Decline and Fall

Tyler Drumheller, former CIA Chief of European Operations, has made it very clear in this Der Spiegel interview who was responsible for the CIA's extraordinary renditions program:

Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences.

SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called "war on terrorism"?

Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

Notice what he identifies as the approach of the administration: to "turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences." Unfortunately it's worse than that, because the administration specifically authorized those illegal programs and interrogation techniques. So they didn't just turn everybody loose, they set everybody up to fail and then let them twist in the wind when the failure inevitably happened.

Further down in the interview, Drumheller mentions his surprise to discover that intelligence he knew to be dubious, which he had specifically caveated as such, was used as the centerpiece of Colin Powell's famous U.N. speech laying out the argument for going to war with Iraq:

Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

It seems to me that this goes a long way toward answering the question of what the Bush Administration knew and when it knew it.

A commenter at A Tiny Revolution sees the Stalin parallel in an interview with Slavoj Žižek:

From the top, you received an order, say, "Cossacks should be liquidated as a class." It was not stated clearly what this order meant - dispossess them, kill them etc. That ambiguity was part of Stalin's logic. Being afraid of being denounced as too soft, local cadres went to extremes, and then, the interesting irony is that the only positive concrete intervention of Stalin was his famous dizziness with success. Here, he would say, "No, comrades, we should respect legalities." Stalin's obscenity was that he put in this kind of abstract, superego injunction which threw you into a panic, and then he appeared as a moderate.

Just remember, they hate us for our freedom.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, interrogation, torture