09/29/09 – Melvin Goodman – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest on the show today is Melvin A. Goodman.
He's a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and an adjunct professor of government at the Johns Hopkins University.
He has more than 40 years of experience in the CIA, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which is the State Department's CIA, and the Department of Defense.
He is the author or co-author of six books, including Bush League Diplomacy, How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk, and The Phantom Defense, America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion, from 2001.
And you might remember we interviewed him a little more than a year ago here on the show about the book Failure of Intelligence, and the decline and fall of the CIA.
Now, the reason we've got Mel on the show today is because of this article.
It's running at Antiwar.com today.
It's called Intelligence Veterans Demand Accountability for Torture, and it is signed by numerous members of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, including Melvin Goodman.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you doing today?
Hi, Scott.
Good to be with you again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and I'm very happy to see Veteran Intelligence Professionals like yourself, of course.
Ray McGovern and Philip Giraldi are both signatories to this, as well as I was happy to see Colleen Rowley, Sam Provance, Greg Thielman, Pat Lang, Larry Johnson, an important list of people.
No CIA directors, so I'm not sure whether you guys have the weight to counteract the letter that was sent to the president a couple of weeks ago by the former CIA directors telling him to somehow intervene and stop this criminal investigation, which I'm not sure is within the president's authority to do anyway.
But I sure wish you luck with it, and I guess I'll like to give you a chance to go ahead and in a nutshell tell us who are the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and what was the purpose behind this letter.
Well, the organization was formed by Ray McGovern several years ago, and it was to bring people who had served in the intelligence community to get their views in the public arena, because it's pretty clear that if you look at the mainstream media, the mainstream newspapers, their views are dominated by operational officers with the CIA and with directors and former directors of the CIA.
So they tend to give a very one-sided account of how the intelligence community operates, where it goes off the tracks, and they definitely ignore all efforts at reform.
What VIPS is trying to do, Veteran Intelligence Officers for Sanity, is to get a little more balanced debate and discussion.
This particular letter, which is in the form of a memorandum for the president, was a response to the effort by seven former CIA directors to get the president to stop any investigation of possible criminal behavior during the policy of torture and abuse, secret prisons, and extraordinary renditions.
And, of course, when you look at the seven directors who signed this, it's kind of interesting to me that one who didn't sign was Admiral Stanfield Turner, who I worked for from 1977 to 1980.
And I've talked to Stan Turner about all of these issues, and I know he's a real opponent of these policies of torture and abuse and extraordinary renditions.
But three of the directors who signed the letter, George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden, are responsible for these policies.
George Tenet essentially started all of these policies with regard to torture and abuse and extraordinary renditions, and the whole system of secret prisons that were set up from 2002 to 2004 were under the leadership of George Tenet.
So it's rather self-serving for them to say that there shouldn't be any investigation because some of the criminal activity that will have to be examined will be the criminal activity of these directors.
Well, I noticed that there's another living former CIA director, at least one more, whose name is not on that letter that they signed, and that's George Bush Sr.
And I wonder if that's just because he knows his son is implicated and he doesn't want to get charged with obstruction of justice, or what?
Well, I would imagine that as not only a former CIA director but a former president, he wasn't going to diminish his role as president of the United States, not go around signing a letter in the name of his role as director of the CIA.
I was just joking about the obstruction of justice thing.
We all know that there really is no law that can apply to presidents or even former presidents in America, right?
No, but if we have a real investigation of these crimes, and I think more crimes were committed over the past eight years, and I think one of the reasons why a lot of people don't want an investigation, I don't see how you can stop this from going to the top.
It would have to go to the president, George Bush, and the vice president, Dick Cheney, and of course their lawyers, people such as Jay Bidey, John Yoo, David Addington, Bill Haines, people who authorized this conduct which amounted to essentially torture and abuse.
But I think if you have a real investigation of the role of the CIA, you will see not only did torture and abuse start before the memos were ever written, but the torture and abuse went way beyond the very specific guidelines that were in the very important four torture memoranda that were released by Eric Holder, who I think is doing a courageous job at the Justice Department, given all the pressure he is getting from the right, from the CIA, from the press, from senators, and now from four former directors of the CIA whose tour of duties go back to Jim Schlesinger in the 1970s.
They cover more than two decades of rule and stewardship of the CIA.
Well, and I guess the investigation, as far as it goes, is a preliminary investigation which has been turned over to the prosecutor from the case of the destruction of the torture tapes by CIA officials.
And I guess he's investigating to see whether to have an investigation, basically.
But actually, before we get too far into that, and I want to go back and address all of what you just mentioned there about the memos and in good faith and beyond good faith and all those things.
But just in terms of the letter from the former CIA directors to the president a couple of weeks back, I guess it's my understanding, perhaps ignorant understanding, that the president doesn't have any authority to stop a criminal investigation once one is started.
And I mean, that's what happened with the Saturday Night Massacre when Nixon tried to have the special prosecutor fired.
The attorney general and the deputy attorney general resigned as well.
Exactly.
There's nothing that President Obama could do right now to turn back the preliminary investigation.
It just seems strange to me that they would make a demand that is, you know, come on, it's the attorney general.
The president can't tell him to not have a criminal investigation.
This is America.
Why would they do that?
This says something for the political sophistication of the people who signed the letter in the first place.
Remember, it included people such as George Tenet, Porter Goss, Jim Woolsey, who was rather undistinguished as a CIA director for Bill Clinton in the early 1990s.
It included John Deutch, who was forced to resign by President Clinton in the mid-1990s.
And then there was an investigation because John Deutch had taken all of these sensitive documents from the CIA and put them on his home computer.
And because that home computer was also accessing pornographic sites in the mid-1990s, a lot of this very sensitive material was compromised.
In fact, if you look at the seven people and see what they contributed to the history of the CIA, Jim Schlesinger, who politicized the CIA, who closed down the Office of National Estimates, who closed down the Special Research Staff, people such as Michael Hayden, who when he was in the National Security Agency was responsible for the policy of warrantless eavesdropping, Porter Goss, the former congressman who tried to shut down the Office of the Inspector General.
This is not a very distinguished list of former CIA directors.
And in fact, in my book, Failure of the CIA, Failure of Intelligence, I spend a chapter on the directors, starting with Bill Casey and including people such as Bob Gates.
By the way, his name wasn't on the list either, but I'm sure that's because he doesn't want to embarrass the President in his current role as Secretary of Defense.
But when you look at the leadership of the CIA over the last 30 years, you can understand the reason for the decline and the demise of the institution.
They have not been well led.
Leon Petta would not be an exception to this description of CIA directors who have really undermined the credibility and the integrity of the institution.
Now, to get into some of the specifics of this investigation, again, it's a preliminary investigation.
And the question is whether CIA actual torturers, the guys doing the actual torture, whether they went beyond what they were allowed to do in the Office of Legal Counsel memos.
Is that basically right?
That's basically right, and that's my basic problem with the investigation.
Because what it means, they're going to ignore all of the torture and abuse that was essentially permitted under the memos that I think had no real legal standing, but they were memos that allowed certain kind of techniques under the heading of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, which is a pretty good euphemism for torture and abuse, and only look at those excesses.
People who waterboarded more times than the memos called for, who engaged in sleep deprivation techniques for a longer period of time than the memos called for.
Well, isn't it already a matter of public record that a lot of these tortures were going on before the memos, that the memos were actually written in order to provide cover for what was already happening?
The memos were designed to catch up to practices that had already been done, and this was at the insistence of George Tenet, who wanted protection basically for his people.
So when you read the memos, it reads like the kind of memos that mafia lawyers would have written for criminals to try to excuse them from any judicial proceedings.
And that's what the purpose of these memos were, to provide that kind of legal protection.
But there were people, and this is the real statistic activity that went on by the CIA and their contractors, that went even beyond the memos.
My concern with the investigation and putting in the hands of John Durham is that John Durham for the past two years has been investigating, to me, an extremely simple matter, and this does deal with obstruction of justice, and here I'm not kidding, and that would be the CIA's destruction of the 92 torture tapes.
Now, I think it would be very easy to subpoena the right people who've already seen the torture tapes before they were destroyed and find out exactly what was on them and how important they were to any investigations or any legal proceedings, such as the one started by the American Civil Liberties Union.
But here is John Durham for nearly two years, even though I think there is now a grand jury looking at this matter, who's taken a very slow and almost indolent approach to getting something, which I think is a very easy case to resolve.
So I don't know how long he's going to take with this case, and it's also compromising whatever investigation would take place by the Senate Intelligence Committee, not that I expect much under the leadership of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who's ignored so many excesses and transgressions of the CIA.
But now the Republicans are saying, given the Durham investigation, they no longer want to proceed with any Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of their own.
So I think what we're going to get at best is the kind of same bad apples approach we got with Abu Ghraib, that the military was able to throw five or six enlisted people into jail, and say, okay, we got the bad apples, you don't have to worry about this.
And now the CIA is going to be in a position to say, oh yeah, you've gone after the people who exceeded their instructions.
But we all know that the instructions themselves basically sanctioned torture and abuse.
So at some point we have to get back to the Nuremberg principle, that you can't excuse yourself from legal proceedings just because you were following an order, because clearly this order was not an acceptable or legal matter in the case of torture and abuse.
Well, you know, the Washington Post has already published a trial balloon, saying that Holder has decided that he's not even going for the torture cases anymore, he's only going after a few cases, perhaps going after a few cases, where I'm not sure if Holder is the right way to characterize it, maybe it's Durham himself.
But anyway, that they're going after only cases, a few cases, where people were actually tortured to death by the CIA, whether they were crucified to death or left outside in the freezing after being beaten, you know, naked or whatever on the cold concrete, you know, whichever way they were murdered, at the salt pit torture dungeon outside of Kabul or at Bagram.
But anybody who was, you know, crucified but not all the way to death, that's all right, even though that's not in the memos.
This is not a good situation, because you could never prove why someone died anyway.
Some of these bodies have not been found, they're missing detainees, that was one of the redacted sections of the torture memos, and the memo of the Inspector General that came out in 2004, that was finally partially released just a few months ago.
So I think this would be an extremely limited way to investigate this situation, but I think that's where we are headed.
We're headed into a very limited investigation, and my only hope is that once they look into this matter, and they see how sadistic the behavior was on the part of CIA officials, as well as CIA contractors, independent contractors, who were hired by the CIA, they will see that once you lift the lid on this sort of mess, they will have to look further.
But clearly I think there's going to be an attempt to keep this investigation as limited as possible.
I doubt very much if anyone's going to suffer any consequences.
And this whole notion that somehow an investigation will undermine the morale of the CIA is opposed by the Inspector General John Helgerson himself, who said so many people came up to him and said their morale has been enhanced by the release of the Inspector General's report on detentions and interrogations, and they hope that there's an additional investigation by the Justice Department.
I think there's a definite need for accountability and transparency in all of these matters.
Obama campaigned on that basis, and I think he has to follow through on that basis, and shouldn't respond to the pressure from the right, from the mainstream media.
You mentioned the Washington Post.
The Washington Post has become an apologist for the CIA.
You have writers at the Washington Post, such as David Ignatius and David Broder, and Richard Cohn, who have pooh-poohed the torture and abuse, and have said there can't be any investigation because the Justice Department already looked into these matters in the Bush Administration.
Well, the Justice Department in the Bush Administration was a thoroughly politicized department, and it was a political appointee, Pat McNulty, who made the decision not to prosecute any of these matters, except for one involving a death, an actual death, and that was an independent contractor.
That wasn't even a CIA official.
The fact of the matter is that George Tenet and his executive assistant, John Brennan, who is now the deputy of the National Security Council, by the way, and others at a very high level, such as John Rizzo, the acting general counsel of the CIA, worked very closely with the Justice Department, people such as Jay Bibby and John Yoo, and got permission for these ugly techniques under the euphemism of enhanced interrogation techniques that were essentially torture and abuse.
Well, it really is amazing, isn't it?
Because if you just take a step back and you look at all the information that, for example, you've just read in the press over the last seven years or what have you, and there's been four or five excellent books, Torture Team and The Dark Side and Chain of Command, and more than that, there's been investigative journalism by great reporters all over this country and all over the world.
We know about ghost prisons all over the world.
We've seen the torture question on PBS Frontline where Tony Lugaranis says, you think Abu Ghraib is a big deal?
You should see what we did to these people in their houses.
We tortured Iraqis every day.
We tortured Iraqis on the side of the road.
We tortured Iraqis in front of their wives.
We tortured Iraqis here, there, with a box and green eggs and ham and the rest of it.
And here we are talking about whether we've narrowed this down to a few cases where people were tortured to death, and where they went outside the memos that we all know were created after the fact and what have you.
It really is remarkable, isn't it?
Just in its own kind of remarkability sense.
Well, it's a really sad fact of life that in the United States that claims it adheres to a rule of law, you cannot establish the kind of truth commission that we've seen established in places such as South Africa.
We've seen it in former communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Poland, Hungary.
We've seen it in the Czech Republic.
Truth commissions to get to the bottom of what happened during some of these sordid episodes.
And what you need is something comparable to what we had in the 1970s, and that was the hearings of the Church Commission at the Senate, or the Pike Commission at the House, the Rockefeller Commission, in the wake of all of the abuses of power that Seymour Hersh exposed during the Vietnam War by both the CIA and FBI during COINTELPRO.
Again, there were violations of personal liberties, there were mail openings, there were wiretaps, there was a fascination policy overseas.
But at least with the Church Commission and Pike Commission, we got some understanding of what went on in the name of the American people and the name of the country.
And then we established a Senate intelligence oversight process and a House intelligence oversight process to make sure this never happened again.
Well, the Senate and the House have not done their job.
The Congress has clearly become dysfunctional on all of these matters.
Senator Patrick Leahy has called for a truth commission, but there's been no support for this whatsoever.
And we're not going to be violating any national security secrets.
Let's face it, this has become a national embarrassment, but I don't think state security is involved here.
And we need to have an understanding of what went on in our name.
And I'm ashamed to say that I don't think we're going to be getting it.
Well, you know, I'm not very plugged into the kind of pop culture, mass consciousness type thing out there, but I'm kind of getting the drift that Iraq, like Korea, will be the forgotten war, that basically the American people have decided in general that they just want to pretend the last eight years didn't exist.
It's not all their fault for cheering it on at the top of their lungs and denouncing all their neighbors who knew better as traitors to America.
And so instead they just want to say, you know what, the Bush era is over like the Eisenhower era is over.
It's a thing of the past and we don't want to know.
I think it's already become the forgotten war, Scott.
I don't think we're going to have to wait for that.
You get very little information, and again in the mainstream media, about Iraq.
A lot of people feel the surge has been effective, and the fact of the matter is the events that will determine the success or failure of Iraq haven't even taken place yet, but it's certainly pointing in the direction strongly of failure.
And the torture regime goes right along with that.
It goes along with it, and some of the worst fights were in Afghanistan, and now we have a president who's contemplating whether he should listen to General McChrystal and send 40,000 more troops into Afghanistan for a war that he calls necessary, and it isn't, and a war he thinks that we can win, which of course we can't.
So, you know, they say history repeats itself, and each time it's different, but we're starting to see similarities between Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's a rather sad picture to observe.
When did you retire from the CIA?
Were you involved in at least analyzing the Afghanistan situation through the war against the Russians there back in the 80s?
Yeah, I was the chief analyst at the CIA.
The chief analyst at the CIA.
On this issue of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Oh, wow, so we need to have a whole other interview about this tomorrow or something.
We can have a whole other discussion about Afghanistan.
There's no question about that, because it would be very useful to look back at the 1970s and then compare the justifications for why we should add to our troop deployment in Afghanistan now, which I think are totally fallacious.
And it's all tied up with the war on terror and how we understand the problem of international terrorism.
So this is definitely a fruitful subject for discussion.
Great.
Well, I hope we can talk about that maybe even later this week.
That would work.
Okay, everybody, that's Melvin Goodman.
The book is Failure of Intelligence, the Decline and Fall of the CIA.
You can find the website.
It's the Center for International Policy at ciponline.org.
And he also wrote Bush League Diplomacy and the Phantom Defense.
There's a whole other topic, America's pursuit of the Star Wars illusion.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Mel.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you.