Porter J. Goss in the Washington Post, April 25, 2009. Goss was director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006 and was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004.
Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.
A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.
Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:
– The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
– We understood what the CIA was doing.
– We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
– We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
– On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.
I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed “memorandums for the record” suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately — to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president’s national security adviser — and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.
Circuses are not new in Washington, and I can see preparations being made for tents from the Capitol straight down Pennsylvania Avenue. The CIA has been pulled into the center ring before. The result this time will be the same: a hollowed-out service of diminished capabilities. After Sept. 11, the general outcry was, “Why don’t we have better overseas capabilities?” I fear that in the years to come this refrain will be heard again: once a threat — or God forbid, another successful attack — captures our attention and sends the pendulum swinging back. There is only one person who can shut down this dangerous show: President Obama.
Unfortunately, much of the damage to our capabilities has already been done. It is certainly not trust that is fostered when intelligence officers are told one day “I have your back” only to learn a day later that a knife is being held to it. After the events of this week, morale at the CIA has been shaken to its foundation.
We must not forget: Our intelligence allies overseas view our inability to maintain secrecy as a reason to question our worthiness as a partner. These allies have been vital in almost every capture of a terrorist.
You know, it’s odd….I just got done reading a post further down this blog which is essentially a cut-and-paste from Greg Mankiw, entitled “The Rule of Law – NOT!,” which seems to be a lengthy and spirited denunciation of what Mr. Mankiw (and, I presume, the authors here, who posted it without comment) perceives to be a discomfiting deficiency on the part of the Obama administration with regard to the poor, beleagured, multi-millionaire investors who’ve been run roughshod over by an administration more dedicated to obtaining a fair outcome (heavens! How DARE they!) than in “preserving the rights of stakeholders as established under existing contracts.” Mr. Mankiw “fears” this is the case, thereby inferring that a good faith attempt to reach a fair solution or settlement in unusual circumstances is a less worthy and admirable goal than simply “following existing contracts.” The Rule of Law, writ large, as it were.
And yet here, I find an even lengthier cut-and-paste from Porter Goss, elaborating in detail his explanation that the Senate and House Intel committee chairs were briefed on every aspect of the torture program which has recently resurfaced as a problem for America. Mr. Goss’ main thrust appears to be that senior Democrats knew about everything that was going on, and that therefore, since they did not object, whatever blame is to be assigned for the torture regime should be assigned equally to both parties. A fairly straightforward assertion, yet one which carries very little real-world weight or value, when examined closely.
Mr. Goss is well-known as a partisan operative, having declared opposition to the creation of a Homeland Security Department, refused to open investigations into the Valerie Plame matter, used his position as Chair of the House Intelligence committee to defend the Bush administration and explicitly attack John Kerry in the fall of 2004 regarding intelligence questions still lingering from the 9/11 commission’s findings, and various other notable instances.
In short, when set against the fact that Speaker Pelosi has repeatedly, publicly stated that they were NOT briefed that the torture techniques were being USED, and that key documents were kept from them which should not have been, Mr. Goss’ seeming outright contradictions of those statements are cast into doubt, to say the least. Put charitably, it sounds as if Mr. Goss is attempting to use “everyone knew” preemptively as a way to head off any investigation or possible prosecution. And his doing so, given the positions he held during the period in question, are about as valuable as Ken Lewis’ thoughts on cramdown legislation: i.e. – valuable insofar as he knows what he is talking about, but suspect in that he’s definitely got an ulterior, personal motive.
Mr. Goss attempts to make this about “security before politics,” something which few, if any, would be against in the abstract. But no one I’m aware of, in Congress or in the Obama administration, is suggesting that rank-and-file intel agents (or even managers) be dragged before tribunals, making Mr. Goss’ attempt to cloud the issue of who devised and green-lighted torture techniques by raising the specter of demoralizing and gutting the intel agencies a disingenuous snow job, at best.
In that other post here – “Rule of Law – NOT” – I wondered whether Mr. Mankiw (and to that list I will add Mr. Goss and anyone else who finds themselves nodding along with Mankiw’s ringing advocacy of it in the financial world) believed that the Rule of Law was something which should enjoy such robust adherence across the board? It would seem to me that since the very core of his argument is that law is law, contracts are contracts, that he would find the same to be true in any area of the law, not just finance. And so I will ask again – given that both President Obama and AG Holder have said, in no uncertain terms, that waterboarding is indeed torture (not to mention the US case law which also says as much), doesn’t this pretty much require we investigate and, where necessary, prosecute those who devised and greenlighted the torture techniques for use in the field?
(relevant passage):