Tainted
by digby
Anyone connected to post-Sept. 11 “enhanced interrogation measures,” no matter at arm’s length, is apparently disqualified to run Barack Obama ’s spy agency.
Hence the immolation of former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan, the president-elect’s closest intelligence adviser, as the lead candidate to run the spy agency.
The left-wing hit job on Brennan showed that liberals may have a taste for covert action after all, the spooks chuckle.
“Almost anyone working at the agency since [Sept. 11] is tainted,” says retired CIA veteran Milt Bearden, a former Pakistan station chief, expressing the facts of life.
[…]
Can anybody who could do the job, get the job?
“Beats me,” said a well-wired former senior intelligence official. “Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty] and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that they were wrong.”
A former national security official and friend of Brennan, who asked not to be identified, is disgusted by what happened.
“Ninety-nine percent of” what the CIA has been doing since Sept. 11 “is not related to torture, but now everybody is tarred with this brush,” he said.
“The dirty little secret, “ he added, “is that very little has been going on since [Sept. 11] that hasn’t gone on for the last 30 years.”
By that standard, almost anybody who’s worked in operations — like the much-touted former CIA station chief Jack Devine, or the current heads of the agency’s clandestine services, Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick — has a skeleton in the closet.
“They are going to have to go outside of that circle,” says a recently retired CIA division chief.
The article goes on to suggest Bill Bradley for the job, about which I have no firm opinion, except it’s good to hear that someone other than a participant in the torture regime (even with only *slightly* grubby hands) might be considered acceptable to some in the intelligence community.
I still have some doubts that it was only the “ill-informed” liberal bloggers who forced Brennan out of the running. Indeed, as hard as it may be to believe, it may even be possible that Obama and his top people agree with the scruffy hippies that members of the intelligence communities who were in the top echelon of the torture regime shouldn’t be running agencies in the new administration. It makes his foreign policy much tougher if he doesn’t clean house on these matters.
We all know that the kinds of things the CIA did during this period were not exactly new. (In fact, kidnapping, torture and indefinite imprisonment go back to the beginning of time.) But in the wake of revelations of similar abuses in the 1970s the country had formed a legal and cultural consensus that the United States could not do these things and live up to our ideals, even if it was in the name of national security. Saying they continued to do these things illegally and in secret is hardly a defense.
But Bush went further than that. The Cheney torture regime was designed to normalize and legalize these behaviors through a fringe theory of presidential infallibility that hadn’t been heard of since Nixon’s ignominious fall. People at high levels, like Brennan, who went along with this nefarious scheme committed a double crime — one against the statutes on the books and one against the constitution itself, by allowing the president to use a crackpot theory to immunize their behaviors through unconstitutional means. None of them should ever be allowed near powerful positions in government again.
I’ve been saying for some time that the pressure coming from the intelligence community to quickly and quietly “dispose” of this torture issue was going to be intense. And while I’m disappointed that the new administration seems to be taking prosecutions off the menu (and I believe it is a mistake) I am very pleased that they seem not to be inclined to appoint people who were directly involved in the torture regime simply to appease those who committed the crimes. That’s a necessary step in the right direction.
There was never a guarantee that any new administration wouldn’t cave completely on this one. Many important members of the political establishment, as well as people in the country at large, think torture is a good idea. They wish it could be used more here in America (except on wealthy elites,of course, who suffer enough punishment just by having their names on the police blotter.) What seems like an obvious and necessary change to most of us isn’t all that easy when you have the whole intelligence and national security apparatus saying that you’ll be responsible for killing Americans in their beds if you don’t do what they want you to do.
According to polling, only around 30% of the public think torture is never justified. It’s not a popular issue.
Update: Greenwald has much more on several aspects of this issue. (Scroll down to the next post as well.)
As he says, it’s our responsibility as engaged citizens to keep our eye on this, regardless of which party is in charge. The intelligence establishment is very powerful.