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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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August 21st,
2009 - Blackwater Disclosure Adds to CIA Worries |
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Blackwater
Disclosure Adds to CIA Worries News of 'Targeted Killing' Program Precedes Interrogation Report,
Possible Probe By R. Jeffrey Smith & Joby Warrick Washington Post August 21, 2009 The disclosure Wednesday of
the CIA's decision five years ago to let a private security contractor help
manage its sensitive effort to kill senior al-Qaeda members drew
congressional criticism Thursday on the eve of key decisions by the Obama
administration that current and former intelligence officials fear could
compound the spy agency's political troubles. Those decisions include the
expected release Monday of newly declassified portions of a 2004 CIA report
that questions the legality and effectiveness of the agency's harsh
interrogations at secret prisons. Additionally, Attorney General Eric H.
Holder Jr. may order a probe of possible criminal actions by CIA officers and
contractors during those interrogations. "In September, you are
going to have a hurricane coming through Washington that is aimed right at
the intelligence community," warned Porter J. Goss, the CIA's director
from September 2004 to May 2006. He noted that a Justice Department inquiry
is also pending into whether laws were broken when CIA officers destroyed
videotapes of the harsh interrogations. Democratic House and Senate
lawmakers and staff members have already described as inappropriate the Bush
administration's decision to hand management and training responsibility for
the CIA's "targeted killing" efforts to Blackwater USA, and they
have reiterated their intent to press for speedier and more complete
disclosure by the agency of such activities in the future. CIA Director Leon
E. Panetta terminated the program in June, shortly before telling Congress
about its existence. Sen. Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.), chairman of the intelligence committee, sharpened her previous
criticism of the program. "It is clear to me that the failure to notify
before now constituted a violation of law," she said in a statement
Thursday. She said she could not
address the program's parameters but emphasized that it "had, in fact,
gone beyond the simple planning stage." "I have believed for a
long time that the Intelligence Community is over-reliant on contractors to
carry out its work," she said. "This is especially a problem when
contractors are used to carry out activities that are inherently governmental." Democrats have previously
pushed to ban the use of contractors to conduct interrogations, and some
suggested Thursday that the restriction should extend to hit squads.
"There is still too much being done by contractors that ought to be done
by government employees," said a congressional staff member who spoke on
the condition of anonymity because the CIA program remains classified. Goss said he had not been
fully briefed on the details of the CIA activities in question, many of which
are classified, so he could not confirm the reported involvement of
Blackwater, now known as Xe Services LLC. A spokeswoman for the firm did not
return a phone call Thursday, but two former intelligence officers familiar
with the effort said the company had received millions of dollars for helping
train and equip teams to undertake the killings. Goss alluded to that effort,
stating that "my standing orders were 'field-forward' mission." "We wanted to catch the
people who brought down the trade centers and killed innocent people and wanted
to kill more," he said. "And we wanted to have every possible legal
means at our disposal that we could to deal with them. That was certainly in
my vision statement, and that is the briefing that was given to members of
Congress" during his tenure. "In my view, we should
constantly be looking at all our options in terms of national security,"
Goss said. "Suppose you got a high-value guy, a terrorist, part of
al-Qaeda, a radical fundamentalist trained to kill innocent people, who you
cannot talk down from the tree. What happens when you actually find that guy?
Do you send the FBI? That's probably not the best option for the tribal
areas" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Political controversy over
conducting lethal activities overseas stems from the fact that "we have
not resolved the basic rules of engagement for covert forces in the world
today," Goss said. "It keeps getting pushed by the prevailing
political winds." He added that the CIA, when confronted by a
particularly tough problem involving a shortage of manpower, too much
regulation or political indecision, has "a tendency to say, 'Let's see
if we can farm this out.' That does not mean we are trying to evade a law,
but to get the mission done in a creditable way." One motive the CIA might
have for hiring contractors may be to add personnel without officially
enlarging its bureaucracy, Goss said. "But it's also the case that there
are some folks at retirement age who still feel like they have some
horsepower left, so they go off into a consulting business and make
themselves available." A former intelligence
official familiar with the effort said the decision to outsource a
substantial portion of the program stemmed partly from the agency's close
ties to Blackwater, which hired several of the agency's top executives,
including former CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black and former deputy
director for operations Robert Richer. A second former intelligence
official intimately familiar with Blackwater's role said that there was never
a formal contract, but rather a verbal agreement between top executives of
the company and the agency. The former official said that the agreement
covered only Blackwater's expenses and overhead, with no additional profit
for the firm. "No one made a dime off of this," the former official
said. Michael V. Hayden, Goss's
successor as CIA director, also declined Thursday to comment on Blackwater's
involvement in the targeted killing program but told reporters that the use
of contractors had ended by the time he became head of the agency in 2006. At
the time he learned about it, he said, the initiative was still in the
planning stages and "never reached either the political or the legal
threshold" that would have triggered a mandatory congressional briefing. "Somewhere in that mix,
I probably would have gone down to talk to Congress, but ... the threshold I
probably would have first crossed was a political one, not a legal one,"
Hayden said. There was no specific legal requirement, he said, but "the
fact was that this was maybe of a bit of a different flavor than the kinds of
things we had briefed the Hill on in the past." Presidential aides, as well
as CIA officials, have said they fear that heightened controversy over the
Bush administration's counterterrorism efforts will push the Obama
administration into a partisan debate it has sought to avoid. The release of the CIA
report Monday - on a date picked by a federal judge in New York in response
to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union - will come as the
president settles into his holiday at Martha's Vineyard, increasing the
likelihood that it will draw attention during a political lull. Hayden said he expects the
report's release to damage CIA morale, even though some passages will bolster
CIA assertions that the harsh interrogations had helped the country learn
about "the basic infrastructure of al-Qaeda" and plan its
counterattack. Holder, speaking at a news
conference in Washington, said the Justice Department has worked closely with
the CIA in an effort to release only those portions of the report that will
not compromise national security. "We will not be doing anything that
will endanger the American people," Holder said. Staff writers Ben Pershing,
Anne E. Kornblut and Carrie Johnson contributed to this report. © 2009 The Washington Post
Company External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/20/AR2009082004064.html |