Old CIA problems Dog New Interrogation Group

The announcement that a new interagency intelligence unit, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, will take charge of terrorist detention and interrogation is a further sign of CIA’s diminishing stock in the US intelligence community, despite claims that many agency veterans are “glad to be rid of” interrogations.  Meanwhile, the HIG’s location on the bureaucratic map under the National Security Council, and not under the purview of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is likely to prove scandal-prone, cumbersome, and subject to political micromanagement.

The Obama administration dropped hints that it would form a separate new interagency terrorist interrogation unit last month, and formally announced the HIG just hours before the court-ordered release of the CIA Inspector General report on torture on Monday. Indeed, the HIG announcement was intended to show that the Obama administration is proactively looking to the future of US intelligence with a fresh new approach.

The HIG will be comprised of experts from around the national security community, but will be based at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent.  The unit, which will not be subordinate to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will report directly to the National Security Council, further distancing the HIG from CIA and the intelligence community.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration is putting a collegial face on the reorganization of a key clandestine intelligence mission.  “The CIA is still going to play a very important role on the operational side,” an unnamed senior administration official told Ackerman.

Ackerman and others have reported that CIA “did not want” the HIG, but that’s sour-grapes parochialism talking, and it’s not as if CIA had much choice.  The Obama administration apparently believes that investigating the senior officials who authorized and managed the torture and detention program is politically untenable. Resuming the CIA interrogation and detention program would also have been politically untenable, especially in the aftermath of the IG torture report release, pending litigation related to torture and detention, and with pending legislation in both the House and the Senate promising even more scrutiny on detention and interrogation practices. So stripping CIA of the interrogation mission to form the new interagency HIG is the Obama administration’s gesture at fixing the problem.

More likely, CIA doesn’t want to share with FBI or any other agency a mission that it can’t own outright.  Recall that CIA, with its well-known ‘not invented here’ culture, has a long history of not playing nice with other government agencies, let alone other intelligence community agencies.  CIA’s Clandestine Service, formerly known as the Directorate of Operations, was responsible for the torture and detention program, and is especially notorious for jealously guarding its turf.  Earlier this year, for example, the Clandestine Service whined loudly via CIA Director Panetta when Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair asserted that he might want to name his own picks as ranking US intelligence officers in overseas posts. Reportedly, Vice President Joe Biden has been called in to resolve the territorial dispute.

Still, Michael Scherer at Time reported in a piece titled “The CIA Says Good Riddance” that many in the agency are relieved to see the torture and detention program moved out of CIA. Indeed, many that I know from CIA--and I include myself--were revulsed by the program.

However, for all of the attention paid to CIA’s morale problems, carving off a small but symbolic chunk of clandestine counterterrorism operations and effectively giving it to the FBI will become part of the hallway lore of a CIA doomed to be put upon by cowardly and opportunistic politicians. In the calculus of Beltway bureaucracy, losing a mission and attendant bureaucracy is a defeat.

Much of the reporting on CIA over the past year has portrayed the agency’s sagging hallway morale as a result of outside forces: investigative and journalistic scrutiny, appointment of outsider management like Panetta, bureaucratic encroachments from rival, or new, intelligence agencies.

Still other reports, like these at Pajamas Media and The Daily Beast, would have readers believe that the state of CIA morale, like the state of the Federal deficit, had been excellent, right up until the day Obama was sworn in as President.

But the “long faces” at CIA, as Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein puts it, are as much a result of a failure of Bush administration CIA leadership. CIA rank and file have long been frustrated that their managers and appointed leaders went along with--certainly didn’t resist--hare-brained intelligence policy hatched by what Stein unforgettably calls “the Bush administration's armchair Torquemadas.”

Speaking of career intelligence managers who enabled Bush administration intelligence policy, the NSC official in charge of the HIG will be John Brennan, the guy Obama had to drop as his pick for CIA Director because of his well-documented support for Bush torture policies, among other problems. Sources claim Brennan is ‘repentant’ about his past involvement in torture, and the speech he gave on Obama’s terrorism policy at Washington think tank last month affirmed that stance.

However, Brennan will be a policy maker in direct control of an operational intelligence unit that will exist outside of customary chains of intelligence community command.  This new arrangement is a kind of legalized version of past policymaker-driven intelligence efforts that occurred out of channels, such as the infamous Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair. That the HIG will exist in that nether zone where executive privilege is afforded to policy makers, and even farther from the reach of judicial and legislative authority, is an invitation to future White House micromanagement of interrogations, politicization, and abuses of power.

The ‘neither fish nor fowl’ character of the HIG is also likely to prove a human resource problem.  Interagency centers have been dumping grounds for sub-par government employees in the past.  If FBI, CIA, DIA, or military personnel can count on having their careers stalled by an assignment to the HIG--which is what happens when government employees are seconded or detailed to posts in other agencies--the new organization simply will not attract the high-quality, conscientious intelligence officers needed to reverse an interrogation program sullied by torture and unprofessionalism.

But if staffing and setting up the logistics of the HIG becomes a problem, count on another bit of Brennan’s confirmation-thwarting resume to cross the stage.  Brennan followed up his career as a torture-defending Bush intelligence official by taking over as CEO of influential intelligence contractor The Analysis Corporation and as the Chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a secretive industry association that represents intelligence contractors.  As senior overseer of the HIG, Brennan will be in a prime position to dole out interogation and support contracts to his friends in the outsourced intelligence industry. For all we know, the HIG is already up and running in office space rented by an INSA contractor--maybe even TAC.

For an organization borne of the necessity for change, it already looks like the HIG is set up to give America more of the same old torture policy, complete with outsourcing and the same old officials in charge.

Cross-posted from Examiner.com.

 

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Comments

[americaforme]

This is not, a fresh new approach. ...Clandestine, seriously secret mumbo jumbo, designed to control the private lives of faithful Americans...So sorry it sounds pretty spooky to me. Its all in big print, if our congress agrees, to this hair brained scheme,(and I bet they will) its par for the course. I wish they would do something in Washington, that wasn't colored with subversive dimentions.

[SamEllison]

Nice job Frank, thanks.

[research]

Illegal Covert Actions seem to blow back disastrously.

Of Course the we need Spies.

Of Course, in times of declared war, we need covert operations.

But deposing democratically elected Iranian leaders for instance, must require presidential and congressional declaration of war.