The Toronto Star sent a reporter to a "Spy Cruise" gathering of intelligence community types, which included former CIA Director Porter Goss and former NSA Director Michael Hayden, and landed some revealing quotes:
About 30 minutes into an interview on an outdoor deck aboard the "spy cruise," the issue of Osama bin Laden arises.
"What can you do with him?" asks Porter Goss, the former head of the CIA, as he settles back in a padded lounge chair.
"Are we going to sit him on a deckchair and ask him to cooperate? Or are we going to put him in a place where he can't leave?"
Goss's point is this: Now that the Obama administration has outlawed harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, shut the CIA covert "black sites" around the world and frowned upon renditions, what are the options open to America's intelligence service?
He insists the CIA "enhanced" methods worked.
"There are undeniable, provable, extraordinary successes," Goss said when asked about waterboarding - an interrogation technique that U.S. President Barack Obama denounced as torture.
The whole article is worth reading (it's not lengthy) as a revealing look at the incredible obstinancy of the anything-for-national-defence crowd as represented by the two keynote speakers to this floating conference. As much as I agree with the main thrust of Glenn Greenwald's criticism of the Obama administration on these issues, it might amaze anyone who hasn't watched the way the right operates to see how completely unmoved they are toward the many ways in which Obama has compromised core civil liberties and US treaty obligations. If Obama listened to the left, Goss and Hayden would likely be in jail, rather than carping about him from the deck of a luxury cruise ship.
On a political tactical level, this highlights the futility of trying to placate these extremists since they can't be assauged by anything short of utter capitulation and meanwhile it just puts off Obama's own natural allies and base. That said, obviously these decisions shouldn't be made on the basis of political tactics, but it's worth noting that if that was the real rationale (since the Obama admin's given rationale on so many of their compromises on this front don't make much sense in policy terms), it's not working.
It also bolsters the need for stronger political oversight of these organizations as Hayden hides behind an astonishingly narrow technocratic view of his role, acting as he or other intelligence officials who participated in the widescale violation of US and international law bear no responsibility for the harm to the US from those actions. But then this is Hayden's perspective:
Hayden said he is tired of the criticism and doesn't believe the CIA's use of waterboarding or covert interrogation sites affected the U.S.'s reputation or fuelled Al Qaeda's propaganda.
First, on Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a bill to stop the Obama administration from purchasing a new prison that could house detainees now at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay under lock and key here in the United States.
Then on Friday, just as the Memorial Day weekend got underway, the House of Representatives voted to stop the president from transferring any of the Guantanamo detainees to the United States for any reason - including a trial.
But then on Saturday, the Washington Post reported that actually, only about 10 percent of the 240 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay when President Obama took office were "leaders, operatives and facilitators involved in plots against the United States." The majority were merely low-level fighters. About 5 percent of the prisoners couldn't be categorized as anything at all.
The report was based on the findings of the administration's Guantanamo Review Task Force, provided to the administration last January. Those findings were never released publicly, and only sent to select committees on Capitol Hill last week. The administration reportedly didn't share the information earlier because, in the wake of the failed Christmas-day bombing attempt, members of Congress had displayed little to no interest in closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Last week's events reveal that many members of Congress continue to show little interest in the real facts about Guantanamo and the detainees held there. How else to explain the stubborn refusal to allow any of them to touch United States soil, even to stand trial, regardless of whether there's any reason to believe that they're actually terrorists?
The Obama administration's task force that deemed most of them low-level foot soldiers was made up of more than 60 career professionals -- including intelligence analysts, law enforcement agents and prosecutors. They reviewed capture information, interview reports, CIA, FBI and NSA records, as well as files on the detainees' behavior since their imprisonment. Notably, the Bush administration hadn't even bothered to look at much of this evidence, the task force reported, so last year was the first time it had been systematically compiled and reviewed. Senior officials from six different agencies, including the defense department and Homeland Security, approved the task force's findings.
Still, that seems to be having little impact on the 282 lawmakers who voted to ban them all from coming to the U.S. for trial. Many persist in portraying all of the 180 remaining detainees as "the worst of the worst," as former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them.
"We can't stop every terrorist from coming to the United States but we can stop the ones that are coming from Guantanamo," said Rep. Randy J. Forbes, the Virginia Republican who offered the House amendment prohibiting the movement of detainees to the United States.
Meanwhile, a long list of retired military leaders have said that keeping the Guantanamo Bay detention center open threatens national security, rather than improving it.
While members of Congress blow hot air about threats they imagine from suspected terrorists confined in Supermax prisons on U.S. soil, they continue to ignore some very real national security dangers that they have the ability to do something about. As the New York Times pointed out over the weekend, Congress has failed to streamline its oversight of national intelligence and refused to prohibit or even adequately regulate companies' use of toxic gases that could easily be weaponized by terrorists for use in a future attack.
It's high time for lawmakers to stop posturing around imaginary threats, which prevents the federal government from bringing actual terrorists to justice and releasing those who don't deserve to be in prison. That - coupled with tackling tangible threats to homeland security that loom right here in our own country - would be the real way to enhance U.S. national security.
Last week, a federal court judge in San Francisco ruled that the Bush administration had illegally wiretapped an Islamic charity and its lawyers without a warrant. The case is notable not only for the judge's decisive ruling that government officials deliberately broke the law. It's also important for its implicit finding that the government, using the so-called "state secrets privilege," tried to cover up the crime.
Congress gave Lyndon Johnson more or less unlimited power to "defend the United States" after North Vietnamese gun-boats apparently attacked an American destroyer on August 2 and August 4, 1964, but there were no attacks.
The NSA immediately classified Hanyok's report "top secret" and buried it in a black hole where it remained until 2005, when bits of it were leaked to the New York Times.
39 years later the Director of the CIA gave Colin Powell a little bottle to wave at the United Nations. "It could be anthrax!"
I've been holding off on even a tentative verdict regarding the transition from the lame-duck Bush to the incoming hope-duck Obama administration. Partly because I just don't know. Partly because I'm remaining cautiously optimistic. Partly because I feel like I'm cursed and that my cynicism and skepticism, coupled with my hope and pride, if made public, might just jinx everything and ruin Obama's presidency. Okay, I've obviously just been watching way too much Twin Peaks lately.
(And by "watching" I mean obsessively and consecutively beaming the entire series into my skull. And by "lately" I mean in the past three days. And by "too much" I mean not nearly enough because, honestly, Twin Peaks was a watershed moment/phenom in television and American history and in a just world ABC would still be airing new episodes once a week and showcasing the best and most unique in television writing, production, directing and acting. Oh well.)
And, partly because the Sky has been Falling for so many on the left that I just really couldn't get with the chorus of naysayers. Not because those sounding the alarms on the left are Chicken Littles and wrong about Obama being Clinton Redux - I've had the same fear - but just because homogeneity is just not my thing and always induces illustrious yawns. (At least I think they look illustrious.)
But this recent front page diary about Obama's pick for National Security Advisor by Chris just screams for my attention.
CNN is reporting that retired General Jim Jones is the leading candidate to become Obama's national security advisor. There is good reason to believe this reporting, given that Jones was one of sixteen names on the "semi-short list" for Obama's Vice-President. While Jones was taken out of contention when it was revealed he supported John McCain, in the third debate Obama still mentioned him as an advisor he would "surround" himself with when elected President. So yeah, this report is probably accurate.
Although not as bad as keeping Gates as Secretary of Defense (I'm not sure any cabinet appointment could be that bad), it would still be a very disappointing selection. Jones, as already noted, supported McCain, and was also offered the deputy Secretary of State job in the Bush administration. He turned the offer down, but turning down an offer like that from the Bush administration in mid-2007 isn't exactly a progressive master stroke. Not many people are keen to jump on board an administration with a sub-30% approval rating and only twenty months left in office.
Let's say that all of the leading contenders for Obama's national security team end up in his administration. This would give him a core foreign policy team of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, Jim Jones, and Robert Gates. That is, overall, a center-right foreign policy team lacking any clear progressives (at least, foreign policy and national security progressives). All of them, with the possible exception of Jones, supported the Iraq war from the outset. At least two of them, Gates and Napolitano, opposed withdrawing troops as recently as 2007 (although the new agreement with Iraq has rendered that debate moot). Also, two members of this group, Gates and Jones, supported McCain. This team would oversee roughly 60% of discretionary federal budget spending, military operations, and all diplomatic relations.
I know everyone is obsessed with the "team of rivals" idea right now, but I feel incredibly frustrated. Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn't there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? Also, why isn't there a single member of Obama's cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely.
It is just so very frustrating. It seems like the only place progressives are making any gains is in the House. We are being entirely left out of Obama's major appointments so far. I guess everyone gets to play in Obama's administration, except progressives. Adam B and I talked about this subject for an hour today on Radio Times, and you can listen to it here.
(AnonymousLiberal) July 28 - It's also worth pointing how breathtakingly hypocritical these leaks are. For years, the Bush administration has refused to acknowledge that it was involved in data-mining activities. When the USA Today reported in May 2006 that the administration was engaged in widespread data-mining, President Bush hastily convened a press conference in which he claimed that his administration was "not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." He also noted angrily that "every time sensitive intelligence is leaked, it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy."
Now the existence of data-mining activities is being confirmed by anonymous administration officials--almost surely at the behest of the White House--solely in an effort to defend Alberto Gonzales from perjury charges.
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