http://pubrecord.org/commentary/867-cia-and-the-washington-post-joined-at-the-hip.htmlCIA And The Washington Post: Joined At The Hip Written by Melvin A. Goodman
Monday, 27 April 2009 00:00
By Melvin A. Goodman
Under the stewardship of Fred Hiatt, the editorial and op-ed pages of the Washington Post have gradually moved to the right. Post editorials and op-eds have defended the decision to go to war in Iraq; opposed any improvement in bilateral relations with Russia; refused to acknowledge Israel’s misuse of military power in the Middle East; and lobbied against the need for investigation of the detention and interrogation programs of the Bush administration.
As part of the campaign to prevent a rigorous examination of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read: “torture and abuse”), the Washington Post's editorial pages have been particularly protective of the Central Intelligence Agency and its senior leaders--the ideological drivers for torture and extraordinary renditions policies. These CIA leaders, particularly deputy director Steven Kappes and acting general counsel John Rizzo, are not trying to protect the reputation and mission of the CIA; they are trying to protect themselves.
Surely senior journalists from the mainstream media must understand that reliance on anonymous CIA clandestine sources is neither good reporting nor professional journalism. Many of these “anonymous sources” almost certainly are former and current CIA officials seeking to protect themselves. George Tenet, John McLaughlin, and John Brennan are individuals who fit that description.
In the past several days, the Post has carried editorials and op-eds by its own editorial writer David Ignatius; its longtime national security writer Walter Pincus; former CIA director Porter Goss; former CIA operative Michael Scheuer; and Marc Thiessen, a former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. These articles have been similar in content and similar to the statements of other CIA directors past and present (Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, Goss, Tenet, and John Deutch) who opposed the release of the memoranda of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that justified the use of torture and abuse.
The Scheuer article is particularly scurrilous, accusing President Obama of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance” in deciding to release the torture memos. Scheuer believes that an end to torture will lead to future terrorist attacks that could involve the “loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen,” and that the president will bear some responsibility. Scheuer, an aggressive proponent of torture and abuse, was the leader of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit in the 1990s. His behavior at CIA was so bizarre that he was eventually quarantined by the Agency, spending the last few years of his employment in the Agency’s library without access to classified documents.
These Post articles also reflect the opinion of key members of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and Office of the General Counsel, who want to cover up CIA war crimes and prevent any authoritative investigation of the CIA’s creation, operation, and maintenance of its detention and interrogation programs. The CIA took a similar stance in trying to block investigations of such intelligence failures as the inability to track the decline of the Soviet Union in the 1980s; the 9/11 intelligence failure in 2001; and the provision of specious intelligence to the White House and the Congress of the United States in the run-up to the war with Iraq in 2003.
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Melvin A. Goodman, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent more than 42 years in the U.S. Army, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense. His most recent book is “Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.”
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