Regarding Donald's Classified Briefing

THIS YEAR, SOME suggested that Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, should not be privy to classified briefings due to his habit of sneezing out the unfiltered contents of his head into the public domain. “This man is dangerous,” said Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrats’ minority leader, in a recent interview. Reid suggested that intelligence officials deceive Trump with phony secrets: “Fake it, pretend you’re doing a briefing,” he said.

In 1952, Harry Truman started the practice of letting presidential candidates sample secret intelligence. Three candidates have since declined to receive the special briefings — Barry Goldwater in 1964, Walter Mondale in 1984, and Bob Dole in 1996.

  The Intercept

Very interesting. I did not know that. Still, I would have trusted any of those three to keep their traps shut.

But how to deal with a candidate who can’t keep his mouth shut? [...] President Obama decided to admit Trump into the classified world.

Inquiring minds want to know: was Obama high?

[T]his year’s briefings are reportedly classified at the level of secret, not top secret as they were during the 2008 race.

[...]

The intelligence briefs given to the candidates “exclude the most sensitive sorts of information,” wrote Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, in an email. He considers it “unlikely” that the briefings “would create any security risk at all.”

Exactly what I suspected at the time: they're not going to tell him anything they'd be worried about. Very close to "fake it, pretend you're doing a briefing."

Trump got his first two briefings at an FBI field office in New York City, inside a special room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. [...] He brought along New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, two senior members of his national security brain trust.

Stop the presses. He brought two people with him? Obviously he knew he wasn't capable of absorbing and understanding what he was about to be told.

The leakage began on Wednesday night. [...] Matt Lauer, the moderator and host of the Today Show, asked Trump about his secret briefings. Was there anything surprising about them?

“Yes,” Trump said. “Very much so.” [...] But Trump couldn’t say what it was. What he could say was that the White House had ignored its experts, turned around, and done “exactly the opposite. … Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending.”

Trump knew this, he said, because he could read his briefers’ body language.

[...]

“Our intelligence community historically has been very, very careful not to politicize its message,” says David Priess, a former CIA official and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets.” To alter intelligence to win over a candidate or achieve some political objective, Priess said, “violates the core ethic of the intelligence community: Tell truth to power regardless of what the customer wants to hear.”

Stop the presses again. That's bullshit.

[17 July 2003: CIA director George] Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.

[...]

[Newt] Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.

Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.

  Guardian

As you were.

It took less than 24 hours for the intelligence establishment to accuse Trump of indiscretion. Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA and NSA, said his behavior was “awful.” Michael Morrell, the former deputy CIA director, questioned Trump’s claim that his briefers disagreed with Obama’s policies. By wrongly impugning his briefers by accusing them of political bias, Morrell said, Trump had “crossed a long-standing red line.”

[...]

There is something unfair about Trump’s using his briefers as “props,” as Hayden put it, to malign Obama’s policies without offering any names or specifics. But Trump’s misbehavior is not exceptional. His mendacity points to a much deeper problem of how government can claim to serve the people while holding back so much information. Those who have access — or who have been led to believe they have access — to secret information never have to engage in a reasoned debate with those who don’t.

A gambit of presidents and generals since the beginning of presidents and generals, I have no doubt.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Irony Is Dead

[James] Mitchell and [Bruce] Jessen were two former U.S. military psychologists contracted by the CIA to design, develop, and run the agency’s detention, rendition, and interrogation operations. As psychologists in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program, the two men had devoted their careers to training U.S. troops to resist abusive treatment in case of capture by governments that violate the Geneva Conventions.

  ACLU

If you have the stomach for it, read the article for details of the torture of one detinee who was held without charge for years, tortured and finally released once he'd been "broken", and the story of how these two criminals aided the US military and CIA's detainee program.

It's well and good that these men should be tried for criminal behavior, but so should the CIA officials who contracted them, and the Bush administration officials who signed off on the use of torture after 9/11 and the rejection of the Geneva Conventions.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 4/22/2016:  A judge has granted three detainees the right to sue these sick quacks.

We Tortured Killed Some Folks

Three “suicides” [of Guantanamo prisoners] on June 10, 2006  “incurred the wrath of then Guantanamo commander, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., who announced that the suicides were ‘not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare against us.’ In a similar spirit, Colleen Graffy, deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told the BBC that the suicides ‘certainly (are) a good PR move to draw attention.’”

The reactions of Harris and Graffy, [...] were indictment enough of the unconscionably coarse attitude of senior U.S. government representatives regarding human life. But now there is the possibility that they were only spouting a cover story for even a worse scenario, a triple homicide about which they may well have been kept in the dark.

[...]

“It is still not 100-percent clear exactly how the three died and who was present at the time. However, it is abundantly clear that the Government’s claims concerning their deaths are false, fabricated to cover up what actually transpired."

[...]

The records “reveal that the three died not from strangulation (as would be the case in a hanging) but from asphyxiation resulting from having cloth stuffed down their throats — precisely the same kind of cloth, it turns out, that was used by a similar interrogation team around the same time at the Charleston Brig, and which has been labeled by a University of California study as ‘dryboarding,’” Horton wrote in an email.

[...]

“Penny Lane was being used by an interrogation unit of the CIA up until approximately the time of the deaths, and it was, strictly speaking, a CIA facility. Under the terms of a Special-Access Program (SAP), neither the camp commander nor the commander of Joint Task Force, Guantanamo were to have any knowledge of this program and what went on in connection with it. The program reported to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally, as well as to an official at the White House’s National Security Council.

  Ray McGovern: Consortium News

And someone may have been getting too close to that fact when it was decided Rumsfiend needed to resign. It happened shortly before he left.

The interminable delays [in releasing the Senate report on torture] can be more readily understood, once you realize that the Senate report, if it is halfway honest, must include evidence on CIA-sponsored homicide as well as torture, which might put Obama back on the spot regarding his pious assertions that “no one is above the law.” He has shown no appetite to discharge his duty if it risks getting crosswise with his spies.

I doubt anyone in Washington wants to get crosswise with the spies.

I was having trouble wrapping my mind around the notion that [my former colleagues at] the CIA had been given official sanction to murder. And inured as I am now to such indignities, I still shudder at the prospect that President Obama will, a year or two from now, explain it all with a nonchalant riff on his earlier “We tortured some folks” — substituting “killed” for “tortured.”

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

He Doesn't Want to Get Involved - Part 3

The National Security Act dictates that every covert operation must be supported by a written declaration finding that the action is necessary and important to the national security. The Congressional Intelligence committees – or at least the Chair and Ranking Member – should receive notice of the finding.

But there is evidence that those Congressional overseers were never told that the finding the president signed on September 17, 2001 authorized torture.

[...]

As Bob Woodward described in Bush at War, CIA Director Tenet asked President Bush to sign “a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation.” As Jane Mayer described in The Dark Side, such an order not only gave the CIA flexibility, it also protected the President. “To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.”

[...]

When George Tenet signed written guidelines for the CIA’s torture program in 2003, however, he appeared to have deliberately deprived the President of that deniability by including the source of CIA’s authorization – presumably naming the President – in a document interrogators would see.

[...]

Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture – along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture – the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration [...] that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public.

  Marcy Wheeler at The Intercept

Presidents will protect each other, won’t they? Nixon’s crimes went so far as to be prosecuted and subsequently pardoned by Gerald Ford, but ideally, they prefer to cloak themselves in “deniability” and cover each other’s crimes and misdeeds. 

And not only presidents protect each other, they have underlings who fall on their swords to protect them.  You remember what happened to  lying George Tenet.  (Although, that may well have been more a result of the fact that he wouldn't willingly fall on his sword to protect W, added to the fact that his lies were too transparent.  And hey, W did give him a Medal of Freedom.  Yay!)

ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, “It was the original authority for the CIA’s secret prisons and for the agency’s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well. It was the urtext. It’s remarkable that after all this time it’s still secret.”

Or perhaps more remarkable that the public was made aware of its existence.

Wheeler speculates in this article what Obama’s refusal to release this redacted phrase may be hiding:

Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Torture Report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.” Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House.

[...]

Bob Woodward even reported that that CIA would carry out that killing using Predator drones, a program CIA still conducts. And in fact, when the Second Circuit ultimately ruled to let the White House to keep the authorization phrase secret, it did so because the phrase also relates to “a highly classified, active intelligence activity” and “pertains to intelligence activities unrelated to the discontinued [torture] program.” Given what we know about the September 17, 2001 finding, that may well refer to President Obama’s still active drone program.

[...]

By releasing the DOJ memos and other materials, the White House provided what seemed to be unprecedented transparency about what the CIA had done. But all the while it was secretly hiding language describing what the White House has done.

Frankly, I’m not sure how what the White House has or has not done is entirely relevant. The CIA operates at the behest of the White House. If the White House doesn’t know what the CIA is doing – deniability – is that good enough to be let off the hook? Oh, yeah. Ronald “I didn’t know” Regan. Apparently that’s good enough for Americans. But just let you get involved in some lawsuit where you are responsible for a child or a pet or a small company (corporate CEOs are just as unaccountable as political ones) and see how far you get around the legal dictum “knew or should have known.”