November 24, 2020– It seemed forever that our outgoing president made way for his successor. Now he has, however, and the world was treated yesterday to the announcement of the first group of people nominated to serve in Joe Biden’s incoming administration. The initial list includes Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence. Judging from that, and from the water fountain gossip of other possible appointees, Mr. Biden may be backing into trouble.
The root of the problem traces to the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency–where Mr. Biden served as vice-president and so knows the people I’ll be speaking of–and Mr. Obama’s predilection for looking forward, not back. What that meant was to avoid dealing with the huge problem of CIA black prisons and torture. No truth commission, special prosecutor, or presidential commission looked into this matter, which involved known officials, including Gina Haspel, the present director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, permitted only a single, already ongoing investigation, of a single obstruction of justice, the destruction of evidence by Jose Rodriguez, then the CIA’s clandestine operations chief.
The Senate intelligence committee, less tin-eared, or perhaps more outraged at the way the CIA had stiffed it, preventing the overseers from access to the true record of its misdeeds, did undertake an investigation. I wrote at some length about this in early posts on this webside as well as in my book The Ghosts of Langleyhttp://thenewpress.com/books/ghosts-of-langley . Aside from preventing a review of the CIA torture, the Obama administration acquiesced in agency maneuvers to impede the Senate investigators, and then essentially conspired to prevent emergence of this Senate report.
That happened when John Brennan headed the CIA. A long-time spook, Brennan had moved over to Obama’s NSC staff to handle intelligence matters and was aware of the play-by-play on the torture investigation. Questioned on his opinion of forms of interrogation during his confirmation hearings, Brennan agreed that some met the definition of “torture.” He also declared he favored release of the Senate torture report. Once at Langley, Mr. Brennan did his best, under the guise of secrecy, to prevent the report from reaching the public.
John Brennan brought Avril Haines in as his deputy CIA director in September 2013. She watched as CIA general counsel Robert Eatinger spearheaded a spy effort against the Senate investigators to discover how they had accessed certain documents. Haines sat with Brennan in January 2014 meetings that permitted further intrusions onto Senate computer networks. Haines accompanied Brennan to a meeting held at Vice-President Joseph Biden’s house that tried to clear away the bad feelings between senators and CIA operatives (and, in fact, Biden employed the look ahead-not behind rhetoric on that occasion too). Meanwhile the CIA excesses led to an internal IG investigation that identified agency perpetrators of the intrusion into Senate working spaces and systems, and an accountability board met to review their behavior, which included lying about what had been said and done. Deputy Director Haines handled that report, which confirmed the intrusions but refused to apply accountability. The CIA Inspector General resigned instead.
Another individual mentioned as a potential Biden appointee is Michael Morrell, now retired from the agency, who spent part of the Obama administration as CIA’s White House briefer, and part as Langley’s deputy director. Morrell is someone who took the Senate torture report and invented arguments to justify the strong-arm methods, employing moral relativism to talk about torture, evoking discredited Justice Department memoranda to assert, against a stack of national and international laws, that the legality of torture is “debatable.” Morrell actually performed the accountability review of Jose Rodriguez. Now he is being mentioned as a possible director of the CIA.
In short, President-elect Joseph Biden looks to be starting by bringing back people whose hands are covered with torture affair dirt. This returns us to the stupidity of the Obama administration–if the CIA torture had been properly reviewed in the first place, Haines, Morrell and others would not have this black mark on their records. You’ve been warned. Now, by the way, Mr. Biden is talking of not further reviewing the question of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians because he wants to look ahead, not behind. Could be the same thing all over again.