Archive for CIA
Closing in on the Torturers
Posted by: | CommentsThis is a great article by Ray McGovern analyzing the recently released CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogation techniques and results. Mr. McGovern was a CIA analyst for 30 years, and offers an insider’s view into the controversy surrounding torture of terrorist suspects.
CIA Torture Guidelines Released
Posted by: | CommentsI’m really getting tired of seeing news about torture. Every new revelation sickens me. I’m not sure what to do, how to face this, how to confront the horror that is the U.S. government. I am complicit through my inaction. Who are the real enemies here? Those who were never convicted, never given trial, never confronted with evidence of crimes? Or those who convince us that this is all okay, that it was necessary, the ticking time bomb scenario necessitated this? This makes me crazy. I think immediate truth and reconciliation commissions should be formed, and the American public needs this in their face 24/7 until it is stopped permanently. NO MORE MONEY FOR A GOVERNMENT THAT TORTURES.
From the Washington Post, check this out:
“After removing the hood, the interrogator opens with a slap across the face — to get the detainee’s attention — followed by other slaps, the guidelines state. Next comes the head-slamming, or “walling,” which can be tried once “to make a point,” or repeated again and again.
“Twenty or thirty times consecutively” is permissible, the guidelines say, “if the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question.” And if that fails, there are far harsher techniques to be tried.”
“After slamming a detainee’s head against the plywood barrier multiple times, the interrogator could douse him with water; deprive him of toilet facilities and force him to wear a soiled diaper; or make him stand or kneel for long periods while shackled in a painful position. The captive could also be forced into a wooden box for up to 18 hours at a stretch.”
I like this…using soiled diapers. Wooden box…threaten wife and children, threaten with immediate death….all wonderful. You see, the torturers could “take the gloves off” and work in the “black world” where this was permissable, and no law held. No law regulated this because they said so.
“The CIA also counteracts the psychological effects of isolation by providing detainees with a wide variety of books, puzzles, paper and ’safe’ writing utensils, chess and checker sets, a personal journal, and access to DVD and VCR videotapes,” the document said.”
See…they were really being nice to these men held indefinitely without charge. DVDs, VCR, checkers!!! We were so nice to them!
US names CIA Torture Investigator and Propaganda Campaign Begins
Posted by: | CommentsJohn Durham has been appointed the US Special Prosecutor in charge of investigating accusations of torture by prisoners held in US custody. Accusations and allegations are more immediately dismissed by those drowning in fear and information overload, so pitching the story like this leads to a willful suspension of disbelief for the forseeable future. CIA abuse is “old news” and of course, a “few bad apples” spoiled the good times for everyone. If only we had never learned that our tax dollars go to men threatening to rape and kill the children (yeah, we know that the actual rape and murders happened too) of the presumed “bad guys”, then all would be right in the world.
Read the CIA report here: 2004 CIA Report
Check out this BBC article US Special Prosecutor Named in Torture Investigation
Note the following:
Nine signatories of a letter to Mr Holder said they were “deeply disappointed” at a decision that “could have a chilling effect on the work of the intelligence community”.
Of course this will be chilling only to those committing international war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some of the signatories to that letter were: Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the minority whip; Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee; and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the judiciary committee.
Read this article for information about the Republican letter: GOP Senators Warn Holder against CIA Abuse Inquiry
Sweet. Those sworn to uphold the Constitution are “warning” the US Attorney General that an investigation into torture and war crimes will “leave the US open to attack”.
This next part would be laughable if it wasn’t so obviously a lie:
In their letter, the GOP lawmakers emphasized that the Justice Department had had the CIA report for more than five years, and that career prosecutors who previously reviewed the cases concluded that there was not enough evidence to warrant criminal prosecutions. “It is difficult to understand what rationale could drive the Justice Department to now reverse course, reopen a 5-year-old matter, and tarnish the careers, reputations and lives of intelligence community professionals,” the letter said.
Yes, of course, the Justice Department headed by Bush appointees, who signed off on the abuse and torture and killings, certainly found nothing surprising in the reports of the abuse, torture and killings. The “brave men” who tortured have really great “careers” to which they must return, to keep us safe from the terrorists they work actively to create. This is shameless and criminal. Let’s call out the traitors to the Constitution. What “reputation” does a man hold who threatens to kill the family members (including children) of our prisoners?
I’m pretty sure that a coup has occurred, and whether Bush or Obama stand as President makes no difference–the killing will continue, and with kid gloves, the US “Justice” Department will box around a few low level lackeys so the citizenry can feel a little better about themselves.
Report on CIA Interrogations Leaked
Posted by: | CommentsA long suppressed CIA report documents the torture of prisoners held by the U.S., including holding mock executions, threatening prisoners with electric drills, and threatening prisoners with the rape or death of family members.
Here are links to a few interesting stories. The Salon article contains a link directly to the CIA Report in PDF format. Much of it is redacted, but it makes for good reading.
Salon.com offers selections of the CIA Report here
Click Here to read an overview of the CIA report from the Guardian
Proof that America is a Sick Country
Posted by: | CommentsBy Dave Lindorff
8-24-2009
You see, here’s the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted things that America’s torturers have been doing, courtesy of President George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting average was pretty lousy.
According to even the Pentagon’s own reckoning, for example, probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number–probably the majority–weren’t even fighting anyone when they were captured. I’m sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people to get the reward money.
Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that we are learning were used by our side–things that make waterboarding sound like a walk in the park. We’re now getting confirmation of things that we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using blanks, faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of the same to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the cell next to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the worst yet–the threat to kill a captive’s children. And of course there is the already disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut with a razor, and generous use of tasers in places on the body designed to cause maximum pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped captives (including young boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up of captives who were simply killed during torture….
For the rest of this story, please go to:
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
The Truth: Americans Love Torture
Posted by: | CommentsToday, I am sad and disheartened. The myth of the United States being a beacon of hope and peace for the poor and oppressed of the world can no longer be sustained. I have taken careful note of the ability of most Americans to avoid admitting their fundamental love and approval for government sanctioned murder and torture. I am growing increasingly convinced that U.S. special interests require torture to achieve their ends, and that these interests have lobbied both the Congress and the Senate directly to prevent any serious inquiries into murder, assassination squads and government involvement in destruction of international treaties and human rights norms. Some evidence:
1) I sent the following message to my representative Tammy Baldwin, and Senators Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold on June 30, 2009 at 10:30pm:
I today read information that is shocking and sickening to my conscience. The June 22nd edition of The New Yorker Magazine (Jane Mayer is the author) has reported that the Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that the prisoner died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms in a hood, and suffered broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide. Mayer notes that no CIA personnel have been criminally charged.
Further, recently released Justice memos contain numerous references to CIA medical personnel participating in coercive interrogation sessions.
I’m not sure what to do with this information. I am passing this on to you today to bring the issue of the United States role in torture to your attention again. I know that you have spoken out against this in the past, but I think we need a truth and reconciliation commission in place immediately so that Americans can face this and work through the implications of such behavior done in our name. Suppression of such information will only lead to further horrors executed in the name of securing our liberty. My conscience can not support any government that sanctions and indirectly supports such atrocities.
I think I would like to hear a plan from you for confronting and publicly working through this information, so that such horrors can be prevented in the future, and so those responsible are held accountable. I’m writing with great sadness today. Please let me know your thoughts about this.
Sincerely,
Matthew Carlson
Here is Rep. Baldwin’s response. I received this at 9:30am on July 1st! She “apologizes” for not getting this to me sooner! How would that have been possible? In any case, note that it is a form letter:
Dear Mr. Carlson:
Thank you for contacting me about the duty of Congress to hold the executive branch accountable. It is good to hear from you and I apologize for the delay in my response.
Over the past several years, serious questions were raised about the conduct of high ranking Bush/Cheney Administration officials in relation to some of the most basic elements of our democracy: respect for the rule of law, the principle of checks and balances, and the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The list of abuses of executive branch power was long, as were the Bush/Cheney Administration’s attempts to impede congressional oversight.
Like you, I believe that unchecked executive power invites abuse. I fully support efforts that hold the executive branch accountable to the Constitution and ensure that abuse of executive power does not occur again. On April 16, 2009, the United States Department of Justice released memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005, detailing techniques used for the interrogation of terrorism subjects. The gruesome details in these memos indicate that more needs to be done to declare that no American-even the President and the Vice President of the United States-is above the law.
You may be pleased to know that on May 8, 2009, I reintroduced the Executive Branch Accountability Act, H. Res. 417, calling on President Obama to reverse the damaging and illegal actions taken by the Bush/Cheney Administration and to collaborate with Congress to proactively prevent any further abuses of executive branch power. Specifically, the bill directs the President to:
w Fully investigate Bush/Cheney administration officials’ alleged crimes and hold them accountable for any illegal acts;
w Affirm that it is the sole legal right of Congress to declare war;
w Restore the writ of habeas corpus as an essential principle of our democracy; and
w Ensure that torture and rendition are uniformly prohibited under United States law.
Please know that I will keep your views in mind as I continue to press for expanded oversight of the executive branch by Congress.
Again, thank you for sharing your views. Your opinion matters to me. If I can be of service to you in any other way, please do not hesitate to let me know. As a security precaution, all mail sent to Congress is first irradiated. This process causes significant delays. To ensure the fastest response, I encourage all constituents who have access to the internet to contact me through my website at http://tammybaldwin.house.gov.
Sincerely,
Tammy Baldwin
Member of Congress
So…it took my House member staff about an hour to get this back to me (given that her office likely opens around 8am). Just yesterday, I received the following from the office of Senator Russ Feingold (Senators, being more important, take more than a month to reply):
Dear Mr. Carlson,
Thank you for contacting me with your views on President Bush and his administration. I appreciate hearing from you.
It is important that we learn the full extent of the wrongdoing of the Bush Administration. As President Obama and Attorney General Holder have said, nobody is above the law. There needs to be accountability for wrongdoing by the Bush Administration, including the illegal warrantless wiretapping and interrogation programs. I agree with you that we cannot simply sweep these assaults on the rule of law under the rug.
President Obama has stated that it is not his administration’s intention to prosecute those who acted reasonably and relied in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice. I have urged the President not to rule out investigations or prosecutions of those who authorized torture, or provided the legal justification for it. Horrible abuses were committed in the name of the American people, and we cannot look the other way. The final decision is up to the attorney general and the president, but I am hopeful that the Justice Department will take this matter very seriously.
I am pleased that President Obama chose to release memos produced by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that approved the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation program, and I agree with OLC’s action to officially withdraw these memos. More recently, news reports have indicated that the Attorney General is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate individuals who may have gone beyond the legal authorization for that program provided by the OLC. I sent a letter to the Attorney General on July 14, 2009, about this issue. I have enclosed a copy of that letter for your review.
I thought you might also be interested to know that in September 2008, I chaired a hearing in the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution entitled “Restoring the Rule of Law.” During the hearing, the Subcommittee heard testimony from legal experts and historians on what steps the president and Congress must take to repair the damage done by the Bush administration. The hearing was an effort to come up with a full range of recommendations for reestablishing appropriate checks and balances in a variety of areas, including wiretapping, interrogations, detention policy, executive privilege, government secrecy, privacy protections and Congressional oversight.
In addition to the testimony of the witnesses at the hearing, I solicited input from a number of other law professors, historians, advocates and other experts to help craft a blueprint for restoring the rule of law for the president and Congress. All of the testimony is available for your review on my website at http://feingold.senate.gov/ruleoflaw/. There are also links there to my opening statement at the hearing, and to a speech I delivered on the Senate floor.
On December 10, 2008, I sent a letter to then President-elect Obama outlining specific executive branch actions that I hope he and his administration will take to begin the process of restoring the rule of law. I have also enclosed a copy of that letter for your review.
Thank you again for contacting me. I look forward to hearing from you again.
Here’s the letter Senator Feingold sent to the Attorney General:
Holder investigation letter 7-14-09
Well, this is all fine I suppose. I appreciate that my representatives in Washington are doing _something_ to address these horrors. However, consider the following: The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Attorney General Holder is planning an inquiry that will be narrow in scope. The investigation, which would focus solely on CIA crimes, would examine “whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized” in memos issued by Bush administration lawyers.
Narrow in scope. Limited. Meaningless and purposeless. Investigating whether people went “beyond” illegally authorized crimes. Torture, crucifixion and murder met with lame excuses and never ending attempts to sweep this under the rug. None held accountable. Not one doctor, not one CIA official, not one Bush Administration official confronted about war crimes and crimes against humanity. This “investigation” has been approved at the highest levels in the Obama administration. The investigation is limited in scope specifically because the government wishes to retain the privilege to torture in the future. You see, the 100 waterboardings a month authorized by the previous administration for one detainee were done relying on “good faith” in the judgments of the DOJ. If slamming a prisoner’s head against a wall is found to conform to the “law” as interpreted by the DOJ, then none need call it torture.
Authorizing a thorough investigation would hold complicit actors currently involved in covert torture of prisoners. Our government officials are being paid now to let these horrors continue. As if endless war, domestic spying, murder of innocents was not enough….now I have to pay for the destruction of the previously noble U.S. standard of justice (whether this is reality or not is irrelevant to my point). We are all paying for this through our taxes. This is why I am convinced that Americans love torture. They continue to pay for it with no outcry. They work to further it. I’m disgusted, terrified and saddened for my people.
One final thought…note the irony of a nation filled with Christians paying for the crucifixion of a prisoner of war!
Al Qaeda bomber killed twice in two years?
Posted by: | CommentsCheck out these images from two major media outlets:
Midhat Mursi, a notorious Al-Qaeda bomb maker, appears to have been killed twice in two years.
My intuition is that there is some strange intelligence work going on here, and that disinformation is being fed between competing intelligence agencies.
Several possibilities and questions come to mind:
1) The news organizations are to some degree incompetent, and stories are run at different times due to this. To my mind, this is the least likely scenario.
2) There were TWO bomb makers with the same name. But, what are the odds that Al-Qaeda, an organization of several thousand, has two master bomb makers in the same area of the world with the same name? Not very good, though who’s to really know much about terrorist networks on the other side of the world?
3) Stories are being planted locally by Pakistani/CIA intelligence to deliberately misinform. This seems probable. An “anonymous” Pakistani intelligence agent offers the information? Why should it be believed? There was a drone attack “success” here, obviously. This story seems spun to promote further drone attacks in Pakistan, and to gain local support for the attacks on Pakistani soil. The Pakistanis have their man (twice), and the U.S. can report a successful operation to the U.S. citizenry. Given no clear mission in Pakistan/Afghanistan, it is necessary to connect the mission to the original source of the mission–Al Qaeda terrorists. If this connection is made even once or twice a year, the horror of 9/11 can be retriggered to some extent, building implicit nervous system support from the populace for the operation. Just remember that “good” is being done, and never mind the man behind the curtain.
To put this in perspective, check out this interview with Dr. David Ray Griffin:
Guns and Butter Program – Audio Interview with Dr. David Ray Griffin
It sounds like there is a deliberate, illegal propaganda campaign being waged against not only the American, but also the Pakistani people. These Al-Qaeda leaders come and go, are killed, resurrected, killed again, end up in Guantanamo Bay, tortured and admitting that they gave birth to their own mother. Anyone remember this happening with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed too? Check out this link from the Asia Times from 2002: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed killed in Pakistan
Who exactly are these men that are used to further specific war time agendas? Keep aware of who is reporting this information, and who profits from distribution of the information. I honestly can’t say what’s going on here…I’m confused by stories like this.
See more about disinformation, propaganda and hypnosis at the Wisdom Lovers Blog.
History of CIA Death Squads
Posted by: | CommentsBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Some time in early or mid-1949 a CIA officer named Bill (his surname is blacked out in the file, which was surfaced by John Kelly in the early 1990s) asked an outside contractor for input on how to kill people. Requirements included the appearance of an accidental or purely fortuitous terminal experience suffered by the Agency’s victim.
Bill’s friend – internal evidence suggests he was a doctor – offered practical advice: “Tetraethyl lead, as you know, could be dropped on the skin in very small quantities, producing no local lesion, and after a quick death, no specific evidence would be present.” Another possibility was “the exposure of the entire individual to X-ray.” (In fact these two methods were already being inflicted on a very large number of Americans in lethal doses, in the form of leaded gasoline and radioactive fallout from the atmospheric nuclear test program in Nevada.) “There are two other techniques,” Bill’s friend concluded bluffly, which “require no special equipment beside a strong arm and the will to do such a job. These would be either to smother the victim with a pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth, such as a bath towel.”
As regular as congressmen being taken in adultery or receiving cash bribes, every year or two the Central Intelligence Agency has go into damage-control mode to deal with embarrassing documents like the memo to Bill, and has to square up to the question – does it, did it ever, have its in-house assassins, a Double O team.
It just happened. In mid-July the news headlines were suddenly full of allegations that in the wake of the 9/11/2001 attacks, vice president Dick Cheney had ordered the formation of a CIA kill squad and expressly ordered the Agency not to disclose the program even to congressional overseers with top security clearances, as required by law. As soon as CIA offials disclosed the program to CIA director Leon Panetta, he ordered it to be halted.
And regular as the congressmen taken in adultery seeking forgiveness from God and spouse, the CIA rolled out the familiar response that yes, such a program had been mooted, but there had been practical impediments. “It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do, it it’s not that easy,” one former intelligence official told the New York Times. “Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?” The C.I.A. insisted it had never proposed a specific operation to the White House for approval.
With these pious denials we enter the Theater of the Absurd. We’re talking about a US Agency that ran the Phoenix Program, that supervised executive actions across Latin America, that…
Before irrefutable evidence of its vast kidnapping and interrogation program in the post-2001 surfaced the CIA similarly used to claim, year after year, that it had never been in the torture business either. Torture manuals drafted by the Agency would surface - a 128-page secret how-to-torture guide produced by the CIA in July 1963 called “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation”, another 1983 manual, enthusiastically used by CIA clients in the “contra” war against Central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan’s years – and the Agency would deny, waffle and evade until the moment came simply to dismiss the torture charge as “an old story.”
In fact the Agency took a practical interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi interrogation techniques avidly and sheltering noted Nazi practitioners. As it prepared its coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1953 the Agency distributed to its agents and operatives a killer’s training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:
“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. … The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.
“…In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.
“If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.”
What about targets of assassination attempts by the CIA, acting on presidential orders? We could start with the bid on Chou En-lai’s life after the Bandung Conference in 1954; they blew up the plane scheduled to take him home, but fortunately for him, though not his fellow passngers, he’d switched flights. Then we could move on to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961, to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, in which the CIA was intimately involved, dispatching among others the late Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency’s in-house killer chemist, with a hypodermic loaded with poison. The Agency made many efforts to kill General Kassim in Iraq. The first such attempt on October 7, 1959 was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Hussein, was, spirited outto an Agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second Agency effort in 1960-1961 with a poisoned handkerchief. Finally they shot Kassim in the coup of February 8/9, 1963.
The Kennedy years saw deep US implication in the murder of the Diem brothers in Vietnam and the first of many well-attested efforts by the Agency to assassinate Fidel Castro. It was Lyndon Johnson who famously said shortly after he took office in 1963, “We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.” Reagan’s first year in office saw the inconvenient Omar Torrijos of Panama downed in an air crash. In 1986 came the Reagan White House’s effort to bomb Muammar Q’addafi to death in his encampment in 1986, though this enterprise was conducted by the US Air Force. Led by that man of darkness, William Casey, in 1985 the CIA tried to kill the Lebanese Shiite leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by setting off a car bomb outside his mosque. He survived, though 80 others were blown to pieces.
In his Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II Bill Blum has a long and interesting list starting in 1949 with Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader, going on to efforts to kill Sukarno, President of Indonesia,Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea, Mohammed Mossadegh, Claro M. Recto (the Philippines opposition leader), Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, José Figueres,Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic…
And we should not forget that the CIA is by no means the only US government player in the assassination game. The US military have their own teams. A friend of mine once had a gardener – “a very scary looking guy” — who remarked that he’d been part of a secret unit in the U.S. Marine Corps, murdering targets in the Caribbean.
In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, as in the Sixties, it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true either side of the executive order, issued by president Gerald Ford in 1976, banning assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” states Executive Order 11905.
One way to read the brou-ha-ha of the past few days is as an effort at pre-emptive damage control by the CIA. Remember, in the months following the 2001 attacks, Americans were looking for blood. They wanted teams to hunt down Osama and his crew and kill them. They cheered the reports – now resurfacing – of U.S., British and French special forces presiding over and directing the slaughter in November, 2001, of about 1000 prisoners of war by the Northern Alliance at Mazar-e-Sharif, with the Taliban prisoners shut in containers left out in the sun with an okay by US personnel, till their occupants roasted and suffocated. Over the next few months and years, more terrible stories will probably surface. Attorney General Eric Holder told Newsweek recently he was “shocked and saddened” after reading the still secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the torture of detainees at CIA “black sites.” “Shocked and saddened”, after what we know and what we have seen already? It must be pretty bad. As William Polk remarks on this site today of the evidence of sodomy, rape and torture captured in the photograph collection that Obama first wanted to release and then changed his mind: “Those who profess to know say that what these pictures show is truly horrible. Some have compared them to the vivid record the Nazis kept of their sadism.”
The CIA death squads and kindred units from the military killed and tortured to death many, many people and most certainly there was extensive “collateral damage” – meaning innocent people being murdered. As regards numbers, we have this public boast in 2003 by president George Bush: “All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”
The CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, recently remarked that “There were things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavory things going on. Now they are a problem for the CIA,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now and it’s going to handicap future activities.” Just because vice president Dick Cheney may have been supervising Murder Inc it doesn’t mean that CIA officers who became his operational accomplices won’t be legally vulnerable. At the moment President Obama is trying to keep the lid on still secret crimes committed by US government agencies in the Global War on Terror in the Bush years. The CIA is clearly positioning itself for further disclosures. So is Dick Cheney.
The CIA – Licensed to Kill
Posted by: | CommentsThe CIA – Licensed To Kill
The agency has been involved in planning assassinations since at least 1954
By David Wise
7-26-9
Back in 1960, the CIA hatched a plan to kill Patrice Lumumba by infecting his toothbrush with a deadly disease. The Congolese leader would brush his teeth and, presto, in a few days or weeks he would be gone.
Around the same time, the CIA’s Health Alteration Committee — who thought that name up? — sent a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief to Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, the leader of Iraq.
And the CIA’s “executive action” unit plotted for years to murder Fidel Castro. It hired the Mafia to poison his food and tried to give him a diving suit contaminated with Madura foot, a rare tropical disease that starts in the foot and moves upward, slowly destroying the body. The CIA also considered offing the Cuban leader with an exploding cigar, a poison pen and a seashell that would blow up underwater when he touched it.
Not one of the plots was successful. Lumumba and Kassem were executed by their foes, and Castro is still alive. But the plots make clear that the CIA has been licensed to kill for decades.
Congress — especially congressional Democrats — was outraged earlier this month when it was disclosed that, apparently on orders from Vice President Dick Cheney, the CIA for eight years concealed from Congress a program to assassinate the leaders of Al Qaeda, starting with Osama bin Laden. But they shouldn’t have been surprised that such a plan was being hatched.
The CIA’s involvement in planning assassinations goes back at least to 1954, when it prepared a manual for killings as part of a U.S.-run coup against the leftist government of Guatemala. The 19-page manual, which was declassified in 1997, makes chilling reading. “The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject,” it declares, noting that while it “is possible to kill a man with the bare hands … the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, ax, wrench, screwdriver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.”
The agency’s manual recommends “the contrived accident” as the best way to dispose of someone. “The most efficient accident … is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve.” The manual suggests grabbing the victim by the ankles and “tipping the subject over the edge. … Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing.”
The manual goes on to discuss “blunt weapons,” noting that “a hammer can be picked up almost anywhere in the world” and that baseball bats are also excellent. The manual explains the best place in the body to stab people or how to bash their skulls in and the pros and cons of rifles, pistols, submachine guns and other weapons.
During the Cold War years, the CIA plotted against eight foreign leaders, five of whom died violently. The agency’s role varied in each case.
After the plots were publicized by a Senate committee, President Ford issued an executive order in 1976 barring political assassination. President Reagan broadened the ban, dropping the word “political” and extending the prohibition to include contract killers as well as government employees.
Although the ban remains in effect, it has largely been ignored on the premise that it does not apply in a military setting. Consider the following:
In 1986, Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya in retaliation for a terrorist attack on a Berlin disco that killed three people, including two U.S. servicemen, and wounded more than 200 others. In the airstrike, Libya’s leader, Moammar Kadafi, a target of the raid, escaped unharmed, but his 2-year-old adopted daughter was killed.
During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, when the first Bush administration bombed Baghdad, Robert M. Gates, the former CIA director and current Defense secretary, said White House officials hoped that “Saddam Hussein would be killed in a bunker.” At an air base in Saudi Arabia that year, Cheney, then secretary of Defense, and Gen. Colin L. Powell signed a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb destined for Iraq. “To Saddam with affection,” Cheney wrote.
In 1998, President Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike on Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan after the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa. The White House was clearly disappointed when the strike failed to kill Bin Laden, who reportedly left one of the camps shortly before the attack.
A year later, again during the Clinton administration, NATO bombed Belgrade after Serbia forced ethnic Albanians to flee from Kosovo. A cruise missile was lobbed right into the bedroom of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader and Yugoslav president, but he was not sleeping there and escaped injury.
In Yemen in 2002, a CIA Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile that destroyed a car in which a top Al Qaeda leader, Qaed Sinan Harithi, was riding.
The problem with assassination, morality aside, is that the U.S. is not very good at it, as the CIA’s farcical efforts to murder Castro demonstrate. It seems unlikely that the CIA will kill Bin Laden with a baseball bat. And there is the real possibility of retaliation for a state-sponsored assassination. President Kennedy was quoted as saying, “We can’t get into that kind of thing or we would all be targets.” Perhaps CIA Director Leon Panetta had that in mind when he canceled the assassination program.
David Wise writes frequently about intelligence. He is the author of “Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million” and “Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America.”
