ABC News reported that:

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

The facility, in an exclusive suburb of Vilnius, was denied by the CIA and the Lithuanian government until ABC went and found out everything about it, down to the make of the generator that powered it. The CIA shifted uneasily in its seat:

On Tuesday, the CIA again declined to talk about the prison. "The CIA's terrorist interrogation program is over," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "This agency does not discuss publicly where detention facilities may or may not have been."

The prison was closed in 2005, along with another black site in Romania. But Camp Bucca, on the Iraq/Kuwait border, which also had a CIA-only area where nefarious things went on, was only closed in September of this year. Another secret black site — one that remains open — would not be a surprise given the CIA's record of late.

That kidnapping was part of a CIA program called "extraordinary rendition," wherein an unknown number of people were flown to secret prisons to be tortured. Obama signed an executive order promising to not fly prisoners to places where they will be tortured, anymore, so his CIA's policy might be more accurately described as ordinary rendition. And we all know the CIA will do exactly as they are told, because they always do.

Extradition of the 23 convicted Americans is not going to happen, though, so Italians should probably consider having agents of their own lawless and unchecked international intelligence organization kidnap them all as they go to church or whatever.

According to the Associated Press, a new survey of scientific literature on stress and memory from a researcher at Ireland's Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience has found that CIA's torture techniques likely caused the agency's victims to actually forget the details that they were being tortured for—if they ever had the information in the first place—and could have also cause them to create false memories.

Prolonged stress from the CIA's harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday.

The methods could even have caused the suspects to create - and believe - false memories, contends the paper, which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology. It suggests the methods are actually counterproductive, no matter how much suspects might eventually say.

It's just a survey of other studies, rather than an actual experimental assessment of what waterboarding does to people's memories. But we'll take it as the perverse and sickening cap on the "debate" over whether American officials ought to have been instructed to inflict mock executions, calibrated drownings, and beatings on human beings in their custody: Torture doesn't work. And even if it works, it's wrong. And even if it works and isn't wrong, it still doesn't fucking work.

In addition to having been considered morally wrong in any circumstance for the whole history of our nation, torture is also illegal. So it's pretty much a no-brainer, when you read the report about how the CIA tortured people, to say "well then they should probably look into prosecuting people." Unless you're Dick Cheney! Then what you do is demand that some other documents that will prove that torture worked get released. And once those documents are released and they just muddy the issue even further by saying over and over again that is impossible to know what interrogation techniques produced what intelligence let alone how much of that intelligence was actionable or even accurate, if you are the media, you write "well Dick Cheney has a very good point."

That is what The Washington Post did yesterday. According to the story, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was a difficult detainee who provided no worthwhile intelligence until he was waterboarded nearly 200 times and shackled and diapered and sleep-deprived for a week straight. Then he was suddenly a Chatty Cathy!

Of course, KSM has bragged about how he made up untrue intelligence while he was being tortured in order to make the torture stop, and the CIA inspector general who helmed the investigation into torture says there's been no analysis of which techniques produced what information or even how useful that information was, but hey, we tortured KSM and then he told us stuff, so torture works and no one should get in any trouble for it, ever.

The problem is probably that as soon as us shocked and appalled "civil rights extremists" who want to read al-Qaeda terrorists their rights said "torture is immoral and ineffective" it just opened the door for patriotic torturers to respond with "torture is effective and anyone who says otherwise has to prove it," which is not the best way for a moral debate to go, really.

The CIA broke the law. They literally killed detainees. Killed them. People who might've been very bad people, but we'll never know, because they were never charged with any crimes, they were not treated as prisoners of war, they were just assumed to be terrorists, and the CIA actually literally killed them.

Here is the story about the war between the CIA and Justice. And, you know, if you've read any of the CIA's heavily-redacted (but not redacted heavily enough for Leon Panetta!) I.G. report on how they tortured and killed people, how sympathetic is Leon Panetta's position here?

The strains became evident inside the administration in the past several weeks. In July, Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, tried to head off the investigation, administration officials said. He sent the C.I.A.'s top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to Justice to persuade aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon any plans for an inquiry.

Mr. Preston presented what was, in effect, a closing argument in defense of the C.I.A., contending that many potential cases against intelligence operatives were legally flawed and noting that they had already been investigated, some more than once. In none, he said, had prosecutors found grounds for charges.

The Bush Justice Department instructed its lawyers to come up with legal justifications for illegal acts, the CIA lied about the scope and the efficacy of those acts, and then exceeded the authority granted them by the already flawed legal guidelines. But, you know, the CIA totally investigated it themselves and decided shit was cool so no need to enforce the law or anything!

Also hidden from public scrutiny, according to the official, was the discovery by the CIA Inspector General that the CIA could not adequately account for several of the 100 al Qaeda suspects who were part of the detainee program that the CIA maintained had been well administered.

The official said "a few just got lost and the CIA does to know what happened to them."

Well, you know, high value detainees are always in the last place you or the Red Cross or any representatives of domestic or international law look.

CIA director Panetta already reportedly exploded in a "profanity-laced" "tirade" over Holder's plans to open a criminal investigation (a CIA spokesman told ABC news that "Panetta is known to use 'salty language,'" which is a really amusing confirmation). And Panetta is also planning on quitting pretty soon, apparently! He is not happy that Obama wants him to report to the Director of National Intelligence, and he is not happy with Democrats in the House, and he is also not happy to learn the various incredibly illegal things the CIA was up to during the Bush years. He is just not happy. He wrote a letter about how the CIA was only doing what Justice told them to do, back then.

Also today the CIA Inspector General's report on how illegal and stupid and ineffective all the torturing was will be released to the public, presumably in a heavily redacted form! But the Justice Department's own internal review into what they did wrong is still not being released any time soon.

And some civil liberties folks are upset that it sounds like Holder will limit his investigation into low-level CIA interrogators who were, after all, acting out policies created and justified by the Bush administration. But others of them say an investigation that starts out narrow could broaden to include administration officials and legal advisers, as long as Holder doesn't explicitly rule out investigating them beforehand, which he still might.

And Republicans don't want anyone to investigate anything ever because that would have a "chilling effect" and it might lead to future interrogators being reluctant to torture and kill people.

Update: If you're bored you can read the CIA IG's report at The Washington Independent. Soooo many black bars everywhere!

It means that the CIA will no longer get its jollies by man-handling suspected terrorists and the such. Rather than letting the agency do the asking, the White House will soon unveil a new "High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group" whose sole task will be to get the truth out of prisoners. And, rather than let these sessions spin into publicity nightmares, the members will reportedly follow a little thing called the Army Field Manual. How novel!

Gone are the days of waterboarding and in are the days of relatively by-the-book inquiries.

Which tactics are acceptable was an issue "looked at thoroughly," one senior official said. Obama had already banned certain severe measures that the Bush administration had permitted, such as waterboarding.

Still, the Obama task force advised that the group develop a "scientific research program for interrogation" to develop new techniques and study existing ones to see whether they work. In essence, the unit would determine a set of best practices on interrogation and share them with other agencies that question prisoners.

In addition to this science-loving group, the Obama White House wants to bring the Justice Department to obtain "assurances" from foreign governments that US-sought detainees won't be tortured. And that Department will do everything in its power to make sure that these "assurances" are sincere. That's certainly refreshing!

Now, don't get too excited, because the task force is still debating which prisoners will receive their Miranda rights. Said one official, "It is not going to, certainly, be automatic in any regard that they are going to be Mirandized.... Nor will it be automatic that they are not Mirandized."

The task force will reportedly be headed by someone from the FBI and, though an independent group, will likely work closely with the CIA, as well as the Bureau.

On a somewhat related note, Stars and Stripes</em>, a newspaper that covered the armed services, reports that reporters looking to be embedded in Afghanistan will be vetted by the military's public affairs office.

U.S. public affairs officials in Afghanistan acknowledged to Stars and Stripes that any reporter seeking to embed with U.S. forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress. That opposition group, reportedly funded by the CIA, furnished much of the false information about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion.

The Rendon Group has been working with the Pentagon for years, by the way, and say their mission is to "expertly deliver insightful strategic communications services and products that provide clients tactical superiority in their complex information environments." Their evaluations will, according to Stars and Stripes, deem a reporter's work as "positive," "negative," or "neutral."

For its part, the military says reporters will be evaluated simply on the accuracy of their stories, not whether their perspective puts a positive spin on the action. That's the government's job! Especially considering that a new brief on the CIA's old, tired, frightening tactics will be soon be released. Now that's what we call beating a story.

Oh, you know, nothing that isn't going to (A) make the rest of the world think Americans' we-won't-but-we-will play of turn-a-cheek policy regarding torture wasn't historically despicable, (B) cause much quasi-self-effacing hand wringing by all sides, and (C) piss the Bad Guys off even more. Like:

According to two sources-one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it-the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him.

Yeah, so basically, we threatened guys with trepanation. Don't tell us the information you've already told us you don't have after we've knowingly permanently traumatized you, and we'll put this drill in your skull. There's a Beavis & Butthead element to this, somewhere: it's some absurd - a power drill? - but sadly, not, because it actually happened. They even put on a little dog and pony for the detainees by harnessing the power of the theatah!

The report also says, according to the sources, that a mock execution was staged in a room next to a detainee, during which a gunshot was fired in an effort to make the suspect believe that another prisoner had been killed. The inspector general's report alludes to more than one mock execution.

Will Eno would be proud! Or something. Talk about breaking the fourth wall. Or the law. Or human dignity. Or protocol. Apparently, Mock Executions "weren't authorized" by the Justice Department, so don't even think of blaming them for it. At least you know what the party line's already going to be. Like all the other terrible things happening in the U.S. military these days: don't ask, don't tell. Or in this case: don't even think about it.

The John Adams Project, a joint operation of the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, is offering support to military defense lawyers at Guantanamo, and they've launched a campaign to identify and expose CIA agents involved in torturing terror suspects. In order to figure out who was doing what to whom, they hired researchers to follow suspected spooks and snap their photos, which they then showed to terror suspects, line-up style:

[G]overnment investigators are now looking into whether the defense team went too far by allegedly showing the detainees the photos of CIA officers, in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes.

Way to go, CIA. Your vaunted counterintelligence capabilities and ever-vigilant secrecy protocols weren't enough to shield you from the all-seeing eye of the fucking ACLU. First the Italians—the Italians!—bust you using your cell phones during an illegal rendition, and now you're letting pointy-headed gay pinko Ivy-league liberals follow you home from Langley. Escape and evade!

Adams quoted Silver as once saying of his CIA service: "I thought it was patriotic. But then time came that life, love and girls distracted me." We took some interest in the tidbit, because Silver once told us the same thing: At a party, he claimed—off the record—to have worked with the CIA in the early 1970s in Laos, running drugs. Cool, we thought.

Well it looks to have been a tall tale he used to impress reporters. We've obtained Silver's FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request, and it is fairly definitive: While he briefly considered becoming a CIA analyst, he never worked for the Agency.

In September 2007, Silver was named by George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a federally funded organization that advises the government on conflict resolution. Silver's position required a security clearance, so he subjected himself to an FBI background investigation.

The results of the background check, which run to hundreds of pages, are the only records in Silver's FBI file. It contains everything from his credit report to interviews with his agent, neighbors, and former therapist—all in all, he seems to have been a stand-up guy. But it also says unequivocally that the FBI checked with the CIA, and the agency had no record of Silver having worked with it:

Silver did travel around Southeast Asia in his early twenties, which in the Sixties and Seventies was practically a guaranteed tip-off that someone was a spook. But he told the FBI about his travels, and said it was all on the up-and-up. While he did very briefly consider a career as an "analyst in one of the intelligence agencies," he met once with one CIA representative and gave up on the idea:

So somewhere along the line, it looks like Silver blew up a sit-down with a CIA recruiter into a few swashbuckling years in black ops. Of course, it is possible that Silver's service was so sensitive that he lied—under penalty if perjury—to the FBI about it. Or maybe it was scrubbed from the file before being submitted to the White House for review. Indeed, five pages of the file were redacted by the FBI because they were classified "in the interest of national defense or foreign policy"—which could mean dark secrets are hidden there. But we're betting on Ron Silver liking the sound of saying, "I used to work with the Agency."

Reports the New York Times:

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials.

(CIA Director Leon) Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Current and former officials said that the program was designed as a more "surgical" solution to eliminating terrorists than missile strikes with armed Predator drones, which cannot be used in cities and have occasionally resulted in dozens of civilian casualties.

Today's Times piece confirms what's been widely rumored of late—That Leon Panetta's June 24th disclosure to members of the Senate Intelligence committee had everything to do with Dick Cheney's rumored covert ops squads that Seymour Hersh had spoken of. Whether or not any of this was legal appears to be open for debate at this point.

CIA Had Plans To Assassinate Qaeda Leaders [New York Times]

Sketchier than your weed dealer, Dan Abrams, the Gotti family, the guys who buried Hoffa, whoever makes the Shake Shack sauce, and anybody who's ever tried to conceal anything that probably shouldn't be hidden...combined. The Times' sources say that Panetta is pointing the finger to Cheney to the intelligence committees in the House and the Senate. From what's understood, it only took Panetta actually learning of the program - the nature of which is still widely unknown - to shut it down, which happened on June 23.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

So, what do we know about it?

• It wasn't the C.I.A.'s interrogation program.
  
  
• It didn't involve anything regarding domestic intelligence.
  
  
• The program never went operational. ""Because this program never went fully operational and hadn't been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial," one intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity. "That's worth remembering amid all the drama.""
  
  
• People think it was really, really bad, whatever it was. "Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that they felt should have been disclosed."

What isn't shady about this? Counter-terrorism - which quickly became a euphemism for "constitution-negating government action" in the Bush administration's "Homeland Security" efforts - has always been, by nature, a sketchy enterprise. It requires the government to (literally) tap into networks of people who operate under the most clandestine circumstances possible, in some of the most low-tech ways one can engage in criminal action. But still: the Bush administration was as transparent (regarding anything) as a brick wall. As the Times helpfully points out:

In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush administration's most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy, and won.

Yes, it's true: the guy even kept his solar panel fetish in the closet. Either way, whatever this is, it wouldn't be a far stretch to imagine it as one of several reasons President Obama's sympathetically protecting Dick, still. Also, as much as we don't like to think about it, he probably wants to keep some things in his administration a secret. Shit, might as well learn from the best, right?

Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project [New York Times]

Why would any good, patriotic American say such a thing in a discussion about border protection? Because all of our politicians crave is the approval of Europeans and to hold on to their cushy jobs and it's going to take an attack from Bin Laden to wake America up to the fact that our leaders need to use "as much violence as necessary" to firmly establish our place in the world. Meanwhile Beck just sat there nodding his approval.

Yeah.

The neoconservatives aren't even trying to hide their pulling for such things anymore. And these are the same people who revel in cloaking their deranged beliefs in patriotism, mind you.

Happy 4th of July weekend everybody!

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Panetta appears to be the first Obama adminsitration official to publicly voice what some in the media have been occasionally speculating, and what many have speculated in private conversation—That the recent Dick Cheney "Obama is going to get us all killed" media tour leads one to believe that Cheney may be secretly hoping for terrorists to strike again on American soil so that he can run around saying "I told you so."

A few miles from the agency's headquarters, which are in Langley, Virginia, former Vice-President Dick Cheney delivered an extraordinary attack on the Obama Administration's emerging national-security policies. Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the new Administration of making "the American people less safe" by banning brutal C.I.A. interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Ruling out such interrogations "is unwise in the extreme," Cheney charged. "It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness."

In January, the Obama Administration banned the "enhanced" techniques that the Bush Administration had approved for the agency, including waterboarding and depriving prisoners of sleep for up to eleven days. Panetta, pouring a cup of coffee, responded to Cheney's speech with surprising candor. "I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue," he told me. "It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

The other interesting takeaway from the piece was a passage on Panetta's desire to find new, less brutal interrogation techniques for use in the future.

Panetta is already forging ahead on one important reform: he plans to replace the abusive interrogation program with a legally acceptable, non-coercive alternative. A task force led by the Harvard Law School professor Philip Heymann has been advising him on a proposal to create an élite U.S. government interrogation team, staffed by some of the best C.I.A., F.B.I., and military officers in the country, and drawing on the advice of social scientists, linguists, and other scholars. "What I'm pushing for is to establish a facility where we develop a team of interrogators trained in the latest techniques," Panetta said. "That's the one thing I'm worried about, frankly. There just aren't that many people who have the interrogation abilities we're going to need." Heymann describes the effort to create "the best non-coercive interrogation team in the world" as the equivalent of "a NASA-like, man-on-the-moon effort" for human-intelligence gathering. He said that members of his task force have travelled to France, England, Japan, Australia, and Israel, in order to compile comparative information on what interrogators do. "We also went to the best people in the U.S.," he added.

Somewhere in America over the next few days, Dick Cheney's copy of this week's New Yorker will arrive and he'll read Leon Panetta's remarks. Agitated, he'll toss the magazine across the room in disgust, accidentally shattering the glass on a framed photo Mary Cheney and her spouse Heather Poe resting on the mantle. He'll then call out to Lynne to prepare his favorite beverage, and Lynn will oblige by bringing him a highball glass filled with puppy's blood, on the rocks, garnished with two Napfilion olives on a yellow plastic spear, and all will be well once again in Dick Cheney's world.

The Secret History [New Yorker]

CIA: Use "intelligence" as a euphemism for doing who knows what.
Bankers: Use "finance" as a euphemism for doing who knows what.


The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.CIA: Train to ingratiate themselves with sources of information.
Bankers: Train to ingratiate themselves with sources of revenue.

CIA: Did cocaine with Colombians and spent all night partying with hookers in a drug lord's villa. It was a mission.
Bankers: Did cocaine with Colombians and spent all night partying with hookers in a Murray Hill co-op. It was Tuesday.

CIA: Have been known to foster regime change in far-flung foreign countries to bolster the interests of the US military-industrial complex.
Bankers: Ditto.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.CIA: Hunt down moles.
Bankers: Hunt down the city's best molé sauce; price is no object, just bring us our fucking food, Pedro.

CIA: Will ride through the rugged mountains of Afghanistan on horseback to make contact with tribal leaders.
Bankers: Wife once suggested some sort of "adventure vacation" crap. I was like, I don't work 100 hours a week to spend my vacation in some tent in the desert getting pissed on by a camel. Go shopping, why don't you, I have a client meeting tonight.

We predict success!
[NYP]

At a news conference in which she appeared—as she always does, every time she speaks—to be lying, Pelosi said that the CIA briefed her in February 2002 about waterboarding and other torture techniques being contemplated by the CIA, but was specifically told that waterboarding was not being used. In fact, by that time, Zubaydah had already been waterboarded 83 times.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The press conference is part of Pelosi's pushback against Republican attacks that she and other Democrats knew that the CIA was waterboarding Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed while it was happening and stayed silent, only to look aghast at the practice now. They've been citing a CIA timeline [pdf] of congressional briefings on the torture program that lists Pelosi's February 2002 briefing and says it included the "use of [torture] on Zubaydah and a description of the particular...techniques that had been employed."

Pelosi adamantly insisted that while the CIA told her that it thought waterboarding was legal, her briefers said it was not being employed. She found out several months later, through a staffer, that then-intelligence committee ranking member Jane Harman was told about the waterboarding and wrote a letter to the CIA questioning its legality. The recent release of the CIA's briefing timeline, Pelosi said, was a "diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off of those who conceived and developed and implemented these policies."

In other words, the CIA lied to me in 2002, and they're lying to you now. Pelosi's acknowledgement that she had learned second-hand of Harman's briefing on waterboarding in February 2003 only narrowly jibes with her previous statement that "we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." It depends on who "we" is—if she was talking about the congressional leadership, then she gets a pass. If she's talking about any members of Congress at all, including Harman—who was prevented by classification laws from sharing the information with any other members—then she was lying and knew it.

Either way, her statement today practically ensures, as Talking Points Memo points out, that some sort of truth commission or robust congressional investigation will get to the bottom of it. Pelosi supports a commission, and Obama opposes one. The fact that she's just dug in her heels and accused the CIA—both its Bush-era incarnation and the current one—of lying strengthens her position. It will be tough and messy for Obama to leave this to Congress to sort out.