CIA Director Leon Panetta is continuing the
culture of cover-up that has plagued the Agency
for the past three decades, ever since William
Casey and Robert Gates collaborated in the 1980s
to hide the crimes of Iran-contra and to politicize
sensitive intelligence.
Panetta was expected to introduce an era of
transparency and accountability to the CIA,
but he has been a major disappointment, refusing
to remove any of the senior officials responsible
for policies that led to secret prisons, extraordinary
renditions, and torture and abuse.
Currently, he is doing the bidding of the most
reactionary elements of the CIA by supporting
the heavy redaction of the Inspector General’s
report of 2004, which is the most authoritative
account on record of the Agency’s interrogation
practices and the use of torture and abuse against
detainees.
In addition to blocking the release of an authoritative
version of the IG report, Panetta has established
his own review group within the Agency on interrogation
practices and has filled it with operational
officials from the National Clandestine Service
and lawyers from the Office of the General Counsel.
These were the lawyers who petitioned the Office
of Legal Counsel for immunity in the conduct
of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.
Panetta has also announced that former senator
Warren Rudman (R-NH) would be the director’s
special advisor on the Senate intelligence committee’s
special inquiry of past practices in terrorist
detention and interrogation. In 1991, Rudman
worked actively to block CIA officials from
testifying against the nomination of Gates as
CIA director.
Panetta, moreover, has demonstrated no concern
with the CIA’s destruction of nearly 100
interrogation videotapes, which was investigated
by the FBI but has thus far led to no indictments
and no information for the general public.
Clandestine officials have a great interest
in making sure that the Senate intelligence
committee does not receive the worst of the
evidence from the investigation.
By placing Rudman as an intermediary between
the review group and the Senate intelligence
committee, Panetta has ensured himself that
the most damaging information will never see
the light of day. The chairman of the intelligence
committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA),
has shown no interest in aggressive oversight
of the intelligence community.
Finally, Panetta has not supported the nomination
of a new Inspector General to replace John Helgerson,
who authorized the 2004 report and had become
a bête noire to three former CIA directors,
George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden.
He should be supporting the nomination of a
lawyer with outstanding credentials, such as
the Justice Department’s Glenn Fine, who
would aggressively puruse wrongdoing at the
CIA. Panetta’s failure to name a new IG
indicates that he supports the policy of using
the lawyers of the Office of the General Counsel
to monitor and restrain the office of the Inspector
General. Again, Feinstein has made no effort
to install a statutory IG at the CIA.
Those CIA directors, particularly William Colby
and Stansfield Turner, who tried to deal forthrightly
with the Agency’s sordid past have always
earned the enmity of the National Clandestine
Service, formerly the directorate of operations.
Colby assembled the “Family Jewels”
or the “Skeletons,” which described
the illegal activities of the CIA in Chile against
the Allende government and in the United States
during the Vietnam War. Colby’s “Family
Jewels” and Seymour Hersh’s story
on the CIA’s illegal domestic activities
led to the Hughes-Ryan Amendment that required
the president to report CIA covert actions to
the congressional oversight committees.
But when Representative Michael Harrington (D-MA)
leaked word of the Chilean operation, he was
denied further access to the files of the oversight
committee, which may explain why congressmen
do not deal openly with CIA transgressions.
One congressman who has dealt openly with CIA
transgressions, Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), has received
no support from his congressional colleagues
in pursuing the CIA cover-up of shoot down of
a missionary plane in Peru that led to the deaths
of a missionary and her seven-month-old daughter.
Again, a report from John Helgerson documented
the CIA ‘s failure to follow presidential
orders controlling the operation. The intelligence
committees have similarly demonstrated no interest
in pursuing CIA killings of innocent civilians
in Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, there is ample precedent for
installing CIA directors who then become a captive
of the clandestine culture and very resistant
to any policy of openness or glasnost. Bill
Casey and his deputy, Bob Gates, made sure that
the White House would be firmly in control of
the intelligence and informational bases of
foreign policy. Both Casey and Gates dissembled
often before the congressional intelligence
committees.
Gates’ role in covering-up his knowledge
of Iran-contra forced him to withdraw his nomination
as CIA director in 1987, and his politicization
of intelligence persuaded more than 30 Senators
to vote against his nomination in 1991.
As CIA director, Gates (along with his immediate
successors) wittingly took part in sending clandestine
intelligence to the White House that had been
manipulated by the Soviet Union and Russia and
designed to deceive the United States.
Other CIA directors, including James Schlesinger,
Goss, Hayden, and George Tenet, were political
directors cut from the same cloth as Casey and
Gates. Tenet made a special effort to cover-up
the CIA’s mishandling of intelligence
on the Soviet Union, which led to the failure
to record the decline and fall of the USSR.
Panetta could learn a great deal from Bill Colby,
who explained that the “Agency’s
survival could only come from understanding,
not hostility, built on knowledge, not faith.”
Sadly, Panetta appears to be cut from different
cloth.
Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor at the National War College. He spent
more than 42 years in the U.S. Army, the Central
Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense.
His most recent book is “Failure of Intelligence:
The Decline and Fall of the CIA.”
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
