A distinction without a difference

By Mel Goodman
Baltimore Sun
July 9, 2007

Late last month, the CIA declassified most of a huge 1973 file known as the "family jewels," which detailed domestic spying, assassination plots and numerous CIA crimes from the 1950s to the early 1970s. In a speech to the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden boldly proclaimed, "The documents provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency. I firmly believe that the improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system. What we do now to protect Americans, we do within a powerful framework of law and review."

Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.

The "family jewels" represent a depressing picture of national security crimes, including drug experimentation on unwitting victims that was redacted from the release of the documents. These activities were authorized by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who used the Cold War as justification for intelligence abuses. They took place when there were no congressional oversight committees to monitor such crimes and no statutory inspector general at the CIA to demand in-house investigations. There were high-level CIA officials, particularly lawyers, who protested these actions, but their warnings went unheeded.

Mr. Hayden's assurances notwithstanding, most of the crimes of the past continue today with no challenge from the oversight committees and no review from the Department of Justice. The ban on assassinations has been modified to exclude suspected terrorists. The National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping allows monitoring of international phone calls and e-mail of people inside the United States. Once again, anti-war activities are being monitored by the Pentagon and local police departments. Additional crimes include torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, secret overseas prisons and "extraordinary renditions."

The Bush administration opened the door to torture and abuse by the CIA and the military in February 2002, when the president decided to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. Military lawyers challenged the White House on these issues, and a significant number of lawyers resigned from the Department of Justice. Many CIA lawyers, however, welcomed the exemptions that permitted CIA operatives to engage in torture and abuse. Two CIA directors, Porter J. Goss and Mr. Hayden, even joined Vice President Dick Cheney in lobbying Congress for an exception for the CIA in the Senate's amendment to ban torture. The lobbying efforts of Mr. Goss and Mr. Hayden were a violation of the agency's charter that prohibits policy advocacy.

In November 2005, The Washington Post confirmed a long-rumored story that the CIA was operating eight to 10 secret prisons in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Human Rights Watch confirmed that the Eastern European prisons were in Hungary, Poland and Romania. Their collaboration was a violation of their membership in the European Union, which is investigating charges of illegal and immoral behavior.

The CIA began the practice of extraordinary rendition - a form of kidnapping with terrorist suspects being "rendered" from one country to another without a court hearing or extradition process - in the wake of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. The number of abductions increased significantly after the 9/11 attacks, and it is believed that nearly 200 people have been rendered since 2001.

Most of these people have not been charged with any crime; they are denied lawyers, and their families do not know their whereabouts. All are low-level suspected terrorists who have been turned over to foreign intelligence services in the Middle East known to torture prisoners. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice disingenuously told a European news conference in December 2005 that terrorist suspects were not turned over to countries without assurance against torture. Once again, we are learning virtually nothing about renditions from our congressional oversight committees - but criminal cases in Germany and Italy involving more than three dozen CIA operatives should bring us much-needed information.

These activities point to the fact that the CIA has lost its moral compass. In a democracy, moreover, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are protected by agreed procedures, it is not in the interest of the state to flout those procedures at home or abroad.

The CIA's crimes have allowed our enemies to taunt us for our hypocrisy and encouraged our friends to doubt our integrity.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, was a Soviet analyst at the CIA from 1966 to 1990. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.”

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