CIA's torture experts now use their skills in secret drones program

[Ichingcarpenter]

The controversy over the CIA’s secret drone program has gone from bad to worse this week. We now know that many of those running it are the same people who headed the CIA’s torture program, the spy agency can bomb people unilaterally without the president’s explicit approval and that the government is keeping the entire program classified explicitly to prevent a federal court from ruling it illegal. And worst of all, Congress is perfectly fine with it.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that many of those in charge of the CIA’s torture program – the same people whose names were explicitly redacted from the Senate’s torture report in order to avert accountability – “have ascended to the agency’s powerful senior ranks” and now run the CIA drone program under the agency’s Counterterrorism Center. Rather than being fired and prosecuted, they have been rewarded with promotions.

The longtime Counterrorism Center chief who just stepped down, Michael D’Andrea, was previously in charge of the notorious CIA prison known as the Salt Pit, where prisoners were regularly tortured and some died. His replacement, Chris Wood, was also “central to the interrogation program”, according to the Times.

The only reason we know D’Andrea and Wood’s names is because the New York Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet commendably decided to publish them – unlike the many newspapers who refused to for virtually no other reason except for the fact that the CIA asked them not to. As Baquet put it to the Huffington Post: “It would have been weird to not name the guys who run it. They’re not undercover. They’re not unknown. They’re sort of widely known.”

Adding to the disturbing nature of the CIA’s ability to kill people in complete secrecy, the agency apparently now has a carte blanche to conduct drone strikes on its own. According to the New York Times, President Obama doesn’t individually approve them anymore – he lets the CIA unilaterally decide to kill people if the strikes “fit certain criteria.” We have no idea what those conditions are since virtually everything about drone strikes at the CIA is secret.

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Yet, up until the Wall Street Journal reported it on Sunday, the public did not know that Obama secretly gave the CIA a “waiver” from those rules for drone strikes in Pakistan, the place where the vast majority of the CIA’s strikes over the last decade have occurred. The publicly-touted policy was made meaningless by a classified order the public had no idea about. (Sound familiar?)

The most absurd part of this whole debate is that the White House actually refused to admit that the two hostages killed in Pakistan died in a US drone strike. Despite an almost universal acknowledgement by media reports – and a multitude of leaks by anonymous US officials – that the hostages were killed by a CIA drone,

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The reason for this denial apparently has nothing to do with legitimate secrets; the administration just wants to avoid a court ruling their program illegal. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday: “the Attorney General’s office warned Mr. Obama that publicly disclosing the CIA’s role in this case would undermine the administration’s standing in a series of pending lawsuits challenging its legality”.

Think about that for a second: The Obama administration has promised more transparency around drone strikes, yet at the same time, won’t even acknowledge that the controversial drone strike it’s apologizing for even happened - just because such admission might force courts to hold the government accountable for its actions.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/29/cias-torture-experts-now-use-their-skills-in-secret-drones-program



Meet The Only Person Being Punished After The Senate Torture Report - it’s the person who helped expose them.


WASHINGTON -- Five months after the Senate Intelligence Committee released its gruesome report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, someone is finally paying steep professional consequences. Except it’s not the former torturers. Or their superiors. Or even the CIA officials who improperly searched the computers that Senate investigators used to construct the study.

It’s the person who helped expose them.

Alissa Starzak, a former Democratic majority staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, played a critical and controversial role during her time on the panel: She was a lead investigator for the torture report, and was one of two staffers involved in an ongoing feud over damning internal CIA documents obtained by the committee......................................


more


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/28/cia-torture-report_n_7154964.html




?7

[woo me with science]

1. K&R.

[malthaussen]

2. Well, yeah, that would follow.

Bureaucracies tend to promote from within and by senority when possible. The torture crowd were not purged from the CIA's ranks, so they have accumulated seniority. Thus they get promoted and go on to head up other programs. So long as our government fails to hold the criminals accountable, they will continue to prosper.

-- Mal

[Comrade Grumpy]

3. We need to abolish the CIA. A bunch of fucking criminals, torturers, and killers.

We could keep the intelligence analysis part, though.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. The CiA is an agency no one has control over.

Not since the Dulles Brothers took it over

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. But..but...they're patriots under a lot of pressure.

Besides, murdering people is less arduous than torturing them.

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. Bill Hicks had a joke about the CIA

when someone is elected president the first day the CIA shows him the Zapruder film and they say........... Any Questions?

Notice ........... not one branch of government is willing to take these guys on be it Congress, Executive or Judicial....... even after all the evidence revealed of their malfeasance.

[DirkGently]

8. A never-seen-before view from a "different camera"

... if I'm remembering Hicks' joke correctly. Sort of the icing on the chilling cake of the joke.

[Ichingcarpenter]

9. Yeah....... Bill knew the score.

Kennedy wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.

[Solly Mack]

7. K&R