[cross-posted at NPR Check]

NPR achieved quite a feat Thursday morning: without even mentioning the CIA, NPR aired two CIA-friendly stories. First, NPR featured rehabbed heroin addict, author, filmmaker, and macho-schmaltz purveyor Richard Farrell imagining that his son's going to Afghanistan as a soldier is directly related to his own heroin addiction in the 80's:

[cross posted at NPR Check]

There are times when I read my transcription of a report on NPR and I ask myself, "Did they really say that?" This morning was one of those cases. Mary Louise Kelly was "reporting" on the CIA program that Panetta cancelled - and which was so secret that even the few members of Congress required by federal law (see short PDF file here) to be informed of such things - were told nothing.

Kelly describes the secrecy of the program and - referring to a New York Times report - notes that "the reason the CIA didn't brief this to Congress sooner was because Dick Cheney told them not to." Inskeep then asks Kelly a reasonable question: "Was anybody at the CIA actually legally required to tell Congress about this?" And this is where things get really strange. Kelly replies,

"It's actually not 100% clear. The law that governs this is called the National Security Act of 1947 and it's been amended many times since then, but the relevant portion is this: 'Congress must be notified about all significant intelligence activities; also' - and this is important - 'all significant, anticipated intelligence activities.' So the question becomes What is significant?, Who gets to decide?, and clearly in the case of this particular program, people came out with very different views about whether it met the standard."

Ah yes, like that wily word torture, significant is such a relative term - open to so many shades of interpretation. Hmmm....just what could significant mean? Funny thing is that Kelly opened the story noting that "what we do know is this: it was a covert program, clearly began back in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. It continued in an on-again-off-again fashion up until last year." She also noted that "there is a lot of speculation that it had to do with a presidential authorization after 9/11 to capture or kill al-Qaeda leaders, so we're talking about using lethal force..." Ah yes, but whether a SEVEN YEAR covert program (and one that likely meant killing people) is significant is just so hard to really figure out.

Quite a list here of who he's meeting with and learning from, and those supposedly "sensible Republicans" are far outnumbered by the usual warmongering criminal ones -- but all is not lost: he's actually read 2 whole books by non-warmongers! (but not spoken to them or met with them or asked them for advice)

A World of Issues Waiting, Obama and His Foreign Policy Squad Brush Up --

... Besides reaching out to Mr. Scowcroft, Mr. Obama has also called former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a Reagan administration official who is known in some foreign policy circles as the father of the Bush doctrine because of his advocacy of preventive war. It is unclear what the two men talked about.

Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

You’ve got to hand it to them. Torture aficionados at the White House and CIA have conned key congressional leaders into insisting not only that torture-lite would be a swell idea, but advocating that the overseers of torture be kept on.

From change-you-can-believe-in, we seem to be slipping back to fear-you-can-trade-on.

It is not just Obama, or even the Intelligence Committees, it is the entire palace of moral bankruptcy that makes this possible.

Question for the group, asked in honest and open-minded interest:

What "good in the world" can the CIA claim? What, specifically, has it done that makes America safer, and/or the world a better place?

There's a lot of chatter about Obama's pick of Brennan, of whom I don't really know that much, and his experience and position on the use of torture as a valid interrogation technique. I'll leave aside that argument for now (except to say it still shocks me we even have an "arugment" about it, feh) and wonder instead about what we need, what we have and don't have, and what we might and should have, in our premier intelligence agency.

I can run down a pretty long list of CIA failures. Just off the top of my head, they were totally wrong predicting the timing and reasons for the collapse of the USSR; they propped up torturing dictators in South and Central America; they failed to provide anything useful in the criminally misguided effort in Vietnam; they've covered for drug lords and murderers and Nazis, allowing them to go unpunished and even rewarded for their crimes; Osama Bin who?; WMD and Iraq...really, it's sort of like shooting fish in a barrel.

So I have a hard time understanding why some people on the left would bother to defend practically anything or anyone associated with today's CIA. Especially after what I imagine to be the usual contamination with cronies and criminals that has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's treatment of virtually every government agency. Via CQPolitics, comes this little gem which more or less sums up how I feel about the Agency today:

"Almost anyone working at the agency since [Sept. 11] is tainted," says retired CIA veteran Milt Bearden, a former Pakistan station chief, expressing the facts of life.

"If he wants experience, get an old-timer who left before that. Or go with a completely new face, maybe someone like a [Richard] Holbrooke, though I doubt he'd take it."

I know some people who've worked in intelligence, and I'm not trying to paint with an overly large brush. I understand there is a difference between the Directorates of operations and intelligence, the people who work in them, and what they do. I know that there really are Bad Guys in the world who are on a mission to hurt and kill Americans for all the wrong reasons, and that it makes sense of a nation like ours to have eyes and ears in dangerous places, the better to anticipate groups who would bring another 9-11 to our shores.

But I'm also always most interested in results. So I'm asking: are there any that CIA can point to, and recently, that would convince a progressive like me that CIA is not in need of massive housecleaning and investigation? My mind is truly open on this, if anyone wants to step up and defend them.

Frank Luntz-isms live on in the Bush White House.

From today's Presidential Radio Address:

Where do we start?   Read more…

The comments on this post are what make it most interesting, but in general it's the kind of post that many of us have written, or read, or understood, many times in the past. It's late and I need to go to bed, but I just have to share this one thought, one that always comes to mind when silly people who don't understand how the drug trade works are talking.

Simply: who owns planes, big rig trucks, and large boats, in this country? Whatever your answer, if you're reality-based, it's not "cholos from the barrio" and "thugs in the hood." No matter what propaganda you may believe about the overarching all-powerful nature of "gangs," the simple truth is that without some kind of government help, there would be no illicit/illegal drug trade in this country. The Barrio isn't filled with people who own planes that fly back and forth from Columbia; the military is. And the military leadership is mostly white. Same when it comes to fleets of boats and trucks- yes, there are black people who work on/with them, but not so many who own fleets of them, certainly not when compared to white people. White people in the Republican party, to be exact.

If you don't like illicit drug use, or people who are addicted when you think they shouldn't be, please don't blame us (gay, brown, or poor people). We may be 'street level' dealers and peddlers, but without rich, MIC/prison industrial complex types, there would be no illicit drugs in the United States. This is a matter of common sense, and I'd like to see more people accept this as they speak of these issues.

In apparrent response to the Senate's passing of Senate Amendment 3017, for which 22 Democrats should be ashamed, Iran has responded:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and the U.S. Army as "terrorist organizations," a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

It would be funny if it were not so scary.

Executive Order 12333 is a Reagan [genuflects]-era order written to make sure the next Ollie North never gets prosecuted, to permit assassinations (in the jargon, "targeted killings"), and to permit domestic surveillance by the NSA.

One wonders what expanded powers Our Betters could possibly need. But need them they do, or so they tell us:

[Mike McConnell,] the national intelligence director, has won White House approval to begin revising an executive order that lays out each spy agency's responsibilities and the government's protections against spying on Americans.

Unlike the surveillance law, the White House can change an executive order without congressional or judicial approval.

I think it's great that the administration is going to do this now, and I'm sure that the Regent [cough] lawyers down in the basement of Cheney's bunker have already formed a prayer group on it. And I absolutely trust the Bush administration to do the right thing on this. Wouldn't you?

[Reach me that bucket, wouldja hon?]

Some officials familiar with Intelligence Director Mike McConnell's plans, speaking only on condition of anonymity because the deliberations remain internal, said his intent is solely to update the policy to reflect changes in the intelligence community since Sept. 11, 2001, including the creation of his own office.

But other officials, who also spoke on condition they not be identified, said opening the order to changes could lead well beyond that. They said the exercise could threaten civil liberties protections approved by President Reagan following intelligence abuses in the 1970s, and that intelligence agencies will be tempted to expand their powers.

In a recent interview, Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, characterized the effort as an "overhaul" aimed at helping all 16 spy agencies work more closely together. He said the discussions about the order — known by its number, 12333 — are still in the early stages.

McConnell himself has said the authorities of his office need to be adjusted. "We don't have it right yet," he told an audience in April.

Well, gosh. How about we good citizens help McConnell out? Here's a copy of the order. And after careful, thoughtful, prayerful considerations, I've come up with the following changes to the Preamble:  Read more…

Today's report from the Council of Europe's investigator, former Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty, can be found here, along with a timeline of the investigation, and supporting documentation in the form of flight logs for the "extraordinary renditions" to and from the prisons.

Here are some excerpts from the report, which is long, detailed, and cries out for the kind of analysis we're doing on Justice Department email:

What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges levelled against them and without any judicial oversight – denied the possibility of defending themselves. Still others have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe, the existence and operations of which have been concealed ever since.

Estimates of the numbers held range from 8,000 to 35,000, with Colin Powell's chief-of-staff Lawrence Wilkerson's estimate at the high end.

Some individuals were kept in secret detention centres for periods of several years, where they were subjected to degrading treatment and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (essentially a euphemism for a kind of torture), in the name of gathering information, however unsound, which the United States claims has protected our common security. Elsewhere, others have been transferred thousands of miles into prisons whose locations they may never know, interrogated ceaselessly, physically and psychologically abused, before being released because they were plainly not the people being sought.

And the European governments are resisting accountability just as much as Bush does, what a surprise:

Some European governments have obstructed the search for the truth and are continuing to do so by invoking the concept of “state secrets”. Secrecy is invoked so as not to provide explanations to parliamentary bodies or to prevent judicial authorities from establishing the facts and prosecuting those guilty of offences [Sound familiar?]. This criticism applies to Germany and Italy, in particular. It is striking to note
that state secrets are invoked on grounds almost identical to those advanced by the authorities in the Russian Federation in its crackdown on scientists, journalists and lawyers, many of whom have been prosecuted and sentenced for alleged acts of espionage.

And now we know for sure the countries where the torture camps were:

YABL used to be one of our favorite acronyms here. "Yet Another Bush Lie!" our headlines would proclaim again and again until, really, it became redundant. "Bush Opens Mouth" we might as well have said. But this particular topic seemed to call for a YABL revival as it is particularly blatant.

For graphic starters, take a look at this lovely Map of Routes of CIA Torture Transports. A larger version can be found here at Le Monde, and even non-Francophiles will have no trouble understanding the breakdown of which flights were by the big C-130 and which by the little Gulfstream. It's nice to have various vehicles handy for different uses, don't you think?

But the particular lie in question comes from this story which only a couple of papers appear to have picked up. Those who watched the recent PBS/Bill Moyers story about Pressure on the Press will understand why.

The announcement that Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility from CIA custody raises worrying questions about how long he has been detained by the CIA, where he was held, what kind of treatment he endured, and whether other prisoners still remain in CIA detention. The CIA has previously detained numerous detainees for months and even years. [snip]

Now here comes the lie:

On September 6, 2006, President George W. Bush publicly revealed the existence of the CIA's secret detention and interrogation program. Although he stated that, as of that moment, there were no prisoners in CIA custody, he did not promise that the program was closing permanently.

Horseshit. He knew it wasn't closed even as he was speaking. But to continue...

GWBushCo loves him some torture. Acccording to ABC News, though, the military is now prohibited from:

--Interrogators may not force a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.

--They cannot use hoods or place sacks over a detainee's head or use duct tape over his eyes.

Woody's right to point out that the timing of this stinks almost as much as the sentiment. Even though I harbor serious foil-induced ideas about the man and his role in 9-11, I have never been able to understand the...words fail me here...incompetent, unconcerned, bumbling, hypocritical "pursuit" of the most wanted man in modern American history:

By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: July 4, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."