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Overseeing secrets

Thursday, December 13, 2007

This column has sometimes been blasted for an obsession with Richard Nixon-era travesties of government. I justify this interest - not “obsession”, please - by asserting that what we learned then helps us, as journalists and citizens, to resist and correct travesties now.

Journalism, perhaps on occasion a bit over-romantically and self-servingly, was then energized (for a while at least, a decade or two maybe) into greater watchfulness over government misdeeds. And in the crusading mid to late 1970s, the US Congress set in place firmer oversight mechanisms, even (or especially) over the most secret activities of the Administration.

 

Trouble is … these two watchdogs have since grown sleepy and toothless. So it’s been exhilarating to watch the press, in the sterling form of Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times (a great recent catch, as a military and intelligence beat reporter, from the Los Angeles Times) as it blasted open the story of the CIA destroying its Al Qaeda interrogation videos, and to watch both Senators and Representatives raising what hue and cry they can in pursuit.

 

The very practice of oversight by Congress to check on the nation’s intelligence work dates back famously to the 1970s and the people’s delegates then - notably the late Senator Frank Church (pictured top left) and his vigorous committee - inquiring into and unearthing activities that Church memorably likened to those of a “rogue elephant”. (As a fan of pachyderms, though, I fail to appreciate why plotting assassinations and conducting warrantless “black-bag” surveillance on US citizens should have made Church think of those magnificent if unruly animals. It was the hardline Republican Barry Goldwater who suggested a better wild-life comparison would be "wild jackass".)

 

The deep digging by the determined young Democrat from the conservative state of Idaho (sadly missed since he died aged only 59 - though maybe not by those spies and bureaucrats who thought him sanctimonious and self-aggrandizing, and who nicknamed him “Frank Sunday School” or “Frank Cathedral”) was repeatedly thwarted by uncooperative Administration functionaries, until he finally triumphed.

 

These functionaries included, significantly and ominously for the future, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who continued to harbor their grudge that the Executive Branch’s ability to act like … oh, executives, I suppose  … was becoming needlessly crimped by Congress and by the public’s right to know.

 

The end result is an Administration nowadays that, despite its publicly-stated positions, does indeed sanction, and moreover encourages the torture of captives. And further, when there’s a danger its operatives will be exposed, it also encourages -  with just as sickening “deniability” - a culture of impunity in which records get destroyed and justice is obstructed.

 

 

 

**A PODCAST BASED ON THIS COLUMN CAN BE HEARD HERE - via Robin Hood Radio **

 

 

SKELETAL PIECES OF THIS PUTRID BODY OF EVIDENCE ARE NOW POKING THROUGH as its shabby covering wears thin. Remember when it was discovered that videotape existed of the interrogation of Jose Padilla? -- the man convicted in August this year on federal conspiracy charges, after an Attorney General’s public accusations of him being an “unlawful combatant” bent on exploding a “dirty” radioactive bomb, were quietly dropped? Well, that video went “missing” (as THE MEDIA BEAT highlighted back in March this year) never to be seen or heard.

 

How many other recordings, maybe even of “water-boarding” itself, might also exist? The Intelligence Committees that were stonewalled (a shade apologetically, but still stonewalled) by CIA chief General Michael Hayden yesterday and the day before are also demanding interrogation tapes (two video, one audio) that were apparently recorded by an allied country’s spy agency.

 

These tapes might now be harder to hide or to “lose”. Their existence was acknowledged and confirmed in a letter from federal prosecutors (heavily redacted with black ink when made public – above center) to the court that tried self-confessed September 11th plotter Zacarias Moussaoui. The letter admitted to “factual errors” made earlier by the CIA in denying that it ever had such tapes.

 

And another court, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has been considering a plea by lawyers for Guantanamo prisoner Mahjid Khan, formerly of Baltimore where he attended high school, for an order to bar the government from destroying taped evidence of him being tortured. Before surfacing recently in the previously unknown "Camp 7" of Gitmo, Khan had earlier disappeared into a CIA secret interrogation program, and his very existence was kept from the International Committee of the Red Cross. What exactly happened to him is legally almost anybody's guess, unless videotapes or other forms of record reveal it.

 

Yet another Gitmo detainee whose treatment is creditably claimed to have been visually documented is Ethiopian-born British resident Binyam Mohammed. His British lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith says: “Through diligent investigation we know when the CIA took pictures of Mr. Mohammed’s brutalized genitalia, we know the identity of the CIA agents who were present including the person who took the pictures (we know both their false identities and their true name) and we know what those pictures show.” Stafford-Smith, not surprisingly, wants the authorities restrained from destroying such evidence.

 

It’s doubtful, though, how much a court preservation order would really help. The tapes at the center of the this week’s storm were destroyed even when at least two federal courts’ instructions were supposedly in effect (and arguably covered the CIA’s secret prisons overseas as well as Gitmo). And the courts' line was "supported" by what were in fact weasel-words of “advice” not to destroy evidence, expressed by the White House (the press is now being told) and by that high oracle of ethical principles, the Bush Administration's Justice Department.

 

 

 

FOR LAWYERS, ELECTED OFFICIALS AND JOURNALISTS ALIKE IT’S SELF-EVIDENTLY difficult to monitor effectively the work of government agencies which, for quite understandable and defensible reasons, have to do their work in secret.

 

But let’s hope that a pushy attorney, reporter, or a Congressional aide armed with a subpoena if necessary, gets to bring into the full public spotlight, answering direct questions, the now retired Director of the National Clandestine Service, Jose Rodriguez (above right). He’s long been known to some as a “robust and colorful” agency operative with a three decade career that's been checkered with internal criticism and at least one reprimand, and he's now being held responsible for the 2005 tape-shredding.

 

Just this past summer, Rodriguez untypically requested his cloak of official secrecy be raised a little, so he could attend a Border Security conference in Texas, and talk up the need for more Hispanic recruits in the intelligence services. He told a university newspaper reporter: “Now I'm out from undercover, so I can participate in other events”.

 

Committee member Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says he can’t name names now because of the committee meeting's closed-door status, but he promises, “We're going to talk to all of the relevant officials."

 

With luck, and some good investigative pressure, ex-officer Rodriguez’s next “other event” could be a public appearance on Capitol Hill, and on the front pages.

 

 

 

THE WESTERN MAINSTREAM MEDIA ARE JUST BEGINNING TO CATCH UP again with South Africa - and its brewing political turbulence. That's because a set-piece of politics-as-theatre is about to happen, under the full glare of news coverage, when five thousand members of the ruling African National Congress meet to elect their next leader.

 

More from me on this next week - in particular on the skills and attributes of the national President, Thabo Mbeki, whom I first knew as his movement's main media man.