Astonishing: Former CIA directors don’t want CIA investigated!
Somehow I’m not astonished. Glenn Greenwald:
In a truly shocking development being treated as major news, seven former CIA Directors — including all three who served under George W. Bush — jointly concluded that the CIA should not be criminally investigated for torture deaths, and they have written a letter to President Obama (.pdf) expressing that view. Do leaders of organizations in general ever believe that their organizations and its members should be criminally investigated and possibly prosecuted for acts carried out on behalf of that organization, and do CIA Directors specifically ever believe that about the CIA? Has a CIA Director ever advocated that CIA agents be criminally investigated for illegal intelligence activities?
But what’s most notable about this letter is that it is not addressed to the individual charged with making decisions about whether an individual should be prosecuted: namely, the Attorney General of the U.S. Instead, it is addressed to the President himself, and they "urge [him] to exercise [his] authority to reverse Attorney General’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations." What so-called "authority" are they talking about?
The way our criminal justice system works is that the President has the authority to set generalized policy priorities for the DOJ (e.g., spend more resources on drug and terrorism offenses but less on pornography and gambling), but decisions about whether specific individuals will or will not be prosecuted are supposed to be immunized entirely from White House influence, and are the province of independent Justice Department prosecutors (led by the Attorney General). That’s what it means to have an apoliticized justice system: the President doesn’t order specific people to be prosecuted or shielded from prosecution. Only Justice Department officials, assessing purely legal factors, make those determinations.
In fact, the entire U.S. Attorneys scandal was grounded in exactly this concern: that Karl Rove and the Bush White House were directing that certain prosecutors be fired either for criminally investigating specific Republicans or refusing to prosecute specific Democrats. Decisions about specific prosecutions aren’t for the White House to make. No DOJ official with the most minimal integrity would allow the President to block specific criminal investigations as these CIA Directors urge.
Richard Nixon tried that and …
So, the same people who didn’t give so much as a murmur when it was revealed that the CIA was smuggling heroin out of Vietnam in the corpses of fallen soldiers are extremely vocal about not investigating these interrogation techniques? Why?
The CIA was created in 1947 in an act of Congress around the semi-Cabinet-level position of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). There already were 9 intelligence agencies, and now somewhere around 14-17, that were independently collecting data. Plurality of sources is good in that it eliminates false leads, and redundancy helps establish the solidity of information, but bad because with one important juicy leak, it may not get to the right people. Naval intelligence knew that there was going to be an attack on Pearl Harbor, but that information did not make it to the President’s desk in time to deflect the attack. After the war, Truman wanted to make sure that there would be a Director of Central Intelligence, a person responsible for collating intelligence and analyzing it centrally. To this end, there was formed a Central Intelligence Agency, not to collect intelligence, but to analyze the intelligence already collected by other agencies. How did that work out?
The primary mission of the CIA was to tell the President when the Soviet Union was on the verge of either a) invading Europe, or b) collapsing. Under George H. W. Bush’s DCI, a program called “Plan B” was started. Jimmy Carter’s administration was reporting that the USSR was less and less of a threat, leading to reduced Pentagon budgets. With stagflation, tax payers wanted to spend less on defense in a less threatening world. “Plan B” exaggerated the threat of the USSR so that Congress would be motivated to spend more on defense. It worked. It later turned out that candidate Ronald Reagan’s data came from Plan B, leading to his push for the MX Missile. Plan B was so successful that agents in the field were lead to believe that the cooked figures were factual. This fraud lasted for a decade, and when the USSR finally did collapse, Plan B data was trusted over field reports, so the CIA was totally unprepared for the fall of the Iron Curtain. Their sole original purpose, and they blow it. Their charter should have been revoked there and then.
What is the purpose of the CIA today? Are they fulfilling their purpose? Is there any justification for their multi-billion dollar black budget (that very few members of Congress have security clearance to audit), outside the control of the General Accounting Office?
47th Problem of Euclid
21 September 2009 at 4:21 am