• Barack Obama,  CIA,  Polling

    Poll Watch: 58 Per Cent Say Obama Release of CIA Memos Endangers National Security

    waterboarding

    The latest polling in unfavorable to the Obama Administration recently releasing previously classified CIA memos regarding enhanced interrogation techniques used during the Bush Administration.

    Fifty-eight percent (58%) believe the Obama administration’s recent release of CIA memos about the harsh interrogation methods used on terrorism suspects endangers the national security of the United States. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 28% believe the release of the memos helps America’s image abroad.

    Sizable majorities of Republicans and unaffiliated voters say the release of the CIA memos about the interrogations hurts national security. Democrats are evenly divided on whether the release hurt national security or helped the image of the United States abroad.

    Seventy-seven percent (77%) of all voters say they have followed news reports about the release of the CIA memos detailing Bush administration interrogation techniques at least somewhat closely. Only six percent (6%) say they have not followed the reports at all.

    On the subject of torture which underlines the issue of the CIA memos:

    Among all voters, 42% say terrorism suspects were tortured by the United States, but 37% disagree. The number who believe America used torture is unchanged from October 2007.

    Most Democrats (54%) and a plurality of unaffiliated voters (46%) believe the United States did torture terrorism suspects. Fifty-five percent (55%) of GOP voters do not believe torture was used.

    Only 28% of U.S. voters think the Obama administration should do any further investigating of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects.

    There appears to be considerable risk to the Obama Administration by releasing the CIA Memos. And, now, former Vice President Cheney and others are calling for a full declassification and release of CIA memos that show the success of the enhanced interrrogation methods.

    A full and thorough public investigtion of the issues raised by the enhanced interrogation program would be the most appropriate here as well as an investigation as to whether President Obama has further endangered Americans national security during his Presidency.


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  • Barack Obama,  CIA,  George W. Bush

    Slow Roll Time at Langley: What the CIA Memos Mean

    waterboarding

    With the discussion of “TORTURE”, the CIA and its use of enhanced interrogation techniques, I have run across a few pieces for perspective:

    President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

    “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

    Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

    Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

    “I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.” (Flap emphasis added)

    The Obama grandstanding tour took a domestic turn with his release of four highly classified Justice Department legal opinions about interrogation. The political point of their release was to signal the end of “a dark and painful chapter in our history,” as President Obama put it — See, we’re not like those lawless Bushies.

    There’s a cost to this preening. Foreign intelligence services will rethink cooperating with us, knowing how bad we are at keeping secrets. Obama’s relationship with the intelligence community will be strained. And al-Qaeda now knows important details of the CIA’s controversial enhanced-interrogation program and will doubtless move to prepare future operatives to resist these techniques, should we ever feel the need to resort to them again.

    The memos tell a different story from the one the Obama administration and the press are pushing. Detailed and carefully reasoned, they make it clear that neither the CIA nor the Justice Department was trying to “define torture down,” but were instead determined to locate and avoid crossing the legal line at which coercive interrogation becomes torture. Congress itself has not drawn this line with great clarity. The memos discuss a number of harsh interrogation methods, but these were carefully circumscribed and monitored so as not to inflict the “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” that would constitute torture.

    The memos confirm that these techniques came out of the U.S. Military’s own “Survival Evasion Resistance Escape” (SERE) training programs. This is important for two reasons. First, it shows that Congress was fully aware that these types of techniques had been used thousands of times in the past — on U.S. service members. Second, and more important, the SERE training program produced years’ worth of data about how individuals react, physically and mentally, to various interrogation methods. From 1992 to 2001, more than 26,000 were SERE-trained. Of these, only 0.14 percent were removed from the program for psychological reasons.

    As the Justice Department acknowledges in its memos, training exercises are obviously not identical to live interrogations. Detainees such as Khalid Sheik Muhammed faced a more intense and extensive application of these methods than any trainee. Nevertheless, so many years of experience certainly permitted the CIA to project the likely impact of the proposed interrogation methods on detainees and to calibrate them to stay within the law. None of this could have been lost on senior members of Congress, in the leadership and on the intelligence committees, who were repeatedly briefed about the enhanced-interrogation program and who encouraged the CIA to make sure they were doing what needed to be done to prevent a reprise of 9/11.

    Admiral Dennis Blair, the top intelligence official in the United States, thanks to his nomination by Barack Obama, believes that the coercive interrogation methods outlawed by his boss produced “high-value information” and gave the U.S. government a “deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” He included those assessments in a letter distributed inside the intelligence community last Thursday, the same day Obama declassified and released portions of Justice Department memos setting out guidelines for those interrogations.

    That letter from Blair served as the basis for a public statement that his office put out that same day. But the DNI’s conclusions about the results of coercive interrogations–in effect, that they worked–were taken out of Blair’s public statement. A spokesman for the DNI told the New York Times that the missing material was cut for reasons of space, though the statement would be posted on DNI’s website, where space doesn’t seem to be an issue.

    Curious.

    There’s more. Blair’s public statement differed from his letter to colleagues in another way. The letter included this language: “From 2002 through 2006 when the use of these techniques ended, the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities both to Executive Branch policymakers and to members of Congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques.” Blair’s public statement made no mention of the permission granted by “members of Congress”–permission that came from members of Obama’s own party.

    Odd.

    And then there are the memos themselves. Sections of the memos that describe the
    techniques have been declassified and released. But other sections of those same memos–the parts that describe, in some detail, the value of the program–have been redacted and remain hidden from public view.

    Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, had access to the full memos and read them to prepare a speech for Bush in 2006. When Thiessen looked at the redacted version released by the White House last week, he noticed something strange.

    At the Central Intelligence Agency, it’s known as “slow rolling.” That’s what agency officers sometimes do on politically sensitive assignments. They go through the motions; they pass cables back and forth; they take other jobs out of the danger zone; they cover their backsides.

    Sad to say, it’s slow roll time at Langley after the release of interrogation memos that, in the words of one veteran officer, “hit the agency like a car bomb in the driveway.” President Obama promised CIA officers that they won’t be prosecuted for carrying out lawful orders, but the people on the firing line don’t believe him. They think the memos have opened a new season of investigation and retribution.

    The lesson for younger officers is obvious: Keep your head down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk. Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.

    Obama tried personally to reassure the CIA work force during a visit to Langley Monday. He said all the right things about the agency’s clandestine role. But it had the look of a campaign event, with employees hooting and hollering and the president reading from his teleprompter with a backdrop of stars that commemorate the CIA’s fallen warriors.

    But by Tuesday, Obama was deferring to the attorney general whether to prosecute “those who formulated those legal decisions,” whatever that means.

    Obama and the CIA: A President Can’t Placate the Left and Keep America Safe

    President Obama on Monday paid his first formal visit to CIA headquarters, in order, as he put it, to “underscore the importance” of the agency and let its staff “know that you’ve got my full support.” Assuming he means it, the President should immediately declassify all memos concerning what intelligence was gleaned, and what plots foiled, by the interrogations of high-level al Qaeda detainees in the wake of September 11.

    This suggestion was first made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who said he found it “a little bit disturbing” that the Obama Administration had decided to release four Justice Department memos detailing the CIA’s interrogation practices while not giving the full picture of what the interrogations yielded in actionable intelligence. Yes, it really is disturbing, especially given the bogus media narrative that has now developed around those memos.

    Thus, contrary to the claim that the memos detail “brutal” techniques used by the CIA in its interrogation of detainees (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), what they mainly show is the lengths to which the Justice Department went not to cross the line into torture. “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms,” wrote then Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury on the very first page of his May 10, 2005 memo. Regarding waterboarding, an August 2002 memo from then Assistant Attorney General (now federal Judge) Jay Bybee stresses that the CIA had informed him that “the procedures will be stopped if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe mental or physical harm.”

    The memos also give the lie to a leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), based exclusively on the say-so of KSM and other “high-value” detainees, that “an improvised thick collar . . . was placed around their necks and used by their interrogators to slam them against the walls.”

    As the Bybee memo notes, the “wall” was a “flexible false wall . . . constructed to create a loud sound”; that “it is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall”; and that the purpose of the collar was “to help prevent whiplash.” If this is torture, the word has lost all meaning.

    It is obvious to me that President Obama has acquiesced to the LEFT and thrown them a political bone that will enable a permanent campaign against the Bush Administration for at least his first term of office. Obama ran successfully against Bush in 2008 and why not push the same hot buttons? Torture, War Crimes, etc etc..

    I look forward to full and complete Congressional hearings and the ensuing criminal prosecutions of Bush Administration officials.

    Oh course, we all know that they will NEVER happen. This is ALL about a permanent campaign to demonize Bush for political advantage and not the pursuit of anything more.

    Watch it come back and bite Obama in the ass.


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  • Al Qaeda,  CIA

    Re: ICRC Report On The Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody – Today’s Release

    First, this report is NOT new and today’s release is a rehash of an old story – with a new spin of medical ethics.

    Second, do you really think I give a SHIT what a LEFTY journalist and the New York Times thinks of CIA practices that keeps me and my family safe from these motherfrakker Al Qaeda terrorists?

    The LEFT and Obama may not think we are engaged in a War on Terror but a WAR it is.


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  • CIA,  CIA Leak Case,  Media,  Politics

    Plamegate Watch: Valerie Plame Cashes IN

    Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame

    New York Times: Book Deal for Ex-C.I.A. Officer

    Valerie Wilson, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer whose identity was publicly disclosed three years ago, has agreed to sell her memoir for a little more than $2.5 million, according to people involved in the bidding process for the book.

    The book, whose working title is “Fair Game,” is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2007 by Crown Publishing, an imprint of Random House. Steve Ross, senior vice president and publisher of Crown, said the book would be Ms. Wilson’s “first airing of her actual role in the American intelligence community, as well as the prominence of her role in the lead-up to the war.”

    Ms. Wilson, he added, “has been this mysterious woman at the very eye of a major storm, and the concentric circles keep widening.”

    Ms. Wilson’s name first appeared in a column by Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, in 2003, spawning a full-scale Washington scandal that ensnared several government officials and journalists. The special prosecutor assigned to the leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has already brought perjury and obstruction of justice charges against I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, stemming from his investigation, and the inquiry continues. Karl Rove, the presidential adviser, recently testified before the grand jury in the case.

    Joseph C. Wilson IV, Ms. Wilson’s husband and a former diplomat who was a critic of the Bush administration’s handling of intelligence in advance of the invasion of Iraq, called the leak a smear campaign by the White House in retaliation for his criticism. Mr. Wilson had gone to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein’s regime had tried to buy uranium, but found no evidence that it had. His own book, “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s C.I.A. Identity” (Carroll & Graf), was published in 2004.

    Well it is the American way? No?

    But, don’t give Flap any crap on how the Bush Administration hurt Valerie Plame.

    Discuss this blog post and MORE…. at the FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blogs, My Dental Forum.


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  • CIA,  Global War on Terror,  Politics,  Terrorists

    Covert CIA Program Watch: GST Leaked to Washington Post

    U.S. President George W. Bush (C) speaks to the press as Porter Goss, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) looks on during Bush’s visit to the CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia, March 3, 2005. President Bush sought to reassure CIA employees on Thursday that they would not lose influence under an intelligence reorganization that created a new overall director for intelligence services.

    The Washington Post has Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor

    Anti-Terror Effort Continues to Grow

    The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.

    The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

    GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

    And, what is the point of weakening American anti-terror efforts by leaking this story?

    What is the motive of the reporter and the Washington Post?

    What is the motive of the CIA or NSA leakers?

    Some former CIA officers now worry that the agency alone will be held responsible for actions authorized by Bush and approved by the White House’s lawyers.

    Attacking the CIA is common when covert programs are exposed and controversial, said Gerald Haines, a former CIA historian who is a scholar in residence at the University of Virginia. “It seems to me the agency is taking the brunt of all the recent criticism.”

    So, is the CIA worried about these “Black Programs”? Flap thinks not.

    But, some of the folks in the MSM who hate the President want to weaken his Presidency at the expense of an unsafe America and exposing Americans to more terrorist danger.

    Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge, who directed the CIA’s covert efforts to support the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, said the nature of CIA work overseas is, and should be, risky and sometimes ugly. “You have a spy agency because the spy agency is going to break laws overseas. If you don’t want it to do those dastardly things, don’t have it. You can have the State Department.”

    Indeed.

    But a former CIA officer said the agency “lost its way” after Sept. 11, rarely refusing or questioning an administration request. The unorthodox measures “have got to be flushed out of the system,” the former officer said. “That’s how it works in this country.”

    The world is a dangerous place.

    These unorthodox measures may offend the “LEAKER” of this story but do not offend Flap and the majority of Americans who enjoy our safety from terrorism.

    The Justice Department should discover the identity of the source of this story and prosecute him/her to the fullest extent of the law.

    No hero here!

    Captain Ed has Exempt Media Blows Cover On Another Key Counterterrorism Program

    In other words, Priest’s sources want to use the Post to fight the housecleaning that Porter Goss has initiated and to play a little CYA along with their years-long pushback against the Bush administration. They hijacked the front page of the newspaper to file complaints about having to engage the enemy in the war on terror, and when confronted about those rogue elements that have spent their efforts fighting the Bush administration rather than Islamofascists, they sob to Post reporters about their “image”.

    One day, these leaks will end, but the question will then be whether we have any effective defense left against the terrorists, or if we have tipped our hand so badly that our enemies will adapt and find ways around our efforts to launch another attack. If that happens, these same media outlets will be screaming about the administration’s failure to keep us safe. However, we won’t be fooled; the responsibility will be on those who took it upon themselves to cripple the very programs that have kept us safe for the past four years.

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