CIA - FBI-2

Release of secret reports delayed
Spy agencies foil Obama plan for transparency

President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of last year, according to administration officials. The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House’s promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials, that were publicly outlined in a set of agency documents known as the “family jewels.”

The documents in question — all more than 25 years old — were scheduled to be declassified on Dec. 31 under an order originally signed by President Bill Clinton and amended by President George W. Bush. But now Obama finds himself in the awkward position of extending the secrecy, despite his repeated pledges of greater transparency, because his administration has been unable to prod spy agencies into conformance. Some of the agencies have thrown up roadblocks to disclosure, engaged in turf battles over how documents should be evaluated, and have reviewed only a fraction of the material to determine whether releasing them would jeopardize national security.

In the face of these complications, the White House has given the agencies a commitment that they will get an extension of an undetermined length — possibly years. It will be the third such extension: Clinton granted one in 2000 and Bush granted one in 2003. But officials said an executive order that has been drafted by the White House to replace a disclosure order that Bush signed in 2003 is meeting resistance from key national security and intelligence officials, delaying its approval.

The failure to meet the deadline “does not augur well for new, more ambitious efforts to advance classification reform,’’ said Steven Aftergood, a specialist on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. “If binding deadlines can be extended more or less at will, then any new declassification requirements will be similarly subject to doubt or defiance.”

The documents, dating from World War II to the early 1980s, cover the gamut of foreign relations, intelligence activities and military operations — with the exception of nuclear weapons data, which remain protected by Congress. Limited to information generated by more than one agency, the records in question are held by the Central Intelligence Agency; the National Security Agency; the departments of Justice, State, Defense and Energy; and other security and intelligence agencies.

“They never want to give up their authority,” said Meredith Fuchs at the National Security Archive, a research center that collects and publishes declassified information. “The national security bureau-cracy is deeply entrenched and is not willing to give up some of the protections they feel they need for their documents.”

The White House is meeting even more resistance on its position that no information shall remain classified indefinitely. The White House is proposing that virtually all classified information — not just some categories — be automatically released 25, 50, or in the case of records about intelligence sources, 75 years after they are created.

The only way to assure that documents will reach the public, Aftergood said, is to allow classification to expire at some point. “This is information that is not just from years ago, but generations ago,” he said.

As the delays mount, so does the backlog of classified data to be reviewed. Still, even if such information is eventually declassified, that doesn’t mean that the public will get to see it in a timely manner. Officials estimate that there are 400 million pages of historical documents that have been declassified but remain in government records centers and have not been processed at the National Archives, where the public can view them.

– edited from The Boston Globe, November 29, 2009
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2010

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

CIA used ‘inhumane’ tactics in detainee interrogations

The Obama administration on August 24 released a newly declassified report by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general that reveals CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of a post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects. The IG’s report, completed in 2004, describes harsh CIA tactics including threats to kill one suspect’s children and to force another to watch his mother sexually assaulted. The long-suppressed report was released under a federal court’s orders.

The administration launched a criminal probe into “unauthorized ... inhumane” interrogations of terror suspects during President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, which are described in the report. One detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — the alleged mastermind of the 1999 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors — was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. Nashiri’s interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him in order to scare him into giving information up. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with “imminent death.” The report also says that a mock execution was staged in a room next to a detainee, during which a gunshot was fired in an effort to make the suspect believe that another prisoner had been killed.

Other interrogators told Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that “if anything else happens in the United States, ‘We’re going to kill your children,’” one veteran officer said in the report. The IG concluded that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding — a technique that simulates drowning — 183 times. In another instance, an interrogator pinched the carotid artery of a detainee until he started to pass out, then shook him awake. He did this three times.

President Obama has said interrogators would not face charges if they followed legal guidelines, but the report said they went too far — even beyond what was authorized under Bush administration Justice Department legal memos that have since been withdrawn and discredited. The report also suggested some questioners knew they were crossing a line. “Ten years from now we’re going to be sorry we’re doing this (but) it has to be done,” one unidentified CIA officer said in the report, predicting that interrogators would someday have to appear in court to answer for such tactics.

A former U.S. official who has read the full, classified report said that it contained an entire section listing ways in which the CIA and contracted interrogators had “gone beyond what they were authorized to do — a whole variety of deviations.” The official said that what struck him most strongly was that the report suggested these techniques were “really not effective” in obtaining information.

As the report was released, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed prosecutor John Durham to open a preliminary investigation into the claims of abuse. Durham is already investigating the destruction of CIA interrogation videos and now will examine whether CIA officers or contractors broke laws in handling of suspects. Holder stated, “I fully realize that my decision to commence this preliminary review will be controversial. As attorney general, my duty is to examine the facts and to follow the law.” He added, “I want to emphasize that neither the opening of a preliminary review nor, if evidence warrants it, the commencement of a full investigation, means that charges will necessarily follow.”

An administration official said there are about 109 cases Holder wants investigated, including the ones cited in the IG’s report. Some cases were fully redacted from the report and remain classified, and these “raise allegations of abuse that are much worse.”

The Senate Committee on Intelligence is now conducting what is supposed to be a thorough investigation of the CIA’s detention- and-interrogation program. The probe is intended not only to document everything that happened, but also to assess whether on balance the program produced major breakthroughs or a deluge of false leads.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said some CIA officers have been disciplined for going beyond the methods approved for interrogations by the Bush-era Justice Department. Just one CIA employee — contractor David Passaro — has been prosecuted for detainee abuse.

President Obama ordered changes in future questioning of detainees, bringing in other agencies besides the CIA under direction of the FBI and supervised by his own national security adviser. The administration pledged questioning would be controlled by the Army Field Manual, with strict rules on tactics. The manual prohibits forcing detainees to be naked, threatening them with military dogs, exposing them to extreme heat or cold, conducting mock executions, depriving them of food, water, or medical care, and waterboarding.

– compiled and edited from The Associated Press, NBC News and Newsweek.com
PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2009

Secret CIA ‘hit team’ program terminated by Panetta

WASHINGTON - The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about an ultrasecret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former-Vice President Dick Cheney. Democrats revealed July 7 that CIA Director Leon Panetta informed the Senate and House Intelligence Committees on June 24 that the spy agency kept secret from Congress planning for a covert program begun after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and kept hidden throughout the Bush administration. Panetta had learned of the program and terminated it only the day before informing the members of Congress.

The secret program explored how to assassinate members of al Qaeda with “hit teams” on the ground — to assemble teams of CIA and special-operations forces “and put bullets in [the al Qaeda leaders’] heads,” one former intelligence official said.

Targeted killing of terrorists is prohibited by presidential orders banning assassinations that date back to the Ford administration. But the president can waive that order, said Vicki Divoll, a former CIA counsel, because there is no specific federal law that bans the practice. There’s also no legal difference, she said, between killing al Qaeda targets with a hit team or with an unmanned drone, because the “intent to kill a targeted person” defines an assassination.

Panetta has launched an internal probe at the CIA to determine why Congress was not told about the program and Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he also is considering an investigation.

The incident has reignited a long-running dispute between congressional Democrats and the CIA, with some calling it part of a broader pattern of the agency withholding information from Congress. Congressional Republicans in return accused Democrats of using the matter to divert attention away from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) accusation that CIA officials lied to her in 2002 about the agency’s waterboarding of suspected terrorists. But Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who chairs the House Intelligence subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said, “It’s not as if this was an oversight ... There was a decision under several directors of the CIA and administration not to tell the Congress.”

Schakowsky, said this is the fourth time that she knows of that the CIA has misled Congress or not informed it in a timely manner since she began serving on the Intelligence Committee two-and-a-half years ago. In 2008, the CIA inspector general revealed that the CIA had lied to Congress about the accidental shoot-down of American missionaries over Peru in 2001. And in 2007, news reports disclosed that the CIA had secretly destroyed videotapes of possible torture during interrogations of a terrorist suspect. She would not describe the other incident.

Democrats cited the new disclosure as one reason for a provision they have added to the 2010 intelligence authorization bill, now under consideration, that would forbid the administration from limiting intelligence briefings only to the “Gang of Eight” — the senior members from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and the Democratic and Republican leaders in both houses.

The Obama White House, as the Bush administration previously had done, has threatened to veto the intelligence authorization bill if that provision is attached, citing existing laws allowing the executive branch to conduct intelligence matters while limiting some highly sensitive information. House Democrats said they are negotiating a compromise to the standoff.

Schakowsky said she thinks Director Panetta is changing the CIA for the better, adding that the failure to inform Congress was indicative of “contempt” the Bush administration and intelligence agencies under him held for Congress. “Many times I felt it was an annoyance to them to have to come to us and answer our questions,” she said.

– compiled from The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times
PeaceMeal, July/August 2009