The CIA vs. the Senate: Inside the shadowy turf war at the center of American government

Πηγή: The Salon
By MARCY WHEELER
Aug 14 2015

CIA chief John Brennan refuses to acknowledge surveillance conducted on the Senate's intelligence committee.

It’s funny what our CIA Directors will apologize for — or not.

Back in May, Senators Ron Wyden, Martin Heinrich and Mazie Hirono, all members of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI), sent two letters to CIA Director John Brennan asking him to apologize. One — a classified letter not made public — “asked Brennan to correct the public record regarding inaccurate public statements that he made in March on a separate topic.” It was fairly obvious the public statements referred to Brennan’s address to the Council on Foreign Relations on March 13. In response to an audience question, Brennan had claimed the CIA doesn’t work with human rights abusers, a patently false claim.

The unclassified, public letter the senators sent on the same day asked Brennan “to acknowledge” that a CIA search of a server that was supposed to be dedicated to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of CIA’s torture program “was improper.” The senators also asked for a commitment that the CIA will not conduct such searches in the future.

At issue in this request was a fight over an internal CIA review of its own torture program, usually called the Panetta Review, because Leon Panetta had asked for it early in his tenure as CIA Director. Back in January 2014, Senator Mark Udall pressured the CIA to turn over the review, which offered proof that the agency had agreed with most conclusions that the SSCI Torture Report had reached. In response, the CIA launched an investigation into how SSCI staffers had obtained that review. Brennan had made an impassioned defense of the CIA’s investigation of the committee tasked with overseeing his agency in March 2014.

Now, over a year later, the Senators on SSCI were asking Brennan to admit he had been wrong.

Almost three months passed after the senators sent the letters, with nary a peep from the CIA to either one of them. Finally, on August 6 of this year, Brennan finally responded — but to just one of them. In his response, he corrected the lie he had told at CFR, notably acknowledging in the process that the secret request (the one that had asked that he correct a public statement) pertained to his claim that CIA “will not work with entities that are engaged” in human rights abuses. And while Brennan didn’t admit to having lied — at least in part, to protect the Saudis — he did say he understood the senators “concerns about my brief, extemporaneous remarks.”

In his letter correcting his lie, however, Brennan made no mention of the request on the same day that he acknowledge the CIA shouldn’t have spied on its Senate overseers.

Brennan’s ongoing refusal to admit the CIA shouldn’t investigate the Senate is all the more inexcusable given that — according to reporting from Vice’s Jason Leopold — Brennan considered apologizing for the improper search of SSCI’s server over a year ago. The CIA even drafted a letter on July 28, 2014, stating that Brennan had recently learned that the CIA’s Inspector General had “found support for your concern that CIA staff had improperly accessed the SSCI shared drive.” Brennan’s draft letter apologized “for the actions of CIA officers.”

But Brennan never sent that letter.

Instead, days later, he sent an entirely different letter informing SSCI Chair Dianne Feinstein and Ranking Member Saxby Chambliss that he would establish an Accountability Board to review what the IG had concluded. That Accountability Board rejected what the IG had found, and instead focused largely on incriminating Senate staffers. Feinstein issued a list of 15 factual problems with the Accountability Board, problems she had identified before its release but which were not corrected in the report, including that the Board had incorrectly accused a Senate staffer of something which, in actuality, a Director of National Intelligence staffer had done.

Translation: Having already drafted a letter admitting CIA was wrong, Brennan changed course and instead doubled down on attacking the Senate.

No wonder Wyden and others are still calling on Brennan to correct the record. His ongoing silence — his refusal to admit what he effectively already did last year — that the CIA was wrong — just serves as an opportunity for him, for his agency, to keep attacking those that oversee the agency.

So while Brennan can admit, indirectly, that our partners the Saudis behead dissidents and abuse journalists, he’s still not going to give up the chance to double down against those who might oversee his own work.

Or, perhaps more importantly, he’s unwilling to meet the other request the senators made: “a commitment that CIA will not conduct such searches in the future.”

The price of becoming addicted to drones

Πηγή: Washington Post
By David Ignatius
Sep. 21 2011


What “rules of war” should apply to Predator drones, the eerily efficient weapons that cruise the skies and target adversaries with the precision of a sharpshooter’s bullet? It’s an urgent question — not simply for the United States, which is expanding its use of drones, but for dozens of other nations that may soon use them to target their own “bad guys.”

Although drones have been controversial abroad, there has been relatively little public debate about them in America. That’s partly because U.S. officials usually won’t discuss their operations, which are highly classified. But officials affirm privately that they have been highly effective against al-Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal areas of Pakistan — and that they are being used in Yemen and Somalia in an escalating campaign against al-Qaeda affiliates there.

These weapons, which project power without risking “boots on the ground,” can become addictive. According to a report last year by a U.N. special rapporteur, more than 40 countries now have drone technology, and nations seeking to arm drones with missiles include Israel, Russia, Turkey, China, India, Iran, Britain and France.

“We have to be extremely careful and prudent about how we use this technology. It’s very efficacious in killing terrorists, but there are significant risks of blowback from its widespread use that could harm our counterterrorism efforts,” argues Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served in the George W. Bush administration’s Justice Department.

A drone debate, of sorts, took place behind the scenes in preparation for a speech last Friday by John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser. He argued that U.S. legal authority to use force against al-Qaeda wasn’t “restricted solely to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan” but could be expanded to other theaters “without doing a separate self-defense analysis each time.”

On the eve of Brennan’s speech, the New York Times reported a split within the Obama administration. The Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, was said to have urged broad targeting against groups anywhere that are aligned with al-Qaeda, while the State Department’s legal adviser,Harold Koh, reportedly recommended a more limited rule that, outside Afghanistan and Pakistan, would authorize targeting only individuals actually plotting to strike America.

These disagreements were resolved by Brennan’s speech, which took a hard-line view. Brennan conceded that some key allies, though “converging” toward U.S. legal arguments, “take a different view of the geographic scope of the conflict, limiting it only to the ‘hot’ battlefields.”

Here’s the real question, according to current and former officials: As the United States steps up Predator attacks over Yemen and Somalia, should it adopt the same “signature” targeting it uses over Pakistan? Under this approach, the drones can strike al-Qaeda training camps and fighters not on the list of specific targets compiled by the CIA. The signature approach is more aggressive, but it risks creating what terrorism analyst David Kilcullen calls “accidental guerrillas” — and thereby widening the war.

To understand the debate, some background is useful. The CIA’s legal authority (it conducts attacks over Pakistan and will probably have similar responsibility in Yemen and Somalia) dates to a lethal covert-action “finding” signed days after Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center compiles a list of approved targets, usually numbering less than several dozen, based on intelligence that they pose a serious, continuing threat to the United States. That list is reviewed every six months, and names come on and off.

Legal review is done by the CIA’s general counsel, who in turn consults with the White House counsel. Signature targeting was added in 2008, using the same 2001 presidential finding, which was renewed by President Obama in 2009. The rules call for notifying the National Security Council (including the attorney general) if a U.S. person is a target. Such a broader review apparently took place when Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen in Yemen who is a seniorofficial in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was added.

Here’s the real problem with drones. They may indeed reduce collateral damage, as their proponents argue, because of their precision and surveillance. And America’s growing use of them against al-Qaeda may be legal under international law that allows self-defense. But what is legal isn’t always wise.

A world where drones are constantly buzzing overhead — waiting to zap those deemed threats under a cloaked and controversial process — risks being, even more, a world of lawlessness and chaos. Drones have been America’s best weapon against al-Qaeda, but one to use sparingly — against people U.S. intelligence knows are seeking to kill others.