David Ignatius starts off his Washington Post column today ("A New Deal for the CIA," 9/17/09) with a story about Jeannie de Clarens, a 90-year-old Frenchwoman who infiltrated the Nazi army, discovered information about German rockets that "saved London," was captured by the Gestapo and survived a year in a concentration camp without betraying her secrets.

De Clarens sounds like a real hero with a great story. But the moral Ignatius draws from it is not so great: "When we read about waterboarding and other techniques that shock the conscience, it's easy to lose sight of what intelligence agents like my friend Jeannie do most of the time--and their importance in protecting the country."

Somehow I suspect, contrary to Ignatius, that CIA employees in recent years have been more likely to be engaged in waterboarding and other forms of torture than to have performed death-defying, world-saving undercover work like de Clarens.  In any case, we admire someone like her because she stood up to a ruthless force that used torture routinely; to suggest that her example should make us pay less attention to torturers working for our own government is rather perverse.

Ignatius goes on to endorse the proposal of David Omand, former coordinator of British intelligence, for a "paradigm shift"--replacing the old system "in which  intelligence agencies could do pretty much as they liked" with a new system where "the public gives the intelligence agencies certain powers needed to keep the country safe." Well, the latter certainly sounds preferable to the former--but as far as the public is concerned, we've always been living under the second system, passing laws through our elected representatives that limited the powers of intelligence agencies. If the agencies decided to act as though they lived under the other system, that's called "breaking the law."

But for Ignatius, expecting that intelligence agencies will follow the law is a new, rather radical idea, and it will require concessions on the part of the citizenry:

In this new "grand bargain," Omand stressed, the public must understand that if it decides--for moral and political reasons--to limit certain activities (as in interrogation or surveillance techniques), it also accepts the risk that there will be "normal accidents."

Ignatius really ought to understand that the U.S. public made that decision a long time ago--back in 1791, when it ratified the Bill of Rights.

Deeming "the battle against baseless, worthless grants of anonymity by journalists" to be "at this point, probably futile," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (6/15/09, ad-viewing required) is exasperated to see how "even many of the nation's best and most valuable reporters--such as the New Yorker's Jane Mayer--seem helplessly addicted to it." Greenwald points to "an otherwise solid and at times enlightening article on CIA Director Leon Panetta and his resistance to investigating past CIA abuses" in which Mayer

includes this passage at the beginning of her article to explain how Panetta was chosen only after Obama's first choice, John Brennan, was rejected:

A friend of Brennan's from his C.I.A. days complained to me, "After a few Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear who write blogs voiced objections to Brennan, the Obama Administration pulled his name at the first sign of smoke, and then ruled out a whole class of people: Anyone who had been at the agency during the past 10 years couldn't pass the blogger test."

What possible justification is there to grant anonymity to someone to spout these clichéd and factually false insults? First, as I've documented numerous times and as Mayer herself well knows, the case against Brennan was not that he was "at the agency for the past 10 years" or even that he had anything to do with the torture program, but rather that (as she herself documents later in the piece) he explicitly advocated and defended many of the worst torture techniques and other Bush abuses. Second, unlike the individual who is willing to spout these insults only while cowardly hiding behind Mayer's shield of anonymity, the bloggers who led the opposition to Brennan (including myself and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan) all attached their names to their views and--as Spencer Ackerman notes--are about as far away as one can be from the trite, adolescent cartoons spewed by Mayer's anonymous insulter. Third, one of the principal points of Mayer's long article is that the objections to Brennan have been vindicated, because--as Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser--he has led the way in urging Obama to keep past CIA abuses suppressed and Bush crimes protected from accountability.

While "the anonymous name-calling Mayer passes on appears on the first page of her piece," Greenwald discovers that way down "on page 5, she includes the facts that show how factually false is the characterization of the objections to Brennan"--there Mayer personally admits that "in an interview with me two years ago, Brennan defended the use of 'enhanced' interrogation techniques and extraordinary renditions." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09).

"Amid all the recent negatives in the worlds of intelligence and journalism," Consortium News' Robert Parry (6/2/09) has spotted "one encouraging development": "the recognition of common ground between two beleaguered groups, honest U.S. intelligence analysts and honest American journalists, two groups that previously had been on opposite sides of the secrecy divide." The strangeness of which is not lost on Parry, who says that "what brought them together, ironically, was that they both were targeted by the same dishonest forces":

Through the 1980s, the neocons spearheaded an assault on the CIA's analytical division by pushing a politicization of intelligence that reversed the tradition of giving policymakers the best possible information. Instead, careerists got rewarded for tailoring intelligence to fit the neocon agenda--and those who wouldn't go along were pushed aside or out the door.

Simultaneously, within the Washington news media, the neocons and allied right-wing attack groups took aim at journalists who dug up unwanted information. Instead of rewards for such work, there were punishments. Many truth-telling reporters were "controversialized," while journalists who played ball moved to the center of the profession.

That last point is on a phenomenon Parry is regrettably quite familiar with--see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "America's Debt to Gary Webb: Punished for Reporting the Truth While Those Who Covered It Up Thrived" (3–4/05) by Robert Parry.

Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/25/09) thinks that "there is no one, it seems, that the U.S. mainstream news media loves more than Colin Powell," and as proof offers "Powell's disingenuous response" to Bob Schieffer's May 24 CBS Face the Nation "question about the ex-secretary of state's knowledge regarding 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' which the International Committee of the Red Cross and virtually all other objective observers say constituted torture": Powell--whom, Parry recalls, "was a member of President George W. Bush's Principals Committee, which oversaw the interrogation policies"--claimed to an unchallenging Schieffer, "to have been kept mostly out of the loop.... He was 'not privy' to the legal memos authorizing the abusive treatment."

Such transparent tripe was left to the renegade Washington Stakeout questioner (and longtime FAIR associate) to take on:

Outside the CBS News' Washington offices after the interview, media analyst Sam Husseini asked Powell what he knew about the torture of al-Qaeda suspect Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who made false claims linking Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, lies that Powell then cited in his infamous pro-invasion speech before the United Nations on February 5, 2003.

"I don't have any details on the al-Libi case," Powell responded.

When asked when he learned that some of the bogus evidence had been extracted by torture, Powell said, "I don't know that. I don't know what information you're referring to. So I can't answer."

And when Husseini explained to Powell "that the information had been publicly discussed by Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson," Powell was reduced to a grade school reply of "So what?" All of which leads Parry to some questions of his own--"Did Powell participate in the Principals Committee?... Did he object to the abusive techniques... that he says 'were judged not to be torture'?--and to a pointed conclusion:

For a Washington press corps that has been up in arms challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA obscured key details of the harsh interrogations from congressional leaders, it was impressive to see how little skepticism was evinced by Powell's claim of ignorance from his seat on Bush's Principals Committee.

See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Does the CIA Ever Lie?: Parsing the Pelosi Torture Controversy" (5/20/09)

The independent website Raw Story (5/6/09) recently summarized the human toll of the U.S. government's torture program.  Approximately 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to human rights investigators, with 34 of those deaths officially classified as homicides; at least eight individuals were tortured to death.

Yet somehow, when corporate media report on the torture program's victims, they focus on the CIA, the agency that designed and helped implement the array of torture techniques known as "enhanced interrogation."  A  May 19 article by Walter Pincus, intelligence correspondent for the Washington Post, is a particularly gross example.

Pincus described the CIA as "battered by recriminations over waterboarding and other harsh techniques," and "girding itself for more public scrutiny."  The article presented the agency's view that "it is being forced to take the blame for actions approved by elected officials that have since fallen into disfavor."

"Fallen into disfavor"--that's one way to describe it.  Another way would be to say that these actions were violations of U.S. and international law, not to mention the Constitution, all of which clearly prohibit torture.

Usually when people are "forced to take the blame" for criminal actions, they are put on trial.  But Pincus notes that President Obama has promised that CIA torturers will not face punishment if they followed the Bush administration's torture guidelines.

But, writes Pincus, "agency personnel still face subpoenas and testimony under oath before criminal, civil and congressional bodies." His example: A grand jury investigation into the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes.  So even though CIA officers been effectively pardoned for the crime of torture, they still may have to answer for destroying the evidence.  Life can be so unfair sometimes.

Pincus cites a CIA officer's anguished plea, "Will I be in trouble five years from now for what I agree to do today?" In Pincus' world, the idea that a spy could commit a crime and not get away with it is a sign that something is very wrong.

Demonstrating his trademark ability to move effortlessly from belligerent grandstanding to completely fictive political commentary, Fox star Bill O'Reilly claimed on April 22 that current and former attorney generals "Eric Holder and Janet Reno put the wall up between the FBI and the CIA, which led to the 9/11 attacks." But Media Matters points out (4/23/09):

in fact, the 1995 Justice Department memo and guidelines to which O'Reilly referred only addressed communications among divisions within DOJ, clarifying longtime unwritten restrictions on the sharing of information between the FBI's intelligence arm and DOJ's criminal division. They had no impact on communications between the FBI and the CIA, the Department of Defense, or any other agencies.

And "O'Reilly should know this," considering that, "when he previously adopted the 'wall' falsehood, 9/11 Commission member and former Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA) told O'Reilly that the policies in question made 'no limitation on any intelligence agency sharing anything with any other intelligence agency at all.'" But O'Reilly has never been one to let simple reality get in the way of what he chooses to know or not know.

Newsweek's Mark Hosenball writes (12/22/08):

The head of Obama's intel transition team, John Brennan, was the leading candidate for CIA chief until he was slammed by liberal bloggers for not doing enough while serving as a top CIA and anti-terror official to oppose Bush.

Actually, "liberal bloggers" hadn't "slammed" Brennan for "not doing enough...to oppose Bush"; they criticized him for being an ardent public defender of rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics," which is a euphemism for torture. Since Obama campaigned as an opponent of such policies, Brennan would have been a dubious choice to be his top CIA official.

One has to be a little skeptical of Hosenball's crediting "liberal bloggers" with the ability to determine who gets to be head of the CIA.

The New York Times yesterday (12/3/08) described problems that President-elect Barack Obama faces in managing the transition at the Central Intelligence Agency. CJR's website has an item today (12/4/08) critical of the piece as a "dramatic example" of the Times' slanting its intelligence reporting toward sources who "don’t think that anyone who formulated or acquiesced in the current administration's torture policies should be excluded as a candidate for CIA director, or prosecuted for possible violations of criminal law." The CJR piece has some interesting back-and-forth with Times editors.

I was struck by this passage in the Times article:

Last week, John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Mr. Brennan protested that he had been a "strong opponent" within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.

Note that Obama is not "evidently" deciding that his "most ardent supporters on the left" might have a point; he's just deciding that it's not worth fighting them. So Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane seems to be implicitly siding here with the "strong opponent" of "harsh interrogation tactics" and against the "liberal critics" who "alleged" that he had a role in implementing those tactics.

It's hard to say, of course, what actually went on inside a spy agency--or even whether Obama or Brennan really decided to take Brennan's name out of the running--but we can take a look at what his public statements were--and Salon's Glenn Greenwald (11/16/08) did just that. Here's Brennan being interviewed by CBS News (Early Show, 11/2/07):

The CIA has acknowledged that it has detained about 100 terrorists since 9/11, and about a third of them have been subjected to what the CIA refers to as enhanced interrogation tactics, and only a small proportion of those have in fact been subjected to the most serious types of enhanced procedures.... There have been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the deaths of 3,000 innocents.

That doesn't really sound like a "strong opponent" of "harsh interrogation tactics," does it?