I really don’t want to go back over this. It’s a serious problem that no one has ever been held accountable for the torture that was conducted under the Bush administration. It’s also a serious problem that the current interim head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations is guilty of ordering the destruction of video evidence of torture that was conducted in Thailand. It’s nice that a woman has finally risen to such a high level of responsibility within the agency, but I don’t give a crap about advances in diversity when she is up to her eyeballs in obstruction of justice. I also don’t care that the Department of Justice has looked at this issue twice and declined to prosecute anyone.
The newly confirmed Director of Central Intelligence, John Brennan, has to decide whether he will make this woman the permanent Director of Operations, and he has apparently sought some cover for his decision.
To help navigate the sensitive decision on the clandestine service chief, Brennan has taken the unusual step of assembling a group of three former CIA officials to evaluate the candidates. Brennan announced the move in a previously undisclosed notice sent to CIA employees last week, officials said…
…The group’s members were identified as former senior officials John McLaughlin, Stephen Kappes and Mary Margaret Graham.
Those three former officers were all involved in the tumultuous and disastrous 2004-5 directorate of Porter Goss. In fact, all three of them resigned from the CIA around the same time. McLaughlin had been the interim Director before Goss arrived. Steve Kappes fought with Goss’s staff. And Margaret Graham moved to work with John Negroponte at the newly-created Department of National Intelligence. Kappes returned to the CIA in 2006 and served until 2010, despite his 2009 conviction in an Italian court of law for his participation in an extraordinary rendition there, and despite covering up the death of a detainee in Afghanistan.
I am pretty disgusted that Steve Kappes would have a role in deciding if someone intimately involved in covering up torture should be allowed to serve as the Director of Operations. And I say that with full knowledge that in the context of the times, Kappes and Margaret Graham were part of the “sane” faction fighting Porter Goss and his nutty staff.
The answer for John Brennan is ‘no.’ This unnamed woman may be remarkably capable and fully qualified for the job. Denying her the permanent position may ruffle a lot of feathers within the agency. But this is not acceptable:
In a fateful decision, the CIA set up a video camera at its secret prison in Thailand shortly after it opened in the months after the attacks. The agency recorded more than 90 tapes of often-brutal interrogations, footage that became increasingly worrisome to officials as the legal basis for the program began to crumble.
When the head of the Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, was promoted to head of the clandestine service in 2004, he took the female officer along as his chief of staff. According to former officials, the two repeatedly sought permission to have the tapes destroyed but were denied.
In 2005, instructions to get rid of the recordings went out anyway. Former officials said the order carried just two names: Rodriguez and his chief of staff.
Ultimately, it’s George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who are responsible for the torture that took place. Unless they are punished, I am not interested in throwing a bunch of CIA officers in prison. But that doesn’t mean that those responsible for destroying evidence should be promoted.
