Op/Ed

By MWC Editor At Large Tom Engelhardt

Weissman on the Plame Case in Perspective

As many now know, Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Counsel in the Plame case, set up an official website last week. Something tells me he isn't planning on going anywhere soon.

While we await the indictments to come, consider the strange history of the 1982 CIA shield law that triggered the process (as Steve Weissman explains it below). It was a backlash law, a dream law of the right; it was a response to the 1960s, to the Church Committee's revelations of CIA assassination plots, coup attempts, black propaganda operations and the like, to the urge to put even minimal constraints on an "intelligence" agency that had run amok in the world; and it was a response to the "rogue" CIA agent Philip Agee who named names.

In 1975, with his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, Agee became the agent-outer of all times. It's true, of course, that many CIA employees are simply in the business of analyzing information, much as reporters or scholarly experts might (though obviously -- since it's "intelligence" -- at least some of their analysis comes from other kinds of sources than a reporter or scholar would have access to). As an insider, the task of the analyst is to privately connect the dots (just as Tomdispatch tries to do in a completely open way) for those who run our government. This is a perfectly sensible thing for any set of government administrators to want and it was, of course, the original stated purpose for the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency. The usually ignored word "central" in the Agency's title once had a real meaning. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the thought was to centralize scattered and ill-coordinated government intelligence, put it in a form the president could use, and get it to him in a timely manner to prevent any future surprise attacks.

The reality of the CIA's half-century-plus run through our world has been quite another matter though: the formation and funding of secret armies and death squads from Laos and El Salvador to Afghanistan; the corruption of democratic political parties; the assassination, or attempted assassination, of leaders of other countries; the investment of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in torture research, and then the teaching of new methods of torture (as well as time-tested ones) to allied police and military forces globally; the running of torture centers and secret prisons abroad; and the overthrow of democratically-elected governments from Guatemala and Chile to Iran. Through all these years, CIA agents have acted with impunity. The intricate tale of CIA "covert" operations is quite a grim little history, drenched in blood and pain -- and a history that finally blew back on Americans.

In his prophetic book Blowback (published before the 9/11 attacks), Chalmers Johnson made that CIA term -- for covert operations about which Americans know nothing which nonetheless inspire retaliation against us -- a part of our language. In many ways, the present nightmare can be traced all the way back to the first (successful) CIA attempt to overthrow a foreign government, that of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953. The Agency was then only six years old. That act -- like the famous shin bone that's connected to the knee bone -- can be connected to the brutal Shah who succeeded Mossadegh (with vast American backing); to Ayatollah Khomeini who overthrew the Shah and brought Islamic fundamentalism to power in one crucial Middle Eastern country; to Saddam Hussein who, again with our backing, fought Khomeini; to the Afghan anti-Soviet war where the CIA supported the most fundamentalist and extreme of the mujahedeen fighters (including one Osama bin Laden); and so on down to the present.

If Patrick Fitzgerald indicts anyone this week for violating the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act (as opposed to a myriad of other possible charges), there will be a certain blowback aspect to it as well. After all, the Plame case lies at the unexpected end of a cycle of blowback (defined more loosely) that started with the right's response to Agee. Now, the most extreme government in American memory could buckle under the weight of the dream law its predecessors came up with at a moment when George Bush the elder, a former CIA director (January 1976 to January 1977) was Ronald Reagan's vice president. So, as you prepare for this week, consider the strange, circuitous route we've taken to the present moment and where we might be heading. Tom

Outing CIA Agents

Valerie Plame Meets Philip Agee
By Steve Weissman

As we approach the week when Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury will undoubtedly issue indictments against White House officials, the seldom considered 1982 CIA shield law under which the Plame case was first launched deserves some attention. When Karl Rove, I. Lewis Libby, and possibly others decided to reveal the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, they clearly wanted to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for undermining administration claims that Saddam Hussein sought "yellowcake" uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons. But by publicly ruining Plame's undercover career, they were undoubtedly also sending a very personal message to CIA types and other insiders not to question Mr. Bush's rush to war in Iraq.

As despicable as this White House treachery may have been, those of us who oppose it need to regain some lost perspective. Being bashed by Team Bush does not turn the Central Intelligence Agency into the home team or necessarily make Valerie Plame a modern-day Joan of Arc; nor should her outing stop journalists or anyone else from blowing the cover of her fellow agents when they are found engaging in kidnappings, torture, or attempts to overthrow democratically elected governments.

CIA Torturers

Among its many sins, the CIA has played a central role in the American torture machine. The agency created its "stress and duress" torture methods back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and then passed the techniques to the Pentagon and client regimes around the world. Now, to complete the circle, CIA squads kidnap those they consider terrorist suspects and secretly disappear them into the prisons and torture chambers of countries like Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, and Uzbekistan.

The antiseptic name for this outsourcing of torture is "extraordinary rendition," and -- to be fair -- the CIA does not do it on its own say-so. "Renditions were called for, authorized and legally vetted not just by the N.S.C. [National Security Council] and the Justice Department, but also by the presidents -- both Mr. Clinton and George W. Bush," former CIA official Michael Scheuer wrote last March in an op-ed in the New York Times (scroll down). "I know this because, as head of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden desk, I started the Qaeda detainee rendition program and ran it for 40 months."

Author of the best-selling Imperial Hubris, Scheuer has become a leading critic of the war in Iraq, which he rightly sees as counterproductive in the fight against terrorists. Still a spook at heart, though, he rushes to defend the agency's "snatch and grab" program, calling those of us who want to outlaw it either "woefully uninformed" or "horse's asses."

The program was "tremendously successful," he told reporter Randy Hall of Cybercast News. "The amount of information we received that helped us better understand al Qaeda and formulate additional operations against them was invaluable, and the simple fact that, for example, we put one of bin Laden's main procurers of weapons of mass destruction in prison is a good thing."

Yes, jailing terrorists is good, but not by sidestepping formal charges, habeas corpus, independent judges, and fair trials -- and certainly not by using torture. To trash civilization's hard-won legal safeguards and let our secret police become judge, jury, and executioner is to do bin Laden's work for him.

For CIA veterans, the ends too often justify the means, as long as the whole business does not become public (as it now has). The belief that an elite corps of CIA officers -- and they alone -- can keep self-corrupting means both under wraps and in check seems to be part of the job description.