The Unidentified Queen of Torture

[deminks]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/unidentified-queen-torture

For the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in the devastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why.

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”

Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

(end snip)

See also:

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/18/354250.html

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/bin-laden-expert-accused-shaping-cia-deception-torture-program-n269551

[Babel_17]

1. Thank you for the article link

Coming from The New Yorker lends some cachet to the story.

[Demeter]

2. This is not acceptable

[bemildred]

3. And we wonder why this country is going to hell in a handbasket? nt

[TBF]

4. Is it Wolfenbarger?

Found this article from 2012 in Time magazine:

"Wolfenbarger became the second female four-star general in the history of the U.S. military in June. She assumed her command just as the first female four-star in U.S. history, Army General Ann Dunwoody"

http://nation.time.com/2012/08/13/female-generals-the-pentagons-first-pair-of-four-star-women/

Only 2 4-star female generals in 2012, is it one of them? It would have to be to cover the Iraq period correct ...


Now what will piss me off to no end is if they pin this all on a female general and let Bush, Cheney and Yoo walk. Because I wouldn't put that past the repugs.

[McCamy Taylor]

5. Agreed. Blame a woman---and then say it is Hillary's fault, no woman can be trusted blah, blah.

The GOP loves to lay the blame on women and minorities.

[Oilwellian]

41. Only when they can't hide behind them n/t

[Doctor_J]

48. So this information bothers you because of its possible effect on Hillary?

Sounds like you're saying we'd really like to punish those who tortured, but not if they happen to be women. Focus, here.

[LanternWaste]

50. To you, most probably.

"Sounds like you're saying..."

To you, most probably.

[HereSince1628]

6. Doesn't it go like this...first deflect, then protect, then cough up a sacrifice

to create a backfire that protects...The Leadership.

The truth is almost certainly guarded among the highest of State Secrets, an uncontrolled leak seems unlikely and would quickly draw the attention of "plumbers".

[TBF]

7. I hope she saved every

single directive in case there's a chance someone will let her talk about whomever ordered her to do this (ahem Cheney) ...

I am not at all surprised.

[PADemD]

8. Meet the US Military’s Three Four-Star Women

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/07/meet-the-us-militarys-three-four-star-women/

[KittyWampus]

20. Born in 1966, age 48. Her age can be determined from this quote:

In one instance recounted in the report, CIA Director Michael Hayden brought the expert with him on Feb. 14, 2007, to brief members of the Senate intelligence oversight committee on the interrogation program.

The then-41-year-old counterterrorism expert, whose experience and depth of knowledge about al Qaeda was virtually unmatched within the agency, forcefully defended the program in the classified hearing.

[Hoppy]

9. There is only one C.I.A. female intelligencer person I ever heard of.

Her name was Valerie something and she got canned or something or had to quit. So everything is now all right. Only people of competence are now making decisions for our security.

[ReRe]

11. Here is her name!

Just heard it (Friday, 12-19-14) on Amy Goodman's show, from the mouth of Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights: Frances McCoskey (sp?)

He says it in the last 15 minutes of the show. There will be a transcript later on today with the correct spelling of her last name. http://www.DemocracyNow.org

[TBF]

21. They said the woman is a general in the military -

"Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit"

Is Francis McCoskey a general?

[ReRe]

26. I have no earthly idea...

Last edited Fri Dec 19, 2014, 12:15 PM - Edit history (1)

Did you go read/listen to what Michael Ratner said on DemocracyNow this AM?

Jane Mayer (The New Yorker, also author of The Dark Sidie) called her the "Queen of Torture" in one of her columns.

Start listening at about 48 minutes into the video.

[hedda_foil]

32. NOT a military general. Original NBC story says she was promoted to the equivalent of that rank in

[The NBC story differentiated between the two.

[TBF]

33. Oh, ok. That makes more sense. nt

[Aerows]

30. Alfreda Frances Bikowsky

[ReRe]

31. Thank you..

Where did you get that? Is it published somewhere else, or is it from Amy's transcript? Thanks.

[90-percent]

12. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information............

"She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks."

That's one of the many aggravating things about 9-11. Bush and Cheney "kept us safe" - well, yeah, after the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor killed 3,000 of us. If you disregard that, they've done a great job keeping us safe. Oh, except for those 4,500 troops we lost invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

My take is that in the summer of 2001, when the intelligence security agencies had a system "blinking red", the GW Bush White House ordered a veritable stand down about all ongoing FBI and CIA investigations of possible terrorists from Saudi Arabia attacking the US. I think these orders were given to appease or please the Saudi Government, who GW liked to been seen with in public kissing and holding hands with.

My point is, if our intelligence agencies were given more freedom to do their jobs and they didn't have this child like internal competition between agencies, 9-11 could have been prevented. There were a lot of damn good field agents doing their jobs and if they acted as a whole they could have put together all the pieces of the puzzle. IN MY OPINION.

One other infuriating point about our government using 9-11 to transform into an authoritarian police state fascist Oligarchy is that the NSA mass surveillance program was begun eight months before 9-11 happened! This info from a long video from Thomas Binney, who helped engineer the program before he realized it WOULD BE USED AGAINST HIS OWN PEOPLE.

So, just another point that our government wanted to go totalitarian on us and treat us all like terrorists from a foreign country instead of as American Citizens with Constitutional rights WELL BEFORE 9-11 GAVE THEM CARTE BLANCE TO DO WHAT EVER THE HELL THEY WANTED IN ORDER TO "KEEP US SAFE"

Lastly, who in authority puts incompetent rank amateurs in positions of tremendous responsibility and then promotes them after their serious serial screw ups anyway? It sounds almost like if this woman had not been such a flaming incompetent 911 never would have happened in the first place.

Which brings up another question about 9-11. Nobody in America's vastly overgrown national security system even lost their job because of the mass incompetence that allowed 9-11 to happen in the first place! The only high intelligence official to apologize and admit responsibility was Richard Clarke, a national security advisor for the White House carried over from the Clinton Administration.

-90% Jimmy

[Jerry442]

13. You don't have to have a PhD in tinfoil hattery...

...to realize that the intelligence agencies were going to get a whole lot more money and power after a successful large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

[WinkyDink]

17. "the GW Bush White House ordered a veritable stand down...." You're almost there, 90% Jimmy. Come

over to the Dark Side, where Cui Bono resides.

[90-percent]

24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono

Thanks for the Latin lesson. And I'm not being snarky. Learning stuff like this helps me feel.......reasonably well educated.

And there's certain words in other languages that describe in one word that which in english would require at least a phrase. The best and almost only example I can offer is the German "schadenfreude" - taking delight in other's misery.

"9-11 changed everything" is a phrase I like to use a lot. It changed all our checks and balances that would have prevented the illegal invasion of Iraq on the basis of lies......some the product of torture!

So, torture does work, as it produces false intelligence to justify an illegal invasion conducted in full view of the entire planet. If you contemplate how brazen you have to be in order to pull off the biggest BIG LIE since Nazi Germany, then it's easy to see why our elected reps have no qualms about the Cromnibus cloak of darkness "let Wall Street gamble with depositors money again" repeal of that portion of Dodd-Frank. It was also PRETTY BRAZEN of them to overturn the D.C. referendum that legalized pot. The will of the people is only for quaint inoperative former Democracies, I guess?

Considering the majority of Americans are in favor of torture and a bigger majority think torture prevented further terrorist attacks, I really do wonder when the civilized and fair and just Democracies of the world de-couple from the U.S. and banish our entire country in the manner Napoleon was banished to St. Helena?

-90% Jimmy

Hunter S. Thompson's prose on 9-12-01 was brilliant in his prescience. He was also great writing about the historical brutishness that is so much of American history. We did lots of bad stuff over the years, the massacre of native Americans for one and slavery for another. Maybe America in a couple of decades post WW2 was the moral leader of the free World, and deservedly so, we defeated Fascism and Totalitarianism and authoritarianism, but in the present we've turned into mean fearful ignorant MF'ers!

http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751

[librechik]

29. on 9/11 I was working at one of the most respected international daily television news programs

My exec producer boss and I looked at each other and said "Bush did it!" at exactly the same time.

Needless to say that little remark never made it into the rundown. Ever.

[shanti]

42. heh

that's exactly what i thought too! of course, most people were appalled at that.

[WinkyDink]

55. I have found my people! {shanti} and {librechik}!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

58. When that guy on CNN came running down the steps in 2000 with the ruling on Bush V Gore....

I said, "That's it! We're going to war!"

[mahina]

60. I just remember crying. My son, then 11, has never seen me cry

Before or since.

[WinkyDink]

54. I discovered HST in high school, laughed my rear off reading F&LiLV, and loved him ever since. You

know how he died, right? "Suicide." After filming the activities of the Bohemian Grove........

[90-percent]

59. HST

I know only the standard story. He put a gun under his chin and blew his brains out in his kitchen. No note and his wife was home at the time.

I am very interested in hearing more about this Bohemian Grove film!

I thought he went out that way because that's the way Ernest Hemingway went out? And probably a few other great authors?

When I first heard of Hunter's death it sounded like a hit by the American government. Suicided. More plausible for HST to go out by firearms, which he loved, than the stereotypical small plane crash. So they made it look good and saved a small plane crash for some other trouble maker later.

-90% Jimmy

[Doctor_J]

47. Let's see....who benefited from 9/11? A corollary to Occam's Razor

[hedda_foil]

38. Eight months before 9/11. Hmm... that would be. January 2001.

I wonder how many days elapsed after their inauguration that Cheney placed his order for NSA's "Homeland Surveillance" system?

[90-percent]

45. Here's the youtube with binney

a year old and long and dense. technobabble to me, but he does mention the program started well before 9-11, i think within the first half hour. I think there's probably other videos and interviews, perhaps with thom hartmann or amy goodman, that are less difficult to watch completely through?

-90% Jimmy

[WinkyDink]

57. Just a few weeks post-SCOTUS-coup d'etat.

[jalan48]

53. LOL @ kissing and holding hands..

That's our George Jr.-ever the diplomat.

[WillyT]

14. HUGE K & R !!! - THANK YOU !!!

[snooper2]

15. Patriarchy strikes again!

They did this on purpose so that women wouldn't be entrusted into positions of power-

This has been in the making for 15 years!

[spanone]

16. k&r....

[Skidmore]

18. Well that would be a quick and convenient way

to absolve Bush and Cheney and the big neocons in their circle ofany responsibility now that the third Bush regime is seeking to find a way to ensconce itself. Tie it up with a neat bow. All done. Who has the most to gain from this? Before jumping on this with both feet, a wider net should be cast.

[KittyWampus]

19. A Neo-Conservative crony? Acting in coordination w/Cheney re: 9/11 hijakers? (speculation)

I just don't believe this is a "loose cannon" or bad seed or someone who has failed upwards in a chance manner.

Too convenient and it helps the evil bastards way too much.


………………………………….


The expert already survived one controversy; she came under harsh criticism after a subordinate on the bin Laden unit refused to share the names of two the 9/11 hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — with the FBI prior to the attacks, which was considered by the 9/11 Commission as a key intelligence failure. It is unclear if she was ever reprimanded for her role in the incident.

But one former intelligence officer who worked directly with her at the time said the expert bears direct responsibility for the intelligence failures prior to 9/11 and should have faced consequences.

"She should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done," the former officer said.


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/bin-laden-expert-accused-shaping-cia-deception-torture-program-n269551

………………




CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY
For the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in the devastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why.

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.



Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”

Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

According to sources in the law-enforcement community who I have interviewed over the years, and who I spoke to again this week, this woman—whose name the C.I.A. has asked the news media to withhold—had supervision over an underling at the agency who failed to share with the F.B.I. the news that two of the future 9/11 hijackers had entered the United States prior to the terrorist attacks. As I recount in my book “The Dark Side,” the C.I.A. got wind that one of these Al Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had obtained a multiple-entry visa into the United States eighteen months before 9/11. The agency also learned, months before the attacks, that another Al Qaeda operative, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had flown into Los Angeles. Yet the C.I.A. appears to have done nothing. It never alerted the F.B.I., which had the principle domestic authority for protecting the U.S. from terror attacks. Its agents had, in fact, been on the trail of at least one of the hijackers previously, but had no way of knowing that he had entered the United States. Nor did the C.I.A. alert the State Department, which kept a “TIPOFF” watch list for terror suspects.

Amazingly, perhaps, more than thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks, no one at the C.I.A. has ever been publicly held responsible for this failure. Evidently, the C.I.A. was adamant in its negotiations with the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the American public never learn the names of anyone directly involved in this failu

[TBF]

22. Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the person

they decide to "sacrifice" ...

[sabrina 1]

28. Maybe it wasn't a failure, that the CIA 'failed' to share that information. Remember

Coleen Crowley who desperately tried to get someone higher up to listen to the FBI agents who were trying to warn about terrorists being in the country?

It is convenient now to say it was a 'failure' to communicate, except when you remember the efforts that were thwarted by FBI agents.

Better to say 'failure', which is bad enough, than 'deliberate'.

If they did nothing wrong they have nothing to hide, yet they have fought fiercely to hide what they did. Why?

[JEB]

39. 9-11 was the neocon wet dream.

Deliberate as jabbing a fork in someone's eye.

[90-percent]

46. Snark

So you're saying that 9-11 was patterned after early 70's SNL sketches written by Michael O'Donohue?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_O%27Donoghue

-90% Jimmy,

aka the DU SNARKINATOR!

[L0oniX]

23. Miss Moneypenny does not approve.

[Sunlei]

25. the second 'Doctor'? there were not to many who 'participated' in torture sessions

We know who the 'for profit' psychologist participated in torture sessions is. The Dr. ghoul we paid 81 million of Americans Federal money.

[Aerows]

27. Probably Alfreda Frances Bikowsky

Last edited Fri Dec 19, 2014, 03:00 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.emptywheel.net/2012/12/13/zero-dark-30-heroine-outed-and-scarred-by-torture-judgment/

[starroute]

34. That does seem to match -- but it's "Bikowsky"

This, from 2011, also seems of interest:

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/09/29/bfp-exclusive-washington-post-takes-editorial-direction-from-the-cia-the-white-house/

Warrick’s book, The Triple Agent, focuses on Jennifer Matthews, the CIA station chief at forward base Chapman who was among those killed by a Jordanian suicide bomber. In discussing the role of Matthews in the CIA’s withholding of critical pre-9/11 intelligence from the FBI and counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, Collins asked if Jennifer Matthews had connections to Alfreda Frances Bikowsky—the CIA officer recently identified here at Boiling Frogs Post. Warrick responded:

“There is a group of very, shall we say, strong personalities within the counterterrorism division, you’ve named 2 of them, they were good friends, they worked together on these cases, and the list of people the IG has identified as potentially deserving of disciplinary review for their actions before 9/11 never been published, but we know from multiple counts that Jennifer Matthews had been on that list…”

In this response, Warrick directly confirms the role of Bikowsky in the pre-9/11 intelligence debacle, as well as her presence at the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydeh, which was being directed by Matthews. And without explicitly naming Bikowsky, he confirms that she was a friend and colleague of Matthews and that they worked together on counterterrorism at CIA.

[Aerows]

43. If I don't make at least one typo a day

I'm not typing

[starroute]

52. You and me both

Sometimes I think my brain has built-in auto-correct. It likes to insert completely wrong words if I let my guard down for a moment.

[KingCharlemagne]

35. Bikowsky (per article linked in your post) - nt

[Aerows]

44. Fixed, thanks

At least it isn't as horrendous as typos I've made in the past - When updating something that people company wide read, it's pretty important to not forget the "O" in the word "Count" in a headline.

[KingCharlemagne]

49. LOL. That's epic. Thanks for the laugh (hope you kept your position :) - nt

[Aerows]

51. I did, but the snickers

followed me for months

[johnnyreb]

36. Richard Clarke in 2011: "You have to intentionally stop it."

"The way they update us on this, at the White House, is every morning I come in, I turn on my computer, and I get a hundred, a hundred and fifty CIA reports. I'm not relying on somebody calling me, and telling me things.

You have to intentionally stop it-- you have to intervene and say "No, I don't want that report to go out."

...at about 2:50:

Alfreda Frances Bikowsky
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=redheaded_cia_manager_1

Michael Anne Casey
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=michelle_1

[4Q2u2]

37. Having their Cake and eating it to

Did this woman fail? Good chance that she did. At a higher rate than a man, or any worse? Cannot be proven. The reason why she was in that position in the first place is that all the men decided that OBL was not worth their time. You cannot give someone a shit sandwich then complain that it stinks in the lunch room.
From the article she seems to be acting in lock step with CIA procedure and has fully integrated in their Culture. It seems that her only real failure to the CIA is learning how to burn someone else for your mistakes.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/women-behind-manhunt/

http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/manhunt-the-search-for-bin-laden#/

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol.-55-no.-3/the-triple-agent-the-al-qaeda-mole-who-infiltrated-the-cia.html

[xiamiam]

40. i found this

http://cryptocomb.org/?tag=david-silverstein

followed one of the links here and it appears that alfreda bilkowski is married to david silverstein

very interesting connections here..googled but couldn't find a lot more except he is director of asmea or was..

snip
Silverstein has gone on to be deeply involved in formulating foreign, defense, and national security policy. He is currently a director and media talking head with two neo-conservative “think tanks” on, mostly, Middle East matters – “ASMEA” and the “Foundation for Defense of Democracies”. Should his relationship to Bikowsky be confirmed, its hard to imagine how his ideas have not trickled into Bikowsky’s mind, and consequently, the CIA’s business practices.
snip