We Need to Know About the Current CIA

“Blowback” is the term coined by the CIA to refer to unintended consequences and retaliatory actions. Ron Paul has repeatedly stated that the attack of the towers on September 11, 2001 was blowback from criminal, destructive and lethal activities conducted by the US in covert operations against various Islamic targets for years prior to 9/11. Chalmers Johnson in his book Nemesis documents such activity.

From Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson:
“On the basis of the new agreement with Egypt, between 1995 and 1998 the CIA carried out a series of renditions [kidnappings for the purpose of torture] aimed particularly at Islamic freedom fighters working in the Balkans, many of them originally from Egypt. Virtually all of the people the CIA kidnapped in these operations were killed after being delivered into Egyptian hands. Predictably enough, these kidnappings generated blowback, although ordinary Americans did not perceive it as such because the actions that provoked the retaliation were, of course, kept secret. On August 5, 1998, the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in a letter to an Arab-language newspaper in London, promised reprisal for recent U.S. renditions form Albania. Two days later, al-Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with a loss of 224 lives. The U.S. renditions continued with the CIA and FBI carrying out some two dozen of them in 1999 and 2000. These in turn helped provoke the attacks on the navy destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Former CIA director George Tenet testified before the 9/11 Commission that there were more than seventy renditions leading up to 9/11.”

Again from Chalmers Johnson:
‘The people held in this U.S. version of the gulag are known as “ghost detainees.’ completely off-the-books. No charges are ever filed against them, and they are hidden away even from the inspectors of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In an unusual typology of rendition sites, Robert Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East and the author of ‘Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude’, has commented, ‘We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on a civilian transport to a third country where, let’s make no bones about it, they use torture. If you want good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the U.S. cannot be blamed as it is not doing the heavy work.”

The scope and collusion of CIA renditions - Chalmers Johnson:
“The Swedish case is of major political importance because it revealed that Swedish authorities collaborated with the CIA. It is now clear that in a number of European countries, some of the local intelligence people were in on these renditions to one degree or another and that throughout Europe several governments pretended ignorance and simply looked the other way. Given the one thousand CIA flights to European destinations, it is hard to imagine that local governments could have been completely ignorant of their purposes. Whether all Western European governments were involved; whether some their intelligence services were functionally working for the CIA rather than their own governments; or whether deniability had been built into their arrangements with the CIA, we do not know. But obviously more was going on than merely bad Americans and good but ignorant Europeans.

No evidence has ever been offered that the two men the CIA kidnapped from Sweden and then delivered to the tender mercies of the Egyptians had participated in terrorist activities..... At about 5:00 p.m. on December 18, 2001, the Swedish secret police picked up Agiza on a street on his way home from a Swedish-language class in Karlstad; minutes later they nabbed al-Zery in a shop in Stockholm....The police transported the two Egyptians to the Stockholm city airport, Bromma, an hour before it was scheduled to close. the police cars were quickly admitted and drove to the office of Police Inspector Paul Forell, who was on duty. There, obviously by prior agreement, they were met by eight balaclava-wearing Americans in business suits who had landed a few minutes earlier in N379P. The Americans used scissors to cut the clothes off Agiza and al-Zery, who were still in handcuffs and ankle chains. They then inserted suppositories presumably containing tranquilizers into their anuses, dressed them in diapers and jumpsuits, and took them to the Gulfstream. At 21:49, the Egyptians, Americans, and two SAPO officers took off for Cairo....

As details of what happened began to leak out, embarrassing the Swedish government, its ambassador in Cairo was ordered to look into the matter. He discovered that after some two years of intermittent torture of both men, the Egyptian authorities decided that al-Zery was innocent and sent him back to his native village, ordering him not ot leave without official permission. They sentenced Agiza to twenty-five years in Masra Tora Prison for membership in a radical organization, presumably the Muslim Brotherhood. Visits to the prison by the Swedish ambassador produced only meetings with the warden and no interviews with Agiza, whose wife and five children remain in Sweden but are faced with the continual threat of deportation.

In the weeks immediately after 9/11, it seems that the CIA conducted a global vacuuming operation seeking to ‘disappear’ suspicious young Islamic men from various countries, including our own. In the course of these activities the agency acquired the names of Agiza and al-Zery, then pressured the SAPO to arrest them and turn over to a rendition team. At least some Swedish authorities involved knew that transferring any prisoner to a country where he might be tortured was a violation of Swedish law as well as of article 3 of the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Sweden had signed and ratified. This case damaged Sweden’s reputation as a champion of international protection of human rights.....

The Swedish affair accomplished nothing other than ruining the lives of two men, a wife and children, for no reason other than showing off the hubris of the CIA....

On June 24, 2005, an Italian judge signed a 213-page criminal arrest warrant for thirteen CIA operatives, including the former Milan station chief, Robert Seldon Lady, charging them with kidnapping an Egyptian in Milan who held political refugee status in Italy..... The warrants for the thirteen CIA men and women, together with their photos, were forwarded to the European police authority, which authorized their arrest anywhere on the continent. It is the first time that a fellow NATO member has ever filed criminal complaints against employees of the United States government acting in an official capacity.....

The abductee in this [another] case is (or was) a forty-two-year-old Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as ‘Abu Omar.’ In 1991, if not earlier, Omar fled Egypt for Albania because he belonged to the outlawed organization Jamaat al-Islamiyya and the police were after him. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, he worked for four years for various Islamic charities, but did not himself participate in any illegal activities. After 9/11, the Bush administration labeled the charities he worked for as supporters of terrorists.... In 1997, he surfaced in Rome where he was granted political refugee status. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Milan....

On Monday, February 17, 2003, shortly after noon, Abu Omar was walking down the Via Guerzoni toward a mosque to attend daily prayers when he was stopped by an officer of Italy’s paramilitary carabinieri police force. According to the Milan prosecutor, Amando Spataro, the Italian carabiniere had been hired by the CIA to approach Abu Omar and conduct a routine documents check....

According to a passerby’s account, two men speaking ‘bad’ Italian then emerged from a parked white van, sprayed a chemical in Abu Omar’s face, and hustled him into the van, which drove away at high speed followed by a least one and possibly two other cars... he was transferred to a civilian Gulfstream, which departed at 8:30 that night for Cairo. When Omar’s plane arrived in Cairo early on the morning of February 18, Egyptian authorities took him into custody. Accompanying Omar to Egypt in the Gulfstream was CIA Milan station chief Robert Lady.’

Although Italian political leaders have steadfastly maintained that they did not collaborate in any way with the kidnapping, it is obvious that police authorities knew a great deal about it. The nineteen-person CIA abduction team of commandos, drivers, and lookouts left an astonishing trail of evidence that suggests they were utterly indifferent to the possibility that they were being observed....by February 1, 2003, virtually all of them were there. They did not hide in safe houses or private homes but checked into four-star palaces like the Milan Hilton ($340 a night) and the Star Hotel ($325 a night)....for between three days and three weeks....eating lavishly at gourmet restaurants, they ran up bills of at least $144,984, which they paid for with Diners Club cards that matched their fake passports....After the delivery of Abu Omar to Aviano, four of the Americans checked into luxury hotels in Venice and others took vacations along the picturesque Mediterranean cost north of Tuscany, all still on the government tab......

Unfortunately, carrying out extraordinary renditions such as the ones in Sweden and Italy, torturing captives in secret prisons, shipping weapons to Islamic jihadists without checking their backgrounds or motives, and undermining democratically elected governments that are not fully on our political wavelength are the daily work of the Central Intelligence Agency. That was not always the case nor was it the intent of its founders or the expectations of its officials during its earliest years. As conceived in the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA’a main function was to compile an analyze raw intelligence to make it useful to the president. Its job was to help him see the big picture, put the latest crisis in historical and economic perspective, give early warning on the likely crises of the future, and evaluate whether political instability in one country or another was of any importance or interest to the United States. It was a civilian, non-partisan organization, without vested interests such as those of the military-industrial complex, and staffed by seasoned, occasionally wise analysts with broad comparative knowledge of the world and our place in it. As the New York Times Tim Weiner notes, ‘Once upon a time in the Cold War, the CIA could produce strategic intelligence. It countered the Pentagon’s wildly overstated estimates of Soviet military power. It cautioned that the war in Vietnam could not be won by military force. It helped keep the Cold War cold.

One of the CIA’s best-known historians, Thomas Powers, laments... ‘the CIA, as it existed for 50 years, is gone.’ I [Chalmers Johnson] think it was actually gone long before. My own view is that President Bush’s manipulation of intelligence to deceive the country into going to war and then blaming his failure on CIA’s ‘false intelligence’ delivered only the final coup de grace to the CIA’s strategic-intelligence function. Henceforth, the CIA will no longer have even a vestigial role in trying to discern the forces influencing our foreign policies. That work will now be done, if it is done at all, by the new director of national intelligence. The downgraded CIA will attend to such things as assassinations, dirty tricks, renditions, and engineering foreign coups....

The reality was and is that presidents like having a private army and do not like to be contradicted by officials not fully under their control. Thus the clandestine service long ago began to surpass the intelligence side of the agency in terms of promotions, finances, and prestige. In May of 2006, Bush merely put strategic analysis to sleep once and for all and turned over truth-telling to a brand-new bureaucracy of personal loyalists and the vested interests of the Pentagon.

This means that we are blinder than usual in understanding what is going on in the world. But, equally important, our liberties are also seriously at risk. The CIA’s strategic intelligence did not enhance the power of the president except insofar as it allowed him to do his job more effectively. It was, in fact, a modest restraint on a rogue president trying to assume the prerogatives of a king. The CIA’s bag of dirty tricks, on the other hand, is a defining characteristic of the imperial presidency. It is a source of unchecked power that can gravely threaten the nation -- as George W. Bush’s misuse of power in starting the war in Iraq demonstrated. The so-called reforms of the CIA in 2006 have probably further shortened the life of the American republic.”

CIA Funding- Chalmers Johnson:
“Wilson [Representative Charlie Wilson] soon discovered that all of the CIA’s budget and 40 percent of the Pentagon’s budget is ‘black’ -- that is, totally hidden from the public and all but a privileged few congressmen. As a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he could add virtually any amount of money to whatever black project he supported.”