Bruce Fein

Bruce Fein concludes his new book, American Empire: Before the Fall, by demolishing the worldview of Henry Kissinger as expressed in a Washington Post column last year.

Of course it’s also the worldview of the Washington Post and many of its readers: We must continue wars to save face. We must imagine we can win wars because facing defeat is too painful. We must talk about winning hearts and minds while increasing the bombings. We must plow ahead at full speed to demonstrate our determination, regardless of what it is we’ve determined to do.

Having played a leading role in a massive and historical defeat (and crime) using this approach, Kissinger’s wisdom is naturally widely sought. But Fein’s wisdom in taking him down — in a chapter and a book that really should be read by all Americans — draws on a longer historical view.

Fein is a conservative, in the sense of wanting to return in certain ways to an earlier America, specifically the one that existed before we had an empire. Fein refutes Kissinger’s fear mongering by building on the examples of the same that he has chronicled in earlier chapters.

Fein’s America is built on four documents: the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, President George Washington’s farewell address, and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ July 4, 1821, address.

Washington said: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Fein says: “What national security sense does it make for the United States to defend Croatia if it were attacked by Serbia over a border dispute, or by Russia as an ally of Serbia? If Croatia were swallowed by either, the effect on the liberty, safety, or welfare of Americans would be submicroscopic. Croatia, moreover, can contribute nothing to deterring or retaliating against an attack on the United States.”

How selfish! Should we just sit by while Nazis kill people? Don’t we have a responsibility to intervene militarily?

Fein thinks not, and thinks our nations’ founders thought not: “Liberty stands at the apex of the Constitution. But the Founding Fathers knew with a certainty that the liberties of American citizens would be crippled by any attempt to spread freedom abroad through military force. That mission would concentrate all power in the President and subordinate every liberty to national security clamors.”

Fein paints a portrait of America, the early years, including a Congress that stood up for itself against presidents, and a Congress that refused to launch wars of foreign conquest.

“She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” said Quincy Adams of America. Fein pinpoints the House vote to censure President James Polk for lying the country into a war with Mexico as “the last serious protest” against presidential imperialism.

Fein claims that the Mexican-American war was “the first occasion when American leaders wielded military power for the sake of domination.” This obviously ignores the slaughter of Native Americans, not to mention other escapades including the War of 1812, which was declared by Congress but was nonetheless driven by more than self-defense.

However, Fein is focused on the presidential acquisition of war powers, as he should be — as we all should be. After all, people can sometimes influence the Congress, and it is presidents who acquire power through war.

Fein chronicles various wars that presidents have lied our country into. But what about, at least the theoretical possibility of, wars of humanitarianism?

“Morality,” Fein writes, “even the prevention of genocide — is a constitutionally illicit reason for initiating warfare. . . . That does not suggest, however, that individuals representing only themselves might not be acclaimed for volunteering to fight for freedom abroad on behalf of oppressed peoples. The constitutional transgression arises when the United States government coerces or otherwise employs its citizens to fight in wars that are irrelevant to American sovereignty.”

Of course, oppressed groups tend to be labeled terrorists by the U.S. government, and providing them “material assistance” is now an offense punishable by endless imprisonment, but Fein’s goal is to eliminate such practices along with the wars that are used to justify them.

Fein takes on the argument that our nation has an interest in other nations practicing democracy, by demonstrating that democracies launch as many wars as any other countries. And, of course, wars do not tend to produce democracies.

Fein addresses the supposed need to fight wars for resources by pointing out and documenting that “neither the United States nor any other country has ever been denied access to strategic materials or trade by so-called ‘enemies’.”

But Fein addresses the moral argument only by shifting it to a legal one. What if it were legal to fight wars for humanitarian purposes? I think the moral argument leads to a position that lines up closely with Fein on U.S. wars of benevolence but parts with his position on something else: the United Nations.

The United States has proven time and time again that humanitarian justifications for war are, in its hands, purely justifications for something else entirely. Clearly the people of the world would be better off if all wars were forbidden, at least until a truly representative and truly international government were able to produce something that could honestly be called a police action.

Which brings us to the United Nations. Fein would eliminate it, all of it, on the grounds that it violates the U.S. Constitution in granting presidents the power to go to war on the authorization of the UN Security Council without a declaration of war from Congress. Fein’s Exhibit 1: The Korean War.

But the UN Charter does not say a president has the power to make war, and blaming the UN Charter for presidential power-grabs and congressional subservience is too easy. That’s a fight between presidents and congresses.

Nor do I think that such a defect in one chapter of the UN Charter, if it existed, would be grounds for scrapping the United Nations entirely. The United Nations rightly opposed the launching of our wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Its primary deficiency is in a lack of independent power, not in any conflict with the U.S. Constitution.

Elsewhere, Fein tosses “regulation,” “protectionism,” “welfare programs,” and making “people financially dependent on government” into his lists of imperial evils, without explanation or elaboration.

And while he would end all wars of aggression, Fein favors a form of defense that sounds more like retaliation than defense: The United States “should . . . threaten destruction worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki to any country that attacks or begins an attack against the American people.”

And for non-state actors, Fein favors secret assassination squads, as long as they are approved by Congress and later made public.

I highlight all of these areas of possible disagreement in order to say that, nonetheless, I would trade the government we have for Fein’s in a heartbeat. I may oppose assassination squads, but I — like Fein — would accept them as a substitute for war without hesitation.

And if Americans had any notion of what war means, all such discussions would take on a very different form. As it is, people who cheered for Fein when he spoke in support of impeaching George W. Bush will now denounce him for disagreeing with the same abuses of power when engaged in by Barack Obama.

Having been established as an enemy of Obama, not to mention Social Security and healthcare, Fein will be lumped with the Teabaggers and forgotten there by millions of well-meaning people. But we ignore Fein’s warnings at our own peril, and that of the rest of humanity.

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press.  You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

They have supported the use of military force in Iraq and Afghanistan; offered apologies for the CIA crimes of torture and abuse, extraordinary renditions, and secret prisons; and criticized efforts by the Obama Administration to reverse these policies and to rely on multilateral diplomacy and arms control and disarmament to resolve outstanding problems. The key writer in Hiatt’s stable has been David Ignatius, who is this year’s winner of the WashPost/Compost Award for the most incomprehensible and fanciful op-ed of 2009.

Ignatius’ winning op-ed was written last month. He sought to justify U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan that, he says, will lead to a “sovereign Pakistan that controls all its territory”; a “future common market between Pakistan and Afghanistan that can power economic development in both countries”; and a “stable structure for Central and South Asia in the 21st century.”

Ignatius believes that, just as the Mexican-American War “helped make the United States a continental nation” and the European wars of the 19th century “helped unify Germany and Italy,” the Af-Pak wars will stabilize a lawless tribal region that has been in turmoil for 150 years. There is no Afghan or Pakistani leader who genuinely believes that the current strife can lead to stabilization.

Indeed, there are few Afghan and Pakistani leaders who understand all the roles being played by Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda, various tribal leaders, and the Pakistani intelligence services, which have played key clandestine roles in multiple crises that have affected Kabul, Delhi, and Islamabad. If the local actors can’t comprehend all the major factions, U.S. leaders (and commentators) are not likely to do better.

Ignatius brings an unusual ignorance to the subject of Pakistan, which he treats as a normal nation-state. In reality, Pakistan is an artificial political entity that has long been both dysfunctional and unstable. In their partition of South Asia in 1947, the British hoped to create one region (Pakistan) that would provide military facilities to Britain. To accomplish this, the British merged five key ethnic groups that had never co-existed in the same body politic historically, according to Selig Harrison, a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy.

The Bengalis were the largest ethnic group, outnumbering the other four: the Punjabis, the Pashtuns, the Baluch, and the Sindhis. The Bengalis seceded in 1971, forming the independent state of Bangladesh. The Punjabis now outnumber the Pashtuns, Baluch, and Sindhis, but the three smaller groups have ancestral claims to more than 70% of Pakistani territory, ensuring continued ethnic and tribal strife.

The essential instability of the Pakistani state and the continued military conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan will make it impossible to create the network of institutions that Ignatius believes can “create a stable structure for Central and South Asia in the 21st century.” He wants unidentified American and Pakistani “statesmen” to “show the same vision and maturity” that post-World War II American and European statesmen used to create the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

These international institutions were born during WWII, however, in an effort to restore international order and prosperity at a time when the U.S. economy was booming and could finance postwar recovery and ensure currency stability. American leaders had a good understanding of the political and economic problems of Western and Central Europe; in contrast, U.S. leaders are basically ignorant about the frontier along the Afghan-Pakistani border and the tribal wastelands of Southwest Asia. The World Bank and the IMF have had their successes, but they have never been able to create positive economic development among the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world; both Afghanistan and Pakistan are key members of this unfortunate group.

Finally, Ignatius believes the U.S. buildup of troops in Afghanistan is the key to securing Pakistan’s control over its lawless tribal region. In fact, Pakistan understands that additional U.S. forces in Afghanistan will lead to increased warfare on the Afghan-Pakistan border and will ultimately drive more militants into Pakistani territory in Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier Provinces.

The suicide bombing of a CIA base along the border and the wave of bombings that have swept Pakistan over the past several months, including the eastern city of Lahore, are a reaction to the increased U.S. use of unmanned drone aircraft in Pakistani territory against al Qaeda and the Taliban. U.S. efforts to bolster border security in Afghanistan may well complicate the overall security situation in Pakistan. Moreover, the Obama Administration’s announcement of a troop buildup in Afghanistan, along with a timeline for withdrawal, presumably have emboldened both al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Pakistan has been masterful at playing off U.S. international anxieties in order to gain increased political and economic support. In the 1950s, the Pakistanis were handsomely rewarded for offering bases to U-2 spy aircraft; in the 1960s and 1970s, the Pakistanis received significant military and economic assistance for providing U.S. leaders with a clandestine entry into China to prepare President Richard Nixon’s summit meeting with Mao Tse-tung; in the 1980s, the United States overlooked Pakistan’s new nuclear weapons program in order to protect clandestine aid shipments to the Mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan; currently, the United States is so frightened by these same nuclear weapons that it is willing to overlook the myriad games that Pakistan is playing at our expense.

Goodness gracious, David Ignatius, why don’t these geopolitical realities register with you?

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. 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 Ground-Based Interceptor missile is tested near Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in December 2008. Photo: Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency

For the past several months, the editorial and oped writers of the Washington Post have railed against Russia as expansionist and assertive toward the West and have argued against improving bilateral relations between the United States and Russia.

President Barack Obama’s plan to scrap a proposed anti-ballistic missile shield in East Europe has given them a new hobby horse to ride. In an editorial titled “Missile Strike,” the opinion writers predictably excoriated President Obama’s decision to scrap the shield as a concession to Kremlin hardliners who “implausibly claimed to feel threatened” by U.S. interceptors and radars.

These writers ignore three fundamental facts that have nothing to do with Russia: the unproven anti-ballistic missile system could not distinguish between an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and a decoy; Iran is not working on an ICBM; and the notion of an Iranian threat to Europe is purely fanciful.

They also fail to mention that the East European countries that were to accept the missile interceptors and radars (Poland and the Czech Republic) never expressed concerns with Iran’s capabilities and intentions and were never concerned with missile defense. In fact, public opinion in the Czech Republic was overwhelmingly opposed to taking part in the program, and the government of prime minister Mirek Topolanek toppled after agreeing to do so.

The Post writers also ignored Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admission last week that the radar for the Czech Republic “looked deep into Russia and actually could monitor the launches of their ICBMs as well.” Gates was the first U.S. official to acknowledge that the radar would be able to see as far as the Caucasus Mountains inside Russia.

In addition to their own editorial, the Post ran two opeds that reified the paper’s position. Ronald Asmus, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, criticized the United States for preventing NATO from stationing its military forces in Central and East Europe.

Such a step would have been a gratuitous swipe at Russia. Asmus also ignored U.S. sponsorship of NATO membership for former members of the Warsaw Pact, a gratuitous act that betrayed former secretary of state James Baker’s commitment to avoid “leapfrogging” over East Germany to recruit new members for NATO. Baker’s commitment was part of the unwritten agreement that led Moscow to withdraw its military forces from East Germany. This withdrawal paved the way for the unification of Germany and the membership of a unified Germany in NATO.

The Post followed up with an oped from David Kramer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration, who called President Obama’s decision a “capitulation to Russian pressure” that marked a “serious betrayal of loyal allies in Warsaw and Prague.”

Both Kramer and Asmus are with the German Marshall Fund of the United States; they are major opponents of arms control with Russia. Accordingly, they do not mention that the scrapping of the missile shield of the Bush administration would improve the prospects for U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations that are currently underway. These negotiations could produce significant reductions in strategic and intercontinental missiles—a positive step for both countries as well as for West and East Europe.

The New York Times, on the other hand, termed Obama’s actions a “sound strategic decision” in an editorial titled “Missile Sense.”  Nevertheless, the Times followed up with an oped from Secretary of Defense Gates, who took credit for both the U.S. decision in 2006 to deploy ground-based interceptors in Poland as well as the U.S. decision in 2009 to discard the Bush administration’s plan for a missile shield.

In an incredible exercise in bureaucratic chutzpah, Gates, who politicized intelligence for the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, said he was “all too familiar with the pitfalls of over-reliance on intelligence assessments that can become outdated.” Gates, the self-described “pragmatist,” certainly knows of what he speaks.

Before genuine pragmatists, progressives, and arms control advocates chortle over the decision of the Obama administration, however, several facts should be kept in mind. In stopping the missile shield technology for East Europe that was nowhere near ready and would have directed $5 billion to the Boeing Corporation, the Obama administration has endorsed dozens of interceptors for U.S. ships in the North and Mediterranean Seas in 2011 as well as interceptors for West and East Europe in 2015 that will direct $5 billion to the Raytheon and Lockheed corporations.

The Iranian threat may be non-existent and the missile shield unproven, but the military-industrial-congressional complex has triumphed once again. The United States has spent more than $100 billion over the past 50 years in its pursuit of a national missile defense. So much for pragmatism!

Our only hope at this point is that someone in the Obama administration will read or reread President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961. Eisenhower, who prevented the unnecessary spending of precious dollars on unnecessary weapons systems, described the Pentagon’s pursuit of taxpayer money as “virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”

He also expressed concern to his granddaughter that future presidents, not schooled in military culture, would fall prey to the military’s insatiable pursuit of such systems.

Unfortunately, his concern was prescient as one naïve or willful president after another has caved to U.S. military’s demands.

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.

And later this month, we will learn whether he will commit more young men and women to a losing battle in Afghanistan, which is rapidly becoming President Obama’s briar patch. Meanwhile, nothing has changed at home, where the armchair warriors of the mainstream media are campaigning for more troops and a greater commitment to “winning.”

Sadly, nothing has changed in Afghanistan, where Afghan civilians are being killed in NATO bombing raids that continue to demonstrate a cavalier attitude toward protecting the innocent from U.S. fighter planes. And yesterday we learned that U.S. soldiers stormed through an Afghan hospital, searching for wounded Taliban fighters and tying up hospital staff and visitors.

We were led to believe several months ago that the change in U.S. commanders in Afghanistan was due primarily to making sure our military power more responsibly and to avoid “collateral damage” in order to “win hearts and minds.”

The late Supreme Court justice Hugo Black believed that “paramount among the responsibilities of a free press was the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shots and shells.” Seven years ago, however, many elements of the mainstream media helped build a consensus for war against Iraq based on falsified intelligence and devious claims about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to terrorism.

The day after Secretary of State Colin Powell’s calumnious speech to the United Nations making the case for war, the editorial and oped writers of the Washington Post seconded the motion and called for immediate military action. Even the most liberal Post writer, the late Mary McGrory, wrote an oped titled “I’m Persuaded,” which failed to analyze the dubious claims put forth by Powell’s speechwriters at the Central Intelligence Agency, led by CIA Director George Tenet and deputy director John McLaughlin.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

Once again, the editorial and oped writers of the Post are making the case for an expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Armchair warriors such as Richard Cohen and Anne Applebaum in Tuesday’s

Post as well as David Ignatius and Michael Gerson in recent weeks have made their pitches for war. Cohen, who is neither a student of national security nor foreign policy and regularly beat the war drums for Iraq, makes the simplest and most simple-minded argument in an oped titled “Eight Years Later and Still No Revenge.”

His column used the word “revenge” six times and provides no other reason for an expanded military conflict that will cost great amounts of blood and

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum.

treasure with no real chance for success.  Applebaum simplisticly believes it is up to Obama to “cajole and convince, to produce plans and evidence, to show he has gathered the best people and the most resources possible—to campaign, in other words, and campaign hard.” She presents no reasons for any of this and has reduced the difficult decisions of war vs. peace to ordinary politics and politicking.

Gerson, the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, simply believes that we have “no choice but to try,” and Ignatius opts for the so-called “middle way,” which demands that we “bolster our friends and bloody our enemies enough that, somewhere down the road, we can cut a deal.” Gerson and Ignatius provide platitudes and bromides without addressing the essential question of whether Afghanistan (impoverished, landlocked Afghanistan) is a vital U.S. national interest that demands more American lives.

They provide no discussion of the impossible logistics situation that we face; no discussion of the impossibility of nation building where there has never been a genuine “nation;” no discussion of the Pakistan sanctuary and Pakistan support for the Taliban. (Post editorial writers would benefit greatly from reading the excellent reporting of their own staff writer in Southwest Asia, Rajiv Chandrasekaran before offering their chauvinistic opinions.)

But the Wall Street Journal, again like the run-up to the Iraq War, takes first place in making the case for an expanded war in Afghanistan. Unlike the Post, the Wall Street Journal actually turns to oped writers Michael O’Hanlon and Bruce Riedel, who have wide experience in the national security arena. Reidel, in fact, chaired President Obama’s review of Afghan and Pakistani policy.

They base their case on six factors that make little sense and, in some cases, are counter-factual: the “Afghan people want success” (what does that mean?); “Afghans are still largely pro-American” (we are talking about one of the most xenophobic countries in the world); the “Afghan Army is reasonably effective” (pure fiction); the “Afghan police show some hope” (more fiction); the “economy is better” (we are talking about one of the most impoverished and tribalized countries in the world); and the “elections were not all bad” (numerous villages turned out unanimous “votes” for President Hamid Karzai in places where no one actually voted). O’Hanlon and Reidel conclude that “our strategy is not perfect yet” but some quick fixes will find “results” in 12-18 months.

Unfortunately, President Obama has not “gathered the best people” to deal with this problem and certainly doesn’t have the “most resources possible.” His national security team has little experience in foreign policy decision-making, let alone the difficult geopolitical terrain of Southwest Asia.

His leading policy adviser (General James Jones) and his leading intelligence advisers (Admiral Dennis Blair and Leon Panetta) were never known for profound thinking on national security; his secretary of state (Hillary Clinton) was chosen for domestic political reasons and has never demonstrated wisdom on tricky foreign policy matters; and his secretary of defense (Robert Gates) was also chosen for domestic political reasons and has already waffled on the question of more troops in Afghanistan (just as he did on the so-called troop surge in Iraq in the winter of 2006-2007).

The weakness of this team is one of the reasons why Obama has been slow to make serious policy initiatives on Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the Middle East peace process, which beg for high-level U.S. intervention.

President Bush invaded Iraq six years ago when there was no connection whatsoever between that country and American national, let alone vital, interests and now President Obama is prepared to commit greater forces and resources to Afghanistan where there is no connection between that country and American vital interests. Our only concern should be making sure that al Qaeda or some other international terrorist force does not gain a safe haven in Afghanistan; it does not require a large-scale troop presence to achieve that mission.

Sea-based air power and air bases in the Persian Gulf could contain any government in Afghanistan, even a Taliban one, and disrupt al Qaeda operations and facilities there. It’s time to join the contrarian voices in asking the president not to draw the U.S. defense perimeter at the Hindu Kush.

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.

A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard

It only took 24 hours for the Washington Post to go from the sublime to the ridiculous.

On Saturday morning, the newspaper described the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Muhammad (KSM), standing before “U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called ‘terrorist tutorials.’”

KSM “discussed a wide variety of subjects, including Greek philosophy and al-Qaeda dogma” and even “scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture. He’d even use a chalkboard at times.”

Presumably the audience of high-level operatives was hooded or masked to prevent KSM’s recognition, which would explain the poor note-taking.  But there is no excuse for not paying attention to a man who was waterboarded 183 times.

On the other hand, since KSM told the International Committee of the Red Cross that he provided “a lot of false information” during the “harshest period of my interrogation,” perhaps it was wise to be inattentive even in front of the CIA’s “preeminent source,” according to the Post. [See my column, “Washington Post Provides a One-Sided Account of Torture and Abuse,” August 29, 2009]

Post reporters Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate, however, should be credited with the fact that they never once used the word “torture” in their article. Dick Cheney would have approved.

On Sunday, however, the Washington Post turned from solemn reporting to outright humor. In a page-two article, Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick discussed sagging morale at the CIA due to the release of the 2004 IG report on CIA detention and interrogation, basing their views primarily on the remarks of A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the implementation of the policy of torture and abuse.

“Buzzy,” by the way, is the brother of Howard “Cookie” Krongard, the former State Department Inspector General, who blocked investigations of contractor fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush White House had Karl Rove and Scooter Libby; the State Department and the CIA had Cookie and Buzzy, respectively.

I imagine that few readers of the mainstream media have heard of the Krongard brothers and, since I first met them on the asphalt basketball courts of Baltimore nearly 50 years ago, perhaps I should fill in the blanks on the Washington Post’s key source. Pincus and Warrick describe Krongard as a “retired CIA officer,” which of course he isn’t. Krongard never had his finger on the pulse of the CIA workforce, although he did have an impact on morale when CIA director Porter Goss suggested to Buzzy that he should leave the Agency after his six-year “career.” When Buzzy left, morale zoomed skyward.

CIA director George Tenet brought Krongard into the Agency and told Newsweek that “Buzzy is perfect. He’s my right hand.” (Remember that Tenet called his deputy, John McLaughlin, who drafted Secretary of State Colin Powell’s fraudulent speech to the UN in 2003, the “smartest man I’ve ever met). Tenet admired the tough-talking Krongard, who liked guns, fought sharks, and did all the martial arts.  Krongard owns a Walther PPK pistol, James Bond’s handgun of choice in the 1960s.

As one CIA insider noted, Buzzy “talks tough, but he’s never been there.” At Alex. Brown & Co., a Baltimore-based investment firm, Krongard told his troops to dress casually and hang out in bars patronized by industry executives in order to catch unguarded comments. Perhaps he had “been there” after all. In any event, Krongard is the only Agency official who believes that “we’re better off with Osama bin Laden at large,” because if something happened to him “you might find a lot of people vying for his position and demonstrating how macho they are by unleashing a stream of terror.”

Buzzy became Tenet’s executive director in 2001; Buzzy’s deputy was John Brennan, the Agency’s cheerleader for secret prisons and renditions, who President Barack Obama hoped to make director of CIA. When Buzzy left, his successor was Dusty Foggo, who is currently serving a three-year prison sentence for bribery and fraud, making him the highest-ranking CIA official convicted of a federal felony.

Buzzy and Dusty, such harmless-sounding sobriquets, were harsh critics of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and big supporters of CIA director Michael Hayden’s investigation of the OIG.  And Buzzy was particularly dismissive of any criticism of Hayden’s investigation: “The perception is like in a police department between street cops and internal affairs.” In fact, Buzzy wanted to stop OIG investigations of CIA secret prisons, renditions, and detentions.

It is particularly noteworthy that Buzzy left CIA and immediately joined the board of Blackwater, which was only fair in view of the fact that Krongard gave Blackwater its first Agency contract.  Krongard was joined by J. Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center, which negotiated the assassination program with Blackwater. Black eventually became the vice chair of Blackwater and ran Total Intelligence Solution, which was Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s private CIA.

Jeremy Scahill, our leading expert on Blackwater, has reasonably asked the congressional intelligence committees to investigate high-ranking intelligence officials such as Black and Krongard, who take their knowledge, contacts, and access to Beltway Bandits such as Blackwater. Editorials and opeds in the Washington Post, by the way, have pooh-poohed the significance of the assassination program because “no one was killed.”

Once again the word “torture” never appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post article. Cheney must be happy with the editorial policy at the Post.

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.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was photographed shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

The lead story in today’s Washington Post, headlined “How a Detainee Became An Asset,” provides a one-sided and distorted account of the torture and abuse of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM) and demonstrates the urgent need for a blue ribbon bipartisan commission to create a comprehensive and authoritative narrative of the eight years of misgovernment of the Bush administration.

The prosecution of low-level CIA officials and government contractors for resorting to torture and abuse beyond the sordid guidelines of the Justice Department will allow the major players of the Bush administration as well as the lawyers of the Justice Department to escape retribution and judgment. Since President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would never be held accountable, the entire nation would be better served by a full understanding of the war crimes that they authorized in our name.

Today’s article argues that the techniques of torture and abuse turned KSM into the CIA’s “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda. Citing an intelligence assessment by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which was presumably prepared for Vice President Cheney, the Post article argues that waterboarding was the key to breaking KSM’s spirit and eliciting valuable intelligence on the “inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology, and operatives.”

This view contradicts the findings of the authoritative 2004 report on detainees and interrogations of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) as well as the personal views of the Inspector General (IG) himself.

As the Post acknowledges, John Helgerson, the former IG who commissioned the 2004 study, said that the work of the OIG did not permit “definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods.” Helgerson acknowledged that waterboarding and sleep deprivation “elicited a lot of information,” but the OIG didn’t “do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out.”

As a result, Helgerson recommended (but the Post article chose to omit) the creation of an independent panel of experts to “systematically evaluate the quality of the intelligence gained as related to the specific techniques used, or not used, in particular cases. This would clarify the value of the information and the utility of various approaches.” This recommendation was one of ten recommendations in the 2004 IG report; unfortunately, the Justice Deparment (presumably due to the importuning of the CIA) chose to redact all ten IG recommendations from the declassified report.

There is ample testimony to challenge the view that torture and abuse worked. There were FBI agents at the site where KSM was held who testified that torture and abuse didn’t lead to eliciting valuable intelligence. And a CIA operative has noted that KSM was willing to talk before being tortured, noting that “tea and crumpets” were all that was needed. The former head of U.S. Army intelligence, Gen. John Kimmons, remarked in 2006 that “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that.

I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.” And more recently, several veteran FBI and military interrogators called for an investigation of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT),” because of their concerns about the legality, morality, and effectiveness of EITs.

It is important to remember that the 2004 IG report emphatically stated that the information elicited by torture and abuse “did not uncover any evidence that [any] plots were imminent.” Other CIA memoranda stated that information gained from detainees led to “arrests [that] disrupted attack plans in progress,” but did not attribute this information to the use of torture and abuse.

The IG study could not even determine if the 83 waterboardings given to Abu Zubaydah were the reason for his increased willingness to talk. The study noted, moreover, that torture was contrary to the Eighth Amendment against “cruel and unusual punishments;” the 1984 UN Torture Convention, which the United States took the lead in drafting and ratifying; and domestic law.

Finally, it is more important to remember that torture and abuse are evil.  Illegal, immoral, counter-productive, but most importantly evil. George Bush told a press conference in 2005 that “this country does not believe in torture,” but the fact is we conducted torture on those who were guilty and those who were innocent.

And Dick Cheney, who has fanatically been waging his own personal jihad in defense of torture and abuse, told Fox News in an interview that will air tomorrow that CIA interrogators were justified in exceeding even the broad authorizations provided by the Justice Department, suggesting that the ends justify the means. Perhaps the Washington Post could give front-page coverage to the 18-page memorandum that the CIA gave to the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2004, which provides extraordinary details of the interrogations in plain, but sordid and sadistic, language.

Two years ago, then CIA director Michael Hayden released a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detailed domestic spying, assassination plots, and other CIA misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s. In releasing the documents, known as the “family jewels,” Hayden told a group of historians who had been pressing for greater disclosure from the Agency, that the documents provided a “glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.” He also stated that, when the government withholds information, myth and misinformation “fill the vacuum like a gas.”

In order to prevent the Washington Post and others from adding to the myths and misinformation of torture and abuse, it is time to appoint a blue ribbon commission to study all aspects of the CIA’s detentions and interrogations policies.

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.

Today, one day after the release of the 2004 CIA inspector general report that documented the use of torture and abuse, a Post editorial actually claimed that “it’s impossible to say, on the basis of information made public so far, whether prosecution is warranted” and that, since the Bush Justice Department already declined prosecution, it would be “unsettling” to pursue even those CIA operatives who used “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” techniques.

The Post is willing to exonerate these operatives because they were “clamoring” constantly for guidance about what it should and should not do; in fact, CIA director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin were more interested in protection than guidance.

On Monday, the paper went judge-shopping in the courthouse and published an oped by Jeffrey H. Smith, who is a well-known lawyer with

Jeffrey H. Smith served as General Counsel of the CIA from May 1995 to September 1996.

Arnold & Porter, one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms, and the CIA general counsel from 1995-1996.  Smith created the most fatuous argument of all for not prosecuting the interrogators and apparently has no understanding of the Nuremberg Laws, which declared that following orders was no defense and that crimes committed by individuals for state purposes were the responsibility of individuals and were punishable under law.

Smith concedes that “we lost our bearings” after the 9/11 attacks and “squandered our credibility,” but fails to acknowledge the sordid and sadistic activities that the nation sponsored and the CIA implemented.  His six reasons range from the disingenuous to the downright unconscionable.

Reason #1: The CIA techniques were authorized by the president, approved by the Justice Department, and briefed to the proper congressional committees.  Since the techniques were “legal,” it will be “very difficult” to pursue prosecutions. The fact is we simply don’t know if all techniques were actually authorized, which is a major reason for an investigation, and the Justice Department is emphasizing those techniques that went beyond authorization.  The level of difficulty of the prosecution is not a reason to stand down in this case, particularly since U.S. laws and Constitutional amendments were broken.  The fact that high-level CIA officials destroyed the torture tapes suggests that there were actions that went beyond the Bush administration’s mandate and that sordid and sadistic acts were committed.

Reason #2: Since the CIA provided its 2004 report to the Justice Department and the department refused to prosecute any CIA officers, it would be “dangerous to settle policy difference at the expense of career officers. This, of course, is arrant nonsense!  Bush’s Justice Department was a politicized government agency that has come under intense scrutiny because of its handling of the firing of U.S. attorneys as well as issues related to interrogation policy.  The decisions on the 2004 report were made by prosecutors and lawyers who reported to a politically-appointed assistant in the Attorney General’s office.  John Ashcroft was the attorney general and he lied to congressional committees.

Reason #3: After the Justice Department declined to prosecute, the CIA took administrative action, including disciplinary action against those officers whose conduct it deemed warranted such responses. This is a misinformed statement or an outright lie!  No high-level Agency official has suffered as a result of the conduct of torture and abuse, which conforms to previous CIA misdeeds.  High-level officials who politicized intelligence for Deputy Director Robert Gates in the 1980s did not suffer; officials who crafted Secretary of State Colin Powell’s phony speech to the UN prior to the Iraq War did not suffer; analysts who lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not suffer.  In fact, the record clearly states that guilty parties in all of these affairs saw their careers prosper.

Reason #4: “Prosecuting CIA officers risks chilling current intelligence operations. Such prosecutions are likely to create cynicism in the clandestine service, which is deeply corrosive to any professional service.” This is Smith’s most fatuous argument and the one that CIA director Leon Panetta is peddling to the congress and the American people.  The fact is that the failure to hold wrongdoers accountable is corrosive to morale and that CIA directors Tenet and Goss had to resort to independent contractors because so many professional Agency officers refused to take part in illegal activities.  IG John Helgerson commissioned the 2004 study because so many Agency officers “expressed to me personally their feelings that what the Agency was doing was fundamentally inconsistent with long-established US Government policy and with American values, and was based on strained legal reasoning.”

Reason #5: Prosecutions could deter cooperation with other nations. Smith could not be more wrong!  It was the CIA’s policies of secret prisons, erroneous renditions, and torture and abuse that corroded the liaison efforts of the Western intelligence network, which is the key to a successful campaign against international terrorism.  European agencies became reticent to share intelligence with the United States because they were opposed to CIA’s abusive practices.  The evidence is ample here and presumably even Smith must know this.

Reason #6: President Obama does not want to be distracted by looking backward and coping with congressional investigations and grand jury subpoenas. We as a nation must know the full extent of the Bush administration’s misuse of government agencies and government personnel.  We need to know what happened in order to make sure that this kind of activity can never happen again.

Smith’s exculpatory brief on the behalf of his putative clients, the Washington Post and the CIA, is particularly disgraceful in view of the unconscionable activities that have taken place over the past decade.  In order to restore the credibility of our intelligence services, permit foreign intelligence agencies to cooperate with us, and reverse the damage that has been done to U.S. foreign and national security, we must know the full extent of the role of 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.

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.