There’s an inter­est­ing story this morn­ing in the New York Times that chron­i­cles the begin­nings of the CIA’s harsh inter­ro­ga­tion pro­gram used to squeeze infor­ma­tion out from KSM and Abu Zubaydah — and others.

It’s a good read, and lays bare the utter sim­plic­ity of how the pro­gram got started. There was no Cheney-lead con­spir­acy to push aside other meth­ods; these were not sadis­tic vam­pires pray­ing on the pain and dis­com­fort of enemy lead­ers; this was not con­structed as pay back for 9/11. No, these were learned men with an alter­na­tive approach that CIA lead­ers were will­ing to give a try to get as much infor­ma­tion out of those who knew the most about al Qaeda plans of any­one in US custody.

The arti­cle slants toward the idea that Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jensen were wad­ing into waters well over their heads — sug­gest­ing they didn’t really know what they were doing based on their grad­u­ate degrees and lack of actual inter­ro­ga­tion expe­ri­ence. But that’s like say­ing an infantry pla­toon leader shouldn’t do his job because he hasn’t seen combat…whatever.

They had never car­ried out a real inter­ro­ga­tion, only mock ses­sions in the mil­i­tary train­ing they had over­seen. They had no rel­e­vant schol­ar­ship; their Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions were on high blood pres­sure and fam­ily ther­apy. They had no lan­guage skills and no exper­tise on Al Qaeda.

Tell me at the time who had?

Another inter­est­ing tid­bit is the men­tion of CIA counter-terrorism cen­ter direc­tor Cofer Black’s enthu­si­asm for the pro­gram. Remember he’s the one that in the wake of 9/11 pledged to law­mak­ers that he’d bring bin Laden’s head in a dry-ice cooled box back to the Hill for them.

At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchells the­o­ries were attract­ing high-level atten­tion. Agency offi­cials asked him to review a Qaeda man­ual, seized in England, that coached ter­ror­ist oper­a­tives to resist inter­ro­ga­tions. He con­tacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first pro­posal to turn the ene­mys bru­tal tech­niques slaps, stress posi­tions, sleep depri­va­tion, wall-slamming and water­board­ing into an American inter­ro­ga­tion program.

By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was con­sult­ing with the C.I.A.s Counterterrorist Center, whose direc­tor, Cofer Black, and chief oper­at­ing offi­cer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his com­bi­na­tion of vis­ceral tough­ness and psy­cho­log­i­cal jar­gon. One per­son who heard some dis­cus­sions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. offi­cials what they wanted to hear. In this per­sons words, Dr. Mitchell sug­gested that inter­ro­ga­tions required a com­pa­ra­ble level of fear and bru­tal­ity to fly­ing planes into buildings.

By the end of March, when agency oper­a­tives cap­tured Abu Zubaydah, ini­tially described as Al Qaedas No. 3, the Mitchell-Jessen inter­ro­ga­tion plan was ready. At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, as reported in prior news accounts, two F.B.I agents used con­ven­tional rapport-building meth­ods to draw vital infor­ma­tion from Mr. Zubaydah. Then the C.I.A. team, includ­ing Dr. Mitchell, arrived.

It’s a story worth read­ing and part two is com­ing. As the Holder jus­tice depart­ment spools up its CIA witch hunt, more of these sto­ries will come out from attor­neys eager to paint their clients in the best light. But after nine years of the most com­plex war America has ever fought, we’ve grown weary of being under threat, and a new admin­is­tra­tion is try­ing to reap polit­i­cal ret­ri­bu­tion for an anti-terror pol­icy the left has always seen as overkill.

Let’s not for­get that the Church Committee ruined the CIA and gave us the over-bureaucratized, risk-averse, by-the-numbers agency that we had when the Soviet Union fell to everyone’s sur­prise and when we were caught flat-footed on 9/11 with no plan to coun­ter­at­tack. Luckily the agency had vet­er­ans who’d stuck around and knew how to fire an M4 and live off the land — and those who were will­ing to push the enve­lope on inter­ro­ga­tions to get vital fol­lowup strike infor­ma­tion before 3,000 more civil­ians were killed.

PS – On a dif­fer­ent note, the NYT also reports that two AP jour­nal­ists were badly wounded in an IED attack while embed­ded with Marines in south­ern Afghanistan. Photographer Emilio Morenatti and video­g­ra­pher Andi Jatmiko were in a mil­i­tary vehi­cle when it struck a road­side bomb. According to reports it looks like Morenatti lost a foot in the attack. A hor­ri­ble, hor­ri­ble thing and our prayers go to their fam­i­lies and loved ones.

– Christian

Ok…so let me get this straight.

Leon Panetta can­celled a secret CIA pro­gram to kill or cap­ture Al Qaeda oper­a­tives at close range — mean­ing using hit teams to do the dirty work instead of Predator drones. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion makes a pres­i­den­tial find­ing call­ing for the assas­si­na­tion or cap­ture of AQ oper­a­tives known to Congress, but then con­ceals the pro­gram (which never really got off the ground) from reg­u­lar brief­ings since then.

A secret intel­li­gence pro­gram can­celed by CIA Director Leon Panetta in June was meant to find and then cap­ture or kill al-Qaida lead­ers at close range rather than tar­get them with air strikes that risked civil­ian casu­al­ties, gov­ern­ment offi­cials with knowl­edge of the oper­a­tion said Monday.

And why are we all freaked out about this? Doesn’t this seem log­i­cal in the extreme?

In fact, didn’t we exe­cute a cou­ple of those mis­sions of the cap­ture vari­ety with Ramzi Binalshibh and KSM in Pakistan? Sounds like it worked just fine to me.

Panetta can­celed the effort on June 23 after learn­ing of its exis­tence, its fail­ure to yield results, and the fact that Congress had been unaware of the pro­gram since its incep­tion in 2001, accord­ing to one offi­cial with direct knowl­edge of the plan.

That offi­cial said for­mer President George W. Bush autho­rized killing al-Qaida lead­ers shortly after the Sept. 11 ter­ror­ist attacks, and that Congress was made aware of that. However, the offi­cial said, Panetta also told mem­bers of Congress that accord­ing to notes that he had been given on the early months of the pro­gram, then-Vice President Dick Cheney directed the CIA not to inform Congress of the specifics of the secret pro­gram.

A.) Tell me how fir­ing hell­fires from Predators is more eth­i­cal or legal than send­ing a team to kill or cap­ture a sin­gle person.

B.) Doesn’t this sort of smack of Sandi Berger-esque national secu­rity pol­icy? We know from the 9–11 com­mis­sion report that Berger got cold feet when he had bin Laden in his sights for a proxy raid in Afghanistan because he was afraid of col­lat­eral dam­age and blow­back. Now some of the same national secu­rity pol­icy minds are back in the driver’s seat so we can­cel a pro­gram to kill bad guys using CIA assets. Great idea folks.

His pri­vate rev­e­la­tion ignited a storm of protests from Democratic mem­bers of the House Intelligence Committee, who accused the CIA of lying to Congress. Some are call­ing for a con­gres­sional investigation.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sug­gested that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion broke the law by con­ceal­ing a CIA coun­tert­er­ror­ism pro­gram from Congress. Feinstein said the Bush administration’s fail­ure to notify Congress about the 8-year-old coun­tert­er­ror­ism pro­gram “is a big prob­lem, because the law is very clear.”

According to Feinstein, Panetta told Congress late last month that “he had just learned about the pro­gram, described it to us, indi­cated that he had can­celed it and … did tell us that he was told that the vice pres­i­dent had ordered that the pro­gram not be briefed to the Congress.”

“We were kept in the dark. That’s some­thing that should never, ever hap­pen again,” said Feinstein.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said he agreed with Feinstein that the CIA should keep Congress informed. But Cornyn said the new asser­tion “looks to me sus­pi­ciously like an attempt to pro­vide polit­i­cal cover” to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats. Pelosi has accused the CIA of lying to her in 2002 about its use of water­board­ing, or sim­u­lated drown­ing, which many peo­ple, includ­ing Obama, con­sider tor­ture.

Once again it’s pol­i­tics, my friends. And Republicans have to be sali­vat­ing over this one as news trick­les out of a jus­tice depart­ment probe into inter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods. That’s all this admin­is­tra­tion needs as it tries to con­vince us we need Canada-style health care — a debate over whether we should be send­ing spooks to kill or cap­ture Al Qaeda oper­a­tives and squeeze infor­ma­tion from them (with­out a lawyer) when we nab one.

– Christian

I’m com­pletely flab­ber­gasted by this CIA pro­gram that the spooks sup­pos­edly lied to Congress about for the last eight years.

Apparently the pro­gram was ini­ti­ated after 9/11, but the crit­ics are still mum on what the nature of the pro­gram was. Now I want a lit­tle spec­u­lat­ing here.

Our boy Bryant Jordan says he heard the pro­gram may cen­ter around an elite assas­si­na­tion squad that was put together of the Sept. 11 attacks and reported exclu­sively to then VP Cheney. I love that story, but it doesn’t sound believ­able since Panetta only learned about it a few months ago and shut it down then.

Again, back to Seymour Hersh rumors, was it a pro­gram to upend the Iranian regime with Delta oper­a­tors, CIA cutouts and polit­i­cal manip­u­la­tion? Maybe.

Huff Post actu­ally has a good arti­cle on this and says one of its sources said even Republicans were stunned when they learned about the pro­gram. I have a feel­ing it’s a pretty hard core one given the silence so far on what the nature of the pro­gram was. We all know that Congress leaks like a sieve — espe­cially if it will gain polit­i­cal points for cer­tain play­ers. So if the folks in the know have been quiet this long, it’s gotta be pretty damned Earth shaking…

…which makes me want to know even more…

All right read­ers, what do you think about this? So what was this TOP SECRET program?

– Christian

From Today’s Front Page at Military.com:

The top American offi­cial respon­si­ble for train­ing the new Iraqi intel­li­gence ser­vices said Tuesday that country’s spies could be ready to go it alone by the end of next year. 

After years of fits and starts, the Iraqi mil­i­tary and min­istry of defense intel ser­vices are up and run­ning, and, with coali­tion help, scor­ing some sig­nif­i­cant wins against insur­gent groups, bombers and cross-border infiltrators. 

“I would say by this time next year they would be likely self-sufficient to the extent that within the capa­bil­ity they have, both tech­ni­cal and human, that they can, in fact, col­lect, ana­lyze and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion to pro­vide sup­port to the Iraqi ground forces,” said Dan Maguire, the senior American trainer for Iraqi intel­li­gence ser­vices, in an inter­view with mil­i­tary blog­gers Nov. 27. 

Read the entire tran­script of the inter­view with Dan Maguire.

Maguire said in and around Baghdad the num­ber of tar­gets Iraqi intel­li­gence per­son­nel develop has jumped from less than a dozen per week before this year’s troop buildup to an aver­age of 50 to 60 tar­gets per week. 

Moreover, Iraqi intel ser­vices are now able to go after about 90 per­cent of the bad guys they fin­ger, where before the surge few tar­gets had hard enough intel­li­gence to nab. 

Check out more intel news at Norman Polmar’s Spy Corner.

The new intel ser­vices have been able to develop their own infor­ma­tion, ana­lyze it and grab insur­gents using Iraqi mil­i­tary and police forces about 30 per­cent of the time, “so they are right now on par in terms of going after tar­gets and hav­ing suc­cess on that with the rest of the coali­tion forces,” Maguire said. 

But that doesn’t mean Iraqi intel­li­gence ser­vices don’t have some work to do before the U.S. can cut the cord. 

Maguire said his pupils are short on basic sig­nals intel­li­gence tech­nol­ogy that can help them inter­cept enemy com­mu­ni­ca­tions, there are too few Arabic-language intel­li­gence analy­sis soft­ware options — which ham­pers the exploita­tion of the infor­ma­tion gained from sources — and there’s a last­ing sus­pi­cion among mil­i­tary com­man­ders that their intel­li­gence per­son­nel are sim­ply spy­ing on them. 

“Many com­man­ders view the tac­ti­cal intel­li­gence orga­ni­za­tions in a divi­sion as being there to spy on the com­man­ders, because that’s their expe­ri­ence or their knowl­edge­abil­ity from the Saddam era days,” Maguire explained. “We are work­ing very hard to rec­tify that by direct inter­face with divi­sion com­man­ders, by recruit­ing and putting in place G-2s at each of those divi­sion lev­els and work­ing closely with them so that the com­man­der and the G-2 build a bond and a trust so that they can, in fact, uti­lizes the resources effectively.” 

At the higher lev­els, how­ever, Maguire likes what he sees. 

“Their joint staff [intel­li­gence offi­cer], and his staff are a very, very com­pe­tent group of indi­vid­u­als,” Maguire said. “We have a new [chief intel­li­gence offi­cer] that’s only been in place now for about a month and a half, who is a for­mer offi­cer in the Saddam era, was an instruc­tor at their National War College equiv­a­lent insti­tu­tion, a very, very bal­anced indi­vid­ual, very knowl­edge­able, very, very good at lead­ing and men­tor­ing his staff. And they are really start­ing to get it and put it together.”

(more…)

I got for­warded a lit­tle num­ber the other day that I thought DT read­ers would get a kick out of. I gotta tell you, I still have a thing for the SR-71. I mean, it con­jures up all kinds of images of pirated space alien tech­nol­ogy, super secret deal­ings, Cold War spy­ing and raw, unadul­ter­ated speed…Shelby Cobra-type speed.

So when I saw this excerpt from a book about SR-71 pilots, my retro hack­les tingled.

One day, high above Arizona, we were mon­i­tor­ing the radio traf­fic of all the mor­tal air­planes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traf­fic con­trollers to check his ground speed. Ninety knots, ATC replied. A twin Bonanza soon made the same request. One-twenty on the ground, was the reply. To our sur­prise, a navy F-18 came over the radio with a ground speed check. I knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, he had a ground speed indi­ca­tor in his cock­pit, but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the val­ley know what real speed was. Dusty 52, we show you at 620 on the ground, ATC responded.

The sit­u­a­tion was too ripe. I heard the click of Walters mike but­ton in the rear seat. In his most inno­cent voice, Walter star­tled the con­troller by ask­ing for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet, clearly above con­trolled air­space. In a cool, pro­fes­sional voice, the con­troller replied, Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground. We did not hear another trans­mis­sion on that fre­quency all the way to the coast.

And another…

Odd are the thoughts that wan­der through ones mind in times like these. I found myself recall­ing the words of for­mer SR-71 pilots who were fired upon while fly­ing mis­sions over North Vietnam. They said the few errant mis­sile det­o­na­tions they were able to observe from the cock­pit looked like implo­sions rather than explo­sions. This was due to the great speed at which the jet was hurl­ing away from the explod­ing mis­sile.

Just an oppor­tu­nity to get inside one of these jets in a lit­er­ary way sat­is­fies my curios­ity. Any for­mer Blackbird dri­vers out there that can add any­thing to this?

(Gouge: CM)

– Christian

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments issued an updated analy­sis recently of the clas­si­fied projects bud­get for fis­cal 2008.

Comprising about 18 per­cent of the DoDs acqui­si­tion bud­get, the $31.9 bil­lion will con­tinue pro­grams with names like Link Plumeria and Black Light and oth­ers which have no name.

Aviation Week reports the pro­grams include…

…a grow­ing abil­ity to invade sen­sors, cre­ate false tar­gets, take over net­works, plant mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion and mine com­puter data, even from manned or unmanned air­craft fly­ing close to the emit­ter of inter­est. A new gen­er­a­tion of stealththat will be invul­ner­a­ble to low– as well as high-frequency radaris being developed.

A lot of money has gone into tech­nolo­gies to find, dis­arm, jam or pre­empt the con­struc­tion, plant­ing and det­o­na­tion of impro­vised explo­sive devices. High-power microwave devices are being designed to dis­able elec­tron­ics, erase or scram­ble com­puter mem­o­ries, or shut down elec­tri­cal activ­ity in road vehi­cles, air­craft in flight or satel­lites in orbit.

CSBA said the bud­get line for clas­si­fied pro­grams has more than dou­bled since 1995, increas­ing by 112 per­cent while unclas­si­fied acqui­si­tion in the Pentagon fis­cal year bud­get has increased 77 percent.

The record for clas­si­fied acqui­si­tion pro­grams has been mixed. Some suc­cess­ful and effec­tive weapon sys­tems were devel­oped and even pro­duced as black pro­grams. These include the F-117 stealth fighter and the B-2 stealth bomber.

On the other hand, some clas­si­fied pro­grams have had trou­bled his­to­ries. Restrictions placed on access to clas­si­fied fund­ing have meant that DoD and Congress typ­i­cally exer­cise less over­sight over clas­si­fied pro­grams than unclas­si­fied ones. This lower level of scrutiny, cou­pled with the com­part­men­tal­iza­tion of infor­ma­tion gen­er­ally asso­ci­ated with clas­si­fied efforts has con­tributed to per­for­mance prob­lems and cost growth in a num­ber of pro­grams, such as the Navys ill-fated A-12 attack air­craft program.

Still, a UAV that plants a virus in an enemy com­puter? Im all for it.

(Gouge: NC)

– Christian

According to The Washington Post’s Al Kaman, an edi­to­r­ial in the July 10 edi­tion of the Iranian news­pa­per Resalat reported the following:

“A few weeks ago, 14 squir­rels equipped with espi­onage sys­tems of for­eign intel­li­gence ser­vices were cap­tured by [Iranian] intel­li­gence forces along the country’s bor­ders. These trained squir­rels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the bor­ders of the coun­try for intel­li­gence and espi­onage pur­poses. According to the announce­ment made by Iranian intel­li­gence offi­cials, alert police offi­cials caught these squir­rels before they could carry out any task.

“Fixing GPS devices, bug­ging instru­ments and advanced cam­eras in the bod­ies of trained ani­mals like squir­rels, mice, ham­sters, etc, are among mod­ern meth­ods of col­lect­ing intel­li­gence. Given the fast speed and the spe­cial phys­i­cal fea­tures of these ani­mals, they pro­vide spe­cial capa­bil­i­ties for spy­ing oper­a­tions. Once the ani­mals return to their place of ori­gin, the intel­li­gence gath­ered by them is then offloaded.…”

I’m con­vinced my local gov­ern­ment has employed a sim­i­lar tac­tic to spy on me and I will con­tinue to counter using my English Setters to scare the var­ments off of my property.

(Gouge: CM)

– Ward

The Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, released the new U.S. Counterintelligence Strategy for 2007 this week.

Its pretty pre­dictable what the main goals are:

Secure the Nation Against Foreign Espionage and Electronic Penetration

Protect the Integrity of the US Intelligence System

Support National Policy and Decisions

Protect US Economic Advantage, Trade Secrets and Know How

Support US Armed Forces

Manage the Counterintelligence Community to Achieve Efficient Coordination

Improve Training and Education of the Counterintelligence Community

Expand National Awareness of Counterintelligence Risk in the Private as well as Public Sector

Whats inter­est­ing, how­ever, is the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­tys empha­sis on enlist­ing civil­ians in the counter-intel process

By engag­ing the pri­vate sec­tor and acad­e­mia in mean­ing­ful dia­logue, there is much we can learn, and in turn we can pro­vide a mech­a­nism to coor­di­nate the pub­lic dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion on intel­li­gence threats to the nation.

Itll be inter­est­ing to see if the pri­vate sec­tor coop­er­ates. But as the national coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence chief, Dr. Joel Brenner, said in a release: “The President and the Director of National Intelligence expect us to make mea­sur­able progress on all of these goals soon. Our job now is to drive this strat­egy from the clouds down to the sidewalk.”

– Christian

When Gen. Michael Hayden, the for­mer NSA direc­tor, was nom­i­nated to head the Central Intelligence Agency, a few folks were wor­ried. The CIA was sup­posed to be in charge of infor­mant and spies — human intel­li­gence, or HUMINT. The NSA was a sig­nals intel­li­gence, or SIGINT, shop. Could the CIA really trust some­one like Hayden, who spe­cial­ized in tech­ni­cal snoop­ing?
At the time, it seemed like a minor point. Hayden, after all, had a HUMINT back­ground, too. And his resume wasn’t really the issue; his autho­riz­ing of warant­less wire­taps loomed much larger.
But the SIGINT/HUMINT divide is bound to come up again, now that Hayden’s boss, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, is get­ting ready to skedad­dle. Because Negroponte’s likely replace­ment is Admiral Mike McConnell, another for­mer NSA direc­tor. Another SIGINT guy.
Now, since 9/11, just about every­one in the intel­li­gence field has talked about how crummy our net­work of flesh-and-blood infor­mants is. Can a cer­ti­fied geek like McConnell fix that? Or is this one more acknowl­edg­ment of the tri­umph of tech­ni­cal intel­li­gence — and the decline of human snoops?
UPDATE 5:59 PM: Speaking of spy­ing, let’s hope the Daily News some­how got this story wrong. Because if George Bush really just granted the gov­ern­ment, by exec­u­tive fiat, the power to read our mail with­out a war­rant, it vio­lates every notion of pri­vacy and due process under the law we’ve built up over the last 230 years in this coun­try.
UPDATE 01/05/06 11:36 PM: “John D. Negroponte’s exit from the nation’s top spy post after just 19 months will tem­porar­ily stall reform efforts for the nation’s 16 intel­li­gence agen­cies and sow fur­ther insta­bil­ity,” Siobhan Gorman reports in today’s Baltimore Sun.

The depar­ture leaves Negroponte’s likely suc­ces­sor, retired Vice Adm. J. Michael McConnell, with lit­tle time to put the fledg­ling office on solid foot­ing before the next White House turnover, tlaw­mak­ers and intel­li­gence offi­cials said.
The lead­er­ship change in the Director of National Intelligence office is com­pounded by the absence of a deputy to replace Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who left the job as second-in-command last spring to head the CIA.