Spooks, Scoops and Pols
JJA: “Exactly. And if the politicians keep on throwing intelligence professionals to the wolves, we’re going to have failure upon failure. It’s often a very good thing to change the rules, but if we punish those who broke the new rules before they even existed, prudent professionals are going to do nothing that’s even remotely aggressive. And then we won’t penetrate terrorist groups and we’ll be right back in that nightmare position of having to choose between following the narrowest possible interpretation of the rules and possibly failing to prevent a massive disaster.”
ML: “Indeed, the failure to get on top of al Qaeda, and Hezbollah, for example, came from precisely that sort of rule change, didn’t it?”
JJA: “In part, it did. When President Carter signed his executive order forbidding anyone to have anything to do with ‘assassination,’ the lawyers at the Agency said that meant we couldn’t recruit terrorists, because they either were, or might very well become, assassins. And so we had to depend on second- and third-hand information about terrorists.”
ML: “But still, I have a lot of sympathy for the people after 9/11 who had to deal with a real Hobson’s Choice: we could either do nasty things that we didn’t much like, or we could work more slowly and hope we weren’t blown up in the meantime.”
JJA: “Sure, one understands those things, and Obama’s total lack of comprehension of the existential dilemmas faced by the intel people is very discouraging. He was right when he said that all these things were behind us, and we should concentrate on the future. But he didn’t do that. He humiliated the people who were, after all, assured that waterboarding and so forth were perfectly legal, and then he even hinted that those people might be prosecuted. There’s really no excuse for that. It shows you don’t value your intelligence agency.”
ML: “I think it’s worse than that. Obama wanted to portray his predecessors as totally evil, and so he edited a memo on the subject from Admiral Blair. The memo noted that the harsh methods had ‘worked,’ and had probably saved American lives. But those words were censored. So there was a deliberate attempt to deceive the public, by portraying the Agency’s behavior as unadulterated evil.”
JJA: “Quite. It’s Carter all over again. I wonder if Obama’s going to have Panetta do the same thing Carter had Stansfield Turner do: purge the most experienced people from CIA, and promote the newbies, who don’t know enough to protect us effectively.”
ML: “Well, time will tell.”
JJA: “That’s just what worries me.”
And he was gone. For once, the ouija board wasn’t damaged, so I’m going to pursue this in a few days.
The thing I don’t get about President Obama, is how he can be willingly setting himself up to get the blame for any major terror attack that occurs against American targets on his watch. After 9/11 and the Anthrax attacks, the Bush Administration set the bar fairly high by preventing any other major terrorist attack against the US for seven and a half years.
Yet Obama has made the entire theme of his first months in office the dismantling of the counter-terrorism apparatuses that created by the previous administration and put into place after 9/11. That means that Obama will be seen as personally responsible for leaving America undefended if the US gets hit again in a big way by terrorists.
Forget the President’s constitutional and moral responsibility for national security. Even in the most basic terms of covering his own political backside, isn’t Obama too smart a politician to put himself in that position?
It is sad that on this very topic you clearly support torture for people who are suspects in terrorist activities. Yet we know so well many of the detainees were simply picked up on dusty streets of Afghanistan and hauled like sheep to Cuba. It is also a known fact many of these people have NOTHING and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Bin Laden and other thugs.
To many freedom loving people around the world, the most precious and real polutonium-235 of U.S. is its how individuals (legal or illegal) are in the eyes of the law. It is this great sense of what this country has gone through toward more justice for all that makes many people fall in love with its system.
So going through James Jesus Angleton, and portraying torture is fine and everyone does it, but it must be kept secret is disappointing.
I remember 30 years ago how I along with friends and thousands and thousands of other cars were stuck in highways going toward Evin prison in Tehran to open the gate to that place. The radio kept saying Evin prison is already freed and people must go home. How sad and how disappointing it is to know the same prison is holding so many great people under most retarded reasons and giving them the most horrifying tortures under the justification of Islamic Republic. Torture is torture, no matter under what context it is used. For God sake, that is why we are different than animals.
I think the scariest people and systems are those that under volumes of words and making up many “what If” nuclear explosion scenarios and other stupid reasons to justify torture, they are no different than what is taking place in places like Iran. Period.
Torture is torture, and reading statement by James Jesus Angleton (your other personality, maybe?) saying “I mean, if sleep deprivation is ‘torture,’ then every family that’s had a baby has been tortured, hasn’t it?” is indeed very insulting to readers to make such comparison. You know well the difference between the two kinds of not sleeping.
I think such statement equates our desires and practices no different than countries like Iran that torture people in prison. This is no rocket science and not too complicated to distinguish and condemn such practices.
what is truly sad, AR, is that you still haven’t taken that remedial reading course you need so badly. i’ve always opposed torture, and these conversations with Angleton provide a way to explore various subjects, and provide some information. your attempt at moral equivalence is noxious, since the methods used by americans are quite different from those in Iran.
Alireza, the fate of the real James Jesus Angleton is important background information for this story. (So find out who he is before writing seven paragraphs in response.) Your sentimental and irrelevant comparisons to Iran are not.
“The bullfight critics, ranked in rows, filled the enormous plaza full. But only one is there, who truly knows, and he’s the one who fights the bull.”
“Sure, one understands those things, and Obama’s total lack of comprehension of the existential dilemmas faced by the intel people is very discouraging.”
If I may be permitted an opposing view… I think this Administration knows full well what it is doing. How they hope to pin the consequences on the previous Administration is one question. The more important question is how they hope to capitalize upon the resulting crisis… not so much “if”, but “how.”
There has been a consistent pattern of actions and policies emerging – well thought-out – that suggests that this move against the intel community is, too, well considered for a desired effect. I do not for a minute give anyone in the Administration the “benefit” of naiveté.
We’re already seeing the beginnings of an exodus of the nation’s best and brightest from such fields as medicine and banking. We need solid, resourceful, intelligent people in the spook business. Looks as if that career option is going to suffer as well.
Ran, I believe you are correct. This is a calculated move on Obama’s part, and when the next terrorist attack takes place in the U.S., he will find a “plausible” way to blame Booooosh.
Who would have thought the demise of the United States could possibly occur in a matter of weeks?
well i personally don’t oppose torturing people who deserve it – this is the key difference. if the jews truly had been guilty of stabbing germany in the back & etc., then who cares if you gas them? or me? or my mother? my mother should not be destroying countries, whether or not she suckled me as a babe.
all this reasonable and self-evident natural reluctance to commit brutalities on people has been exploited into a wide-open door for the usual active measures: and so now everyone must make extravagant professions of abhorrence at torturing and disclaim in advance any possible connection to the implications (as interpretted by my worst enemy) of any possible words I may have written or said in the past…
how effeminated, passive-aggressive, manipulative, and dishonest this all is.
here – put the hammer in my hand: you think wanting to crush with a ball-peen hammer the hands and legs and teeth of the cunning subhuman who designed and carried out the operation that slaughtered 3,000 people and could have slaughtered tens of thousand makes me a moral reprobate? I will express this in language you can understand: if so, you – a hypothetical you, but Alireza will do – live in Opposite Land, sir.
Nothing proves more the success of the Soviet subversion of the United States that so many of our educated citizens truly believe there is some kind of tendency to instantly go fascist unless we are hypervigilant and always moving to the Left. Such dishonor will not go unpunished.
In 2004, Robert Baer told a reporter of the British political weekly New Statesman, regarding the way the CIA deals with terrorism suspects, “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt”
So, some probably did the “dirty job”, because it’s common by their standards of human condition, well, as the US could hire “blackwaters” service as suppleant army forces, I bet that the CIA could do the same, thus it keeps its hands “clean”, just sayin !
It’s true that torture doesn’t help on a long term program, better tu use propaganda and endoctrinment via State department supports.
Torture was effective on a small scale and with the support of an army strategy, like it was for Alger anti-guerilla quadrillage, or “hot” dejebel sites.
Torture for the sake of torture, as a mean in a defense policy, doesn’t find its moral justification in modern societies, though they were initiated by deviant and evil regimes in the middle of the 20th century ; some of our officers that practiced it were former resistants that had been tortured by nazis, if by experience they hadn’t found it efficient, probably that we would have lost Algeria war on the battle fields, but torture is one of the reasons we lose Algeria war political credit among the population, so in a long term, torture doesn’t help.
In western army history, I don’t remember that torture was used before, but religious made a great deal of it
This isn’t about torture per see. It is about the Revolutionary Justice Committee getting off to a flying start. Torture is a good hook to hang things on. Once the Revolutionary Justice Committee (hereafter RJC) really gets rolling , the hot irons and sharp knives will come into play. Socialists have never had a problem with torture, so long as it sin’t them being tortured.
What amuses me is that the MSM STILL hasn’t figured out that this is the RJC that EVERY socialist coup puts into place after power had been stolen and that they will Face the RJC after the first list of ‘enemies of the state’ is finished. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
Back on topic, James Jesus Angleton was maybe the worst CIA employee EVER. Does the name ‘Philby’ ring a bell?
JJA was incompetent, or himself a double agent.
A LOT of insiders asked this question because Ames joined the agency in ’62, when JJA was going strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames
It might be a coincidence that JJA crossed paths with almost EVERY major spy employed against the USA. May be…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton
Then again, maybe not. Remember, Philby TRAINED him.
We will never know, but IMHO, JJA was recruited by Philby and in turn recruited Ames, as well as others.
To Mr President Obama and to the United States Attorney General, Mr. Eric Holder and also to the the blind org “human rights watch”. I ask them, in the name of humanity, if REALLY they believe in the Real Humanity Rights!!! You should reconsider your positions of so-called “torture memos”.
No rights for terrorists, No rights for whom support terrorism, No rights for the Terror Masters. This sort of people deserves a very harsh treatment, they are ruthless people and intolerant, You saw them horribly proudly enjoying in slaughter of the Western. The Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl getting decapitated, or of the U.S. contractors in Fallujah getting torn limb from limb by Al-Qaida operatives. The American hostage Paul Johnson Jr. being beheaded by his terrorist captors in Saudi Arabia by this sort of people you want to advocate them!!!!!!Alas and Alas!!!
The United States has a legitimate right to self-defense after atrocities 9/11. Most sadly we see today some American policymakers are much proud to bring to justice some American officials from the previous administration. In this case, you want to bring to justice those WHO SAVED LIVES of a lot of Americans through the frustration of some terrible plots against the U.S by subjecting Al-Qaeda’s terrorists to some pretty violent treatment.
No matter how, if Americans used some harsh interrogation methods against the 9/11 terrorists and other plotters, but the United States remain a “MORAL STATE FOR HUMANITY”. The US is the only country that STRONGLY FIGHTING for people freedom, even if require using the hard power.
For example, you can put me in the west prisons for a many years and with such kind of harsh interrogation methods, but don’t put me a few minutes in the prisons of dictatorial regimes.
Whatever the cause, the western people are very thoughtful and emotional while our people “Arabs and Moslems” are ruthless and intolerant people, especially the fundamentalist Moslems and the regime followers.
For instance, I feel safe if I sleep in home of extremist Christian or Jewish extremist if severely I criticize their religion, but my life become a threatened if I do the same with the extremist Muslim, even if they are my family or the best friends to me.
However, this kind of prosecutions in such issues will lessened respect for American political institutions, above all will wounded the American greatness and harm the American influence on the earth. In this case you humiliate the United States of America and reveal your interrogation methods to your enemies.
Most obviously, you just want to portray your predecessors as totally evil “retaliation for no thing”, but PLEASE REMEMBER that “this retaliation will be ONLY ON THE ACCOUNT OF AMERICAN NATIONAL SECURITY AND AMERICAN INTEREST.”
If really were happened a few of violent interrogation methods against terrorists in Goantanamo or elsewhere, it was only their fault not America. The US government WAS NOT responsible of the wrong behavior for some persons, although that the harsh methods it was necessary to save American lives and had prevented a massive disaster.
If you claim your self in advocates of human rights, please see THE HORRIBLE TORTURE METHODS in the tyrannical regimes prisons in the Middle East.
In Syria, the most common methods of torture and ill-treatment used in Syria are:
Beatings on all parts of the body vary from the uninterrupted flogging to electrocution of your genitals, and electric shocks to the nose and ears, burning the victims with a hot iron and with cigarettes, Pouring boiling water on victims, beating on the soles of the feet. be it women or men, experience whippings, removal of finger nails, beatings of genital areas. the tyre, hanging from the ceiling sometimes for days or hanging the victim from a suspended tyre and beating him or her with sticks and cables. dripping acid or salt on open wounds. Pouring cold water over the victim’s body. So-called the German Chair, a metal chair with moving parts to which the victim is tied by the hands and feet.The back rest of the chair bends backwards, causing acute hyper extension of the spine and severe pressure on the victim’s neck and limbs. This is said to result in difficulty in breathing almost to the point of asphyxiation, loss of consciousness and, in some cases, fracturing of the vertebrae. All horrible methods mentioned above used in Syrian prisons, If you just express your opinion freely, or if you demonstrate or rally against any action by your government, no matter how inconsequential, then you write your own death sentence.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was the first leader to use chemical weapons against his own population, used it savagely toward his people such as genocide, expulsions and lethal gassing “mustard gas and nerves” of his own people over past 35 years. Iraqi forces had been using mustard and paralyzing gases as well as mass execution, where Saddam massacred more than 100000 Kurds in the genocide in the 1980s, including large numbers of women and children. What is more, most of mass cemeteries are still not found yet.
Saddam also routinely tortured and murdered women. Saddam’s son, Uday, have beheaded in public more than 200 women all over the country, dumping their severed heads at their families’ doorsteps.
Only in Abu Ghraib prisons, over thirty thousand people were executed there, and countless more were tortured and mutilated.
In Iraqi prisons during Saddam’s reign, it was there a lot of savage scenes of decapitation, citizens are publicly beheaded, hands amputated and fingers chopped off one by one, gouging out eyes, or Spraying insecticides into a victim’s eyes, Hammering nails into the fingers and hands and removal of finger nails and burning victims with a hot iron, Pouring boiling water into the victim’s rectum, Using bees and scorpions to sting naked , tongues hacked out with a razor blade while the tongue is held with tweezers, Nailing the tongue to a wooden board, Extracting teeth with pliers, all while victims shriek in pain and the thugs chant Saddam’s praises.
And though, you blame the previous administration on their MORAL HELP to Iraqi people and Afghani. You try to discredit them. But please remember that Iraqi people “TODAY ARE FREE”.
WAKE UP, PLEASE!!!
#2. Alireza: How sad to see people in the Middle East think like you?!
Jassem Othman, Syrian.
What is truly amazing is the fact that people define what was done as torture. The term has been so defined down that it is utterlu meaningless now.
What is truly amazing is the fact that people define what was done as torture. The term has been so defined down that it is utterly meaningless now.
The fate of the real James Jesus Angleton? Angleton was a drunk. Angleton was paranoid, which might be an occupational hazard for counterintelligence experts. Angleton made us so reliant on Israeli intelligence for information on the Middle East that he helped make American policy there the arm of Israeli policy that it is to this day. He destroyed our efforts to gain any useful intelligence on the Soviet Union by his constant mole searches. He refused to take seriously good intelligence because he believe that all defectors were KGB or GRU plants. And early in his career he shared everything we did with his old buddy, and fellow lush, Kim Philby, the British Soviet spy.
Some fount of wisdom you chose.
Jassem Othman, They are awake, they just have different objectives then you or I. Back when I was a speckled pup, Working in the black hole at Ft. Meade, I had to hand carry some time critical intercepts over the Turkey Run.
The guy I delivered them to had a picture on his wall. It showed Washington D.C in the foreground, taking up about 75% of the picture. New York was off in the upper corner with about 5% of the picture, a narrow strip above D.C. was labeled America, it took up another 15% or so. The background along the upper edge was labeled ‘the World’.
I think it was supposed to be a visual joke, but too many people in Washington see it as an accurate map of the reality.
Parochialism is alive and well in the seats of power.
America has a peculiar system of government. To acquire power in America, one must do the very things that lose one’s power in the rest of the world. Because of that fact and the tendency of older people to become set in their ways, Power in America is held by those least suited to use it on the international stage.
The Rules codified by Machiavelli several centuries ago that international relations follow is discounted in America because American politics ignores those rules. Machiavelli pointed out in the 2nd or 3 paragraph of his intro that his rules do not apply to democracies, that he wasn’t sure what rules did.
So you have the most powerful nation in the world trying to run ( or not run) the world by rules that the rest of the world doesn’t understand.
Despite the fears of Europeans, China and the third world, America has no interest in running the world.
All this is why nobody in power in DC actually gives a shit what happens in the turd world. Remember about 80% of Americans don’t understand the connection between Iraq and the War Islam is waging against America. President Bush didn’t understand it and he had the best information. The Average American cannot grasp the fact that Islam divides the world into the house of Islam and the house of War, that the religion is built around the concept of using war to convert EVERYONE to Islam. So they scoff at the idea of a war lasting 7 times longer then America is old. The politicians elected to power are even worse, since they got elected thru the system and try to apply the rules of that system to the rest of the planet, which isn’t interested at all.
To half of America, Iraq proved that the USA can invade any turd world country and hang the dictator. So that means to them that the yet-to-be-hung dictators should pay attention. Under the system they are used to, Iraq was a lesson and the tyrants should learn from it.
The tyrants play by a different set of rules and Iraq was an aberration, one that didn’t work out so well for President Bush. The tyrants know that the key to defeating America is to lay low and wait. America has the attention span of a sex starved flea and waiting a few years, months, or in the case of Georgia, days will let America direct it’s attention elsewhere. Iran has been doing this for decades. It would be easier to turn a fish into a bird then change the way America looks at this. If you could, America wouldn’t be America, but just a slightly larger turd world nation.
That is the goal of the Usurper and the puppet masters pulling his strings.
He really has set the arrow to point right back at him if we get attacked again.
I hope that every Democrat, on his or her deathbed, realizes that their entire life has been wasted in moral grandstanding and that the blood of the innocents killed in future attacks (we all know they’re coming) is partially on their hands. Yeah, I want that to be the last thing they are conscious of in this life.
Jassem, that is powerful stuff. Best wishes to you as you make your way through this crazy minefield we call life.
#typos_R_us: Yes, Iraq it was a good lesson and the tyrants should learn from it, and the American Socialists should understand that these blind organizations “U.N , the Security Council and the Human Rights Watch”, they are the largest PEACEFUL enemies to the United States. Which is why the United States must be imperious, ruthless, and relentless, and this BENEVOLENT POWER on the earth must lead the world in the name of freedom.
The United States of America is “THE ONLY UNIQUE MORAL SUPERPOWER” in the world. The American power always kept a peace, so Mr. President Obama and the rest of the Revolutionary American Socialists of this sort, please KEEP YOUR interests only in the HIGH-RISK ISSUES!!!
I have no idea why you would consider James Jesus Angleton a reliable source for anything, dead or alive. Reviewing his dubious career, it’s amazing we weren’t all incinerated by the Soviet Union.
Jassem, I sometimes think that the American dis-interest in Empire building is part of the problem. It is very strange to have a nation with overwhelming power that doesn’t use it build an empire. Time an dagain the USA has invaded some nation, then left. Weird! No wonder the average tyrant is clueless.
Our European cousins fear our power, or at least the elites do. Education is all well and good, but if you are born with a ‘von’ or a ‘du’ in your name that has been there for 7 or more centuries, it must be hard to relate to American Elits, who mostly bought their status. That makes them merchants by the standards of a von or du whose great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather was in line for a throne. I think that the Europeans don’t want to curtail or power so much as redirect and control it. Since they have no choice but to share the parlor with an 800 Lb gorilla, they would really like to make sure it has on a good pair of fetters. That is what the UN is supposed to do. NATO also. All chains to keep the USA from running amoke.
No evidence that we will, but why take chances?
That is why President Bush made the Euros nervous. Clinton paid absolutely no attention to the UN NATo or the GC. He just did pretty much what ever he wanted, bombed whoever he wanted, started the rendition program, the wiretapping program, etc. Clinton didn’t scare the Euros because the Elites knew he was a coward and his wiold man act was just that. With Bush, they knew he meant what he said, or at least he did at first.
The Usurper is a moderate by Euro standards and the Elites are not threatened by him.
It will be interesting to see how the Euros react when the on-going low key civil war here in the States heats up.
typos_R_us, “the USA has invaded some nation”
Obviously, the United States colonialism created economies many countries and made it a high notable standing and respected in the world, i.e. the USA made them the biggest economic power in the world.
The Europeans fear your power, because the US strongly fighting against fascists and Europe still rule by politically active racists and anti-Semites those who are sympathetic with the Nazis that killed more than six millions Jews in this country “Poland”. Euros pro-Nazis they also known for their dubious statements about Jews, and continually their praise of Nazism. Let alone the European jealousy toward America’s Greatness and wealth. They fear America Power although that Americans who freed Europeans from European Nazi.
typos_R_us:
you’re making a confusion, the “de” and the “von” are no more the elite as you understand it : influent persons on the political and intellectueal spectrum. The Nobles with an old lineage are anonym, they are part of our economical society in that sense they can occupy a position in the army, in the banks direction, communications, etc… or simple farmers and hosteliers, now they hire their castels for tourists or conventions. But they do not represent what you call the opinion, though their life style still try to preserve the old moral, they usely still attend church mass, they have several children (from 5 to 8), they have refined manners and the honnor code, and they do not mix with the “villans” as far as marriage are concerned.
If they still would be in power, I bet their position would be more nationalist and independant from external influence,(De Villiers), ie EU and or US.
The warrior cult would drive their policy, defence of the patry values and interests.
Now , our political elite, from right or left sides attended the same sort of schools, “Sciences politiques” and ENA (school of administration), so the solutions that they propose are allways of the same pattern, and they practice clientelism among their own schools former students, so something never changes.
Saying that we or they are jaelous of America is a non-sense, none of them would like to emigrate, their seat is much confortable in EU.
Also we/they are facing the difficulty to dedend our identity in the globalisation, by emphasizing what are our differences, cultural divergences, economical system, traditions and diplomaty.
And I agree that EU has become an abstract inerty power, with too many discussions and commissions, the French are more and more doubtful about the utility of EU for solving international conflicts
a “Figaro” article (28/04/09) says that from 64% of the French favorred EU in 2004, only 48 % of them still do today, while the average of the EU nations is 53 %, that means that the French become euro-sceptict like Czecholovakia, Poland…
This happened in spite of the official discourse that promotes the EU spirit for good reasons (elites autoreproduction)
Though we are repproached to be individualists by our EU counterparts, Sarko is irritating a lot of them by initiating some decisions, that were not undertaken before, because of these neverending discussions.
He show that he won’t let an external enemi to impose its laws, (ie piracy treatment), so I am not afraid that he wouldn’t take the right decision in case of conflict, and above all, he won’t ask the permission to the EU burocrats.
As our forces are limited we have to select what are the useful and necessary wars we want to undertake, and sometimes they were/are/will be not the sames (as a whole, but part of them)that our Big american “papa” would choose.
So I can’t see envy and or disdain, it’s rather that we have to carry on walking on our traditional path
Jassem Othman:
I can’t recognise my country in your description
http : // www .rue89 .com/2009/03/06/pseudo-retour-de-l-antisemitisme-un-rituel-au-diner-annuel-du-crif