Secrecy versus responsibility
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Amid yet more Washington ceremonies this week, President Barack Obama's now (very nearly) complete Cabinet of newbies has been on public parade. But one of his senior lieutenants will be doing his work much less publicly, whatever the promises of complete transparency that issue from this Administration.
Perhaps appropriately, he habitually wears a shabby-looking trenchcoat, and as a former Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton he’s no stranger to hidden backroom duties.
This would be of course Leon Panetta (above left). But for all his Columbo-esque attire, the new CIA chief has never done any actual gumshoeing, in law-enforcement or in espionage.
His new field of work is one in which the new Obamite writ of transparency will inevitably be constrained. But let’s hope it is not totally forgotten.
Very soon, within weeks or even days, special investigator John Durham is expected to complete his report on what exactly happened in November 2005 to 92 videotapes showing two “war on terror” detainees, Abu Zubaydah (above center) and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, being interrogated 3 years previously in a hidden “black site” prison in Thailand.
It is known that the tapes - comprising hundreds of hours of “enhanced” or “harsh” interrogation techniques, which in Zubaydah’s case almost incontrovertibly included “waterboarding” - were destroyed on the immediate orders of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr (above right) at the time the Agency’s head of clandestine services. (This evidence-shredding was explored in previous editions of THE MEDIA BEAT)
Until this instruction from Rodriguez - if indeed it did come originally from him, and not from higher up the chain of command - the tapes had been secured in a safe in the CIA’s Bangkok station. We learn this now from the Obama Department of Justice’s filing to a New York court earlier this week in a Freedom of Information Act case.
Durham’s findings – currently said by DoJ insiders to be as thorough and revealing as his previous renowned probe into FBI collusion with the Mafia in Boston – will open up even more fully the whole question of criminal responsibility among Bush operatives – including the Bush Cabinet.
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THE MEDIA IN AMERICA, FAR MORE than abroad, have tended to treat this possibility almost academically - as a matter merely for balanced discussion. The New York Times, indeed, has set aside space to consider the question under the heading, somewhat pusillanimously in my opinion, of “Room for Debate”.
Any truth-seeker - journalist, jurist or civic leader – can recognize when a crime has been committed. Torture is a crime, nationally and internationally. And waterboarding is acknowledged authoritatively to be torture; certainly this current administration is clear about that, and so is the rest of the world.
The only question for debate – or rather for some refined weighing of the political consequences – is who exactly should be held accountable. And how far up in the Administration they exercised their responsibility so shamefully.
It will be gravely disappointing if Leon Panetta, like too many CIA directors before him, goes into a defensive crouch over outright criminality among the staff he’s inherited, and among the office-holders who previously directed them.
In the legislative background, both Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers want a "Truth Commission", and both have been galvanized further by those deeply unsound legal memos of justification published this week from the early Bush years.
But in the executive foreground, the President himself did say during his first press conference with the White House media corps "I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backward". And inside the Agency's Langley headquarters, the signs are that Panetta will indeed merely clamp down on truth-telling, in a misguided effort to protect the secret agent’s (undoubted) need to operate in secret. He shouldn't be allowed to.
GLOBAL FOOTNOTE. Yesterday's issuance from The Hague of an arrest warrant against Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity is a timely reminder - offensive though it might be to many American jingoists - that if we don't assign criminal responsibility among our own errant representatives, then the world at large will likely do it for us.
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