CIA in the Crosshairs

"The world is on the edge of eruption," former CIA Director George Tenet recalls as he arranged for an emergency meeting at the White House with National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice on July 10, 2001. Cofer Black, the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and Rich Blee, accompanied Tenet. Tenet recounts Blee's warning to Rice, "There will be significant attacks against the United States in the coming months." He continued, "Al Qaeda's intention is the destruction of the United States." Black then adds, "This country has got to go on a war footing now," as he slams his hand on the table.

Following the meeting Black tells Blee, "I think we've finally gotten through to these people." But later he realizes that essentially nothing happens. Rice later said she did not recall the meeting and wrote, "My recollection of the meeting is not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day." Having raised the alert levels for personnel abroad, she added, "I thought we were doing what needed to be done." But on September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda struck a coordinated blow against the United States, killing nearly 3,000 people.

This dramatic episode in the CIA's history is told in detail in the Showtime documentary, "The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs," which will air Saturday night. The program pulls the curtain back on America's most secret agency and sheds light on its successes and failures. Actor Mandy Patinkin, who plays CIA operative Saul Berenson in the series Homeland on Showtime, narrates it.

The Spymasters includes interviews with all 12 living CIA directors and their operatives. They talk about their convictions, "and, for the first time, their passionate disagreements about the agency's past, its current mission, and its future." The documentary lays out the complexities, the growing threat, and the controversies that been laid at the doorstep of the CIA. Did the CIA fail in 2001? Did the White House ignore the CIA's warnings about 9/11? The 9/11 Commission Report, released in July 2004, concluded, "This was a failure of policy, management, capability, and, above all, imagination."

The failure for the U.S. government to keep America safe led to a series of controversial decisions. Rendition was an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to countries for interrogation and detention in "black sites" in countries where U.S. safeguards did not apply. The use of torture, known as the enhanced interrogation program, used techniques like waterboarding, in order to gain crucial information from suspected terrorists. Former director Stansfield Turner says, "I don't think a country like ours should be culpable of conducting torture." Tenet, on the other hand, says the U.S. Justice Department ruled the techniques were not torture, and President George Bush approved them.

Another consequence of the 9/11 attacks is the use of drones to strike back at terrorists. The Pentagon's use of drones is public, but the CIA has never acknowledged it also uses them. Yet President Barack Obama's former CIA Director Leon Panetta recounts a time the CIA had located a "bad man" who was responsible for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. But the terrorist was with his family, which made the use of a drone strike problematic. "One of the tough questions was what should we do?" Panetta recalled. He said he called the White House and they said, "Look, you're going to have to make a judgment here." Panetta said, "I found I was making decisions on life and death as director, and those decisions are never easy, and frankly they shouldn't be easy." He added, "I thought it was really important in that job to do what I could to protect this country." The CIA struck, "And it did involve collateral damage, but we got him," Panetta concluded.

Following 9/11 the CIA scored an early victory in Afghanistan driving the Taliban out and destroying Al Qaeda's sanctuary, but Osama Bin Laden escaped. This victory was followed by one of America's most controversial wars. "Neither the CIA or any other or any other government agency ever found any evidence that Iraq played any role at all in 9/11," former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell recalled. Yet former Vice President Dick Cheney was speaking out publicly about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's connection to Al Qaeda. Tenet told the President Bush that Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk." The U.S. invaded Iraq and more than a decade later it is still paying the price for this bad decision.

CIA in the Crosshairs is directed by Gedeon and Jules Naudet, who were responsible for the most powerful documentary ever produced of the 9/11 attacks. It is written by Chris Whipple, a skilled investigative journalist, and the executive producer is CBS News' Susan Zirinsky. She is also my wife.

Americans are on edge following the horrifying November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris. Questions are being raised about where the line is drawn between what techniques the CIA can use to defeat the terrorists, especially those that are home grown, and every American's right for privacy. 

Panetta says, "We may have to use these kinds of weapons. But let me tell you something, if we fail to do this, and God forbid this country faced another 9/11, you know what the first question would be, 'Why the hell did you let this happen?'"

Cheney Doesn't Shoot Straight

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is trying hard to salvage his legacy, so he is resorting to spin, distortion and lies. By why is the media paying attention to him? Not even Cheney himself could erase from history the devastating record he has amassed, especially working with President George W. Bush. 

A 2012 New York Times report revealed all of the warnings the Bush/Cheney administration received in the spring and summer of 2001 of a terrorist threat against the United States from within. On May 1, 2001, the CIA warned Bush a "group presently in the United States" was planning an attack. In July, the CIA warned that the attacks could be "imminent." On August 6, Bush received a classified document entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." None of the dots were connected by the White House, which dismissed criticism by saying they were not told when or where the attacks would occur. The attacks occurred on September 11, with devastating consequences. 

In response, The Bush/Cheney White House targeted Iraq and its ruthless leader, Saddam Hussein. They built their case around alleged links between al Qaeda and Hussein, as well as allegations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD's). While Hussein was a brutal dictator, his government held together Iraq's various religious factions and served as a balance against a restive Iran. 

Cheney was among those from the administration who were speaking out publicly about WMD's in Iraq. In August 2002, Cheney told a VFW convention, "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons." Of course, there were no WMD's in Iraq. The administration had misled the American people. 

Just before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Cheney was asked on NBC's Meet the Press how long a U.S. invasion would take. He responded, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators...I think it will go relatively quickly...weeks rather than months." The U.S. was not greeted as liberators, and the invasion proved to be poorly planned by the Pentagon and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 

In September 2003, six months after the invasion, Cheney said, "If we're successful in Iraq..we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." But no link between Hussein and the terrorists was ever found, and Osama bin Laden was based in Afghanistan. The Bush/Cheney administration failed to focus on the war in Afghanistan.

Following the invasion, the administration implemented a policy of de-ba'athification, which rid the Iraqi government of Hussein's Ba'ath party supporters. As a result, an estimated 50,000 civil government employees were removed from their positions and the military's officer ranks were depleted. The Bush/Cheney operatives had failed to fully understand the possible implications of their policy, so the result in Iraq was chaos. Meanwhile, the Bush/Cheney White House backed a government supported by hard line Shiite religious organizations, which included now Prime Minister Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The Sunnis, who are about 20% of the population, were squeezed out, as were the Kurds. 

Today's civil war involving ISIS is largely a result of Bush/Cheney policies. The Iraq War has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $2 trillion dollars and 4,000 American lives. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. And to what end?

In 2005, The Washington Post editorial page dubbed Cheney "The Vice President for Torture." Cheney initiated and defended the use of torture on terrorism suspects, a violation of human rights and the Geneva Convention. In 2011 he defended the policy in an appearance at the American Enterprise Institute. "The notion that somehow the United States was wildly torturing anybody is not true," he said. "One of the most controversial techniques is waterboarding ... Three people were waterboarded. Not dozens, not hundreds. Three. And the one who was subjected the most often to that was Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and it produced phenomenal results for us." Of course, he lied about the "phenomenal results" too.

Cheney was also behind an NSA operation to monitor the phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens without warrant, which would later become known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. After two years of going along with "the vice president's special program" the Justice Department decided that parts of it were illegal.

The Bush/Cheney team allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Georgia and take control of two of its regions. And the Bush/Cheney team is responsible for not reining in Iran early on. Ari Shavit, an Israeli author and columnist, wrote, "The Bush administration didn't initiate a political-economic siege on Iran when it was weak, and Mr. Bush weakened America by exhausting its economic power and military might in a futile war."

On domestic policy, the Bush/Cheney team led this country into the worst recession since the Great Depression, yet Cheney refuses to take any responsibility for the policies that nearly destroyed the world's economy. They added billions to the U.S. deficit, but Cheney once said, "deficits don't matter." 

Now Dick Cheney is defending his legacy and bitterly attacking President Barack Obama. For instance, Cheney took to CNN Wednesday to say that Obama is "the worst president of my lifetime." But President George W. Bush left office in January 2009 as one of the most unpopular presidents in history. According to a CBS News/New York Times poll at the time, 73 percent of Americans surveyed said they disapproved of the way Bush handled his presidency. 

Ever since Dick Cheney shot his friend in a 2006 duck hunting accident Americans have known that Cheney just doesn't shoot straight.

Benghazi Politics

Republicans are obsessed with last September's attack by terrorists on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.  So rabid are their efforts to uncover a scandal that some in the party are throwing the word impeachment around. 

An independent inquiry, headed by former Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Pickering and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, released a damning report last December.  It found that "systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies" within the State Department resulted in a "security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place."    Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took full responsibility in a Congressional hearing in January. 

Instead of focusing on what is being done to capture the perpetrators and what measures are being put in place to assure it doesn't happen again, tragically Republicans are zeroing in on a misleading set of administration talking points used by officials to explain the attack.   The State Department's top spokeswoman at the time, Victoria Nuland, objected to including the CIA's reference in an early draft to intelligence about the threat from al Qaeda in Benghazi.  ABC News reported that one of her emails said it "could be abused by members (of Congress) to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned."  

With the Presidential Election a few weeks away last fall, Republicans believe that the administration did not want to say anything that would undermine President Barack Obama's claims that Al Qaeda was defeated.  Instead, they believe the talking points were intentionally "scrubbed" of references to Al Qaeda.  And they cite as further proof the statements made by America's U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sunday talks shows that the attack was in response to an anti-Islamic film that had fueled violent anti-American demonstrations at the same time in twenty countries, including Egypt and Tunisia.   

Were her statements, which came from the talking points, a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people?    Reuters reported that, "A source familiar with the Benghazi communications said Nuland was concerned the talking points went further than what she was allowed to say during her briefings and that 'the CIA was attempting to exonerate itself at the State Department's expense.'"  In other words, this was a skirmish between two government agencies over who would be blamed.  

In Wednesday's Congressional hearing, chaired by Republican Representative Darrell Issa, three witnesses spoke at length about the incident.  The then number two official in America's Tripoli Embassy, Gregory Hicks, said he was stunned when he heard Rice's account.  He claimed that he was later demoted for raising questions about how the incident was handled by the State Department.  That charge was denied by the State Department, which said he was reassigned with no reduction in pay.  Nonetheless, Hicks was not prohibited from speaking to Congress.

There were 64 attacks on American diplomatic targets during President George W. Bush's administration.   American diplomatic facilities have been targets of anti-American sentiment for decades.  In spite of that, Congress has been reducing diplomatic security budgets in recent years.  

Sadly, four Americans died in the attack at Benghazi.  In their memory, and for the sake of all those who serve our country overseas, Congress should now focus its attention on how to better protect our outposts instead of trying to score political points.    









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Racism in America

The 2012 presidential election campaign has been disappointing.   Perhaps the most disappointing thing about this election is that were President Barack Obama white it is likely he would be on his way to a landslide victory.  

President Obama inherited a disastrous mess. When he entered office the economy was shrinking at 9 percent annually due to the Bush Recession.  About 800 thousand Americans were losing jobs each month.  The banking system was on the verge of collapse, the housing market was a disaster, and the American car industry was dying.  The country was engaged in two difficult and costly wars, both in lives and resources, with no end in sight.  Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, and mastermind of the worst attack on U.S. soil, continued to plot against America and its allies. 

In his inaugural speech, at the U.S. Capitol before nearly 2 million people, the president said, "On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord."  But, inside the Capitol, Republicans met and formulated a plan to obstruct, deny and delay the president's agenda.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would later publicly state that making President Obama a one-term president, not the economy, was the number one priority of his party. 

The new president, facing fierce partisan opposition, signed into law the Recovery Act, a.k.a. the stimulus package.  Although it was smaller than he originally proposed, most economists credit it with righting the stalling economy.  Even Representative Paul Ryan requested stimulus money to help businesses in his district.  The president also signed tough banking reform legislation to assure a similar crisis would not occur. He enacted the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that assures fair pay for women.  He bailed out the American auto companies over the objections of many Republicans, including Governor Mitt Romney, who wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece that they should be allowed to go bankrupt.  The auto bailout saved one million jobs, and now the industry is vibrant again.  

The president's signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) will make health care more affordable and accessible to all Americans, and protect consumers from abuses by insurance companies.  For instance, no longer can insurance companies deny people health care benefits because they have a pre-existing condition.  More importantly, 40 million uninsured Americans will be covered and the government will realize $1 trillion in health care savings over the next decade, according to its sponsors. . 

But Republicans have used Obamacare (sounds like Romneycare) as a major rallying cry against the president, falsely charging it is a government take over of health care, that it would restrict an individual's choices, and that it would set up death panels.  While they offered no credible alternatives, they demonize the president as a socialist.   

The president had promised to end the war in Iraq, and he did.  But Republicans were vociferous in their criticism, saying he withdrew too early.  The president promised a military build up in Afghanistan, where the war was nearly in its tenth year, and he did.  The president also set a deadline of June 2014 for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from that country.  But Republicans criticized the president for announcing a deadline.  And just last week candidate Mitt Romney announced at the third debate that he agreed with the president's deadline after all. 

The president made getting Osama bin Laden a top priority early on in his administration.   Bin Laden had eluded capture for nearly a decade, and was a low priority for both President George Bush and candidate Romney.  But in May 2011, U.S. forces killed the world's most heinous terrorist leader in Pakistan.  The president took a huge political risk by ordering the killing, but now Republicans claim that anyone would have done the same thing.  

The president has had some missteps during his first term.  The U.S. economy is still sluggish and too many people remain unemployed.  But the world is a different place today than it was in the early 1980's, when President Ronald Reagan revived a bad U.S. economy.  Economic growth in China and India has slowed; much of Europe is still in a recession.  Nonetheless, under President Obama the U.S. economy has enjoyed 31 straight months of jobs growth and unemployment is at its lowest point, 7.8 percent, since he took office.  

At the Democratic Convention, President Bill Clinton said, "No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, could have repaired all of the damage he found in just four years."  When one considers the animus and vitriol that has roiled the American political scene, stirred by Republicans and Tea Party loyalists, it is a wonder that the man who called for "unity of purpose" has succeeded at all.

Mr. Obama has been labeled "the food stamp president" and an "anti-colonialist" by leading Republicans.  He has repeatedly been treated with unprecedented disrespect, including on the floor of the House of Representatives.  His place of birth has been constantly questioned, as have his academic records.  About a third of all Republicans think the president is a Muslim and not a Christian.  Most recently, when General Colin Powell, a leading Republican, war hero and African American, announced his thoughtful endorsement for the president's reelection, right wing critics sniped.  Former Vermont Governor John Sununu, and chief Romney surrogate, said, "Well, I think when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him."

On Saturday, the Associated Press released a poll that found, "51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey."  According to AP, "Overall, the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, President Obama could lose 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican challenger Mitt Romney."  Racial prejudice actually increased in America over the past four years with an African American in the White House, a president who has rarely raised the issue of race.

Americans should vote for the candidate who they believe will be the best president.    But to use race as a factor would only reward those who have divided the nation by using fear and hatred to achieve their political agenda.