The government was hoping that offering tribunals to evaluate the prisoners’ status would perform a useful public relations function, making the administration appear to be granting important rights to the 600 or so prisoners held in Bagram, and distracting attention from the real reason for its purported generosity: a 76-page brief to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, submitted yesterday, in which the government attempted to claim that “Habeas rights under the United States Constitution do not extend to enemy aliens detained in the active war zone at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.”

The main reason for this brazen attempt to secure a public relations victory before the appeal was filed is blindingly obvious to anyone who has been studying the Bagram litigation over the last five months. In April, Judge John D. Bates ruled that three foreign prisoners seized in other countries and “rendered” to Bagram, where they have been held for up to six years, had the right to challenge the basis of their detention in US courts.

Below, I discuss the government’s position regarding these men, and explain why introducing Guantánamo-style tribunals at Bagram is no substitute for the Geneva Conventions, and at the end of the article I also ask whether the government may not have an even darker motive, related to what I perceive to be comments from administration officials revealing Bagram’s ongoing use as a secret prison for foreign suspects “rendered” from other countries.

Why bringing Guantánamo to Bagram is intended to exclude the US courts

Despite fierce opposition from Obama’s Justice Department, which clung to the line taken by the Bush administration, Judge Bates ruled in April that Boumediene v. Bush — the Supreme Court ruling last June, which granted constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the prisoners in Guantánamo — extended to foreign prisoners “rendered” to Bagram, because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same.”

He added that, although Bagram is “located in an active theater of war,” and that this may pose some “practical obstacles” to a court review of their cases, these obstacles “are not as great” as the government suggested, are “not insurmountable,” and are, moreover, “largely of the Executive’s choosing,” because the prisoners were specifically transported to Bagram from other locations.

Judge Bates was undoubtedly correct, for two reasons: firstly, because, as I explained at the time, “only an administrative accident — or some as yet unknown decision that involved keeping a handful of foreign prisoners in Bagram, instead of sending them all to Guantánamo — prevented them from joining the 779 men in the offshore prison in Cuba”; and secondly, because he refused to extend habeas rights to an Afghan prisoner “rendered” to Bagram from the United Arab Emirates in 2002 — and, by extension, to the rest of the Afghans in Bagram, seized in Afghanistan, who constitute all but 30 or so of the 650 men held in the prison — primarily because he agreed with the government’s claim that to do so would cause “friction” with the Afghan government regarding negotiations about the transfer of Afghan prisoners to the custody of their own government.

Reinforcing its hopes that offering tribunals to the prisoners would deflect attention from its desire to keep holding “rendered” prisoners at Bagram indefinitely, the government included an Addendum with its brief on Monday, outlining its plans for the new tribunal system.

This is designed to replace an existing review system, which, in the words of Judge Bates, “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo” in Boumediene, being both “inadequate” and “more error-prone” than the notoriously inadequate and error-prone system of Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) that was established at Guantánamo to review the prisoners’ cases.

Reporters have been quick to spot that the new review system — far from providing an adequate system that would, presumably, satisfy the Supreme Court — is, in fact, little more than a carbon-copy of the CSRTs, which were severely criticized by the Supreme Court in Boumediene, and which were also savaged by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on them, who explained, in a series of explosive statements in 2007, that they were designed primarily to rubberstamp the administration’s insistence that the men were “enemy combatants,” even though they had not been adequately screened on capture.

What has happened to the Geneva Conventions?

This omission of screening on capture — which has applied at Bagram ever since — came about because, under instructions from the highest levels of government, the military was obliged to shelve its plans to hold competent tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, despite the fact that they had been pioneered by the US, and had been used successfully in every war from Vietnam onwards. Held close to the time and place of capture, these tribunals (as opposed to the CSRTs, which mockingly echoed them), comprise three military officers, and are designed to separate combatants from civilians seized in the fog of war, in cases where it is not obvious that prisoners are combatants (when they are not wearing a uniform, for example), by allowing the men in question to call witnesses.

During the first Gulf War, around 1,200 of these tribunals were held, and in nearly three-quarters of the case, the men were found to have been wrongly detained, and were released. The failure to implement these tribunals in the “War on Terror” contributed enormously to the filling of Guantánamo with prisoners who had no connections to any form of militancy whatsoever, and these initial errors were not redressed when a skewed version of the tribunals — the CSRT system — was introduced two and half years later.

As a result, plans to introduce Guantánamo-style tribunals to Bagram — in which prisoners are assigned military representatives instead of lawyers, and may call witnesses and present evidence if “reasonably available” — may be an improvement on the existing system of Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Boards at Bagram — in which the prisoners have no representation whatsoever, and are only allowed to make a statement before they hear the evidence against them — but it fails to take into account the fact that non-uniformed prisoners seized in wartime, like those at Bagram, should, under the terms of the Geneva Conventions, be given competent tribunals on capture, and then, if found to be combatants, held unmolested until the end of hostilities.

Despite being addressed in the DoD’s new proposals, these concerns are not mitigated by the fact that, according to these plans, new prisoners will be subjected, on capture, to cursory reviews by “the capturing unit commander” and by the commander of Bagram to ascertain that they “meet the criteria for detention,” and the problem is underlined by the DoD’s insistence that it is not merely holding prisoners “consistent with the laws and customs of war,” but also holding those who fulfill the criteria laid down in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (the founding document of the “War on Terror,” approved by Congress within days of the 9/11 attacks), which authorized the President to detain those who “planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” or those who supported them.

So is Bagram Obama’s new secret prison?

However, while this is a genuinely disturbing development, because it suggests that the Obama administration is essentially following President Bush’s lead by unilaterally rewriting the Conventions, presumably to allow it to continue exploiting prisoners of war for their supposed intelligence value (even though the DoD explained, in its proposal, that “intelligence value, by itself, is not a basis for internment”), only one major media outlet — the New Yorker — has picked up on a disturbing disclosure in the Times’ coverage of the story on Sunday. I reported this in an article yesterday, when I explained that there was something deeply suspicious about the officials’ statement that:

the importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has risen under the Obama administration, which barred the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention.

As I explained yesterday, this “seems to confirm, in one short sentence, that, although the CIA’s secret prisons have been closed down, as ordered by President Obama, a shadowy ‘rendition’ project is still taking place, with an unknown number of prisoners being transferred to Bagram instead.”

In a blog post for the New Yorker, Amy Davidson also picked up on the statement, calling it a sentence “that doesn’t make much sense,” and then asked:

So closing Guantánamo increases the need for a new Guantánamo, and barring the use of secret prisons just means that you need to find a new place to stash secret prisoners? Have we had it with Guantánamo because it’s unfashionable — like a played-out spring-break destination, now overrun with journalists and human-rights lawyers hopping on planes in Florida — or because we actually don’t like extrajudicial, indefinite detention?

While I await further developments, I recall that, back in April, CIA director Leon Panetta explained that, although the CIA “no longer operates detention facilities or black sites and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites,” the agency “retains the authority to detain individuals on a short-term transitory basis.” Panetta added that, although no detentions had occurred since he became director, “We anticipate that we would quickly turn over any person in our custody to US military authorities or to their country of jurisdiction, depending on the situation.”

Is this what is happening now at Bagram? Shortly after Panetta made his comments, I noted that “the only logical conclusion” I could draw was that, “essentially, the Obama administration’s only real problem with ‘extraordinary rendition’ is one of scale. The Bush administration’s industrial-scale rendition policies have been banished, but the prospect of limited rendition — to third countries rather than to the US court system, as would surely be more acceptable — is being kept as a possible option.”

Whether hidden transfers to third countries are taking place is unknown, but from my reading of the officials’ comments to the Times, I infer that the CIA is now handing suspects over to the US military, including those captured outside Afghanistan, and that this is the reason, above all, that the government is anxious to prevent the US courts from having access to foreign prisoners in Bagram.

Moreover, as with the Bush administration, the indications are that this process focuses solely on the gathering of “actionable intelligence” — or with “decommissioning” suspects — and that those responsible for implementing it have, yet again, chosen to ignore the fact that terrorism is a crime, prosecutable in the US courts, and not an act of war requiring secret prisons and extra-legal detention.

It doesn’t matter how much it may be dressed up in review procedures that include only the following “[p]ossible recommendations” for what will happen to those prisoners who “meet the criteria for internment”: “continued internment” in Bagram, transfer to the Afghan authorities for prosecution, transfer to the Afghan authorities “for participation in a reconciliation program,” and, in the cases of “non Afghan and non-US third-country national[s],” options “that may also include transfer to a third country for criminal prosecution, participation in a reconciliation program, or release.”

What, I wonder, are the options that were not included?

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

The late senator Daniel P. Moynihan created the PIDB in the 1990s to reduce the “torment of secrecy,” which denied important information on national security to the American people. The EAB was designed to deal with the complexities of managing the CIA and to improve the access of intelligence information to the Congress and the American people. Hayden and Rudman have a cold war preoccupation with secrecy and have never been known for improving access. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, is responsible for the Hayden appointment; CIA director Leon Panetta appointed Rudman.

As Steven Aftergood, the editor of Secrecy News noted, Hayden is “not well known as a classification critic or a proponent of declassification.” As director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Hayden instituted the warrantless eavesdropping program that violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits unlawful seizures and searches.

In defending warrantless eavesdropping at the National Press Club in January 2006, he argued that the Fourth Amendment did not stipulate the importance of “probable cause,” which of course it does. Hayden also conceded that he relied on advice for the program from White House lawyers and never considered consulting the legal staff of NSA.

Soon after arriving at the CIA as director, Hayden began an unprecedented investigation of the Office of the Inspector General, which had been critical of the CIA’s renditions and interrogations programs. Hayden even targeted the statutory inspector general of the CIA, John Helgerson, who had recommended the creation of “accountability boards” for CIA officers, including former director George Tenet, involved in 9/11 intelligence failures.

The failure of the chairmen of the congressional oversight committees to come to Helgerson’s defense made it extremely difficult for the IG to do his job and he announced his retirement seven months ago. The White House and the CIA have still not named a replacement for Helgerson, which is particularly damaging in view of the high-level investigations of CIA detentions and interrogations programs as well as the numerous secret prisons or “black sites” established after 9/11, which would benefit from an aggressive Office of the Inspector General.

In addition to naming Rudman to the EAB, Panetta has made the former senator the director’s special advisor on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s (SSCI) special inquiry of past practices in detentions and interrogations.

Panetta has his own review group within the CIA on these practices, but has prominently placed current members of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) in the group. The Rudman appointment and the use of NCS officers does not augur will for genuine openness with the Senate inquiry. The NCS has been a major player in the culture of cover-up at the CIA, including the destruction of the 92 torture tapes that has been investigated by the FBI for nearly two years.

By placing Rudman as an intermediary between the SSCI and the CIA’s review group, Panetta has ensured himself that the most damaging information on detentions and interrogations will never see the light of day. Rudman was the most active member of the SSCI in trying to block CIA officials from testifying against the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director in 1991.

Rudman actually branded those few individuals willing to come forward as “McCarthyites” in an effort to marginalize their testimony and to make sure additional witnesses would not testify or submit written affidavits against Bob Gates. There is ample evidence, moreover, of Rudman’s strong, even bellicose, partisan politicking over the years.

One of the greatest unknown scandals within the intelligence community is the over-classification of government documents in order to keep important information out of the hands of the American people. It costs billions of dollars for government and industry to classify documents, with several million individuals in the government and private industry having the right to classify information.

Government vaults hold over 1.5 billion pages of classified information that are more than twenty-five years old and, thus, unavailable to scholars and researchers, let along the general public. Documents are typically classified to hide embarrassing political information, not secrets. Greater respect for openness might have prevented the policies that led to the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the CIA’s network of secret prisons, and the CIA’s detentions and interrogations programs.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

The Washington Post's David Broder.

David Broder, the senior op-ed writer at the Washington Post, has joined his colleagues (Fred Hiatt, David Ignatius, and Richard Cohen) in condemning Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to name a special counsel to examine possible law-breaking by CIA interrogators. And like his colleagues, Broder has put forth a list of irrelevant reasons for turning away from the abuses and violations of law during the eight years of the Bush administration.

Although Holder’s inquiry will only target those who acted beyond so-called legal guidelines, Broder is concerned that we will ultimately see Vice President Dick Cheney “standing in the dock.” Broder should be concerned with the need to explicitly repudiate the policies and actions of President George Bush and Cheney that violated domestic and international law. These actions require a public hearing and an open record of some kind.  Holder’s inquiry is the first step in what Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books called a “complicated political process.”

Broder’s lamest and most disingenuous reasons deal with CIA director Leon Panetta and the methodology of the Post’s news staff.  Broder calls Panetta a “conscientious director” of the CIA, but Panetta has surrounded himself with the ideological drivers of the policies of detention and interrogation, Steve Kappes and Michael Sulick, and has fought every effort of the Obama administration to bring transparency and accountability to the Bush-Cheney policies.

Broder adds that Panetta’s “judgment” is supported by the reporting of Ignatius and others with “excellent sources inside the CIA.” Their sources, of course, are Kappes and Sulick, the very officers who seek to cover-up their own activities and have the freedom to talk to reporters. Good reporting and journalism require an honest effort to seek all sources and not merely those who reify one’s own positions.

Broder echoes Panetta when he argues that any investigation will have a “harmful effect on the morale and operations of his agency.” No, morale was compromised by high-level CIA officials such as George (“slam dunk”) Tenet, who tailored intelligence to go to war against Iraq, and Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, who used outside contractors to build secret prisons, conduct extraordinary renditions, and engage in torture and abuse.

The CIA Inspector General (IG) responsible for the 2004 report on interrogations and torture told Der Spiegel this week that he decided on preparing a report because “some agency employees involved with the program…were uneasy about it; he told the Washington Post last week that he “could not walk through the cafeteria without people walking up to me, not to complain but to say ‘More power to you.’”

CIA torture and abuse as well as extraordinary renditions also compromised valuable liaison relations with European intelligence services that are needed to combat international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As a result of CIA’s illegal activities, intelligence services in Germany, Italy, and Spain were refusing to cooperate with their CIA counterparts.  Nevertheless, the CIA is still resisting the release of hundreds of pages of internal documents on detentions and interrogations, arguing that national security is at stake. No, national embarrassment is involved and not national security.

At some point, Broder and his colleagues should be forced to read the 2004 IG Report on detentions and interrogations; the 2004 CIA report on interrogation techniques; the 2004 Taguba report on military abuse of detainees; the 2005 collection of “secret” documents by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel in their The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib; the 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross Report on CIA’s treatment of detainees; the 2008 Senate Armed Services report on U.S. treatment of detainees; and Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side.

Then, they need to compare the treatment of the detainees, some of whom were totally innocent or erroneously detained, with what the Justice Department memoranda on interrogations permitted.  Of course, Broder believes that the Justice Department torture memoranda demonstrate that the Bush administration engaged in a “deliberate, and internally well-debated policy decision, made in the proper places…by the proper officials.” Meanwhile, the Post has presented no evidence of policy debates on torture and abuse, extraordinary renditions, and secret prisons.

Broder and his colleagues could also try to interview those individuals who watched some or all of the 92 torture tapes before they were destroyed by high-ranking officials from the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. This destruction of evidence has been investigated for the past two years by John Durham, who will conduct the current inquiry for Attorney General Holder.

Broder, Ignatius, Hiatt, and Cohen have relied entirely on those CIA operatives who are trying to put the best possible face on CIA transgressions; the ethics of good journalism requires that they seek sources to learn about the details of the sordid and sadistic activities that put the nation at risk. President Barack Obama should be credited with closing the secret prisons and ending the practice of torture and abuse, but the nation still needs to confront and understand the evidence and the events of the past six years.

Finally, the news and editorial reporters of the Washington Post need to compare their findings of the evidence with the laws that govern the illegalities that have taken place. They could start with the 8^th amendment of the Constitution against “cruel and unusual punishments” (it has the virtue of being short); the War Crimes Act of 1996; the Convention against Torture of 1984 (yes, the United States is a signatory); and of course Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions.

Broder and his colleagues do not understand that the stature of international and domestic law is diminished when a nation violates it with impunity. The stature of a nation is diminished when it commits crimes against humanity.  And the national leadership and the nation itself are diminished when it ignores the need for accountability and explicit repudiation. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., had it right when he called for a “truth commission” to gather information on the CIA programs that the Bush administration endorsed and protected.

This would represent a good start in restoring our moral compass on the crimes of the post-9/11 era. The judgment of history will be harsh if we choose not to do so.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

He even cites deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, one of the key ideological drivers for the policy of detention and interrogation, as someone who “doesn’t want to have anything to do with interrogation.”

Ignatius strongly believes that it is time for the CIA to “get on with it,” which was the signature line of former CIA director Richard Helms, who Ignatius considers the “savviest spymaster this country has produced.” Let’s forget that Helms lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1973 on the overthrow of the elected government in Chile and that a grand jury was called to see if he should be indicted for perjury.

Let’s forget that the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms, who pleaded nolo contendere, and was fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended prison sentence. And let’s forget that Helms was the major supporter of James Jesus Angleton, the crazed head of CIA counterintelligence for 20 years, who believed that the KGB had successfully penetrated the Agency.

We called Angleton “The Ghost” when I was at the CIA because no one had ever seen the man. And it was “The Ghost” who befriended Kim Philby, the Soviet spy from British intelligence, introduced him to high-level CIA officials, and defended him to the end. So much for counterintelligence.

In his efforts to prevent any investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program, Ignatius has also forgotten the lessons of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946.  The International Tribunal taught us that crimes committed by individuals for state purposes were the responsibility of those individuals and punishable by state law. And, most importantly, following orders was not a defense. But Ignatius believes that all of the relevant evidence on torture and abuse was seen by “career prosecutors, who decided against bringing cases.” So, let’s forget that the career prosecutors were employed by the politicized Justice Department of the Bush administration and that they reported to a politically-appointed assistant attorney general.

Ignatius believes that investigation and accountability will hurt the Agency. It will actually restore the credibility of the Agency and lead to greater cooperation from important foreign intelligence services, which is essential to combating terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It was CIA crimes such as secret prisons and extraordinary renditions that hurt the Agency, and led to reticence about sharing intelligence. For example, there is no intelligence service within the European Union that would assist in a rendition by the CIA; no EU country that would permit the CIA to transport a prisoner by aircraft; no EU country that would agree to a secret prison or “black site” within its borders.

Ignatius also reveals that he knows nothing about loyal dissent.  He argues that “questioning presidential orders isn’t really the job” of the CIA leadership, “especially when those orders are backed by Justice Department legal opinions.” This country has fought two unnecessary wars in the past 45 years with the deaths of more than 60,000 American men and women simply because high-level officials failed to expose the deceptions and manipulations of the Johnson and Bush administrations.

In supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ignatius and the Washington Post appear enamored with U.S. military power, with the Post providing few opportunities for contrarian voices to be heard. The mainstream media, particularly the Post, has been far too complacent in holding the Bush and Obama administration’s feet to the fire in the case of these wars.

Finally, Ignatius claims that the CIA resorted to independent contractors for help in “waterboarding” and assassination programs because of a lack of expertise. In fact, the CIA turned to outside help in these egregious areas because it was trying to avoid accountability and there was internal resistance to both programs.  There were many officers in the National Clandestine Service opposed to the renditions and detentions program; the Office of Medical Service had serious problems with the waterboarding program, which is outlined in the 2004 Inspector General Program.

Presumably, there were some greybeards around who mentioned that resorting to Blackwater to run an assassination program resembled the CIA’s contacts with the Mafia in the early 1960s to kill Castro. The CIA assassination program led to the Church Commission hearings in the 1970s, which placed restrictions on covert action programs and created a congressional oversight process that has fallen into disarray.

It is unbelievable that Ignatius could read the chilling and appalling 2004 IG report and not temper some of his views.  His continued support of the CIA points to fanaticism and reminds me of Stalin’s reference to Western journalists who defended Soviet policy—he called them “useful idiots.”

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Panetta issued a statement in advance of the release later Monday of a critical 2004 inspector general’s report on the agency’s torture program. Panetta says the horrific details of torture and abuse contained in the report “is in many ways an old story” and that the interrogation methods used against detainees were approved in Justice Department legal memoranda.

The outlines of prior interrogation practices, and many of the details, are public already,” Panetta said. “The use of enhanced interrogation techniques, begun when our country was responding to the horrors of September 11th, ended in January. For the CIA now, the challenge is not the battles of yesterday, but those of today and tomorrow. It is there that we must work to enhance the safety of our country. That is the job the American people want us to do, and that is my responsibility as the current Director of the CIA.

I make no judgments on the accuracy of the 2004 IG report or the various views expressed about it. Nor am I eager to enter the debate, already politicized, over the ultimate utility of the Agency’s past detention and interrogation effort. But this much is clear: The CIA obtained intelligence from high-value detainees when inside information on al-Qa’ida was in short supply. Whether this was the only way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute, with Americans holding a range of views on the methods used. The CIA requested and received legal guidance and referred allegations of abuse to the Department of Justice. President Obama has established new policies for interrogation.

His statement was disseminated to reporters hours after ABCNews.com reported that Panetta got into a “profanity-laced screaming match” with a senior White House staff member over reports that Attorney General Eric Holder was considering the appointment of a special counsel to probe the CIA’s use of torture against “war on terror detainees.”

According to intelligence officials, Panetta erupted in a tirade last month during a meeting with a senior White House staff member. Panetta was reportedly upset over plans by Attorney General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation of allegations that CIA officers broke the law in carrying out certain interrogation techniques that President Obama has termed “torture.”

ABCNews.com added that Panetta had threatened to resign over the possibility of a criminal investigation involving agency interrogators.

Panetta’s about-face stands in stark contrast to statements he made in a series of op-eds in the Monterey County Herald and other publications last year. In a March 8, 2008, column titled, “Americans Reject Fear Tactics,” Panetta wrote that “all forms of torture have long been prohibited by American law and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents alike.”

“Our forefathers prohibited ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ because that was how tyrants and despots ruled in the 1700’s. They wanted an America that was better than that. Torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive. And yet, the president is using fear to trump the law.”

Here is Panetta’s statment in full hours before the Justice Department released the CIA IG torture report and other documents.

Message from the Director: Release of Material on Past Detention Practices

Today, as part of a number of Freedom of Information Act cases, the government is responding to court orders to release more documents related to the Agency’s past detention and interrogation of foreign terrorists. The CIA materials include the 2004 report from our Office of Inspector General and two papers-one from 2004 and the other from 2005-that discuss the value of intelligence acquired from high-level detainees. The complete package is hundreds of pages long. The declassification process, a mandatory part of the proceedings, was conducted in accord with established FOIA guidelines.

This is in many ways an old story. The outlines of prior interrogation practices, and many of the details, are public already. The use of enhanced interrogation techniques, begun when our country was responding to the horrors of September 11th, ended in January. For the CIA now, the challenge is not the battles of yesterday, but those of today and tomorrow. It is there that we must work to enhance the safety of our country. That is the job the American people want us to do, and that is my responsibility as the current Director of the CIA.

My emphasis on the future comes with a clear recognition that our Agency takes seriously proper accountability for the past. As the intelligence service of a democracy, that’s an important part of who we are. When it comes to past detention and interrogation practices, here are some facts to bear in mind on that point:

· The CIA itself commissioned the Inspector General’s review. The report, prepared five years ago, noted both the effectiveness of the interrogation program and concerns about how it had been run early on. Several Agency components, including the Office of General Counsel and the Directorate of Operations, disagreed with some of the findings and conclusions.

· The CIA referred allegations of abuse to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution. This Agency made no excuses for behavior, however rare, that went beyond the formal guidelines on counterterrorism. The Department of Justice has had the complete IG report since 2004. Its career prosecutors have examined that document-and other incidents from Iraq and Afghanistan-for legal accountability. They worked carefully and thoroughly, sometimes taking years to decide if prosecution was warranted or not. In one case, the Department obtained a criminal conviction of a CIA contractor. In other instances, after Justice chose not to pursue action in court, the Agency took disciplinary steps of its own.

· The CIA provided the complete, unredacted IG report to the Congress. It was made available to the leadership of the Congressional intelligence committees in 2004 and to the full committees in 2006. All of the material in the document has been subject to Congressional oversight and reviewed for legal accountability.

As Director in 2009, my primary interest-when it comes to a program that no longer exists-is to stand up for those officers who did what their country asked and who followed the legal guidance they were given. That is the President’s position, too. The CIA was aggressive over the years in seeking new opinions from the Department of Justice as the legal landscape changed. The Agency sought and received multiple written assurances that its methods were lawful. The CIA has a strong record in terms of following legal guidance and informing the Department of Justice of potentially illegal conduct.

I make no judgments on the accuracy of the 2004 IG report or the various views expressed about it. Nor am I eager to enter the debate, already politicized, over the ultimate utility of the Agency’s past detention and interrogation effort. But this much is clear: The CIA obtained intelligence from high-value detainees when inside information on al-Qa’ida was in short supply. Whether this was the only way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute, with Americans holding a range of views on the methods used. The CIA requested and received legal guidance and referred allegations of abuse to the Department of Justice. President Obama has established new policies for interrogation.

The CIA must also keep its focus on the primary responsibility of protecting the country. America is a nation at war. This Agency plays a decisive role in helping the United States meet the full range of security threats and opportunities overseas. That starts with the continuing fight against al-Qa’ida and its sympathizers. There, alongside all its other contributions, the CIA is helping our government chart a new way forward on interrogation, one in keeping with the President’s Executive Order of January 22nd. You, the men and women of this great institution, do the hard work and take the tough risks that intelligence and espionage demand.

I am very proud of what you do, here and abroad, to protect the United States. Your skill, courage, commitment, and focus on mission make the CIA indispensable to the nation. It is a privilege to serve with you.

Leon E. Panetta

In both cases, Ignatius relied on high-level sources from the CIA’s National Clandestine Service to make the best possible case for the Agency. This is neither good reporting nor professional journalism. [See Mr. Goodman's previous columns on David Ignatius' defense of CIA misdeeds here and here.]

Thanks to New York Times reporters, particularly Scott Shane and Mark Mazetti, we are learning more about CIA’s illegal assassination program. Ignatius and the Washington Post either failed to investigate the issue or simply dismissed it based on assurances provided by those at CIA with the most to lose from public exposure. And on Monday, thanks to the work of Attorney General Eric Holder, we should receive additional details of the CIA’s torture program.

Each revelation exposes more about the illegal, immoral, and counter-productive actions of the Bush administration and the CIA over the past eight years. Each revelation demonstrates that CIA has withheld information and sought to cover-up its actions. And each revelation speaks to the need for an accountability investigation that will restore the credibility of the CIA as well as the integrity of American democracy.

Ignatius’ focus is trivial, misguided, and aligned with the perspective of his CIA sources. His expressed concern is that any congressional inquiry or the appointment of a special prosecutor will lead to what he terms “slow rolling” at the CIA. Slow rolling means that Agency officers will “go through the motions…pass cables back and forth; take other jobs outside the danger zone…cover their backsides.” They will “keep their heads down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk.  Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.” This is a recurrent theme, advanced by those seeking to prevent oversight. And it is arrant nonsense. CIA is staffed by professionals who want to conduct their activities in a legal and effective manner.

Both Ignatius and CIA director Panetta have fallen into a trap, failing to understand that accountability would actually boost morale at the CIA. The fact is that previous CIA directors (George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden) had to rely on independent contractors to conduct torture and abuse and to build an assassination program, because too many professional Agency officers refused to take part.

The CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS) did not believe that torture and abuse were either necessary or moral, so Tenet turned to two military retirees who were looking for a business opportunity to sell torture and abuse. The fact that neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had any expertise on al Qaeda, or had any knowledge of terrorism meant nothing to CIA officials.

CIA abandoned the worst of its interrogation techniques in 2004, after CIA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report concluding that torture and abuse had not thwarted any “specific imminent attacks” and OMS advised that the risk to the health of the prisoners outweighed any potential intelligence benefit. Actually, FBI officials and military analysts previously had concluded that torture was “less reliable” than traditional psychological methods, and had warned that it would lead to an intolerable political and public backlash.

The additional fact that CIA had no way of determining which detainees had useful information and which had none almost certainly led to the abuse of low-level or even innocent people. Some or many of these detainees probably provided false “confessions” in an effort to stop the torment.

There is now ample public evidence about the CIA’s renditions, detentions, and interrogations program, but there remains much that is unknown. The job of a serious journalist is to pursue the unknown and shed light on areas of possible wrongdoing. A serious journalist would be trying to learn what was on the 100 hours of torture tapes that CIA operations officers destroyed.  A serious journalist would not rely on sources whose clear agenda is the cover up of their own, possibly illegal, actions.

We would be better off as a nation if journalists such as David Ignatius and congressional leaders such as Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) stopped aiding and abetting CIA’s efforts to cover up its past actions and began to press for genuine reform of the institution. CIA necessarily operates on the edge of the law and in secrecy; it therefore requires strong, constant, and effective oversight from the congress and the press if it is to remain within legal bounds.

Thus far, the nation has benefited from the lawsuits of the American Civil Liberties Union, which have forced the release of government torture documents and the CIA’s IG report from 2004 detailing techniques that violated the Justice Department’s requirements. It has also benefitted from reporting by the New York Times and Warren Stroebel of the McClatchy Newspapers and from the investigation by the OIG. At the very least, Senator Feinstein should make sure that the White House and the CIA appoint another statutory inspector general at the CIA to replace John Helgerson, who announced his retirement more than six months ago. After all, our only comprehensive study on torture and abuse was produced under Helgerson’s leadership five years ago.

Ignatius warns repeatedly that the “sunlight of exposure” will blind our shadow warriors.” The reverse is true. The “sunlight of exposure” will restore the effectiveness of CIA’s “shadow warriors” by providing them a clear understanding of the parameters within which they can operate legally. CIA’s “shadow warriors” are both professional and patriotic; they seek to serve their country by protecting the principles on which it is founded—not by flouting them.

Investigation, public exposure, and accountability will ensure that the activities that have created more terrorists have ended.  They also will restore the credibility of our intelligence services, permit foreign intelligence agencies to cooperative effectively with the CIA, and reverse the damage that has been done to U.S. foreign and national security policy.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Feinstein’s comments were made in response to a report published in the New York Times Wednesday stating that in 2004 the CIA outsourced the assassination program, aimed at targeting al-Qaeda leaders, to security firm Blackwater, now known as Xe, a company whose former chief executive was recently accused of murder. To date, Blackwater has received more than $1.2 billion in government contracts.

She said despite assertions by Republican lawmakers and CIA officials that the program was never operational, it had, “in fact gone beyond the simple planning stage.”

A report published in the Los Angeles Times Thursday said the CIA “delivered a report to Congress earlier this month after conducting an internal probe of the program, which was first launched after the Sept. 11 attacks but was canceled and restarted several times under different regimes at the agency.”

She said it was now “clear” to her that the “failure to notify” Congress about the program, which lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees first learned about in June during a closed-door meeting with CIA Director Leon Panetta, “constituted a violation of law.”

Feinstein is the first lawmaker to state unequivocally that the CIA broke the law by failing to inform Congress about the covert program, which was concealed from Congress for nearly eight years.

While Feinstein would not comment on the specific revelations contained in the New York Times report, she said she has “believed for a long time that the Intelligence Community is over-reliant on contractors to carry out its work. This is especially a problem when contractors are used to carry out activities that are inherently governmental.”

“The program was never briefed to the Congress before June despite a clear requirement in law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed,’” she said.

“That’s a big problem and it should never ever happen again,” Feinstein said. “Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress. If they are not, that is a violation of the law.”

News reports said Panetta told the Intelligence Committee that Vice President Dick Cheney advised the agency not to disclose details of the program to Congress.

Feinstein, whose committee is currently conducting an investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program to determine whether the torture of high-level detainees produced any actionable intelligence, added that her panel has included a provision in the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Bill that “clearly states that there is no exception to the legal requirement to notify Congress.”

In July, the House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation to determine if the CIA violated federal law, “including the National Security Act of 1947″ by withholding details of the program from Congress.

Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes said the probe would be part of a wide-ranging investigation about the way in which the CIA informs Congress about its covert activities and other matters.

Blackwater was reportedly paid millions of dollars to train CIA operatives to assassinate and kill leaders of al-Qaeda, according to reports late Wednesday in the New York Times and Washington Post.

According to the Los Angeles Times report, the CIA “did not have a formal contract with Blackwater in connection with the targeted-killing program. Instead, the agency hired the company’s founder, Erik D. Prince, a former Navy SEAL team member, and other Blackwater executives to help turn an idea for forming Al Qaeda hit squads into an operational program.”

“The effort ranged from consulting with top executives to carrying out training exercises at Blackwater’s headquarters in North Carolina. Company officials did not respond to requests for comment.”

Blackwater has long been the target of Democratic lawmakers over its controversial security and business practices.

Wrongfully Awarded Contracts

In July 2008, the Inspector General of the Small Business Administration (SBA) released a report that said Blackwater misrepresented the size of its firm so it could receive more than $100 million in small business contracts from the federal government.

The report said the mercenary outfit obtained a total of 39 contracts intended for small businesses with annual revenues of $6.5 million between 2005 and 2007. But the report said Blackwater’s revenue surpassed $200 million for those years.

Blackwater “obtained a total of 33 contracts during Fiscal Years 2005 through 2007, totaling $2,188,620, which may have involved misrepresentations to obtain the contract.”

The report also found that “it is possible that misrepresentations took place” on the remaining six contracts, totaling $107,311,356.”

Of the 39 contracts reviewed, 38 were awarded by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs awarded one. The Inspector General’s report says the small business contracts “could have involved potential misrepresentations by Blackwater.

Moreover, the Department of Defense wrongfully awarded Blackwater aviation contracts worth $107 million. That contract was earmarked for companies with annual revenues of less than $25 million or less than 1,500 employees, the report said.

The report was prepared at the request of Congressman Henry Waxman, who at the time was the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Waxman sent a letter in March 2008 to Steven Preseton, the administrator of the Small Business Administration.

“As part of the Oversight Committee’s investigation into the business practices of Blackwater Worldwide, the Committee has obtained evidence indicating that Blackwater may have applied for and received federal contracts by improperly claiming that it was eligible for small business preferences,” Waxman’s March 10, 2008 letter said. “It appears Blackwater sought these small business contracts by improperly designating its security guards as “independent contractors” rather than “employees.”

The Inspector General’s 27-page report released Monday said Blackwater appeared to have improperly classified its guards stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan as independent contracts as opposed to full-fledged employees in order to obtain government contracts.

According to a memo issued by Waxman to Oversight Committee members Monday, “The key issue… was whether personnel hired by Blackwater to provide security services for the Department of State (DOS) and other agencies were Blackwater employees . . . or independent contractors.”

“In claiming it was a small business, Blackwater argued that 1,000 security personnel it provided under the State Department’s $1.2 billion Worldwide Personal Protective Service (WPPS) contract were independent contractors,” Waxman’s memo says. “The [Small Business Administration Inspector General] reports that Blackwater claimed that it “had little or no knowledge of the activities of the security personnel performing the contract and exercised little or no supervision over these personnel once they were deployed.”

The report “concludes that these assertions were incorrect,” Waxman’s memo says.

The Inspector General’s report says “Our review of the WPPS Statement of Work indicates that it contained a number of provisions that appeared to be inconsistent with SBA’s conclusion that Blackwater did not have knowledge about the actions of the personnel once they were deployed.”

Target of Controversy

Last December, five Blackwater security guards were indicted on manslaughter charges over the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. The Iraq government also stripped the company of its security license. The publicity reached such negative proportions that Blackwater sought to reinvent itself under a new name: Xe.

Recently, a Blackwater employee and a former ex-Marine employed by the company in a security capacity said in a sworn affidavit filed Aug. 3 in a federal court in Virginia, that company CEO Erik Prince may have murdered or assisted in the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal law enforcement authorities investigation the company.

The explosive allegations, which also include claims the company was involved in the distribution of controlled substances, tax evasion, child prostitution, were made in a civil lawsuit filed against Blackwater that charges the company with Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) violations.

The company was also under federal investigation and was expected to be slapped with nearly $2 million in fines last Novemeber by the State Department for shipping about 900 weapons to law enforcement facilities in Iraq and Jordan without authorization. The weapons, however, ended up on the black market. It’s unclear whether the company was in fact fined or faced other charges. There does not appear to be additional information available about the weapons smuggling case beyond the reports of expected fines.

Congressional Investigation

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers continue to downplay new reports about the CIA’S assassination program and criticized Panetta’s decision to end the program.

Sen. Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, accused Feinstein and other Democrats of engaging in “partisan, political theater” for launching a probe to determine if the CIA broke the law by not informing Congress about the program.

Today’s Washington Post carries an op-ed by CIA Director Leon Panetta that accuses the congress of seeking “retribution” from CIA officials who were simply implementing “presidential decisions.”

Panetta’s views are similar to those of former director Richard Helms who, in defending the CIA’s role in overthrowing the elected government in Chile, said that “we are all honorable men.”  The following year, Helms was fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended prison sentence for lying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Post and Panetta strongly believe that Washington is too “consumed with what the CIA did in the past” and that it is pointless to pursue “disputes over policies that no longer exist.”  However, these policies and the cover-up of these policies have compromised the objectivity and independence of the CIA.

Objective intelligence is needed to enable policymakers to challenge the polemicists and alarmists who exaggerate the threats to our national security.  One of the most damaging exaggerations was the Bush administration’s drum-beat of fear concerning Iraq’s fictional arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War.

CIA director George Tenet was in a position to at least try to educate the Bush administration with the intelligence that refuted the lies concerning WMD.  Instead, Tenet said that it would be a “slam dunk” to provide the phony intelligence to make the case for war, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, actually delivered the “slam dunk” briefing in the White House in January 2003.

Unfortunately, President Obama has made the journey toward an investigation of torture and abuse more difficult by appointing Panetta as CIA director and John Brennan as deputy director of the National Security Council.  Brennan was a major player in the era of cover-up at the CIA, serving as Tenet’s executive assistant and playing a public role in selling renditions and secret prisons to the media, including the Washington Post.

Panetta, moreover, has retained the ideological drivers of these policies, including Steve Kappes, currently deputy director of the CIA, and Mike Sulick, chief of the National Clandestine Service.  Panetta takes credit in his op-ed for reporting a secret assassination program to the congress, but he has not addressed the fact that Kappes and Sulick kept the program secret from the director for more than four months. All four of these officials tried to stop President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder from releasing the torture memoranda.

Panetta has not named a new Inspector General for the CIA, although the former IG—John Helgerson—announced his retirement more than six months ago.  Instead, Panetta has relied on a weak acting IG who is not up to maintaining the independence of the office of the IG.

President Obama and Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., should find it unacceptable that there is not a statutory IG in place at the CIA at this delicate juncture.  Helgerson’s departure was particularly untimely because he was responsible for the only authoritative study of CIA torture and abuse and detention policies that documented the abuse that started before the Justice Department sanctioned these measures and the torture that exceeded the permitted guidelines.

Panetta correctly argues that the CIA and the intelligence community are America’s first line of defense, but he fails to recognize that the abusive practices of the CIA have made it more difficult for foreign intelligence services to share vital information with their CIA counterparts.

CIA’s detention and interrogation programs were hidden from foreign intelligence services—and from our own congressional intelligence committees—and this has created suspicion and skepticism about CIA actions and assessments. This has complicated the task of maintaining credible relations with our allies in the battle against terrorism and with our congress in its important constitutional role of oversight.

Sadly, Panetta’s op-ed suggests that he is a follower of Stephen Decatur, the naval commander who won a major victory over the Barbary pirates in 1816 and celebrated with these words: “Our country!  In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.”  Panetta would serve the country better if he followed the words of Carl Schurz, a Major General in the Union Army who was elected to the Senate, where he proclaimed: “Our country, right or wrong.  When right, it ought to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.”

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

A week ago, Ignatius argued that it was “just plain nuts” to have an investigation and that CIA operatives would refuse assignments in counterterrorism in the wake of any investigation. What Ignatius doesn’t do is discuss the legal and moral implications of a secret assassination program or the CIA’s tortured history in this field.

The CIA is no stranger to the field of assassination where they have contributed to numerous disasters. Revelations of assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam in the early 1960–at the direction of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations–led to a ban on CIA political assassinations in the mid-1970s. None of these assassination attempts helped U.S. national security interests, and all of them led to increased violence, even terrorism.

An assassination plot against Patrice Lumumba in the Congo led to the emergence of Mobutu Sese Seku, the most evil tyrant in modern African history. CIA’s covert actions against the democratically elected Salvador Allende led to the emergence of Augusto Pinochet.

Ignatius discusses CIA training of a Lebanese assassination team after the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks, but fails to mention the team’s only operation. In 1985, the CIA-trained team set off a car bomb that killed 80 innocent people in Beirut and wounded 200.  The devastation, fires, and collapsed buildings from the bomb killed, hurt, or terrorized anyone who happened to be in the immediate neighborhood.

The target of the bomb, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, escaped without injury, and his supporters placed a “Made in the USA” banner in front of a building that had been blown out. In that same year, despite the ban on political assassination, the CIA demonstrated its contempt for the ban and produced a manual for the Contras that discussed “neutralizing” officials in Nicaragua.

Ignatius does not discuss the Phoenix operation in Vietnam, where the CIA ran a paramilitary campaign of arrest, interrogation, torture, and assassination that targeted many innocent victims. William Colby ran this program from 1968 to 1971 and, when he became CIA director in the mid-1970s, he decided to share sensitive intelligence on the assassination plots with the Church Commission because of his regrets over the Phoenix program.

Nor does Ignatius mention the CIA training of death squads in Central America, including Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. The CIA misled the congress about most of these actions, and we still lack complete information on CIA support for the repressive regime in Guatemala over a forty-year period. All of these activities raised serious questions about the judgment and objectivity of high-ranking CIA officials and demonstrated that these illegal covert activities are addictive to some operational officers.

It is noteworthy that Ignatius relies on his information from retired and active clandestine operatives who seem to have no difficulty in passing sensitive information, including operational code names, to a sympathetic journalist like Ignatius. Three years ago, however, an officer in the Office of the Inspector General was fired and frog-marched out of CIA headquarters for having unauthorized conversations with journalists.

Her name was Mary McCarthy, and she accused senior Agency officials of lying to congress about detentions and interrogations, the very abuses that cause Ignatius no concern. CIA director Leon Panetta must understand that such a double standard exists at the CIA and he should wonder why it took him five months to learn about the secret assassination program. And perhaps he should make sure that a new statutory Inspector General is named at the CIA to replace the one who announced his retirement five months ago.

Even democracies must rely on secret intelligence for their survival, but the role of a secret intelligence agency in a democracy will always be difficult and occasionally controversial. The CIA’s role in torture and abuse, secret prisons, and extraordinary renditions is an example of the illegal and immoral activity that can take place without proper leadership.

These activities must be investigated, and CIA director Panetta was certainly correct to report any assassination program to the congress, even one that had not conducted any assassinations. When the CIA oversteps its moral and legal boundaries, it must be stopped.

Just as illicit CIA actions during the Vietnam War and Iran-contra led to the introduction of reforms, the CIA’s unlawful activities in the wake of the Iraq War must be examined and never repeated. Unfortunately, Ignatius believes that such a period of discovery will weaken the CIA; it is more likely to strengthen the CIA. The creation of a congressional oversight process in the 1970s was an important reform; the creation of a statutory Inspector General in the 1980s was another.

Ignatius may be a Robert Ludlum wannabe, but he should realize that there are no Jason Bournes at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said the probe will be part of a wide-ranging investigation about the way in which the CIA informs Congress about its covert activities and other matters.

Reyes, in announcing the wide-ranging probe Friday, said he had consulted with the panel’s ranking Republican minority leader, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and other committee members. Reyes said he and concluded that an investigation into “possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1947” were warranted. Under that law, the CIA must keep Congress “fully and currently informed” via classified briefings about its intelligence activities.

“This investigation will focus on the core issue of how the congressional intelligence committees and Congress are kept fully and currently informed,” Reyes said. “To this end, the investigation will examine several issues, including the program discussed during Director Panetta’s June 24th notification and whether there was any past decision or direction to withhold information from the Committee.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Friday that her subcommittee will handle some part of the investigation into the CIA’s assassination program, which may have extended beyond al-Qaeda targets, according to veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker.

“Why was there such a high-level determination to keep it secret? And how may it have changed over all these years? And why was it immediately ended as soon as the current CIA director learned of it?” she said, describing the areas of focus for her subcommittee.

Reyes’ aides said the investigation will also delve into the use of torture by CIA interrogators and contractors against alleged “high-level” detainees, the agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, 12 of which depict acts of torture against two prisoners, and the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program.

These aides added that the probe will also look into claims made by former CIA official Mary O. McCarthy, who accused senior agency officials of lying to members of Congress during an intelligence briefing in 2005 when they said the agency did not violate treaties that bar, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees during interrogations, according to a May 14, 2006, front-page story in The Washington Post.

“A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that ‘CIA people had lied’ in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading,” The Washington Post reported.

On the matter of domestic surveillance, Bob Graham, the committee’s former Democratic chairman, said in 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet and National Intelligence Director Michael Hayden (who later headed the CIA) lied to him about the extent of the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance and never provided him with a full and complete briefing.

In an interview with ABC’s “Nightline” on Dec. 15, 2005 – after the New York Times disclosed the existence of the warrantless wiretapping program – Graham said he attended meetings in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office in 2001 and discussed surveillance activities, but added that neither Cheney nor then-National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden spoke about a plan to spy on Americans. (CIA Director George Tenet also took part in the meeting.)

“The issue was whether we could intercept foreign communications when they transited through U.S. communication sites,” Graham said. “The assumption was that if we did that, we would do it pursuant to the law, the law that regulates the surveillance of national security issues. …

“There was no suggestion that we were going to begin eavesdropping on United States citizens without following the full law. There was no reference made to the fact that we were going to use that as the subterfuge to begin unwarranted, illegal — and I think unconstitutional — eavesdropping on American citizens.”

Graham suggested that Cheney and the intelligence officials had lied to him and other members of congressional intelligence panels.

Cheney and other Bush administration officials – aided by Republican lawmakers – responded to Graham’s comments with a fierce counterattack. In another “Nightline” interview on Dec. 18, 2005, Cheney said Graham, as well as other members of Congress knew that the administration intended to spy on the phone calls of some Americans.

“He knew,” Cheney said. “I sat in my office with Gen. Hayden, who was then the head of NSA, who’s now the deputy director of the National Intelligence Directorate, and he [Graham] was briefed as long as he was chairman of the committee, or ranking member of the committee.”

Last week, an unclassified report prepared by inspectors general of five federal agencies said George W. Bush’s surveillance program was far more expansive than his administration had publicly revealed and that much of it was concealed from Congress.

The issue of the CIA’s use of torture and whether the agency fully informed top lawmakers on the Senate and House intelligence committees in 2002 and 2003 about techniques used against “high-level” detainees was called into question a few months back when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed she was never told that the CIA tortured prisoners at secret “black site” prisons using methods such as waterboarding.

But a CIA document turned over in May to Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking minority member, that contained the dates and a summary of the briefings given to a select group of congressional leaders, including Pelosi as well as Graham, about “EIT’s” or “enhanced interrogation techniques…employed” against “high-value” detainees.

Republicans seized upon the document as a way of showing that Democrats were complicit in the Bush administration’s torture program by not raising objections to the use of specific interrogation methods when they were briefed.

But the briefing document turned over to Hoekstra was rife with errors. Three of the four dates in which the CIA said it had briefed Graham don’t match his records.

“When I asked the CIA when was I briefed, they gave me four dates, two in April and two in September of ‘02. On three of the four occasions, when I consulted my schedule and my notes, it was clear that no briefing had taken place, and the CIA eventually concurred in that. So their record keeping is a little bit suspect,” Graham said.

One of the disputed dates for a briefing on interrogations – in April 2002 – fell in the same month as one of the supposed briefings on surveillance. In both cases, Graham said no briefings took place.

Moreover, Graham said he was not told about the CIA’s torture techniques, which the agency’s records claim were explained to Graham and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama.

The CIA document also alleged that Pelosi was given a full accounting of the torture program, but Pelosi said in May that the CIA briefers obscured the fact that the agency already had begun subjecting prisoners to the near-drowning of waterboarding and was using other torture techniques.

The CIA also erred in 2006 when a four-page memo from Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte was turned over to Congress several that contained the dates lawmakers were briefed about the surveillance program, briefings that began shortly after President George W. Bush signed a highly classified executive order that removed some legal restrictions against spying on US. citizens.

The memo contained four dates that alleged Graham – along with Pelosi, then ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and their Republican counterparts, Rep. Porter Goss and Shelby – were briefed on Oct. 25, 2001, Nov. 14, 2001, April 10, 2002, and July 8, 2002. A cover letter accompanying Negroponte’s letter said the briefings took place at the White House.

But Graham, who famously keeps a detailed journal of his daily schedule, said he checked those dates against his own records, which revealed no briefings on Oct. 25, 2001 and April 10, 2002. The memo had claimed Graham was the only lawmaker briefed on April 10, 2002. On July 8, 2002, the document said Graham and Shelby were briefed.

“When I got those dates, I went back to my notebooks and checked and found that on most of the dates there were no meetings held,” Graham said in September 2007. “In fact, in several of them, I wasn’t in Washington when the meetings were supposed to have taken place. So I stand by what I said.”

Graham said he did attend briefings on the two other dates but he told the Washington Post “there was no discussion of anything [about spying on Americans' telephone calls] in the meeting with Cheney.”

“I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy,” Graham said.

Briefing lawmakers last month about a covert CIA assassination program that was recently shut down, CIA Director Panetta said it was Cheney who ordered the agency not to inform Congress about the covert activity for eight years, according to several lawmakers, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, and numerous media reports.

Last week, after attempts to get Panetta to change a statement he made in May in which he said it was not the CIA’s “policy or practice to mislead Congress” failed, Reyes and other Democrats on the intelligence committee publicly released a letter they sent the CiA director characterizing his briefing to them.

The letter was sent by Reyes to Hoekstra and other top lawmakers on the intelligence panel. It said CIA officials “affirmatively lied” to the panel, presumably about the assassination program, and misinformed the committee about on numerous occasions about other intelligence matters.

Republicans, including Hoekstra, said Democrats were trying to cover for Pelosi’s accusations that the CIA lied to her. On Friday, Hoekstra said neither he nor his Republican colleagues would support an investigation into the CIA.

“At no time will the Republicans of this committee agree to or take part in congressional Democrats efforts to tear down the CIA to provide cover for Speaker Pelosi,” Hoekstra said in a statement Friday.

However, the committee will also probe accusations that the CIA lied to Congress, as revealed in an agency watchdog report, about the shooting down of an airplane over Peru in 2001 carrying American missionaries. Hoekstra was the lawmaker who accused the CIA of lying to Congress about the incident, a fact that he has since distanced himself from.