Wednesday, December 12, 2007
CIA Efforts to Prosecute Whistle-Blower Spy Stopped
The former CIA intelligence official who went public on ABC News about the agency's use of waterboarding in interrogations, John Kiriakou, apparently will not be the subject of a Justice Department investigation, even though some CIA officials believe he revealed classified information about the use of waterboarding.
"They were furious at the CIA this morning, but cooler heads have apparently prevailed for the time being," a senior Justice Department official told the Blotter on ABCNews.com.
Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, did sent out a classified memo this morning warning all employees "of the importance of protecting classified information," a CIA spokesperson told ABCNews.com.
Kiriakou was not mentioned by name in the memo, according to the spokesperson, who said he could not make it public because it is classified.
The spokesperson would not comment other than to say that "intelligence officers have a lifelong, moral and legal responsibility to safeguard classified information. This continues even after someone leaves the agency."
In his appearance on ABC News and later with other media outlets, Kiriakou revealed that captured al Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to waterboarding during his interrogation. It was the first time any current or former CIA employee has revealed the use of the technique in public.
"The CIA has not commented on specific interrogation techniques," its spokesperson said. "Disclosing classified information is a violation of the law."
While the use of waterboarding may be classified, its use by the CIA as an approved interrogation technique has been known publicly for at least two years and has been debated in Congress.
Kiriakou said he did not seek CIA approval to appear on ABC News but said he knew "the rules."
Labels: CIA, John Kiriakou, torture, waterboarding
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Question Time for Nominee Linked to Interrogations
WASHINGTON, June 18 — In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, at a time when the Central Intelligence Agency had long been out of the interrogation business, senior C.I.A. officers scrambled to build a program to question terror suspects in secret jails abroad.
To check on the legality of the harsh interrogation techniques they proposed, they turned to John A. Rizzo, who was then acting as the agency’s top lawyer.
On Tuesday, Mr. Rizzo will go before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing to become the C.I.A.’s general counsel, giving the new Democratic majority its first chance at a public airing of agency practices that drew condemnation abroad and set off a prolonged debate at home.
Mr. Rizzo has been acting general counsel off and on for most of the last six years, serving without Senate confirmation. He was first nominated to the position last year, but a confirmation hearing was delayed.
In a report last month, the committee questioned whether the C.I.A. program was “necessary, lawful and in the best interests of the United States,” particularly in view of “the damage the program does to the image of the United States abroad.”
Mr. Rizzo, an agency lawyer for three decades who is known for his dapper dress and his discretion, will probably be questioned in open and closed sessions about the most contentious policies: holding terror suspects in secret; subjecting them to tough physical treatment, including the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding; and delivering some to countries that routinely practice torture.
“He’ll be the piñata,” said A. B. Krongard, executive director of the C.I.A. from 2001 to 2004, who remains a strong defender of the detention and interrogation program.
Mr. Krongard said Mr. Rizzo worked hard to see that the program was lawful, insisting on written legal opinions from the Justice Department.
“He did everything possible to get it right,” Mr. Krongard said. For any legal faults, he added, “Rizzo can be held accountable, I guess, but nowhere near as much as the Justice Department.”
Committee Democrats said they planned tough questioning for Mr. Rizzo, who was a crucial link between the interrogators and the Justice Department lawyers who gave their approval.
“I have serious concerns about this nomination,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who said she wanted to gauge Mr. Rizzo’s precise role in what she believed were deeply flawed legal justifications.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, C.I.A. director since May 2006, strongly defended the program and Mr. Rizzo’s role in shaping it.
Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman, said, “Mr. Rizzo knows better than anyone the full range of complex legal issues that influence intelligence operations in a democracy.”
Mr. Rizzo has earned a reputation for helping overseas operatives find a legal way to do what they feel is necessary. But officials said he did reject some proposed interrogation methods as excessive and illegal.
John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 but is critical of the detention program, said Mr. Rizzo “bears a share of responsibility” for the program and perhaps should have counseled against actions that were “technically legal but wrongheaded.”
But Mr. Radsan said top Bush administration officials deserved greater blame “for asking to push things right to the point of illegality.”
Mr. Rizzo, who is not granting interviews before his confirmation hearing, is no stranger to the agency’s legal controversies. A graduate of Brown University and the George Washington University Law School, he joined the agency in 1976, when the Church Committee of the Senate had just unearthed the agency’s involvement in assassination plots.
In the 1980s, he worked for the C.I.A.’s inspector general, investigating accusations of wrongdoing at agency stations abroad. He later became the agency’s point man for outside investigations into the Iran-contra affair, in which three agency officers were charged with crimes.
Since 1995, as senior deputy general counsel, Mr. Rizzo has often filled in as acting general counsel for months at a time. That was the case from November 2001 to October 2002, when top C.I.A. officials were negotiating the placement of secret jails abroad.
Interrogation was uncharted territory for most serving C.I.A. officers. A 1963 agency interrogation manual described the infliction of pain, including the use of electrical shock, but such techniques were banned by the 1980s, and by 2001, few C.I.A. officers had any experience in questioning suspects.
Mr. Krongard said deciding the limits of interrogation for Al Qaeda’s top operatives was not easy. “Can you slap someone in the face? Maybe,” he said. “But can you hit them as hard as you can? Maybe not.”
The approved options were first applied after the capture in March 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, a senior Qaeda figure. Mr. Rizzo was responsible for the legal advice to the officers holding him in Thailand as they escalated physical and mental pressure.
But colleagues said Mr. Rizzo insisted on Justice Department approval for actions they knew might be second-guessed.
“We were always conscious in the agency that we are judged not by the standards of today, but by the standards of tomorrow,” said Robert Richer, who retired in 2005 as second in command of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service.
The intelligence officers’ conviction that the political and legal winds would shift has proved accurate. A Justice Department memorandum in 2002 declared that nothing short of the pain associated with organ failure constituted illegal torture; the department later withdrew it and Congress set new limits on interrogation last year with the Military Commissions Act.
Since then, the C.I.A. has awaited White House approval for a new set of interrogation methods. It will again be up to Mr. Rizzo, if he is confirmed, to tell the agency what is and is not permitted.
Labels: CIA, interrogation, John A Rizzo, torture, War on Terror, waterboarding
Friday, June 08, 2007
Report: CIA Ran Secret Prisons in Europe
Council of Europe Investigator: CIA Ran Secret Prisons in Poland, Romania From 2003 to 2005
The Associated Press
PARIS
The CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2005 to interrogate high-level detainees in its war on terror, European investigator Dick Marty said in a report released Friday.
He accused Germany and Italy of obstructing his probe into alleged secret detentions by the CIA. Marty's report, citing unnamed CIA sources, also said top terror suspects Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were secretly held and interrogated in Poland. He said "highest state authorities" in countries involved knew of the alleged detention centers.
This is a breaking news update. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
PARIS (AP) The CIA ran secret prisons in Europe, including in Poland, said the head of a European investigation who was to present new findings Friday on what he has called a "spider's web" of human rights abuses during the war on terror.
"We have proof, on the basis of information collected, of the existence of illegal prisons in countries closely collaborating with the United States, such as Poland," the French daily Le Figaro quoted Swiss senator Dick Marty as saying.
Marty, leading an inquiry on behalf of the Council of Europe, has spoken to former CIA agents to corroborate his earlier accusations against Poland and Romania, where he suggested CIA planes landed to drop off detainees, a person familiar with the investigation said.
Marty was to release his latest findings Friday. In Romania, a senator who headed a panel investigating the allegations on behalf of the Romanian parliament rejected Marty's conclusions.
"The report is totally unfounded," Norica Nicolai said on news television Realitatea TV. "There are very serious allegations and I would not have expected a European lawmaker to make such serious accusations without evidence."
President Traian Basescu's former security adviser Sergiu Medar also denied allegations Romania's military intelligence department was involved in the CIA prison scandal.
"The military intelligence categorically did not participate in any kind of activities of this kind." He added that authorities cooperated with the investigation by the Council of Europe panel.
Last year, Marty accused 14 European nations spanning a swath from Dublin to Berlin to Bucharest of colluding with U.S. intelligence in a web of rights abuses to help the CIA spirit terror suspects to illegal detention facilities.
Marty said evidence suggested that CIA-linked planes carrying terror suspects had landed at airports in Timisoara, Romania, and Szymany, Poland, and likely dropped off detainees there. His findings backed up earlier news reports that identified the two countries as possible sites of clandestine detention centers.
His report also said European governments "did not seem particularly eager to establish" the facts.
Both the Polish and the Romanian government have vehemently denied the allegation that CIA secret detention centers were in their countries.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said that "Europe has been the source of grossly inaccurate allegations about the CIA and counterterrorism. And people should remember that Europeans have benefited from the agency's bold, lawful work to disrupt terrorist plots."
The European Parliament completed its own investigation in February, also accusing several European countries of colluding with the CIA to transport terror suspects to clandestine prisons in third countries.
President Bush acknowledged the existence of secret detention centers in September 2006, but did not specify any locations.
On Thursday, a coalition of human rights groups published a list of 39 terror suspects it believes are being secretly imprisoned by U.S. authorities.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and four other groups said information about the so-called "ghost detainees," a list of which was published Thursday, was gleaned from interviews with former prisoners and officials in the United States, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.
Information on the purported missing detainees was, in some cases, incomplete, the report acknowledged. Some detainees had been added to the list because Marwan Jabour, an Islamic militant who claims to have spent two years in CIA custody, remembered being shown photos of them during interrogations, it said.
Others were identified only by their first or last names, like "al-Rubaia," who was added to the list after a fellow inmate reported seeing the name scribbled onto the wall of his cell.
But information for at least 21 of the detainees had been confirmed by two or more independent sources, said Anne Fitzgerald, a senior adviser for Amnesty International.
Detainees on the list include Hassan Ghul and Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, who were both named in the 9-11 Commission report as al-Qaida operatives. Another is Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a jihadist ideologue named as one of the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists."
In Milan Friday, the trial was opening of 26 Americans all but one of them believed to be CIA agents accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect in Italy in 2003 and taking him to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before he was transferred to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for four years and claims he was tortured.
Associated Press Writer Jan Sliva contributed to this report.
Labels: CIA, Secret Prisons, War on Terror
