i want to know more about this....it's troubling on it's face.....who here is a member i wonder, anyone...no one....i definitely want to know more......their is a history of deputizing citizens in this country, is this what this is? or is it really a secret police force which i would have large problems with....what do my fellow conservatives make of this.....may i post this else where f6?.....very intriguing indeed
Interrogation work outsourced heavily; legality uncertain.
By Siobhan Gorman The Wall Street Journal Friday 08 February 2008
Washington - The CIA's secret interrogation program has made extensive use of outside contractors, whose role likely included the waterboarding of terrorist suspects, according to testimony yesterday from the CIA director and two other people familiar with the program.
Many of the contractors involved aren't large corporate entities but rather individuals who are often former agency or military officers. However, large corporations also are involved, current and former officials said. Their identities couldn't be learned.
The broader involvement of contractors, and the likelihood they partook in waterboarding, raises new legal questions about the Central Intelligence Agency's use of the practice, which is designed to simulate drowning. It also will fuel the contentious debate over the administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques.
The role of contractors in sensitive security programs has become a hot issue on Capitol Hill. It isn't clear what laws govern their work and who is accountable when activities go awry, as they did when employees of the security firm Blackwater allegedly killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded 24 others in September. An investigation of that is under way; Blackwater continues to provide security services to State Department employees in Iraq.
In testimony before the House yesterday, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden was asked whether contractors were involved in waterboarding al Qaeda detainees. He replied: "I'm not sure of the specifics. I'll give you a tentative answer: I believe so." An agency spokesman declined to clarify the answer.
According to two current and former intelligence officials, the use of contracting at the CIA's secret sites increased quickly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in part because the CIA had little experience in detentions and interrogation. Using nongovernment employees also helped maintain a low profile, they said. The sites were designed to handle only the most sensitive detainees. Gen. Hayden has said fewer than 100 people have been held at these sites.
In his comments yesterday, Gen. Hayden said that among the reasons the agency eliminated waterboarding from its interrogation program was that the legal landscape has changed.
"In my own view, the view of my lawyers and the Department of Justice, it is not certain that that technique would be considered to be lawful under current statute," he told lawmakers on the House intelligence panel.
Gen. Hayden maintained that the practice was legal at the time the CIA used it, from 2002 to 2003, on three al Qaeda suspects. "All the techniques that we've used have been deemed to be lawful, he said.
The use of outside contractors raises awkward questions about accountability. "The government may be prohibited from doing something, but is a corporation?" asked R.J. Hillhouse, a former political-science professor who has researched the outsourcing of military and intelligence operations for her book "Outsourced." Ms. Hillhouse said procurement law has traditionally differentiated between the reporting responsibilities of government officers and contractors.
Gen. Hayden, however, said private contractors involved in CIA interrogations "are bound by the same rules" as the agency's officers.
Lawmakers are concerned that using contractors in interrogations may violate the law, or at least government policy, which states that "inherently governmental activities" must be performed by government personnel.
Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel, said it might make sense to use contractors who have a language specialty to screen detainees, for example. But waterboarding crosses into the realm of activities only the government should perform.
"If we're going to ask contractors to do these things, then we have to find a way to assure that they comply with the law and that, to the extent we direct them to do activities that violate local law, that we protect them," Mr. Smith said. He added that he opposes the waterboarding.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Wednesday to ask his views on the legality of involving contractors to program interrogations.
"I believe the interrogation of detainees falls squarely within the definition of an inherently governmental activity," Sen. Feinstein wrote. The 2006 Detainee Treatment Act includes a legal shield for U.S. government employees who use officially authorized interrogation techniques.
"It is not all that clear to me, given our experiences in Iraq, that private contractors are held to the same standards as are government employees," Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the Illinois Democrat who asked Gen. Hayden about contractors' use of waterboarding, said in an interview. "People who actually work for us are accountable to us. Using employees of private companies to engage in what most of the world anyway believes is torture, I find problematic."
The CIA established its detention sites in several countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and multiple countries in Eastern Europe. Waterboarding reportedly took place in Thailand and possibly other countries.
The Justice Department is currently investigating the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes that reportedly included footage of waterboarding. Lawmakers have urged the department to expand its inquiry to include a criminal inquiry of the technique. The attorney general told a separate House committee yesterday he wasn't ready to do that.
Providing additional details about the workings of the once highly secret interrogation program, Gen. Hayden said, "was a very difficult decision." He described the program as "a covert action," which is perhaps the most secret type of operation the agency does.
He said, however, it was time to talk more openly about the program because it was being widely debated in public and "it was our strong belief that the political discussion that was going on was misshaped."
When George W. Bush last week presented on a cute little laptop notebook his budget for 2009, hardly a hue and a cry was raised about him slashing the national budget for law enforcement and Homeland Security, including a program that would keep illegal aliens in American prisons. Not only did this proposed hatchet job go unnoticed outside of law enforcement circles, no one even bothered to ask how George Bush could expect them to be our first line of defense in the event of a national emergency.
The answer’s simple: Because he no longer needs them. He no longer needs the National Guard. He no longer needs to worry about violating posse comitatus. Indeed, as FBI Director Robert Mueller put it in a 2005 InfraGard meeting, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
Via Digby, God bless her, via Cossack and crossposted on Alternet is Matthew Rothschild’s trouser-shitting story about InfraGard, an organization that, quite rightly, is giving my girl Digby cold sweats and flashbacks of the East German Stasi. http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/informants-r-us-by-digby-speaking-of.html
InfraGard isn’t a company per se as is it an allied collection of private industrialists that, so far, number nearly 24,000 strong (with a membership of less than 1700 two months after 9/11), with 350 of the country‘s Fortune 500 companies represented. They’ve been collected and deputized by the FBI and Homeland Security and plan to be utilized in the event of martial law. What’s even more surprising than this is the fact that InfraGard’s been around since 1996, smack dab in the middle of the Clinton administration. Since co-operating with federal authorities back then to combat terrorism (shades of the telecom giants and Western Union), InfraGard now has 86 chapters from coast to coast. They’re supposedly supervised by the FBI but they have some extraordinary powers and latitude. For instance…
Well, this is the part that Digby had emboldened and for damned good reason:
"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says.
This is the understanding among all InfraGard executives. They freely admit being given the latitude to use terminal force, if they deem necessary. However, one would be hard-pressed to imagine corporate executives toting M16’s and using them against our nation’s citizens. So the question one must ask themselves is, Who will do their killing for them?
Isn’t Blackwater USA in the private sector? And haven’t they already taken it upon themselves to patrol our nation’s streets (New Orleans) before being invited to by the FBI and Homeland Security? You’d have to be a gullible fool to think that that psychopath Erik Prince and his Blackwater goons wouldn’t be charter members of InfraGard.
One needs, also, to look at ChoicePoint, the Alpharetta, GA-based “data aggregation company” which, as with InfraGard, is fully prepared to literally murder us in cold blood during martial law and to do so with absolute impunity, is presenting itself as a warm and fuzzy public service company that just wants to have a Coke and a smile with all of us. In point of fact, ChoicePoint’s official website slyly makes no mention of the fact that they’ve already collected literally billions of bits of information on American citizens, quietly funded by those very same taxpayers, on matters ranging from our consumer spending habits, credit history, criminal records, if any, all the way down to our DNA profiles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChoicePoint
They specialize in obtaining, as they call it, “actionable intelligence.” Well, gee, why the fuck don’t we send them to Gitmo to extract “actionable intelligence” from “the worst of the worst”?
The problem with ChoicePoint, which has gotten virtually no press whatsoever except from investigative BBC journalist Greg Palast (who goes into detail about the company in Chapter One of Armed Madhouse), is that not only are they invading your privacy with the help and money of the FBI and the CIA, they’re not even very good at safeguarding it, as this article reminds us. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/05/fbi_choicepoint.html
Ever since the Rothschild article came out a couple of days ago, certain InfraGard members have already begun ripping the tinfoil hats off our heads, starting with Jim Lippard, who runs a blog:
Nonsense. I've been a member of the Phoenix InfraGard Members Alliance for years. It's a 501(c)(3) organization sponsored by the FBI whose members have been subjected to some rudimentary screening (comparable to what a non-cleared employee of the federal government would get). Most InfraGard meetings are open to the general public (contrary to Rothschild's statement that "InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public"), but the organization facilitates communications between members about sensitive subjects like vulnerabilities in privately owned infrastructure and the changing landscape of threats.
In other words, we have meetings for the proles that don’t reveal anything threatening but when we have real serious shit to discuss, like national security matters to which we’re more privy than you and even your elected officials, then we keep it internal.
Jim Lippard and his ilk must think that we’re truly gullible fools if they expect us to believe for a minute that a deliberately under-publicized corporate police state that’s more in the loop than the citizenry and even its public officials regarding national security threats would nonetheless be open and honest in their so-called public meetings, especially since it’s a given among InfraGard members that martial law is a matter of when, not if, and that they reserve the right to murder American citizens if they even think that their infrastructure is threatened.
And how much you wanna bet that this autonomous-sounding organization already has its 007 license to kill legally indemnified because Uncle Sam’s Justice Dept. has already designated InfraGard as apart from the government since they’re “contractors”?
A thing that Paul Bremer had made abundantly clear with his last-second Order 17 to which Blackwater’s been clinging like grim death ever since we raised a ruckus about them murdering 17 civilians in Baghdad on September 16th, a war crime for which not a single Blackwater mercenary still has not seen the inside of a jail cell.
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