How the CIA gets away with it: Our democracy is their real enemy [View all]

[Octafish]

The inside, untold story of CIA's efforts to mislead Congress -- and the people -- about torture will horrify you

SCOTT HORTON
Salon.com, Feb. 21, 2015

EXCERPT...

Indeed, the dynamics had changed dramatically after the coordinated terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In the ensuing years, the CIA’s budget ballooned to more than double its pre-2001 numbers. Moreover, it got the go-ahead to launch programs previously denied or sidetracked, and clearance to encroach on the Pentagon’s turf through extensive operations using armed predator drones. Washington, it seemed, had forgotten how to say no to Langley. Still, the operation of the black site and EIT program involves a strikingly different dynamic—because the spring that fed it came not out of Langley but from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, inside the White House.

Senior figures in the CIA, including the agency’s senior career lawyer, John Rizzo, fully appreciated that the black sites and the EITs presented particularly dangerous territory. Exposure of these programs could damage some of the agency’s tightest points of collaboration with foreign intelligence services—authoritarian regimes such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Thailand, and Yemen, as well as among new democracies of Eastern Europe, like Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. British intelligence had been deeply involved and feared exposure, considering the domestic political opposition and the rigorous attitude of British courts.

CIA leadership was also focused on the high likelihood that the program, once exposed, would lead to a press for criminal prosecutions under various statutes, including the anti-torture act. It therefore moved preemptively, seeking assurances and an opinion from the Justice Department that would serve as a “get out of jail free” card for agents involved in the program. But when those opinions were disclosed, starting hard on the heels of photographic evidence of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq—much of it eerily similar to techniques discussed in the Justice Department opinions—a political firestorm erupted around the world. The Justice Department was forced to withdraw most of the opinions even before George W. Bush left Washington.

Leon Panetta, arriving at the CIA in 2009, found top management preoccupied with concerns about fallout from this program.

The CIA chose to react to plans for a congressional probe cautiously, with a series of tactical maneuvers and skirmishes. Its strategy was apparent from the beginning: slow the review down while hoping for a change in the political winds that might end it. And from the outset it made use of one essential weapon against its congressional overseers—secrecy. For the agency, secrecy was not just a way of life; it was also a path to power. It wielded secrecy as a shield against embarrassing disclosures and as a sword to silence and threaten adversaries. It was an all-purpose tool.

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http://www.salon.com/2015/02/21/how_the_cia_gets_away_with_it_our_democracy_is_their_real_enemy/