To what extent is the CIA still involved in detaining and interrogating terrorist enemy combatants? Yesterday we noted that past Petraeus paramour Paula Broadwell had claimed on Oct. 26 that the agency was holding three Libyan detainees in Benghazi at the time of the 9/11 attacks there. Fox News Channel’s Jennifer Griffin mentioned the three detainees in a report the same day. Yesterday Griffin added that according to her sources, “other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East” had also been held there, though “most . . . had been moved two weeks earlier.”
The agency issued a categorical denial: “The CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless.”
Executive Order 13491, issued on President Obama’s second full day in office, provides: “The CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” It also bans the enhanced interrogation techniques the agency used during at least part of the Bush administration: Detainees under U.S. custody or “effective control” are not to “be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in [the] Army Field Manual.”
But it turns out Benghazi isn’t the only place where the CIA has been reported to have acted in contravention of Executive Order 13491. In July 2011, The Nation, a hard-left magazine, reported that the CIA “uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters” in Mogadishu. There, according to the magazine, detainees from Al Shabab, “an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda,” are held and interrogated.
“While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA,” The Nation reported, “US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners.” The following month, the New York Times published a substantively similar report, in which it added the detail that some Somalis call the detention facility ” ‘Guantánamo’ for its ties to the United States.”
These reports–published, we should note, before David Petraeus became CIA director–prompted a letter from Human Rights Watch to President Obama, dated Sept. 6 (the day Petraeus was sworn in): “These allegations, if true, would raise serious questions regarding whether the United States is acting in compliance with the requirements of Executive Order 13491 and other legal obligations.”
Fourteen months later, Human Rights Watch tells Best of the Web Today that the letter went unanswered.
Assuming that these reports are accurate–that the CIA is involved in detention and interrogation in Mogadishu, Benghazi and perhaps elsewhere–the Petraeus sex scandal has drawn attention to a policy scandal. Obama sold Americans a complete bill of goods when it comes to counterterror policy.
In 2008 he promised to reverse Bush policies that raised the hackles of Europeans and left-leaning human-rights types. In area after area–Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, surveillance–he failed to do so. He even stepped up the use of lethal drones against terrorists, including U.S. citizens. Detention and interrogation policy was supposed to be the one case in which the policy had actually changed.
This column is on the opposite side from our friends at Human Rights Watch, which is to say that we generally approve of the administration’s actual policies. We favor drone strikes, indefinite detention, enhanced interrogation and the rest of it. We’d rather Obama break his promises than endanger Americans by keeping them. It’s galling that many Obama partisans, including Obama himself, are now willing to countenance policies they self-righteously denounced just four years ago. But that’s politics.
If the CIA was running a detention facility at Benghazi, it’s possible it was a rogue operation, or it’s possible the president secretly authorized an exception to Executive Order 13491. Either way, there would be extraordinary political pressure to keep it quiet. That might explain why, as Jennifer Griffin reported, the CIA repeatedly refused requests for military backup during the 9/11 attacks on the consulate and the nearby CIA annex. (A CIA spokeswoman denied the agency refused such requests and said “the Agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues.”)
According to Griffin, former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty defied orders to “stand down” and traveled from the annex to the consulate, where they helped evacuate Americans. They then returned to the annex, where they were killed by a mortar shell. If military backup was denied for fear of exposing continuing CIA detention activity, then they paid with their lives for Barack Obama’s moral and political posturing.
General Disarray
The David Petraeus sex scandal turns out to have more twists than a pretzel factory, to borrow a phrase from a former journalist. It came to light when a Florida woman started receiving threatening emails from an unknown source, who turned out to be the CIA director’s biographer. The Florida woman went to an FBI agent, from whom, The Wall Street Journal reports, she had previously received shirtless photos. The shirtless FBI agent got the ball rolling on the investigation, which uncovered the affair between the CIA director and the biographer.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports, the Florida woman was also receiving “between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of documents–most of them e-mails–that contain ‘potentially inappropriate’ communication” from the Marine general who serves as the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. To be sure, there could be an innocent explanation. Maybe they were passing around copies of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
CBS News reports there’s also a custody battle in which the CIA director and the Marine general both served as character references for the sister of the woman who received the threatening emails, the shirtless photos and the 20,000 to 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate communications.
In a Washington Post op-ed, the ghostwriter for the biographer of the CIA director complains that he feels left out, because he never had an inkling that the biographer and the CIA director were having an affair. Other things he didn’t know about include the threatening emails, the shirtless photos, the 20,000 to 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate communications, and the child-custody dispute. “My wife says I’m the most clueless person in America,” he writes. We should all be so lucky.
Maybe they should change the name of the U.S. military to “Melrose Base.”
Secrétaire à la Défense?!
Here’s one of the worst ideas we’ve heard in a while: “President Obama is considering asking Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to serve as his next defense secretary, part of an extensive rearrangement of his national security team that will include a permanent replacement for former CIA director David H. Petraeus,” the Washington Post reports.
Kerry had previously been floated as a possible secretary of state, which is bad enough, but as the New York Sun points out in an editorial, Kerry got his start in politics as an “antiwar” activist, slandering fellow Vietnam servicemen and openly hoping for an enemy victory: “It’s hard to imagine that a more calculated insult to American veterans has ever been made on Veterans Day.”
Barack Obama was 9 when Kerry gave his infamous testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, so presumably he has no memory of it. But surely someone older from the administration could set the president straight.
