly, effectively, and within the law”; that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support”; and that agency personnel largely “followed guidance and procedures and documented their activities well.” So where’s the scandal?

***

Mr. Helgerson describes how the CIA collaborated with the Pentagon, the Justice Department and even outside experts to develop specific guidelines for 10 enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that passed legal muster. The enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) “would be used on ‘an as needed basis’ and all would not necessarily be used. Further, the EITs were expected to be used ‘in some sort of escalating fashion’ . . .” The agency had psychologists evaluate al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, to ensure he would not suffer physical or long-term mental harm.

As the program expanded, the CIA “implemented training programs for interrogators and debriefers.” By early 2003 it had created guidelines on detention and interrogation and required “individuals engaged in or supporting interrogations be made aware of the guidelines and sign an acknowledgment that they have read them.” The guidelines also made “formal the existing . . . practice of requiring the field to obtain specific Headquarters approvals prior to the application of all EITs.” This was hardly a rogue CIA.

Congress also knew about it. The IG report belies House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claims that she wasn’t told about all this. “In the fall of 2002, the Agency briefed the leadership of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of both standard techniques and EITs. . . . Representatives . . . continued to brief the leadership of the Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of EITs and detentions in February and March 2003. The [CIA] General Counsel says that none of the participants expressed any concern about the techniques or the Program . . .” Ditto in September 2003.

As for examples of “unauthorized techniques,” the IG explains that the most “significant”—an accusation that an interrogator threatened a detainee with a gun and a power drill—was the subject of a separate investigation. As for the rest—”the making of threats, blowing cigar smoke, employing certain stress positions, the use of a stiff brush on a detainee, and stepping on a detainee’s ankle shackles”—the IG report says the “allegations were disputed or too ambiguous to reach any authoritative determination” and “did not warrant separate investigations or administrative actions.”

The most revealing portion of the IG report documents the program’s results. The CIA’s “detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world.” That included the identification of Jose Padilla and Binyam Muhammed, who planned to detonate a dirty bomb, and the arrest of previously unknown members of an al Qaeda cell in Karachi, Pakistan, designated to pilot an aircraft attack in the U.S. The information also made the CIA aware of plots to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi, hijack aircraft to fly into Heathrow, loosen track spikes to derail a U.S. train, blow up U.S. gas stations, fly an airplane into a California building, and cut the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

While the report doesn’t take a position on the value of enhanced techniques, the facts speak loudly that they caused detainees to yield important information. The report notes that early on Zubaydah provided some information, but that the waterboard resulted in “increased production.” It also notes that since the use of the waterboard, “Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative.”

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was not waterboarded. “However,” says the report, “following the use of [enhanced techniques], he provided information about his most current operational planning as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of [enhanced techniques].”

Then there’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who directed the 9/11 attacks. The report cites him as the “most prolific” provider of information. Yet it later notes that KSM, “an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete.” The report explains that KSM was then waterboarded 183 times, and it redacts the rest of the section. This suggests that what interrogators gleaned was valuable enough that it requires classification even today.

This conclusion is buttressed by two other CIA documents released this week, one from 2004 and another from 2005, that outline interrogation results. One provides details of how interrogations brought down Hambali, mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings. KSM provided information about al Qaeda operative Majid Khan, who had been tasked with delivering money to an operative named Jubair. Khan, who had been caught, revealed information to capture Jubair, who divulged that he worked for Hambali, and provided information for Hambali’s arrest. KSM then admitted that Hambali’s brother was his likely successor, and that brother in turn provided information to take down an entire terrorist cell in Karachi. Hambali admitted these terrorists were to be trained to fly airplanes into U.S. targets.

The two CIA papers don’t discuss enhanced interrogation, though the IG report suggests that KSM provided little of this information prior to his waterboarding. Some will argue that these details could have been elicited without enhanced techniques. We’ll never know. The question is whether Attorney General Eric Holder and his new special counsel intend to second-guess the decisions of CIA officials who were operating in the shadow of 9/11 and who, we now know, successfully unraveled terror plots and saved lives.

***

Which brings us to another salient part of the IG report: CIA officials well understood that they might be second-guessed years later by politicians. “During the course of this review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation. . . . officers expressed concern that a human rights group might pursue them for activities . . . they feared that the Agency would not stand behind them.” Another said, “Ten years from now we’re going to be sorry we’re doing this . . . [but] it has to be done.”

The outrage here isn’t that government officials used sometimes rough interrogation methods to break our enemies. The outrage is that, years later, when the political winds have shifted and there hasn’t been another attack, our politicians would punish the men and women who did their best to protect Americans in a time of peril.

By Dan Balz

Wednesday, August 26, 2009 

Washington Post - link to original article

No matter which way he turns, President Obama can’t seem to shake the legacy of George W. Bush’s presidency. On two issues this week, the Obama administration broke with and embraced the policies of his predecessor, drawing criticism on successive days from both ends of the political spectrum.

The biggest break came with the decision Monday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to initiate an investigation into allegations of detainee abuse by CIA interrogators and contractors.

Obama, who in his first days as president ordered an end to the agency’s harshest interrogation techniques, has said repeatedly that he does not wish to re-litigate the past or subject officials to criminal prosecution if they believed they were operating within parameters approved by their superiors. Holder’s decision undercuts Obama’s desire to move forward.

The appointment of career prosecutor John H. Durham to determine whether there is enough evidence to warrant prosecutions does not guarantee that criminal charges will be filed. But the decision keeps the controversy alive indefinitely at a time when Obama has more than enough controversies to occupy him.

The decision pleased neither liberal nor conservative critics. Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that there is more than enough evidence to warrant prosecutions and accused Holder of “appeasing the political interests in Washington.”

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney weighed in late Monday with a statement to the Weekly Standard. He said Holder’s decision to hold CIA officials up for possible prosecution and a separate administration policy removing authority over detainee interrogations from the CIA are proof that the Obama administration cannot be trusted to protect national security.

“He’s clearly carved out a middle course of not wanting the most egregious behaviors to pass uninvestigated while not wanting judgment of the Bush administration as the centerpiece of his administration,” said Robert Borosage of the progressive Campaign for America’s Future. Obama, he added, “bent over backward to be sensitive and probably has paid a political price for it.”

On the same day Holder made his announcement, it became clear that some elements of the Bush administration’s policies for handling suspected terrorists would continue. The current administration will continue the policy of rendition — shipping suspects abroad for interrogation — although, administration officials insist, under stricter guidelines that will prevent them from being tortured.

That was the latest example of an area of continuity between Obama’s and Bush’s national security policies, particularly the policies that were in practice during the last years of Bush’s presidency.

The most obvious area of continuity in foreign policy involves two of the key architects of Bush’s policies in the final two years of his presidency. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, continue to play central roles in military and security policy of the Obama administration.

In Afghanistan, Obama’s departures from Bush’s policies have been aimed at augmenting the size of U.S. forces and stepping up the nation’s commitment to the war there. In Iraq, Obama has ordered a withdrawal of U.S. forces, as he pledged during the campaign, but on a slightly elongated timetable. In reality, given the relative success of Bush’s troop surge policy and the agreements negotiated at the end of his administration, the shift from U.S. to Iraqi dominance in securing the country was already in the works.

In other areas of national security policy, Obama has made alterations but not always full breaks with Bush. In some cases, he has repackaged the rhetoric that describes these policies, but Bush administration officials see clear links.

“None of these are exact replicas of what Bush as doing, of course, and Obama and his team have an interest in not drawing parallels to what Bush & Company did,” Bush White House official Peter Wehner said in an e-mail Tuesday. “But they exist.”

The following day, when the administration’s new forecasts said the country would rack up an additional $9 trillion in debt over the next decade, officials pointed to a series of Bush administration policies that they said had irresponsibly contributed to the deficit. Though they said the steeper-than-expected recession played a major role, the officials also cast blame on Bush’s tax cuts, a prescription drug bill that was not paid for, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were never truly accounted for in the budget.

At the same time, Obama interrupted his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard to announce that he had decided to nominate Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, keeping the Bush appointee in place for another four years. Obama praised Bernanke for his boldness and creativity in dealing with the financial crisis that began to spiral late in last year’s presidential campaign.

Bernanke was part of a three-person team during the waning days of the Bush administration that took the first steps designed to stabilize the financial markets and prevent the economy from slipping into a depression. The others were then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and Timothy F. Geithner, then the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and now Paulson’s successor at Treasury.

Together they helped initiate, with Bush’s blessing, the financial industry bailouts that have continued under Obama — to the dismay of some of the current president’s liberal allies.

Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution said Obama’s moves amount to embracing the Bush legacy while trying to walk away from it. “It was changes made by Bush late in his tenure . . . that are more readily embraced by President Obama.” Those policies, he said, most seem to rankle Cheney.

Where there is continuing conflict with Bush policies, Mann said, it is “with the original Bush and the unchanging Cheney, while the overlap is to be seen in some of the more pragmatic moves made near the end of Bush’s term.”

All this leaves Obama in an uncomfortable position, drawing fire from conservatives while making his liberal friends nervous. It is a clear example of the difference between campaigning for president and actually being president.

By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN

Published on DickMorris.com on August 27, 2009

After vowing not to become involved in recriminations over the Bush anti-terror policies, President Obama has allowed his Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to dig up all the dirt he can find on the CIA and the anti-terror investigators whose aggressive questioning saved us from countless attacks.

Why the switch?  Because Obama needs to do something to appease the left that elected him.  After refusing to pull out of Iraq and deciding to follow the Bush timetable for withdrawing and staying in Afghanistan and likely having to beef up our presence there, liberals might be wondering why they elected Obama.  After all, his opposition to the war in Iraq and his criticism of the Bush anti-terror policies were the hallmarks of his campaign in 2008.  

And, on the domestic front, Obama likely realizes that he may have to pull in his horns on health care and accept some sort of compromise which may not endear him to his constituency.

So he has decided to throw a few CIA interrogators to the wolves.

The report that Holder released to accompany his decision to name a special prosecutor itself showed the trivial nature of the charges against these patriotic anti-terror investigators.  Among the allegations prominently featured in the report is that the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole was scrubbed with a rough brush in the bath so as to cause him pain.  Our heartless interrogators also threatened that they could bring in his family and parents for questioning.  How do these “tortures” compare with the deaths of more than a dozen American sailors roasted to death in flames or drowned in the sea?

The CIA report, also released on Monday, demonstrates, within the limits that secrecy allows, how these very interrogations thwarted serious terrorist plots against our country. 

Would the public agree that if we had bin Laden in custody that it would be wrong to scrub him with a harsh brush?  Or to threaten to involve his family?  Or to press his carotid artery until he was on the verge of passing out?  If such techniques could have averted the deaths of 3,000 Americans on 9-11, would we not all have sanctioned them?

But Obama needs political cover so he is creating a three ring circus for the media by naming a special prosecutor to conduct a likely leaky investigation designed to throw dirt at the CIA.  The exposures he is likely to make will dominate the headlines even as Obama disingenuously retreats from his campaign commitments on Iraq and on foreign policy in general.  And, the investigation may even make enough noise to permit a retreat on health care.  We hope so.

Lawyers are about to smother the war on terror. - link to original article

By DANIEL HENNINGER

Wall Street Journal - AUGUST 26, 2009

Shakespeare wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” As we know, that didn’t happen. Four hundred years later, they’re killing us with the smothering pillow of hyper-proceduralism. Now the lawyers are aabout to smother the war on terror.

This Monday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder named a special prosecutor to investigate persons who conducted the CIA’s interrogations in the war on terror, Scotland’s Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill stood before his parliament and gave this defense for releasing convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi:

“It was not based on political, diplomatic or economic considerations. . . . My decision was made following due process, and according to the law of Scotland. I stand by the law and values of Scotland.”

Faced with a similarly fastidious assertion of the law’s triumphal self-regard in “Oliver Twist,” Mr. Bumble replied: “If the law supposed that, the law is a ass—a idiot.” Mr. Bumble added something acutely relevant to what is happening to the war on terror: “The worst I wish the law,” said Mr. Bumble, “is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”

The experience of a world beset by terror eludes the eyes of a Kenny MacAskill, Eric Holder and others in the Obama administration. The rest of us may suffer for it.

In a May speech at the National Archives, President Obama, mirroring Kenny MacAskill’s remarks, said we had to “update our institutions” to deal with terrorism but “do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process.”

That “update” is upon us. The smothering pillows have arrived.

Attorney General Holder named Connecticut prosecutor John Durham to conduct an investigation into whether interrogations by CIA employees warrant a criminal inquiry. It has been shown repeatedly the past 25 years that an office of independent counsel or special prosecutor nearly always puts in motion an Inspector Javert-like hunt for an indictable defendant.

Mr. Holder’s justification, that his own reading of the “available facts” gave him no choice, is close to a preordained conclusion that Mr. Durham will cite one of these CIA guys for criminal prosecution.

The day of Mr. Holder’s announcement, CIA Director Leon Panetta said his agency received “multiple written assurances its methods were lawful.” It’s now clear that even playing by the rules cannot stop erosion by legal challenge.

That day also brought the release of CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s 2004 report on the agency’s detention and interrogation of terror suspects. Both sides to this argument say the report supports their view of the CIA. No matter. What the release of the Helgerson report mainly does is open the dams on detainee lawsuits.

This litigation nightmare, together with the chilling effect of the special prosecutor’s potential indictments, has as its goal making the price of aggressive interrogation too high under any circumstance, including a one-hour-bomb scenario.

To supervise future interrogations, the administration is creating something called a High Value Detainee Interrogation Group. Interrogation techniques will be limited to those in the Army Field Manual or that are “noncoercive,” which suggests more constrained than a big-city police department. Authority is being moved from the CIA to the FBI.

This means that the class of person who blows up skyscrapers, American embassies or the USS Cole would spend less time under a bare light bulb than a domestic robbery suspect. The Los Angeles Times reported in May that the goal of a proposed administration “global justice initiative” would be to get all terror suspects into a U.S. or foreign court.

Eric Holder cited the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Responsibility as influencing his decision to proceed with a CIA special prosecutor. This is the legal office that is expected to release its long-awaited report on whether former Bush Justice lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury should be cited for misconduct for providing the CIA with legal opinions about these interrogations. If, as expected, the OPR cites the lawyers, legal groups will try to disbar them. After that, no lawyer will go near the war on terror.

Individually, some of this may be arguable. In toto, it’s a death sentence for an effective war on terror. It makes what’s left of the war—telephone wiretaps or monitoring money transfers—vulnerable to a steady stream of congressional and legal objection. That lets the Obama administration evade political responsibility by letting others wind down the war on terror.

The message of Scotland’s release and the Holder decision is that the will born in the wake of 9/11 is waning. The war on terror is being downgraded to not much more than tough talk. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Iranians, not yet converts to the West’s caricature of its own legal traditions, will take note. In time, they will be back. The second war on terror is in the future.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

Eric Holder unleashes a special counsel on U.S. war fighters - link to original article

‘It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.” –Attorney General Eric Holder, April 2009

“Justice Department Names Prosecutor to Reopen CIA Abuse Cases” –Wall Street Journal, yesterday

Wall Street Journal 

AUGUST 25, 2009

Mr. Holder had it right the first time. His about-face yesterday, compounded by his release of a 2004 internal CIA report on that agency’s handling of terrorists, opens a political war that President Obama, the CIA and above all the country will live to regret.

This is a trap the Administration set for itself. Mr. Obama and his team have attempted to appease their political left by publicly denouncing the Bush Administration’s national security policies, even as they claimed to want to forget the past. Their disparagement has only fed the liberal demand for Bush prosecutions and increased the pressure on Mr. Holder to appoint a prosecutor.

Justice threw kerosene on those politics yesterday with its release of findings compiled by the CIA’s inspector general in 2004 about the agency’s detention and interrogation of terrorists. The ACLU had won a court order for their release. We were still reading its hundreds of pages at deadline, but most of the supposedly damning details had already been leaked. The new bits include the fact that interrogators threatened terrorists with a gun shot in a nearby room, with a power drill and cigarette smoke, and against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s family. We suspect millions of Americans will be shocked to learn that these unshocking details are all that the uproar over “torture” is about.

The CIA itself commissioned the IG review early in the first Bush term, the agency sent an unredacted copy to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in 2004, and the entire membership of both those committees was given access to the report in 2006. The CIA also sent the report to the Department of Justice in 2004, referring allegations of abuse for potential prosecution. Current CIA Director Leon Panetta, in a note yesterday to agency employees, pointed out that “career” prosecutors (not Bush appointees) evaluated each of those claims “carefully and thoroughly, sometimes taking years to decide if prosecution was warranted or not.”

The DOJ brought only one case, convicting a CIA contractor who beat a detainee who subsequently died. In no other case did Justice attorneys decide that a prosecution was warranted. This is no surprise, given that most of the techniques outlined in the CIA report had been approved by superiors and declared to be legal in official legal opinions.

Yet none of this counted for much yesterday, as Mr. Holder used the report’s release as an occasion to appoint federal prosecutor John Durham as a special counsel to re-open the cases for potential criminal prosecutions. His decision was supported by a recommendation from Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which has been complaining about CIA practices for five years and now finally has a willing ear in the new Attorney General.

By naming Mr. Durham, who is already investigating destroyed CIA videotapes, Mr. Holder suggested this was merely an expansion of an existing probe and would be limited in scope. He described Mr. Durham’s task as a mere “preliminary review” of overseas interrogations, which may not result in any charges.

We hope he’s right, but special prosecutions, once unleashed, have often been impossible to control. Mr. Durham may well begin by examining isolated cases where CIA interrogators are accused of breaking the law, such as the CIA employee who supposedly fired a gun in a room close to a detainee, in an attempt to make the detainee believe a colleague had been executed. This threat of potential imminent death may have violated some statute, though it was used against men who were thought to have information that could save innocent American lives. But Mr. Durham will be under enormous pressure to investigate everyone up and down the CIA chain of command, starting with those who merely followed the legal opinions, and going all the way to senior CIA officials such as former Director George Tenet and other Bush Administration officials.

Mr. Holder’s decision has already re-energized demands to prosecute the Bush lawyers who wrote the legal opinions that authorized enhanced interrogations. As New York liberal Representative Jerry Nadler declared recently, going after the CIA interrogators who “waterboarded” a detainee with “eight ounces” of water rather than the Bush lawyers who decreed they could only use three ounces, would be “terrible.”

All of this will further demoralize a CIA that has already been stigmatized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats as an agency populated by rogues who lied to Congress. This is the same agency that Mr. Obama and all Americans are counting on wage a war against al Qaeda and deter future terrorist attacks. The message that Mr. Holder’s criminal probe will send to thousands of men and women is that they had better not do anything remotely controversial on behalf of American safety, even with a lawyer’s permission. This war against our own war fighters comes just as President Obama’s counterterror escalation in Afghanistan is getting more difficult.

***

By threatening to prosecute CIA officials, the Obama Administration is taking ownership of future troubles in a way that will only do itself harm. Like the Church and Pike probes of the 1970s, Americans will once again see that the Democratic Party cares as much or more about settling scores against fellow Americans as it does about fighting the war on terror. Mr. Holder yesterday acknowledged that his decision to reopen the old CIA wounds would be “controversial.” He will soon learn how much.

May 1, 2009

By Jonah Goldberg

National Review OnLine

In his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama offered a nice little sermonette on “shortcuts.”

Asked about his decision to release the “torture memos” and ban waterboarding, Obama said: “I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when . . . all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. . . . Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.”

It’s a nice, honorable statement. But there’s not much evidence it’s true.

It’s unconfirmed, but the article Obama referred to is probably a combination of a 2006 op-ed by Ben Macintyre in the Times of London and a recent blog post about it by The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. Macintyre focused on British Col. Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, the wartime commander of Camp 020 whose motto was “never strike a man,” a code he didn’t always succeed in enforcing. But even many of Stephens’s preferred techniques - sleep deprivation, psychological cruelty, etc. - are routinely denounced as “torture” by Bush administration critics like Sullivan.

Macintyre doesn’t mention Churchill. That’s all Sullivan, who writes: “Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting.”

Typically, Sullivan’s emotions are getting ahead of his facts. Churchill’s preference for humane treatment of German POWs under the Geneva Conventions had more to do with ensuring reciprocity from enemy armies. Al-Qaeda isn’t a signatory and isn’t interested in such reciprocity.

One reason Churchill might have eschewed putting the screws to detainees in 1942 is that he already knew what they could tell him about the bombings. The Allies knew where the airbases were and had cracked German codes years before.

Regardless, Churchill and Great Britain didn’t quite take the firm stand against “torture” that Obama and Sullivan suggest. During the war, the Brits ran an interrogation center, “the Cage,” in one of London’s fanciest neighborhoods, where they worked over 3,573 captured Germans, sometimes brutally. The Free French movement, headquartered in London, savagely beat detainees under the nose of British authorities. From 1945 to 1947, Colonel Stephens himself ran the Bad Nenndorf prison near Hanover, Germany, where Soviet and Nazi prisoners were treated far more brutally than those at Guantanamo Bay. Stephens was court-martialed, and cleared, for some of the alleged atrocities.

Of course, none of this remotely made Britain “equivalent” to Nazi Germany.

Regardless of the debatable facts, the real problem is this idea that “taking shortcuts” erodes the character of a people. One hears this constantly, but it is almost invariably asserted rather than demonstrated.

First, this argument assumes society knows about the shortcuts. After all, if the shortcut in question is kept a secret, then it’s hard to see how the “character of a people” will be corroded (or that such methods will be used as a “recruiting tool”). Alas, the idea that the government should be able to do things in secret to fight a war is out of vogue today.

The more significant shortcuts are the public ones people can’t ignore. Churchill ordered the firebombing of Dresden just twelve weeks before the end of World War II. No one knows for sure how many civilians were burned alive, but tens of thousands surely were, in no small part to deliver a psychological blow to the Germans. If Churchill could have waterboarded a prisoner to avoid that - or stop the Holocaust - would one shortcut have been preferable to the other? Why? Or why not? Obama gives no sense he has an answer to such questions. You can ask the same questions about the shortcuts that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Did these shortcuts erode the character of the American and British people? If so, how? And what does it say about the “greatest generation” Barack Obama invokes relentlessly? And, again, what of the shortcuts we don’t know about?

Churchill was a heroic leader. He did right as best he could in a bloody mess of a war. But he made countless horrible-but-correct decisions in the process. For instance, he refused to warn residents of Coventry that the Nazis were going to bomb, lest he betray the secret that he was listening to Nazi cable traffic. After the war, he advocated the shortcut of summary executions of Nazi officials.

It might seem otherwise, but I’m not making the case for what some people see as torture. I’m simply noting that war is always about shortcuts - all are horrible; some are necessary. If Obama doesn’t understand that, let’s hope he never has to learn it.

checkTextResizerCookie(’article_body’);

© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/01/obama_gets_it_wrong_on_churchill__torture.html at May 02, 2009 - 04:23:47 AM PDT

AP - link

Saturday, April 18, 2009

The United Nations’ top torture investigator criticizes Obama’s decision not to prosecute CIA agents for detainee treatment that has deemed torture

VIENNA — President Barack Obama’s decision not to prosecute CIA operatives who used questionable interrogation practices violates international law, the U.N.’s top torture investigator said Saturday.

On Thursday, Obama absolved CIA officers from prosecution for harsh, painful interrogation of terror suspects under the former Bush administration. The announcement was met with disappointment from human rights groups and former detainees who condemned such methods as torture.

In a brief telephone interview with The Associated Press, Manfred Nowak, an Austrian who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said the United States had committed itself under the U.N. Convention against Torture to make torture a crime and to prosecute those suspected of engaging in it.

“They are party to the convention and the convention is very, very clear,” Nowak said when asked to confirm comments contained in an interview he gave Austria’s Der Standard newspaper. “The fact that you carried out an order doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility,” he said, adding it could be a mitigating factor.

Nowak, who said he would soon travel to Washington for meetings with officials, also called for a comprehensive independent investigation into the matter and added it was important to compensate the victims.

“Now we need to know all the facts — not just bits and pieces,” Nowak said. “First you need the truth and then you need justice.”

The Obama administration on Thursday also released secret CIA memos detailing interrogation tactics sanctioned under Bush.

The memos authorized keeping detainees naked, in painful standing positions and in cold cells for long periods of time. Other techniques included depriving them of solid food and slapping them. Sleep deprivation, prolonged shackling and threats to a detainee’s family also were used.