NATIONAL INTEREST AND
MORALITY
The
use by nations of their intelligence agencies to preserve their interests as
well as to facilitate the undermining of their ideological and economic
adversaries is a well-trodden path.
For
it is through intelligence that the strength of rivals can be assessed, their
weaknesses detected and strategies implemented to promote the geo-political and
economic advantage of one nation or alliance of nations over others.
It
is also the case that the work undertaken covertly by intelligence agencies in the
pursuit of national objectives may often stray into what is perceived as being
morally objectionable.
Indeed,
there is something of a universal understanding among both practitioners and
non-practitioners of the dark arts of covert espionage of the inevitable
conflict between many aspects of intelligence and what is considered as being
ethically sound and within the boundaries of the law.
How
far can actions taken by intelligence agencies in the furtherance of the
national interest be taken and be justified? The works of early renaissance-era
thinkers bear thinking about.
It
was of course Niccolo Machiavelli who argued that essentially all means
employed by a ruler in terms of preserving and promoting the stability and the
prosperity of his domain was inherently justifiable, regardless of whether such
methods involved the use of violence, murder, deception and cruelty. The ends,
in other words, justified the means. Giovanni Botero argued against
Machiavelli’s thesis both on the basis of its amorality as well as it
counter-productivity.
The
resonance of these opposing arguments is not lost when transferring the context
from the preservation of power within medieval and early renaissance states to the
preservation of American power and hegemony in the modern circumstances of
international relations and power politics.
In
straightforward language, governments, both totalitarian and democratic, use
various arms of their intelligence services to do their “dirty work”; thus allowing
for a psychopathic quality enabling politicians to outwardly espouse an
adherence to democratic and humane values while deviating from conventional
morality via the policies and operations which their intelligence services
follow covertly in the pursuance of the national interest.
For
instance, a 1954 report compiled by the National Security Council for President
Eisenhower stated that in “international communism”, the United States faced
“an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever
means and whatever cost.”
It
advised that the US needed to “learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy its
enemies by more clever and more ruthless methods than those of its opponents.”
This of course would entail adopting a “fundamentally repugnant philosophy”
which contradicted “longstanding American concepts of ‘fair play’”, but it
insisted that such an approach was necessary given the gravity of the international
situation.
What
then the question of accountability of those involved in destroying the enemies
of the nation by fair means or foul? Are the values of human rights and respect
for the rule of law to be inviolable? Or are there as Oliver Cromwell once
said, “great occasions in which some men are called to great services, in the
doing of which they are excused from the common rule of morality?”
It
is while perhaps bearing Cromwell’s statement in mind that Henry Kissinger said
the following:
The
average person thinks that morality can be applied as directly to the conduct
of states to each other as it can to human relations. That is not always the
case because sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils.
Such
evils which involve the adoption of morally repugnant schemes that traverse
laws made within nations as well as the laws regulating the conduct of nations.
But American statesmen like Kissinger have for long appeared to be above
accountability.
The
case may be made that the concept of ‘American Exceptionalism’ forms the basis
for the belief that it be excused from aspects of international law as they
pertain to criminal transgressions.
It
is a matter of historical and contemporary record that the United States
through the use of its various intelligence service branches, most notably the
Central Intelligence Agency, has instigated successful and failed attempts
geared towards the destabilisation of sovereign nation states, the
assassination of leaders, as well as the funding of death squads and extremist
militias who have tortured and murdered civilian populations.
Of
its relationship -including payments- with human rights violators such as the head
of the Chilean DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, the CIA, in the 1970s,
claimed that it made “a deliberate decision balancing the nature and severity
of the human rights abuse against the potential intelligence value of
continuing the relationship.” The veracity of such pronouncement was in doubt
then as it is now.
The
record of contemporary events has revealed the involvement of the same agency
in the aforementioned plots and mechanisms with the popularisation of terms
such as ‘extraordinary renditions’, black camps and the medieval-type of
torture known as ‘waterboarding.’
This
has implications for the democratic nations, pre-eminent of which are the
United States and its Western European allies, who proclaim their societies to
be predicated on the rule of law and the values associated with democracy.
The
inauguration of the War on Terror, encompassing the invasions of both
Afghanistan and Iraq and the countering of the subsequent insurgency in the
latter, military operations in the Yemen and Pakistan, as well as the civil
wars in Libya and Syria in the context of the Arab Spring, has brought the role
of Western intelligence services into sharp public focus.
It
is now universally accepted that the war launched in 2003 against Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq by nations allied to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO) under the leadership of the United States was based on the falsehood of
the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
A
decade later, the issue of the morality of waging a war which arguably was a
breach of the rules of international law, continues to prompt heated debate but
has yielded little or nothing in the manner of actual accountability of the
relevant political leaders and chiefs of intelligence.
The
issues of ethics and accountability regarding the involvement of Western
intelligence officials have come to the fore in regard to the handling of
persons detained under the US Homeland Security regime as alleged members of
al-Qaeda.
The
background to the legal arguments as to whether or not they are entitled to
prisoner of war status under the Geneva Convention, whether they should face
trial in criminal courts or military commissions as well as the indefinite
detention of others is littered with allegations of unethical practices of
intelligence operatives.
Suits
launched against the British and German governments based on their obligations
under the European Convention of Human Rights have done the same. These
lawsuits have highlighted one avenue by which governments and intelligence
operatives may be held to account.
This
however, has proved not to be the case so far as the United States is
concerned. The memory of the terror attacks on September 11th has
not led to a backlash against the CIA as occurred in the post-Watergate era
with the revelation of the agency’s excesses. Indeed, a segment of American political
and public opinion has consistently been in favour of empowering their intelligence
operatives and granting them legal immunities.
Nonetheless,
the recent prosecutions and convictions for human rights abuses of American and
Italian Intelligence officials in Italy, albeit that the Americans were
convicted in abstentia, serves as a
testament as to what can be achieved if the sentiment for setting higher standards
of accountability is backed up by a willingness to vigorously pursue such an
end.
DEMOCRATIC VALUES VERSUS
ESPIONAGE VALUES
Inherent
to the healthy functioning of the political system of any nation which
considers itself to be a democracy is a strict adherence to the rule of law.
Public officials comprising the political classes and civil servants are
expected to discharge their duties and responsibilities with a high level of
moral probity. The need for transparency and the accountability of officials
for their errors as well as their misdeeds is paramount.
These
values do not readily transfer into the ambit of the security and intelligence
branches of government. The security services are often granted certain
immunities to help them in the conduct of their duties. This includes the
commission of or the involvement in the commission of criminal offences.
For
instance, under the Intelligence Services Act (1994) agents working for the
Secret Intelligence Service of Britain, otherwise known as M16, are allowed to
conduct illegal activities such as bribery, breaking and entering and to plant
listening devices in the interests of national security.
While
section 7 of the Act does not specifically give agents a ‘license to kill’, it
does offer protection to agents who may become involved in murder, kidnap and
torture where such actions have been authorised in writing by a government
minister.
The
transparency of the workings of government, a notion represented through laws
governing the freedom of access to information, are not uniformly applied
across the departments of government. The intelligence arms of state after all
operate in stealth. Secrecy is a much valued and necessary criterion for the
successful running of such areas.
The
CIA is protected by standard rules governing freedom of information legislation
while in Britain, the security services are not subject to the 30-year rule
governing the disclosure of cabinet and high level government papers.
So
far as the constructing of many a sensitive covert operation is concerned, the
value of accountability within the intelligence community is often replaced by
the requirement of ‘plausible deniability’; the maxim of “hear no evil, see no
evil” comes to mind. The object is to create a situation whereby in the event
of the failure of an operation, responsibility could be denied by political figures
and possibly those within the intelligence service.
For
instance, within the bowels of the American secret state has existed an
interdepartmental committee associated with the National Security Council
(NSC). Known variously as ‘The Special Group’, ‘The 303 Committee’ and later as
‘The Forty Group’, it reviewed and authorised covert operations and was
ultimately the basis through which a serving president would not be compromised
if things went wrong.
There
is evidence that the activities of ‘The Special Group’ and its successors acted
without the knowledge of their political masters. And while legislatively
prescribed mechanisms exist for the intelligence services to be accountable to
the executive and legislative branches, there are covert programs which in
recent times are kept hidden from elected officials.
For
instance, in 2009 the termination of a long term covert program kept secret
from Congress for eight years was announced.
It
is pertinent to note that the levels of secrecy attendant to intelligence
operations in a democracy may carry with this the insidious effect of
distorting history. An example of this may be found in regard the nearly
century’s long obfuscation surrounding the British government’s alleged hand in
an attempt to assassinate Vladimir Lenin and overthrow the Bolshevik government
in Russia.
Files
associated with the ‘Lockhart Plot’, an operation engineered by MI-1C, the
precursor to MI6, and overseen by Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat
based in Russia, remain under lock and key preserving the pretence that today’s
policy regarding the intelligence services which is averse to the subverting of
foreign governments and the assassination of foreign political leaders has
always held sway.
So
far as Britain is concerned, issues of accountability and transparency of its security
and intelligence organs were historically abstract concepts given the fact that
the existence of both its domestic and foreign branches, MI5 and MI6 was not officially
acknowledged until near the closing of the 20th Century.
The
case of Harman and Hewitt v The United Kingdom (1991) held that the failure of
United Kingdom to provide a statutory basis for the existence of a body having
powers of surveillance and file-keeping ran counter to the rights protecting
privacy, and, by extension, was an abrogation of the rule of law. The Security
Service Act (1989) and then the Intelligence Services Act of 1994 followed to
correct this state of affairs.
THE BASIS OF THE COLD WAR
The
gradual but inevitable fracture in the war time alliance between the risen
American superpower and the Soviet Union after the conquest of Nazi Germany led
to the Cold War.
The
resultant drawing of an ‘Iron Curtain’ from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic
coast, in actuality a foreseeable set of events given Churchill’s wartime
consultations with Stalin over post-War spheres of influence, produced an
ideologically-predicated standoff between the capitalist West led by the United
States and the Soviet Union-led Eastern Bloc of socialist states.
It
led to the establishment of military alliances. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation brought into effect on April 4th 1949 had as a central
plank of its existence the objective of keeping the Russians out of Western
Europe.
It
had already been made clear two years earlier by President Harry Truman in his
doctrinal statement on the containment of communist influence, that the United
States intended to do the same on a worldwide scale. The Soviet response to the
creation of NATO was the signing of the Warsaw Pact. It also sought to extend
its influence around the world by aiding or forming alliances with
anti-colonial liberation movements.
Thus,
the stage was set for a tense geo-strategic confrontation spanning the
continents in which the CIA would play a key role in American attempts to aid
friendly states and groups and to destabilise those adjudged to be unfriendly.
Intelligence
expertise and resources would play a crucial part in a four decades long tussle
which would involve espionage, counter-espionage, the support of authoritarian
regimes, the facilitating of coup d’etats and proxy wars. Along with these
endeavours came the attendant moral implications of funding and supporting
campaigns of murder, torture and deception.
THE SINS OF THE CIA
The
CIA was created by the National Security Act (1947) as a replacement for a
number of short-lived organisations most notable of which was the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), the first independent US Intelligence agency which
ceased to exist in late 1945.
In
a directive issued on June 18th 1948, the National Security Council
(NSC) gave the CIA the authority to carry out covert operations “against
hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or
groups but which are so planned and conducted that any US government
responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons.”
President
Harry Truman’s enunciation of what came to be known as the ‘Truman Doctrine’
formally put into words the defining statement of US foreign policy of the age,
and the CIA would become a key instrument in the aggressive defence and promotion
of American interests in regard to the dangers of the extension of the spheres
of Soviet or Chinese communist influence.
As
it turned out, the CIA would also act against non-communist regimes or groups
who may have been anti-colonial and reformist in their tendencies. It did not
matter that such regimes or movements were popular and democratically elected.
The
overthrow of the elected government of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 after he had
nationalised British oil interests was the first of major covert operations
undertaken by the CIA to destabilise and successfully engineer the removal of a
foreign government.
Led
by the section chief of the Middle East, Kermit Roosevelt, Operation Ajax
involved acts of bribery and the disseminating of false information including an
exaggerated concern about Mosaddegh’s association with communists.
It
meant the silencing of influential religious clerics who withdrew support from
Mosaddegh, payments to underworld figures who intimidated voters and created
disturbances during elections and the suborning of figures in the military who
staged a coup which installed the Shah as the ruler of a repressive regime until
his removal through a popular uprising twenty seven years later.
The
following year, the agency was also involved in the overthrow of the government
of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who had inaugurated a popular policy of land reform
which threatened the commercial interests of the American multinational concern
known as the United Fruit Company.
The
completion of Operation PBSUCCESS also known as the ‘Banana Revolt’ involved
funding and training an avowedly anti-communist “army of liberation” which invaded
Guatemala and prompted a coup d’etat
that installed Colonel Carlos Armas at the head of a military junta.
The
prelude to the invasion involved CIA-inspired disinformation in the form of
rumour mongering, air-dropped pamphlets and poster campaigns which heightened
anti-communist sentiment and provoked sedition among the officer corps of the
Guatemalan military.
The
CIA was very active during the 1950s and the 1960s in fomenting dissent in
Indonesia. The target was President Sukarno who was allied to the Communist
Party of Indonesia (PKI). Sukarno successfully put down a military rebellion in
1958, but an amalgam of CIA and MI6 operatives, backed respectively by the US
State Department and British Foreign Office succeeded in deposing him.
The
usual tricks of deception, disinformation and the strengthening of opposition
groups were put in motion. Newspapers trumpeted the increasing and ‘malevolent’
power of the communists which were intended to alienate the public from
communist organisations and to incite the army –a bastion of anti-communist
sentiment- which was given increasing financial aid at the time when the United
States was withdrawing and scaling down aid to the Indonesian state.
A
psychological warfare strategy was worked out and implemented by the Foreign
Office from a base in Phoenix Park in Singapore. This involved its Information
Research Department (IRD) and MI6 personnel. Links were maintained with
officers of the Indonesian military who used an attempted coup allegedly
sponsored by the PKI as the pretext for ousting Sukarno and replacing him with Suharto,
the army commander.
Perhaps
one of the most reprehensible schemes perpetrated by the IRD during the
campaign against the PKI was the consistent aligning of the PKI with “Chinese
communism”; a diabolical ploy aimed at identifying communism with the ethnic
minority Chinese against whom Indonesians acted during the anti-communist purge
that followed failed coup attempt.
The
violent overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende, the first Marxist leader to be
democratically elected in Latin America, by the Chilean military in 1973 is
perhaps the most widely known and notorious of CIA-sponsored coups, which was
engineered during the Cold War. As in Guatemala, a major US owned multinational
company had its interests at stake, in this case the International Telephone
and Telegraph Company.
The
findings of the Church Committee and US government records since unearthed have
implicated the CIA in a plot to bribe members of the Chilean Congress in order
to persuade them not to appoint Allende as President. The agency admitted that
it had paid the gang which kidnapped Chile’s army chief of staff, General Rene
Schneider, who was later killed for failing to use the army to block Allende’s
appointment. Approaches were made to members of the Chilean army to instigate a
coup.
As
in other targeted nations Black Propaganda played a role. The CIA spent between
$800,000 and $1,000,000 on covert action in an attempt to influence the outcome
of the 1970 elections which would bring Allende to power.
After
his election, the 40 Committee committed itself to planting stories in the
European and Latin American press which would spin dire predictions on the
future of Chile.
The
agency’s tentacles spread into the US media. It succeeded in changing the previously
favourable tone given by the Time
magazine correspondent in a cover story as well as its timing.
The
CIA also knew to be “likely disinformation”, the production of the “White Book”
by civilians collaborating with the CIA, which was intended as a justification
for Allende’s overthrow on the grounds that he had intended to murder the
Chilean high command in the months prior to the coup.
The
aforementioned operations leading to regime change were at the time of their
implementation construed as successes. But the costs and benefits assessments
as details of these covert operations came to the public attention came into
sharper focus.
The
installation of a political ally in the form of the Shah of Iran whose regime
benefitted American and British interests in oil is now viewed as disastrous.
His repressive regime alienated the masses and prompted a revolution leading to
the Shah’s fall and a subsequent power vacuum filled by an Islamist regime and
perpetual hostile relations with the West.
The
benefits of bringing to power an anti-Communist junta in Guatemala at the
expense of a progressive liberal coalition government needs to be weighed
against decades of corrupt and repressive military rule which led to fratricidal
conflict with Leftist and democratic-reformed groups which involved the use of
ruthless, US-backed death squads.
As
for Indonesia, the fall of Sukarno led to an anti-Communist purge which
resulted in the deaths of over 500,000 people and the concentration
camp-imprisonment of hundreds of thousands.
And
if the military government headed by General Augustino Pinochet saved Chile
from becoming a pit of Marxist misery from which the ‘Domino Principle’, Latin
American-style, would play out, the violation of democracy, the torture and
extra-judicial execution of thousands in prisons and ‘black camps’ as well as
publically staged assassinations of political dissents requires rueful
reflection as a suitable cost.
By
the middle of the 1970s, the cost to the image of America among the community
of nations including importantly those in the developing world, hit a low. The
costs were also felt internally as the reputation of the CIA reached a nadir.
It
was the ‘Family Jewels’, a report which compiled the more insalubrious record
of domestic rather than foreign operations and which had been intended to be a
damage limitation exercise but which turned out to be almost the undoing of the
CIA.
The
subsequent specially convened Congressional committees in the 1970s and reforms
of the agency instituted under the helm of Stansfield Turner, who was director
during the ethically-minded and human rights-promoting administration of Jimmy
Carter, appeared to set the agency on a more ethically sensitive path in its
foreign endeavours.
Carter’s
predecessor, Gerald Ford had set the tone for what was hoped to be a more
morally sensitive mode of conducting foreign intelligence by issuing in 1975,
an executive order which prohibited the assassination of foreign leaders.
But
the post-Watergate atmosphere of public recantation of past misdeeds and
violations of its legislative charter did not have a lasting effect. The Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan prompted calls for the CIA and other foreign
intelligence services to be given “more dagger” in combating the ‘menace’ of
Soviet communism.
It
would lead to the cynical operation which led to the Iran-Contra Scandal and
other covert interventions in Central America which led to the support of mass
killing death squads –a continuum in many ways of the CIA-sanctioned Operation
Condor- a phenomenon which would be deliberately replicated in the era of the
War on Terror in Iraq, and as evidence may well reveal in the course of time,
in the present civil war in Syria.
THE COLD WAR: OPERATION
GLADIO
The
United States of America took the lead in the liberation of Western Europe from
Nazi domination and was also the facilitator of its economic rehabilitation
through the Marshall Plan.
With
the formation of NATO, it became the major shareholder in a military alliance
designed to forestall the invasion of the West by Soviet-led forces. As the
guarantor of Western European freedom and independence, America was keen to
preserve what was referred to as the ‘Yalta System.’
Given
this backdrop and the circumstances of the supervening Cold War, it is not
surprising that the policy of the United States was not to countenance any
scenario in which the essentially free market economies and democratic systems
of government would come under the influence or control of Communist parties,
some of which were large and powerful as was the case in Italy.
Italy
was a special priority for the Americans so far as the threat of falling in to
the hands of the communists was concerned. A large network of communist
partisans had fought against the Nazis and an influential communist party was
established on the resumption of democracy.
The
question was just how far the United States was prepared to go in securing a
non-Communist post-war political order. An indication of this concern is
indicated by the fact that one of the first secret operations mounted by the
nascent CIA was to support the Christian Democrat Party during Italy’s first
post-war elections.
The
aftermath of the Second World War saw the establishment of a network of
stay-behind cells in countries of Western Europe who were to have the role of
mounting guerrilla attacks on occupying Soviet forces were they to invade and
conquer. These secret armies, whose existence would not be revealed until
decades later, were brought under the control of NATO.
NATO
coordinated the running of the secret armies under the Clandestine Planning
Committee (CPC) and a military command centre named Allied Clandestine
Committee (ACC). The supervision of the stay-behinds was facilitated through
the offices of the CIA, SIS and the various military secret services of the
relevant European nations. The secret soldiers were trained under the auspices
of the British Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) and the American Green
Berets.
The
receding threat of an invasion by the Warsaw Pact did not apparently condemn
the stay-behinds to mere training drills and inactivity. Evidence would come to
light that they would be utilised in the engineering of military coups in
Turkey and Greece as well as in Italy.
The
secret armies bore different names in the respective countries in which they
were based, but the code designated in Italy, that of ‘Gladio’, has become
something of a brand name.
Evidence
which has come to light shows that Gladio was used to combat the threat of
communist influence by staging terrorist incidents which killed and maimed
innocent members of the public and which were blamed on far left groups such as
the Marxist-Leninist inspired Brigate Rosse.
The
objective was to two-fold. First was to discredit the Left whose electoral
successes through the Communist Party (PCI) had steadily increased in
successive elections.
The
second was to create a state of mind in the population; one in which people,
fearful for their security would turn to the state for protection by a
Right-wing authoritarian government. In time this would become known as ‘La
Strategia della Tensione’: The Strategy of Tension.
Among
the most notorious of bombings carried out during the Anni di Piombo’ (Years of Lead) were the outrages of Milan in 1969,
Peteano in 1972 and Bologna in 1980.
It
is clear that many of those who were recruited into the ranks of the secret
armies such as in Italy were persons with far Right political inclinations. The
rationale was based on the thinking that such persons would be reliable in the
battle to prevent the spread of communism.
The
revelations of Vincenzo Vinciguerra to Felice Casson, an investigating judge
confirmed long-term suspicions about Peteano. Blamed on the Brigate Rosse, it
was in actuality mounted by members of Ordine Nuovo, a party to which
Vinceguerra belonged, who had received directions from members of the Italian
military secret service.
The
explosives used in the bombing were identified as NATO-issued C4 explosives
which had been buried underneath a village cemetery located on the outskirts of
Verona.
There
is no specific data available indicating that American intelligence operatives
specifically directed any of the bomb outrages, but there is evidence that
members of the Italian military secret service received regular payments from
the American intelligence figures.
American
intelligence also had close links with members of Propaganda Due (P2), the
pseudo Masonic lodge which had among its ranks high-ranking military officers,
members of the secret services, the police, industrialists, politicians, civil
servants and journalists.
Headed
by Licio Gelli, P2 had the ultimate aim of staging a golpista (coup d’etat) which would form the basis of its ‘Plan For
Democratic Rebirth’. In 1974, Gelli secretly met with Alexander Hague, the
White House Chief of Staff, at the US embassy in Rome. Hague had assured Gelli
of continuing support for Gladio and for efforts geared towards circumventing
the political Left.
To
many Italians, the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for the
tragedy of the anni di piombo and
such culpability is reflected in a 2000 report based on a second parliamentary
investigation into Organizzazione Gladio, the Left-leaning Gruppo Democratici
di Sinistra wrote:
“Those
massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organised or promoted
or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been
discovered more recently, by men linked
to the structures of United States intelligence.”
THE COLD WAR: OPERATION
CONDOR AND THE DEATH SQUADS OF CENTRAL AMERICA
1.Operation
Condor
Operation
Condor was an agreement between the nations of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil,
Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in which the respective intelligence services,
armies and police services would pool resources in apprehending members of
Left-wing groups, their sympathisers or other political dissidents after which
they would be imprisoned, tortured and or liquidated.
It
meant that apart from the internal dispensing of individual entitlements to due
process, the legal obligation under international law to grant sanctuary to
political dissenters was abrogated.
Refugees
were captured in a foreign country and returned to their country of origin to
face torture and execution. Condor also extended its terror outside of Latin
America to the cities of Europe and the United States where dissidents were
targeted for assassination.
The
CIA denies American responsibility for the actions of these states, albeit that
it met the needs of the Cold War policy of stemming the spread of communism and
Leftist ideologies within its hemispheric sphere of influence, but there is an
argument for American culpability based on the knowledge US agencies had of
Condor as well as the material and financial assistance given by American
intelligence to the executors of the programme.
Some
trace the roots of Condor to the decades-long relationship developed between
the US military commanders and their Latin American counterparts formalised
through defence and mutual military assistance pacts which followed the
Inter-American Conference held in Mexico City in 1945.
It
was at this conference that the spectre of Communism and the dangers of its
spreading in Latin America was raised by American officers. Marxist ideas were
like a contagion that needed containment lest its spores be spread to America’s
borders.
American
officers had of course a long-standing tradition of serving as advisers to
South American armies and trained their officers at their colleges in the
United States as well as at the US Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) located
in the Panama Canal Zone.
The
Conference of American Armies (CAA) which met annually was inaugurated in 1960
at the Panama base of the head of the US Southern Command. It was later turned
into a biennial event and the meetings transferred to the American Military
College, West Point. However, a standing committee situated in the Canal Zone
which served as a conduit for the exchange of information and intelligence was
established.
This
system would later serve as an important part of the communication process when
Condor was created. Indeed, a blueprint of sorts appears in part of the 1968
speech made by one General Porter, the head of the US Southern Command in his
proposed strategy for taking on Left-wing and radical elements in Latin
America:
In
order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces
within and among Latin American countries, we are...endeavouring to foster
inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organisation of
integrated command and control centres; the establishment of common operating
procedures and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises.
In
September of 1973 at the 10th meeting of the CAA, the commander of
the Brazilian army, General Fortes asserted that so far as combating communism
was concerned, “the only effective methods are the exchange of experience and
information, plus technical assistance when requested.” It led to a joint
agreement that information exchange needed to be strengthened “in order to
counter terrorism and control subversive elements in each country.”
As
one-by-one successive Latin American nations came under the rule of the
military, this method of information sharing would form the bedrock of their
combined ferocious assault on the suspected dissident members of their
populations. It did not only target leftists but also proponents for democracy,
human rights activists, as well as those critical of the governments such as
journalists, trade unionists, priests and students.
The
most famous Condor operation was the assassination in September 1976 of
Pinochet critic Orlando Letelier, in Washington D.C. The assassin was Michael
Townley, a former CIA agent who had taken up employment with the National
Defence Directorate (DINA).
In
exchange for identifying his Cuban exile accomplices as well as the man who
ordered the assassination, Colonel Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA, Townley
was handed a reduced sentence and put on the Federal Witness Protection
Program.
This
incident led to the sacking of Contreras, a CIA asset between 1974 and 1977 who
received a large payment for his services, and the disbanding of DINA. The newly
elected administration of Jimmy Carter, pledged to promote democracy and human
rights put pressure on the Chileans in solving the Letelier killing.
The
precise extent of the role of the CIA and other US intelligence agencies in
Condor is difficult to gauge given the exemption it has under Freedom of
Information laws. However, files culled from diplomatic cables, the FBI and
other sources have shed some light.
An
FBI cable in 1976 from its legal attaché in Buenos Aires explains the modus
operandi of Condor. Another is a State department cable dated October 13 1978
from Robert White, the US ambassador to Paraguay, to Cyrus Vance, the Secretary
of State in which White informs Vance of the manner in which Condor is run and
how the countries:
Keep
in touch with one another through a US communications installation in the
Panama Canal Zone which covers all Latin America...it is...employed to
coordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries. They
maintain the confidentiality of their communication through the US facility in
Panama by using bilateral codes...obviously this is the Condor network which
all of us have heard about over the last few years.
The
ambassador further informed Vance that communication was through an encrypted
system within the US communications net and advised the secretary of state to
“review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in US interest.”
To
some such as Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive,
the contents of the cable suggested, “foreknowledge, cooperation and total
access to the plans and operations of Condor.”
While
allegations that the CIA actually supervised Condor operations cannot be fully
corroborated, in addition to the aforementioned evidence of the potential
knowledge of all critical aspects of Condor, it should be mentioned that the training
given to numerous Latin American officers at the Army School of the Americas
included Pentagon and CIA-issued manuals on torture.
The
‘Doctrine of National Security’, the basic ideology underpinning the Latin
American military regimes from the late 1960s to the early 1980s which focused
on the internal threat of subversion and class warfare had its philosophical-spiritual
home at the SOA, run of course, by the Pentagon.
2.The
Death Squads of Central America
The
notion of America’s interest in the affairs of Latin American countries of
course predates its resolve to fight communism globally. The Monroe Doctrine,
The Roosevelt Corollary and the Good Neighbour Policy each adjusted American
policy geared towards a framework which assured the United States of its
continued hegemony within the southern part of the Western hemisphere.
Latin
America, as the phrase went was the ‘Back Door’ of America, and the Roosevelt
Corollary provided justificatory grounds for mounting ‘police actions’ in Latin
America in order to keep European powers out of the region.
But
policies which alternatively were interventionist such as the Roosevelt
modification to the Monroe Doctrine, and the Good Neighbour Policy which was
ostensibly non-interventionist, led to unsatisfactory results from the
perspectives of the little nations of Central America and the Caribbean.
The
former led to spells of occupation in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican
Republic while the latter led to the unchallenged emergency of dictatorships in
the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the Nicaragua.
In
fact the three dictators, Rafael Trujillo, Francois Duvalier and Anastazio
Samoza all shrewdly made use of the American concern about the global spread of
communism to bolster and perpetuate their respective rules.
Some
aspects of the Truman Doctrine overlap with the corollary because of the Cold
War-era belief that the formation of Left-wing governments in Latin America
would equate to giving a foreign power, namely the Soviet Union, a foothold to
challenge American supremacy in the Western hemisphere.
This
line of thinking prevailed even at the expense of defeating the expression of
the democratic will of countries in which the United States intelligence
services help engineer overthrows of governments; the cases of Guatemala and
Chile being prime examples.
American
foreign policy in Latin America was not only tolerant of Right-wing
dictatorships but also sought to preserve these regimes because of their
anti-Communist credentials even though they did not fulfil the prerequisites
for been democratic anymore than were governments which functioned according to
communist designs.
In
the 1980s, Jean Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the United Nations would
justify this by drawing a distinction between those states which were
‘authoritarian’ on the one hand and those which were ‘totalitarian’ on the
other.
So
far as Central American countries are concerned the legacy of American
intervention is tainted by the bitter legacy of a phenomenon that came to be
termed the ‘Death Squad’.
These
are armed paramilitary groups which have been created with the objective of killing
people, most notably those who stand in political opposition. The typical
activities range from specifically targeted assassinations to mass killings of
combatants and civilian populations.
They
serve the function not only of physically eliminating those who threaten the power
base or power aspirations the killers, but also of instilling a climate of fear
in the wider population which is intended to work as a form of control.
The
United States utilised death squads during the Vietnam War through Operation
Phoenix, a plan of action hatched and executed by the CIA and US Special
Forces. It targeted civilians and not combatants. Its aim was to neutralise the
infrastructure of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.
Unlike
Operation Condor in South America in regard to which the extent of American
involvement is disputable, the evidence of a United States military
intelligence agenda in creating death squads institutionally as well as the
funding and the training of the participants is solid and incontrovertible.
Starting
in the early 1960s, agencies of the United States encompassing the State
Department, CIA and US military formed two organisations in El Salvador which
formed the germ of what developed into the Death Squad formations which would
traumatise the nation.
They
were ORDEN, a rural paramilitary and intelligence network and ANSESAL, an elite
intelligence agency attached to the president’s office. ORDEN, which was
conceived to “use clandestine terror against government opponents”, was the
direct ancestor of the ‘Mano Blanco’ which carved out a notoriety all to
itself.
An
ironic feature of the development of what would metamorphose into the ill-famed
death squads was that they evolved in response to the Kennedy
administration-initiated ‘Alianza para el Progreso’ or ‘Alliance for Progress’,
an ostensibly enlightened decade-long multibillion-dollar aid program for Latin
America.
It
was designed to help promote economic growth and prosperity which would create
the conditions which would discourage the appeal of communism to the masses.
However,
the agencies of the United States government overseeing the program came to
believe that the success of its implementation would have to be predicated on a
security system involving a combination of civil, paramilitary and military
structures whose roles would be synthesised with the aim at obstructing any
form of subversion or dissent on the part of individuals or organisations.
The
model of such a national security apparatus as applicable not only to El
Salvador but to the rest of the countries of Central America (Guatemala,
Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica) was laid down in March 1963 at the
Declaration of San Jose.
At
the meeting, President Kennedy had declared that “Communism is the chief obstacle
to economic development in the Central American region,” and this theme was
followed by subsequent meetings between the interior ministers of the relevant
nations and the various interested organs of the United States government
including the State Department and the CIA.
These
meetings, at which ideas and information were exchanged, were formalised so
that they occurred every three months under the supervision of the state
department.
The
security organisations which were created such as the Salvadorian ORDEN and
ANSESAL were armed and trained in the counter-insurgency with the aim of
disrupting the designs of “international communism.”
The
leaders of these security organisations such as General Jose Alberto Medrano, appear
at one time or another to have been paid CIA assets. The CIA provided them with
the day-to-day intelligence while training was given by American Green Berets.
While
ORDEN served to indoctrinate the peasant masses against communism and gathered
an information database on those deemed to be “suspicious”, ANSESAL would receive
such information and determine the action that needed to be taken.
The
action, often a targeted slaying, would be carried out by one of several
groups: ORDEN, its death squad offshoot named the Blanco Nero, detatchments of
the army or the National Guard. What is also clear is that the CIA furnished
death squads with information on dissidents who were later murdered.
The
role of army Colonel James Steele is worth mentioning. According to US House
Representative Dennis Kucinich, Steele was responsible for implementing a plan
under which many Salvadorans were murdered or disappeared. Steele’s term of
service covered the period in 1980 when Archbishop Oscar Romero and four
American nuns were murdered.
Steele
would resurface twenty years later in Iraq at the special request of US
Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld where, as ‘Counselor for Iraqi Security
Forces’ he would be part of a team which implemented the ‘Salvador Option’ as a
means of combating the Sunni-led insurgency in the wake of the occupation of
Iraq.
THE BASIS OF THE WAR ON
TERROR
The
crashing of two aeroplanes into the twin towers of New York City’s iconic World
Trade Center, among other targets, on September 11th 2001 may be
pinpointed as the commencement of what has come to be known as the ‘War on
Terror’.
The
main participants in this confrontation on a global scale are a network of
Islamic militants with the designation ‘al-Qaeda’ whose ideological figurehead
was the Saudi Arabian, Osama Bin Laden. Arraigned against al-Qaeda is the
Western world and as with the Cold War, it is led by the United States.
The
September 11th attack led for the first time to the invoking of
article 5 of the constitution of NATO which provides that an attack on one member
state is considered as an attack on others. Bin Laden was been sheltered by the
ruling Taliban government of Afghanistan which the US attacked under the
auspices of a NATO mission.
This
was followed by the war and occupation of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as well as
military action in Islamist strongholds in North West Pakistan and Yemen. While
the administration of President Barak Obama officially refers to US and
NATO-involved military action as Overseas Contingency Operations, the term ‘War
on Terror’ is still used.
THE ARAB SPRING IN THE
CONTEXT OF THE WAR ON TERROR
The
‘Arab Spring’, is an appellation used by the Western media and governments to
describe protest movements against Arab regimes in North Africa and the Middle
East.
It
was often posited as spontaneous expressions by coalitions of groups composed
of youthful, modern-thinking masses imbued with sentiments which were generally
sympathetic to Western notions of freedom and democracy.
Beginning
with the self-immolation of a petty trader protesting against excessive administrative
red tape in Tunisia in December of 2010, unrest led to the unseating and
fleeing of President Ben Ali and spread to Egypt a month later where protests
centred on Cairo’s Tahrir Square became the focus of media. Like Ben Ali,
President Hosni Mubarak fell from power.
This
phenomenon continued in Libya starting with public protests in the eastern city
of Benghazi which transmogrified into a civil war with the founding and
expansion of various militias who with the aid of NATO were able to defeat the
forces of Muamar Gaddafi.
In
Syria, a series of protests which began in February 2011 led to the formation
of the so-called Free Syrian Army and a protracted and still ongoing civil war being
waged against the Alawite minority government led by Bashar Assad.
If
historians in the future choose to continue the view of the War on Terror and
the Arab Spring as distinct passages, the pattern of intervention by the United
States in crucial intelligence operations as well as military action tend to
suggest a continuum of selected interventions based on long-term geo-political
objectives.
The
war waged against Iraq and later on the NATO intervention in Libya and evidence
of covert influence in the prosecution of the Syrian Civil War while choosing
not to intervene in other countries which are key centres in the spread of
Jihadist sentiment such as the Wahhabist Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and where
despotic regimes suppress popular protests as in Bahrain, bear this out.
Some
idea of underlying American goals which are an enduring feature of its foreign
policy can be found in the document produced by a think-tank called the Project
For The New American Century (PNAC) which was established in 1997.
PNAC
proposed a post-Cold War world in which the vacuum left by the disintegration
of the Soviet Union would be utilised to American advantage in terms of
moulding the global framework to its advantage.
In
order to do this, the United States would be required to bolster its
expenditure on military resources and resolve to “challenge” regimes which were
hostile to the “interests and values” of the United States.
At
the top of the list was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This appeared to be the
uninhibited policy adopted by the administration of President George Bush which
had already made the decision to attack Iraq long before it was made public and
which was based on manipulated and flawed intelligence.
Confirmation
of the scheme came via retired General Wesley Clarke, the former supreme
commander of NATO who was informed by a former colleague on a visit to the Pentagon
while Afghanistan was being bombed that a just-released internal memorandum had
described how the United States was going to “take out seven countries in five
years.” These he revealed to be Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and
“finishing off” with Iran.
NATIONAL INTEREST:
PUBLICALLY STATED POLICIES VERSUS STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES
Before
critiquing the ethical soundness of intelligence operations conducted in
relation to both the War on Terror and the Arab Spring, it is useful to briefly
set out the national objectives of the United States and contrast this with the
publically enunciated justifications for its direct and covert interventions in
a number of countries.
Publically
stated goals
|
Strategic objectives
|
<!--[if !supportLists]-->·
<!--[endif]-->Combating and containing Islamist-inspired
terrorism.
<!--[if !supportLists]-->·
<!--[endif]-->Promote democracy. For example, by
overthrowing “oppressive dictators.”
<!--[if !supportLists]-->·
<!--[endif]-->Humanitarian intervention. For example, by
protecting civilian populations from massacres under the Doctrine of
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as was applied in regard to Libya and a
supposedly threatened massacre of people in the city of Benghazi.
|
<!--[if !supportLists]-->·
<!--[endif]-->Securing and protecting access to raw
materials such as oil and gas resources.
The occupations of
Iraq and Afghanistan along with US bases in neighbouring Gulf states and
agreements with countries on its northern borders effectively form an
encirclement of Iran.
<!--[if !supportLists]-->·
<!--[endif]-->Overthrowing “hostile regimes.” For
example, removing and dismantling the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria.
Also:
1.The support given
to anti-Assad groups as well as to neighbouring states who are supporting
opposition groups serves not only to weaken the Assad regime but is also
designed to marginalise Hezbollah.
2.The dismembering
of sovereign states into smaller entities along ethnic-religious lines such
as may result in Syria
<!--[if !supportLists]-->·
<!--[endif]-->The overthrow of governments designated as
“hostile” as occurred in Libya (despite a temporary rapprochement with the Gaddafi
regime), and as threatened in regard to the Assad regimes attack on
protesters and the prescribing of the so-called “red line” condition
concerning the regime’s use of chemical weapons.
|
INTELLIGENCE IN THE WAR ON
TERROR AND ARAB SPRING
Iraq
The
decision to go to war in Iraq as is now long known was based on flawed
intelligence relating to Saddam Hussein’s possessing what are termed ‘Weapons
of Mass Destruction’ (WMD). Also discernable soon after the occupation of Iraq
was how ill-prepared the United States and NATO were in terms of running a
post-Saddam country.
One
key feature of this lack of foresight was the effectiveness of a Sunni-mounted
insurgency against the occupying forces. The response, using counter-insurgency
techniques applied by the CIA and US military intelligence during Cold War-era
in Central America, was brutally effective, but has left the country seriously
scarred and America’s reputation among the wider population, most of who were
in support of the removal of Saddam Hussein, severely impaired for the foreseeable
future.
1.
Promulgating the war
After
the attack of America in September of 2001, the Bush administration set about
casting the regime of Saddam Hussein as a state sponsor of terrorism and one
with a direct connection to the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocity. The
existence of such a link between the secular Baathist government and an
Islamist cell of al-Qaeda appeared unlikely at first sight and was this was confirmed
on closer scrutiny.
Stories
appeared in the press alleging the presence of Iraqi agents in the uranium-rich
West African state of Niger. Evidence of the sort of ‘black propaganda’
techniques employed by intelligence agencies during the Cold War appeared to be
confirmed by an expose in the UK Sunday
Times in December 2003 about the SIS-conducted ‘Operation Mass Appeal’
which was a campaign to plant stories about Iraq’s WMDs in the media. The aim,
it appears, was to exaggerate threat Iraq posed.
In
a Parliamentary announcement designed to coincide with the release of a dossier
for which he gave a personal foreword, Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that
Iraq’s WMD programme was “up and running” and that weapons could be deployed “within
45 minutes.”
The
reality was that the evidence was based on a combination of fabrication and
lies. Although other reports filed by figures in the CIA and British
intelligence painted a far more cautious picture, it appears that the political
will was to pursue a course of war which entailed heightening the importance of
two Iraqi defectors, one a chemical engineer codenamed ‘Curveball’ and another,
a former military intelligence officer; both of whom proved to be unreliable
sources.
Indeed,
an official memo which surfaced after the war from Richard Dearlove, then the
head of SIS, to Tony Blair revealed that the prime minister had been advised
that President Bush had decided on attacking Iraq even though the case for the
existence of weapons of mass destruction was “thin”. The lack of evidence was
no problem according to Dearlove because “intelligence and facts were being
fixed (by the US) around the policy.”
The
now infamous presentation made in February 2003 by US Secretary of State Colin
Powell before the United Nations Security Council claimed that Iraq was
harbouring “weapons of mass destruction” and refusing to disarm.
2.
Combating the insurgency
The
losses suffered by American forces as well as civilian casualties in the first
two years of the Iraq occupation convinced the Pentagon to take action to stem
the flow of attacks mounted by Sunni insurgents. The solution that it found was
in a model which US military intelligence had tried and tested with devastating
success but with a tragic legacy: The ‘Salvador Option’.
This
essentially was a reapplication of the methodology employed by the United States
government during the Cold War years in Central America when it funded and
trained death squads run by military dictatorships in their wars with Left-wing
guerrillas.
It
is the sort of operation that can be run at arm’s length by the CIA giving America’s
political leaders the ability to deny it. But when US Secretary of Defence
Donald Rumsfeld was denying any knowledge of such a program even as bodies
began turning up in the alley ways and refuse tips of Baghdad, the strategy was
all but an open secret.
Rumsfeld
knew of course. Two US Special Forces colonels, James Steele, retired, and
serving Colonel James Coffman were consultant-advisers to a group of Special
Police Commando attached to the Iraqi Interior Ministry. It would be funded by
a multi-billion dollar fund with Coffman reporting directly to General David Petraeus.
Defeating
the insurgency would require intelligence about the leadership: their
identities, the locations in which they were based or hid and also their
planning.
The
Americans needed the interior ministry to operate death squads who could
ruthlessly hunt down and either kill or kidnap the insurgents or their
sympathisers and also operate a special prison system which would torture
captured persons in order to extract valuable information on the insurgency.
The
dominant strain of the death squads, the most notorious of which was known as
the Wolf Brigade (The 2nd Battalion of the Interior Ministry’s
Special Commando), was composed in the main of members of the two largest Shia
militias, the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army. These Shias would be motivated
by feelings of revenge against Sunnis whom they considered a privileged group
during the oppressive reign of Saddam.
There
is evidence that both Steele and Coffman had access to the prisons built around
Baghdad to cater for detained suspected insurgents or sympathisers and that
they supplied the commandos with lists of people who they wanted brought in.
The
counter-insurgency programme, of “fighting terror with terror” achieved its aim
but at the cost of a sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia which cost the
lives of thousands of innocent civilians who were murdered indiscriminately as
well as intellectuals and professionals who were the victims of targeted
assassinations.
It
was, as was the earlier death squad policy conducted in Central America, in
effect a centrally planned genocide.
Libya
The
government of Colonel Muarmar Gaddafi had for long been targeted by the
American CIA for overthrow. Over the decades of his rule, he had survived a
number of insurrections and assassination attempts; some of them traced to
Western intelligence agencies.
A
blatant attempt had been made to assassinate him in 1986 when the Reagan
administration had launched a bombing attack on Tripoli in retaliation for his
alleged involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which American
soldiers had lost their lives. The renegade MI5 officers, David Shayler and
Anne Machon alleged that British intelligence had mounted an operation to have
him killed.
A
rapprochement with his regime had been in process for some years when the Arab
Spring arrived in Libya. The West decided to seize the opportunity to overthrow
him by aiding a bourgeoning rebellion in the eastern city of Benghazi which had
traditionally served as a hotbed of dissent against his regime.
The
pretext of an imminent massacre threatened by Gaddafi against protesters in
Benghazi prompted a UN resolution allowing the United States and NATO to impose
a ‘No Fly Zone’ over Libyan territory.
The
result was to allow NATO to bomb much of Libya’s infrastructure and to target
Gaddafi and key members of his government for assassination under the pretext
of getting rid of the command and control centres of the Libyan defence forces.
The bombings also enabled the rebel militias, prominent among which was the
Jihadist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), to seize territory.
British
intelligence involvement was apparent earlier on in the conflict with the
uncovering of a bungled attempt to make contact with rebel leaders by an SIS
officer and Special Forces soldiers who had been arrested.
British
Special Forces were revealed to have trained rebels and co-ordinated their
ground fighting strategies with the NATO bombing campaign. The Special Air
Regiment (SAS) were reported in August of 2011 to have taken a lead in hunting
Colonel Gaddafi who was eventually captured in Sirte and lynched by his
captors.
Syria
The
destabilization of the regime headed Bashar al Assad has long been a priority
for Western intelligence agencies. The construction of the Free Syrian Army
(FSA) was an attempt to create an opposition army composed of military figures
who it was hoped would defect from the government in substantial numbers.
This
has not transpired and the FSA does not have a unified command structure but is
instead an umbrella name for disparate groups of mainly Sunni rebels many of
whom are Islamist in sentiment. A large degree of the operations launched by
the FSA have been conducted by members of the Jabhat al Nusra Front, a body
composed of al Qaeda affiliated fighters.
The
role of the CIA and the intelligence division of the Pentagon has been to
provide covert support to rebel militias as well as to infiltrate Syrian
intelligence, its armed forces and civil service. Support is also offered to
the regional powers involved, namely Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, all of
whom may be interested in the dismemberment of Syria.
Rebels,
composed by a large segment of foreign mercenaries, receive training in the
Gulf region from private security consultancies run by former US Special Forces,
while arms shipments have come through the Syria’s borders with Turkey and
Jordan respectively on the north and the south.
These
‘Syrian Contras’ conduct sabotages of government installations and conduct
killings of civilians and the assassination of government officials. The
sectarian nature of the conflict is one which given the record in Iraq, US
intelligence have no qualms in exploiting.
The
Alawite minority government that has dominated Syria since the assent of the
Assad family to power cannot survive without the support of sections of the
majority Sunni. The FSA and al Nusra Brigades have fomented sectarian divisions
by targeting members of the Alawite, Druze, Kurdish and Christian Orthodox
communities. They have also executed Sunnis designated as traitors for opposing
their control of various districts.
Press
reports about the role of US intelligence in aiding the rebels has occasionally
filtered through. On March 8th 2013 the Daily Telegraph reported a massive airlift of 3,000 tons of weapons
via Zagreb by “the US and Europe” to “Syrian militants”. These shipments of
former Yugoslav weapons were, it was indicated, done at the behest of the
United States and paid for by the Saudis.
A
New York Times article from 24th
March 2013, titled “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expand, With CIA Aid” partly
read:
With
help from the CIA, Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their
military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a
secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar
al-Assad, according to traffic data, interviews with officials in several
countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.
Many
of the cargo military flights under Jordanian, Saudi Arabian and Qatari colours
land at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, while others landed at various Turkish
and Jordanian airports.
There
have been reports of British French and American military advisers operating in
countries which border Syria who offer training to rebel leaders and former
Syrian military personnel.
A COMPARISON OF TACTICS
USED DURING THE COLD WAR WITH THOSE USED IN THE WAR ON TERROR
The
tactics employed during the War on Terror arguably form a continuum of the sort
which had been established in the Cold War era. Assassinations, US-state
sponsored terrorism including the use of death squads and proxy wars are part
of this as are the utilization of extremist groups and the possible employment
of false flag operations. The use of extraordinary rendition and ‘black camps’
where torture has been employed are somewhat reminiscent of the tactics adopted
by Latin American Juntas during Operation Condor.
<!--[if !supportLists]-->(A) <!--[endif]-->Ethics
of The War on Terror in comparison to the Cold War.
- Extraordinary Renditions
Terrorist suspects
designated as illegal combatants kidnapped by the CIA and sent to secret camps
or handed over to an allied nation where they would face torture. It is
estimated that over 130 were extra-judicially rendered in this way enduring
abuse with many been released due to lack of evidence.
For example, Khalid
el Masri, a German citizen was kidnapped in Macedonia in December 2003 then
handed over to a CIA ‘rendition team’ at Skopje airport before being secretly flown
to Afghanistan for interrogation.
He was tortured for
months before being released without trial in Albania in May 2004. His civil
suit against CIA chief George Tenet was dismissed by the US Supreme Court in
2007. The reason was that such a trial would reveal state secrets.
President Obama by
an Executive Order entitled “Ensuring Lawful renditions” in January 2009. This
designed to ensure that detainees who were transferred to foreign nations did
so under circumstances which would ensure that their detention would not
contravene US law, policies or international law. It allows for “third party
oversight” but does not outlaw renditions.
- ‘Black Camps’
Black camps is the
appellation designated to the network of secret prisons operated by the CIA
outside the territory and jurisdiction of the United States. Many of these
camps have been established as having existed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria,
Thailand and Diego Garcia. The flight paths covered Airports in Ireland,
Britain, and Morocco amongst many.
- Torture
The usage of
physical and psychological torture by the CIA as a legitimate means of
extracting intelligence is predicated on the logic of the permissibility of
anything against what is perceived as being an “inhuman enemy”. The Phoenix program
in Vietnam involved the most inhuman and degrading forms of torture many of
which led to the deaths of detainees.
The means of torture
cover a wide range of techniques which include waterboarding, stress positions,
forced nudity, beatings as well as sleep and sensory deprivation which have
been utilised at illegal CIA prison sites as well as at Guantanamo Bay.
During the Bush
years, the CIA was allowed to use what were termed “enhanced interrogation
techniques”, an allowance believed to allow for what is defined as torture.
The United States is
a signatory state of the United Nations Convention against Torture which was
signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the United States
Senate in 1994. Torture is also against the United States Uniform Code of
Military Justice.
Although President
Bush issued an Executive Order in 2007 banning the torture of suspects by
American intelligence officials, it cannot be confirmed that the practice no
longer exists.
- Assassinations
The CIA had early in
its history developed a capability for “Executive Action” i.e. to murder
foreign leaders. Its predecessor, the OSS had developed drugs to incapacitate
or kill members of the Nazi leadership. Later on, the Cold War saw plots
hatched to assassinate Arbenz in Guatemala and Castro in Cuba.
The former, to be
engineered by means of a “silent bullet”, was aborted because of an
unwillingness to make him a martyr, while numerous plots failed against the
latter. Discussions relating to the liquidating of Sukarno by Macmillan and Kennedy
were doubtlessly similar ones between Blair and Bush over Saddam Hussein.
The objective of
assassination was certainly at the forefront of NATO policy in regard to Colonel
Gaddafi under the guise of the bombing raids aimed at “removing the command and
control structure” of the Libyan military but which succeeded in killing
members of his family.
- Supervision of extremist militias
and death squads
1. The United States
military intelligence has trained and funded death squads since the time of the
Vietnam War. As mentioned above, the institutionalised security mechanism which
facilitated death squads in El Salvador and other Central American countries was
adapted to fight the Iraqi insurgency. The Libyan opposition militias adopted
these death squad tactics as indeed do Syrian opposition forces.
2. Heightening
ethnic strife as a means of weakening resistance of the unfriendly state or
opposition.
This was evident to
some extent during the Cold War in Indonesia, via the identification of the Chinese
community with Red China and so far as the War on Terror-Arab Spring is
concerned, the stimulating of ethnic confrontation between Sunni and Shia to
counter the Sunni-led insurgency as well as between Sunni on the one hand and
Alawite, Druze, Shia and Christians on the other in Syria.
3. Use of criminals
and political extremists.
The Cold War saw the
CIA consorting with criminal organisations; notably the American Mafia, who
were utilised in efforts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Also, political
extremists in Europe were used as recruits to NATO-run stay-behinds which were
suspected of involvement in terrorist outrages in Italy (Milan, Peteano and
Bolognia), Belgium (Brabant Shootings) and West Germany (October Fest Bombing).
There were also high
level US contacts with members of the P2 pseudo-Masonic lodge in Italy which
along from its political objectives was involved in assassinations and money
laundering.
In Afghanistan, the Islamist
Mujahadeen, including among their ranks the young Osama bin Laden, was funded
and trained by the United States during their war against the Soviet occupiers.
While there was at yet no global confrontation with political Islam, the US had
absorbed a limited although violent backlash which had arisen after the siege
of Mecca in 1979.
During the War on
Terror-Arab Spring, Islamic extremists were used to unseat Gaddafi in Libya as
well as to destabilize and possible fracture the Syrian nation state. This had
led some to pose the question, and a serious one at that, as to whether al-Qaeda
have become NATO’s shock troops of choice?
Seymour
Hersh’s 2007 report in The New Yorker
entitled, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s New Policy Benefitting Our
Enemies in the War on Terrorism?” provided a pointer of sorts on this:
To
undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has
decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In
Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government,
which is Sunni, in clandestine operations which are intended to weaken
Hezbollah, the Shiite organisation that is backed by Iran. The US has also
taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A
by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist
groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam are hostile to America and
sympathetic to al-Qaeda.
- Manipulation of the media
(including Black Propaganda).
During the Cold War,
the aforementioned Indonesian and Guatemalan operations are prime examples, as
well as the also mentioned meddling in the European and Latin American press in
regard to Chile. So far as the War on Terror is concerned, the SIS conducted
Operation Mass Appeal has been noted.
Can BBC errors such
one regarding footage broadcast during the Libya unrest depicting an anti-Gaddafi
demonstration, but which was discovered later on to be actually old footage
from India, be taken at face value? Later, a picture utilised by the BBC regarding
a dead baby after a massacre in Syria, was quickly identified as an old picture
from the Iraq conflict.
- False Flag Operations
The simple
definition of a ‘false flag’ operation is the commission of a terroristic
outrage which the perpetrator then blames on their opponent. The objectives for
such undertakings are manifold and often are interlocking.
The primary motive
is to discredit the opposition in the court of public opinion and the resultant
manufactured fears and concerns of the populace create the conditions for a
response which involves the taking of an extraordinary measure or series of
measures. This may range from the declaration of a state of emergency to some
form of military intervention.
The December 1969
massacre at Milan which inaugurated the Italian ‘Years of Lead’; perpetrated by
state-sponsored members of the extreme Right, had in fact been designed to pave
the way for the declaration of a state of emergency and the installation of an
authoritarian government.
Long before Judge
Felice Casson’s breakthrough discovery of the use by Ordine Novo of materiel
designated to the NATO-administered Gladio stay-behind, there were clues pointing
in the direction not only of the manipulations of the Italian military secret
service, but also of the possible involvement of this American-led
supranational military entity.
In November of 1971,
a builder who was repairing the roof of a building in Castel Franco Veneto
accidentally broke into a partition wall which served as the storage point for
a cache of weapons and explosives.
Of particular
noteworthiness was the presence of ammunition boxes which were similar in form
to those used as bomb containers in the Milan outrage. Each bore the
inscription of NATO.
General Vito Miceli,
the head of SID; the Italian Military Secret Service, provided an admission
that strategic direction in the unorthodox combating of the communist threat
was given by NATO and, effectively, the Americans.
In 1974, he had been
arrested by an investigating judge, Giovanni Tamburino, who charged with
organising elements in the military and civilians toward fomenting an
insurrection. Miceli blurted out that the United States and NATO “asked me to
do it.”
The template of just
what a false flag operation entails in terms of its modus operandi as well as
the immorality and criminality inherent in such designs can be discerned from
the memorandum ‘Justification For US Military Intervention in Cuba’; a top
secret document earmarked for the eyes of President John F. Kennedy and his
defence secretary Robert McNamara.
It called for the
invasion of Cuba by staging a series of hijackings, bombings and shootings in
American cities which would be blamed on operatives working for the secret
service of Cuba.
The plan, dubbed
‘Operation Northwoods’, was discarded by the Kennedy administration but some
wonder if the diabolical thinking behind such an enterprise was not transferred
to Italy and a number of Western European nations when the architect of
Northwoods, General Lyman Lemnitzer, was redeployed as the supreme commander of
NATO forces in the early 1960s.
Certainly General
Gianadelio Maletti, the former head of Italian military counter-intelligence,
in 2001 made the allegation in open court that the United States had instigated
and abetted Right-wing terrorism in his country during the 1970s.
The lamentations of
many Italians about the damage done to their country by false flag outrages
make that nation a huge reservoir of sceptics so far as the September 11th
attack in New York is concerned. Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, an honorary
president of the supreme court of Italy, for one is of the opinion that a
‘strategy of tension’ ploy was at work to justify the armed intervention in
foreign nations.
For others, the fact
that mock security exercises geared towards specific eventualities took place
prior to the bomb blasts which ripped through train carriages in the European
cities of Madrid and London respectively in 2004 and 2005 does not inspire
confidence in the official narratives presented to the public.
These, the reasoning
goes, were the capital cities of two nations where significant opposition to
the wars instigated by NATO after the commencement of the so-called ‘War on
Terror.’
Cold
War
Country
|
Client
|
Objective
|
Result
|
1.Vietnam
|
Military government
|
Kill and neutralise rebel leaders and
sympathisers
|
Operation Phoenix killed over 26,000
between 1968 and 1972.
|
2.Guatemala
|
Military government
|
Kill and neutralise rebel leaders and
sympathisers
|
36-year-old civil war claimed 200,000
lives
|
3.Honduras
|
Military government
|
Kill and neutralise rebel leaders and
sympathisers
|
Hundreds assassinated by government death
squads such as Battallion 3-16
|
4. El Salvador
|
Military government
|
Kill and neutralise FNLM rebel leaders and
sympathisers or activists
|
A civil war with the deaths of 75,000
people and 1 million refugees out of a total population of 6 million.
|
5. Nicaragua
|
Contra guerrillas (Anti-Sandinista
militias based in Honduras)
|
Destabilise the Sandinista regime
|
The cross border Contra attacks claimed
50,000 civilian lives.
|
6. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Paraguay and Uruguay
|
Military Juntas
|
To kidnap, torture, execute and
assassinate Leftist guerrillas including the Argentinean People’s
Revolutionary Army (ERP) and the Chilean Movement of the Revolutionary Left
(MIR) and political dissidents.
|
35,000 murdered with a substantial amount
of them ‘disappeared.’ Also, hundreds of thousands imprisoned and tortured
|
War on Terror/Arab Spring
Country
|
Client(s)
|
Objectives and Methods
|
Result
|
1.Iraq
|
Wolf Brigade (2nd Battalion of
the Interior Ministry’s Special Commando)
Using Kurdish and Shia militias.
Shia militias such as the Badr
organisation and the Mahdi Army
|
To kill Sunni leaders and neutralise
post-Saddam insurgency.
Civilians targeted so object of fomenting
sectarian violence.
|
A civil war between Sunni and Shia.
|
2.Libya
|
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
|
Training and guiding a militia of Islamist
guerrillas and irregular volunteers in battles against forces of Colonel
Gaddafi.
Militias summarily executed captured
tribal rivals fighting for the Gaddafi forces and targeted Black Africans who
were viewed as mercenaries on the side of the Gaddafi regime.
|
A civil war that led to the overthrow of
the regime of Colonel Gaddafi.
|
3.Syria
|
Free Syrian Army (components of which have
Islamist sentiments) plus Al Nusra Brigades
|
Mount terrorist attacks against figures in
the Assad government, military and industrial complexes and massacre of
civillains: Alawite, Shia, Druze and Christian ‘enemies’ as well as Sunni
‘traitors’.
|
An ensuing civil war which has claimed
thousands of lives and created a refugee crisis in neighbouring countries.
|
THE BASIS OF ACCOUNTABILITY
The
scope of the powers and the responsibilities granted to the security and
intelligence services in the United States and United Kingdom derive from
statutes. And in keeping with democratic traditions, these bodies are expected
to be accountable to democratically elected institutions and office holders as
well as to be subject to the rule of law.
While
the starting point must be the legislative instruments that create the
respective intelligence organisations, the full range of avenues of
accountability must take into account further pieces of legislation which are
linked to powers granted to combat terrorism and a panoply of measures linked
for instance to immigration control and invasions of privacy.
Laws
in place play a crucial part in setting the basis of providing ethical guidance
in regard to the boundaries within which security agencies may operate. Breach
of regulations and legal provisions would thus provide an avenue through which
accountability for ethical misdeeds and the exceeding of powers granted is
ensured.
Such
avenues include the functions played by law makers in special committees which
monitor the intelligence services as well as the application of sanctions and
redress through the system of civil and criminal courts.
1.
The United States
Regulating
Acts of Congress
The
CIA was established in 1947 by the National Security Act as an independent
civilian intelligence agency with a remit to gather national security
intelligence assessments as to the capabilities and intentions of friendly and
unfriendly nations which was to be provided to senior United States policymakers.
The Act specifically did not give it police or law enforcement functions
“either at home or abroad.”
The
Hughes-Ryan Amendment Act of 1974, which amended the Foreign Assistance Act of
1961, attempted to regularise accountability by imposing checks on covert
operations by stipulating Presidential approval for covert operations and an
obligation to provide briefings to the Senate.
The
key provision of the legislation was to prohibit the use of US funds “to
provide training or advice or provide any financial support for police,
prisons, or other law enforcement forces for any foreign government or any
program of internal intelligence or surveillance on behalf of any foreign
government.”
The
Intelligence Authorisation Act (1991) was passed in the wake of the
‘Iran-Contra Scandal’ provided for a mechanism aimed at managing covert
operations. This was to be handled by an authorising chain of command involving
a report being made to the President and the supply of information to the
intelligence committees of both houses of Congress.
The
Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act (2004) which attempts to
ensure the co-ordination of vital intelligence data reaching the President, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high officials of state from the intelligence
community, created the position of ‘Civil Liberties Protection Officer’.
The
role of this official is to ensure that the policies and procedures which are
implemented by the office of the Director of National Intelligence as well as “elements
of the intelligence community within the National Intelligence Program” comply
with the constitution and to assess complaints of any breaches relating to
civil liberties and privacy.
So
far as the use of torture in regard to the extracting of intelligence from
prisoners is concerned, the War Crimes Act of (1996) technically provides the
basis for holding officials to account for war crimes.
The
Act defines a war crime as a “grave breach” of the Geneva Convention which
includes the use of “torture or inhuman treatment.” This would include members
of the United States armed forces, its intelligence branches as well as
officials of state.
The
Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v Rumsfeld (2006) held that the War Crimes Act
applied to the circumstances of the War on Terror. The ruling that al-Qaeda
prisoners were covered by certain provisions under Common Article 3 of the
convention meant that the law could potentially be invoked against American
officials and contractors.
Regulation
by the Executive
The
executive branch of government has over the course of time made initiatives
geared towards promoting ethical conduct in the intelligence community. Soon
after taking over the reins of power from Richard Nixon, President Gerald Ford
set up the Rockefeller Commission to look into the excesses of the CIA.
During
this period following the fallout from Watergate and the Crown Jewels report, the
Justice Department also weighed in; publishing a 683-page report on the
“questionable activities” of the CIA.
Several
Executive Orders have been issued by United States Presidents as means of
prescribing a moral and ethical course for the nation’s intelligence agencies. President
Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 12036, issued on 24th January 1978,
outlawed all covert operations within the United States except those approved
by the executive.
It
also outlawed assassinations and restricted the surveillance of what it termed
“US Persons” to overseas jurisdictions although exceptions could be made with
the approval of the President and the Attorney General. Carter continued the
Intelligence Oversight Board established by President Ford which had the duty
for reviewing intelligence activities and reporting irregularities to the
President.
Executive
Order 1273 of 17th October 1990 during the administration of George
H. Bush, also attempted to place ethics at the helm of intelligence operations.
The so-called “Deutsch Rules” provided the requirement that permission be
sought by agencies in the recruitment of persons with criminal records or
negative human rights records. Recent key executive orders setting out a course
for ethical conduct during covert operations are the aforementioned 2007
Executive Order issued by George W. Bush banning the torture of suspects by
American intelligence officials and President Obama’s 2009 Order with the
objective of ensuring Lawful renditions.
The
reforms initiated by President Carter, while attempting to re-establish the
rule of law and assert a higher standard of moral conduct were, however,
littered with loopholes which would in future provide inadequate protection
from abuse; much the same of which could be said of the orders issued by
Presidents Bush and Obama
The
definition of “national security”, the notional requirement by which exemptions
could be made under the outlawing provisions was then as it is now a vague
expression often pregnant with a subtext of being an urgent and unchallengeable
judgement made by experts to which politicians and members of the judiciary are
duty bound to bow. The issue of foreign-geared political operations also
appeared to be sidestepped.
Political
Accountability
Laws
and mechanisms of scrutiny are not always enough. There has to be the will of
elected officials to effect such scrutiny. This has not always been the case.
The decades following the CIA’s formation up to the middle of the 1970s may be
characterised as a period when the CIA conducted operations untrammelled by the
prying eyes of ostensibly supervisory committees of both houses of Congress.
The
attitude of John Stennis, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee was
revealed in the following comment made in November 1971:
This
agency (the CIA) is conducted in a splendid way. As has been said, spying is
spying...You have to make up your mind that you are going to have an
intelligence agency and protect it as such, and shut your eyes some and take
what is coming.
Not
surprisingly, the Intelligence Sub-Committee was not regularly convened in the
early years following his appointment. His fellow senator, Stuart Symington
ruefully reflected thus:
I
wish his interest in the subject had developed to the point where he held just
one meeting of the CIA subcommittee this year; just one meeting!
The
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of the House did not fare any better.
The
constitutionally derived investigatory capacities of both Senate and House of
Representatives have come to the fore in the wake of disastrous failings in
ethics by the intelligence services. These include the period following
Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair.
Following
the ‘Crown Jewels’ expose through the famous New York Times feature written by investigative journalist, Seymour
Hersh, the CIA found itself the subject of public scrutiny respectively by the
Church Committee headed by senator Frank Church and the Pike Committee presided
over by congressman Otis Pike.
While
committees have formed a suitable public arena for ethical infractions to be
aired and the basis on which reforms may be based, they have not always
guaranteed the practice of ethical behaviour at hearings.
For
instance, William Colby lied before the Church Committee when denying that the
United States was not engaged in covert operations during the war in Angola.
Colby’s perjury was merely an expression of the ethics of a career intelligence
serviceman who had being sworn under oath to protect the secrets of his nation
as indeed had been the conduct two years earlier of Richard Helms who had also
lied to the Senate about United States involvement in anti-Allende activities
in Chile.
Accountability
to Judicial Authority
While
William Colby was convicted of perjury and fined, charges failed to materialise
in the cases of both Richard Helms and Henry Kissinger.
As
mentioned earlier, under the homeland security regime legislation promulgated
since the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’, CIA and other designated military
and civilian figures have immunities conferred on them while executing the
orders of the state and thus effectively exempt from prosecution for involvement
in torture or war crimes.
2.
The United Kingdom
Regulating
Acts of Parliament
Both
of Britain’s main security agencies dealing respectively with domestic and
foreign intelligence originate from the same organisation, the Secret Service
Bureau, which was established in 1909. The bureau splintered some years later;
both styled as the Directorate of Military Intelligence, with the home service
becoming known as Section 5 (MI5) and the foreign department Section 6 (MI6).
Both
would continue their roles through war and peace for over eight decades without
their existence being acknowledged by the law; the Security Service (still
widely referred to as MI5) in 1989 and the Secret Intelligence Service five
years later.
The
Intelligence Services Act (1994) enshrines in statutory format what the SIS has
always functioned as, that is, as a provider of foreign intelligence to Her
Majesty’s Government, and is tasked with the twin roles of espionage and
counter-espionage. The internal Security Service is charged with protecting
parliamentary democracy, as well as, counter-terrorism and counter-espionage.
Political
Accountability
The
work of both SIS and the Security Service along with the intelligence community
consisting of Defence Intelligence (DI) and General Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ) are overseen by the Intelligence and Security Committee of the British
Parliament whose members are directly appointed by the prime minister.
Accountability
to Judicial Authority
Section
8 of the Intelligence Services Act provided for the creation of a Tribunal
headed by a commissioner with experience of high judicial office which is
empowered to investigate any complaints persons may have about the intelligence
Service or GCHQ.
The
invocation of the European Convention on Human Rights has provided a powerful
tool for holding government officials to account. The law of England is quite
clear about refusing to allow as admissible evidence in court, that which has
been extracted by torture.
The
case of A v Home Department (No2) (2005) confirmed this by holding that
evidence acquired by an allied secret service could not be used during the
trial of an alleged terrorist.
Furthermore,
the cooperation between the SIS and the secret service of the late Libyan
leader Muamar Gaddafi in the surveillance and apprehension of suspected
Islamist militants –a threat to the secular regime of Gaddafi- has led to one
high profile legal suit.
Abdel
Hakim Belhadj, a prominent leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),
a prominent militia among the groups that overthrew the colonel, had been
arrested in Malaysia in 2004 and sent to a secret prison in Thailand which was
operated by the CIA.
Belhadj
was then transported to Diego Garcia, a British-controlled territory, under the
auspices of MI6 from where he was sent on and delivered into the hands of Gaddafi’s
secret service which he alleges tortured him. Belhadj has thus far refused a
financial settlement.
The
operation which led to Belhadj’s capture was, according to his lawyers,
undersigned by the then foreign secretary Jack Straw. If so, the existence of
such a fact would render immunity to those British intelligence officials
involved in Belhadj’s rendition.
MECHANISMS FOR
NON-ACCOUNTABILITY
1.The
United States
The
potential liability imposed by the War Crimes Act and Hamden v Rumsfeld were
effectively limited in scope by section 6 of the Military Commissions Act
(2006).
Although
the Act was amended as a result of the case of Boumediene v Bush (2008) in so
far as the issue of denial of the writ of habeas
corpus is concerned, the judiciary’s susceptibility to accepting arguments
of ‘national security’ effectively neutralise the use of the War Crimes Act in
holding officials to account –particularly those with “command responsibility”-
for the use of extracting intelligence via torture.
The
earlier Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 which requires military interrogations
to be performed according to the US Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence
Collector Operations was designed to effectively nullify accountability for
efforts aimed at extracting information which veered on torture.
While
prohibiting “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of any
prisoner of the US government, including prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the Act
conferred immunities to government agents and military personnel from civil and
criminal action or using interrogation techniques that “were officially
authorised and determined to be lawful at the time they were conducted.”
Guidelines
pertaining to how the phrase was to be interpreted were lacking as was a
reference to the specific edition of the aforementioned manual.
The
putative safeguards contained in pieces of legislation such as within the
Intelligence Authorisation Act (1991) are, as in the past, susceptible to wide
degrees of interpretation and are not put under heavy scrutiny until secret
operations are brought to light.
2.The
United Kingdom
Section
7 of the Intelligence Services Act (1994) confers immunity to agents involved
in crimes committed abroad where their activities were sanctioned by the
Foreign Secretary.
The
security services are only required to be “proportionate and compliant” with
legislation such as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Data
Protection Act (1998) are exempt from disclosure under section 23 of the
Freedom of Information Act (2000)
Successive
attempts to curtail US covert operations have been continually circumvented;
this by flagrant disregard of the law or by adopting an arms-length approach
i.e. indirect means.
For
instance, as noted above, the Hughes Amendment Act of 1974 was ignored in the
conduct of the civil wars in El Salvador and other Central American countries
in the funding and training of death squads.
There
can appear to be an ebb and flow in terms of the will to initiate reforms to
ethicize the conducting of intelligence operations. For instance, in the post-Watergate
period which saw the collapse of the imperial presidency, the failure in
Vietnam, and the publication of the CIA’s ‘Crown Jewels’ report, public outrage
at the excesses of the secret state led to various inquiries established by the
legislative and executive branches of government.
Reforms
followed, but those initiated by the Carter Administration ignored foreign
covert actions. The Soviet invasion developed the widespread sentiment to roll
back restrictions placed on US intelligence agencies.
The
Iran-Contra Scandal brought with it much umbrage at the conduct of certain
forms of covert intelligence from both the public and members of the political
class which led to the passage of the aforementioned Intelligence Authorisation
Act (1991).
Later,
however, in the aftermath of the massacres of September 11th,
legislation represented by instruments such as the PATRIOT Act and the
introduction of the Homeland Security regime, reflected an urge to give the
security services “more dagger”.
President
George Bush rescinded the ban on foreign assassinations (which now allows for
the killing of US citizens who are designated as enemies of the state) and
immunities are conferred on members of the intelligence services and armed
forces for involvement in acts of torture and war crimes.
While
the rationale for affording such protections to its citizens may be based on
the presumption of fighting “the inhuman enemy” who recognises no civilised
restraints as is ‘normally’ operated in the culture of the United States, the benefits
of using torture as a technique for enabling the extractor to establish leads in
combating the enemy remains open to debate.
It
is, of course, a debate which has lasted several millennia and from which the
strongest argument against its usage emanate from the words of Ulpian, a Third
Century Roman Jurist who noted that “the strong can resist torture and the weak
will say anything to end their pain.”
Some
who have served in the highest echelons of intelligence are strident in their
opposition to its usage. Harry E. Soyster, a retired lieutenant general who
served as head of the US Army Intelligence and Security Command as well as
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency recently opined that torture is
“both destructive and self-destructive.” Adding that, “a nation that resorts to
torture is not only in moral hazard but is also less secure.”
The
US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has compiled an as yet unreleased 6,000-page
report based on a three-year review of “enhanced interrogation techniques”
during the Bush administration which allegedly failed to produce any major breakthroughs
in intelligence.
But
here, the potentially cleansing mechanism which would serve to enlighten the
populace and provide evidence of probative value on the failure of the United
States torture program is threatened by the recurrent recourse to secrecy: The veil
of national security threatens to prevent the release of this extensive insight
which was culled from approximately six million pages of official records.
1.
The Punishment of Perpetrators.
It
is clear that the period spanning the Cold War era to the present has been
characterised by a lack of accountability on the part of political leaders, as
well as their intelligence and military chiefs. This state of affairs has
existed despite the evidence of serious abuses and transgressions of the law
which occurred with the explicit or tacit approval of those in control of national
policy. Most have not faced prosecution while others who were in fact
prosecuted were treated relatively leniently.
Cold
War
Politicians
and statesmen
- Henry Kissinger
Allegations
against Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State
during the administration of Richard Nixon, as a transgressor of the law are
well documented and have been many and wide ranging; arguably reaching a peak when
a book written by the journalist Christopher Hitchens, ‘The Trial of Henry
Kissinger’ was published. It detailed his role in directing covert operations
in notable theatres such as Indochina and Chile where war crimes and
significant abuses of human rights resulted.
For
instance, of Kissinger’s role in the secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos, it was
alleged that he involved himself in the minutiae of devising mission patterns by
actual selecting bombing raids after having read the raw data of intelligence
reports. He was part of an elaborate deception by which military records were
altered by having bombing missions recorded as been undertaken in Vietnam when
in fact they had been re-routed to targets in Cambodia. He also chaired the 40
Committee which gave the go ahead for all the bombing raids.
Intelligence
service personnel
- William Colby
Colby
was convicted of perjury for lying before the Church Committee regarding US
involvement in Angola, however, Richard Helms, the CIA director at the time of
the anti-Allende intrigues which culminated in the military coup, was not
convicted for lying before the senate regarding Chile.
- Oliver North
The
face of the Iran-Contra Scandal was convicted of three out of twelve charges
relating to the illegal support of the Contra rebels. These were falsifying and
destroying documents, obstructing Congress and illegally receiving a gift.
He
received a three-year suspended prison sentence, two years on probation, 1,200
hours community service with inner city drugs projects and a $150,000 (£94,000)
fine. His superior, National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane was fined and
sentenced to community service while his other boss, Admiral John Poindexter,
was convicted of conspiracy, obstructing congressional enquiries and lying to
Congress and sentenced to a term of six month imprisonment.
The
results were decidedly unsatisfactory. North, who was convicted of offences
which attract a maximum of 10 years in prison and $750,000 (£470,000) fine was
in the final analysis dealt with leniently, and he succeeded in getting his
convictions overturned some years later as did Poindexter.
War
on Terror
Politicians
and statesmen
- George Bush, US President
- Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of
Defence
- Dick Cheney, US Vice President
- John Ashcoft, US Attorney General
- Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister
It is the legal
opinion of many experts in the field of international law that evidence has
long existed for prosecuting both George Bush and Tony Blair for waging a war
of aggression in Iraq; this based on the principles established at the landmark
Nuremburg trials.
It is argued that both
leaders were culpable for alternatively presiding over the manipulation of
flawed intelligence or for failing to exercise due diligence in relying on such
defective intelligence to lead their nations into a war which was prima facie
illegal.
As the government’s
chief legal adviser, John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General during the Bush
administration, arguably bears an all encompassing responsibility for those illegal
policies and actions which flowed from the extreme measures employed in
pursuance of the War on terror.
Donald Rumsfeld, the
US Secretary for Defence, is arguably liable for gross human rights violations
for presiding over the policy of using death squads in Iraq where he handpicked
El Salvador veteran Colonel James Steele to advise the Iraqi government on its
creation and implementation. Rumsfeld, of course, was a party to the decision
to take America into the Iraqi War as indeed was Vice President Dick Cheney.
Intelligence
and military personnel
- George Tenet
- General David Patraeus
- Zbigniew Siemiatkowski
- Nicolo Pollari
- Jeffery Castelli
- Robert Seldon Lady
The
conduct of the ‘War on Terror’ has, as detailed in this paper, raised grave
concerns in regard to the violations of international and municipal law in the
area of human rights. George Tenet, director of the CIA from 1997 to 2004
arguably has culpability for presiding over that organisation’s policies of
mounting extraordinary rendition and condoning torture.
Among
the military, General David Petraeus, for a period the overall commander of US and
Coalition forces in Iraq, would have a case to answer for presiding over the
implementation of the death squad policy executed by the aforementioned Colonels
Coffman and Steele (rtd) as a means of combating the insurgency in Iraq.
The
complexities involved with the running of the rendition programme would have
made its operation impossible without the collusion of other countries. As a
result, those officials from the nations allied to the United States who
facilitated the implementation of extraordinary renditions have also received
attention.
These
have included the former Polish intelligence chief, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski for
allowing the CIA to run a secret prison in his country. Siemiatkowski, who was
also the interior minister, was indicted by a Polish court in March of 2012 for
“unlawfully depriving prisoners of their liberty.”
This
however has been stalled and may be discontinued owing to the severe
embarrassment which a trial would give to the Polish state.
Another
intelligence figure, Nicolo Pollari, the former head of the Italian military
intelligence service SISMI, was in February 2013 sentenced to 10 years in jail
for presiding over SISMI’s cooperation with the CIA in the 2003 kidnapping and
rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian Muslim cleric granted
asylum who was a resident of Milan.
Nasr,
also known as Abu Omar, was snatched off the streets in broad daylight and
bundled into a white van which sped off. He was held at military bases in Italy
and Germany before been transported to Egypt where he was tortured whilst in
detention only to be released when an Egyptian judge ruled that he had no case
to answer.
The
CIA Milan station chief Robert Lady and Rome Station Chief Jeffrey Castelli who
allegedly pushed for Nasr’s abduction along with 21 other Americans were
convicted in abstentia in 2009. These were upheld in 2012 by the highest court
of appeal. An application for their extradition to Italy was frustrated by the
combined efforts of the Obama administration and that of former Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi.
It
is important to note that neither the Bush nor Obama administrations have acknowledged
US involvement in Nasr’s rendition and that no individual has been held
accountable for this programme which involved widespread human rights
violations.
As
mentioned earlier, the rendition and the drone assassination programmes bear
similarities with Operation Condor operated by Latin American dictatorships. In
2012, 25 senior military officers including former heads of state were brought
to court on charges of conspiracy to “kidnap, disappear, torture and kill”
political opponents.
“Holding
these officials accountable for the multinational crimes of Condor cannot help
but set a precedent for more recent abuses of a similar nature,” argues Carlos
Osorio, the director of the Southern Cone Documentation project.
2.Redress
for Victims.
The
requirements of justice dictate that wrongful conduct; apart from attracting
sanctions against the perpetrator may entitle the victim to compensation for
the damage they sustain. However, recompense has been a difficult goal to
attain given the perennial issue of national secrecy.
For
instance, the relatives of the victims of the Brabant shootings and the October
Fest Bombing respectively in Belgium and Germany are unable to get relevant
details of information which tie in the security establishment with these
outrages.
The
skeletons of an overarching corrupt Belgian state have not been opened despite
the insights given by the scandal involving the paedophile Roger Dutroux, and
in Germany, items of critical forensic evidence which were supposed to be
secure in police vaults have over the years gone missing.
Cold
War
In
2001, the son of Rene Schneider, the Chilean Army Chief of Staff who was
murdered using weapons dispatched by the CIA and under a process monitored by
Henry Kissinger filed a civil action in New York against Henry Kissinger on
September 11th 2001. The case was later struck out.
War
on Terror
Victims
of intelligence operations pursuant to the rendition programme have, despite
the denials or the paucity of information offered by the United States
government, have made inroads in achieving redress for the harm they sustained.
This
has come under the auspices of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article
3 prohibits the use of torture. This is an absolute right from which
governments cannot derogate. In other words, it cannot be deviated from in
limited circumstances or be qualified.
- European Court of Human Rights
cases
In December of 2012,
the European Court of Human Rights handed down a landmark ruling when it stated
that the aforementioned Khaled el-Misri was tortured by the CIA while
Macedonian police state officials looked on. The methods of torture included
sodomising, shackling and beating him. The court ordered the Macedonian
government to pay el-Misri 60,000 Euros (£49,000) in compensation.
The court also ordered
the US government to voluntarily pay compensation. It of course remains to be
seen whether the German authorities will prosecute the Americans involved.
As earlier
mentioned, Abdel Hakim Belhadj, a member of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan
Islamic Fighting Group which NATO aided in its action to unseat Colonel
Gaddafi, is suing the British government over his rendition which occurred in
1994.
CONCLUSION
Two
matters remain clear. First, that it is not possible to subordinate all aspects
of intelligence work under a rigorous moral code. The caveats placed within
legislation granting immunities to certain officials for criminal acts as seen
respectively in the Detainee Treatment Act (2005) and the British Intelligence
Service Act (1994) or otherwise implanting ostensible safeguards which can be
circumvented by interpretations given officials or by judges do not allow for
this.
Secondly,
is that oversight mechanisms such as intelligence committees staffed by elected
politicians have frequently had limitations imposed on their ability to
disclose vital information to the wider public who they serve due under
pressure from both senior figures in the government of the day as well as from
intelligence establishment.
So
it is that in 2013 the situation exists that while the US Senate Intelligence
Committee’s report on torture is referred to by its chairman, the Democrat
Diane Feinstein as “one of the most significant oversight efforts in Senate
history”, its release is being stalled and even put in doubt owing to the
apparent reluctance of President Obama. Also, the CIA is believed to be against
releasing the report or otherwise redacting huge portions of it.
The
recalcitrant state is often adept at evading or diluting the scrutinizing eyes
of information seekers. When Italian Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti revealed
the existence of the stay-behind network of secret armies, he did so only under
pressure from the Italian Senate enquiring into the possible hand of state
agencies in fomenting terrorism during the anni
di piombo.
Italy,
Belgium and Switzerland, are the only countries who mounted parliamentary
investigations into the existence of the secret armies not known to and
unaccountable to the democratic institutions of state; this inspite of the condemnation
of the warped role of the Gladio programme issued in November 1990 by the
European Parliament.
The
names of each stay-behind force has not been revealed in some countries and
there was never an announcement that the networks had been dissolved, if they
had been succeeded by other entities and in either case, what the present scope
of their activities are.
Although
former CIA director William Colby alluded to the existence of secret armies in
his memoirs, the policy of the United States has been not to confirm or deny
requests for documents under the auspices of Freedom of Information legislation.
Whatever
files that may exist in the various military intelligence departments of
European states as well as that of NATO are not open to parliamentarians,
journalists or historians who may wish to access data as pertaining to the
running of Operation Gladio.
The
restriction of information as relates to the intelligence services while
ostensibly protecting what is often referred to as “national security” also has
an insidious effect. Distortions, half-truths and outright fictions may result.
Counter-productive policies and practices are allowed to continue; criminal
wrongs remain unpunished.
The
crucial question is, if the past can’t be properly addressed, what hope is
there in meeting the challenges of the present and the future? In referring to
the issue of the stalled Senate Intelligence Committee report on the United
States-run torture program, Vice President Joe Biden is on record as having
said that the “only way you exorcise demons is you acknowledge exactly what
happened straightforwardly.”
These
sentiments square with the analysis of Professor Robert Service about learning
from the past. Referring to the fact that documents associated with the
Lockhart Plot remain unreleased presumably as a justification of the British
government’s continued pretensions of having always conducted an ethical policy
in the conduct of intelligence operations, he is scathing calling it “fatuous” and
asserting that such policies serve to in effect “distort” history.
A
solid understanding of the past enables the capacity to comprehend the present
as well as to anticipate the future. After the release of detailed files
relating to its activities in Chile, the CIA professed not to condone human
rights abuses. But these can only be taken at face value given to a situation
which has yet to amount to a full disclosure of its past transgressions.
On
observation, it is clear that controls exercised on the intelligence services
of a democracy such as the United States have tended to wax and wane over the
course of time. During the ‘trough periods’ which follow scandal and failure,
efforts are made to circumvent their powers, while during the ‘peak’ periods of
concern for national security, the emphasis has been to afford them the use of a
range of powers.
At
the height of the Cold War there was very little substantive oversight; a state
of affairs which lasted until the ‘Crown Jewels’ scandal. The Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan rolled back whatever mechanisms of checks and restraints that
had been put in place until the Iran-Contra Scandal brought renewed scrutiny.
However,
the inauguration of the War on Terror along with accompanying draconian
legislation, Homeland Security regime and its threatened endurance for an indeterminate
period has seriously compromised the process of genuine oversight and
accountability.
It
means that so long as there is an absence of the political will to abrogate
laws and policies which encourage unethical strategies and techniques in the
conduct of intelligence, it is left to the vigilance and the persistence of the
legal profession, human rights organisations and an independent media to ensure
that the idea of genuine accountability does not become an illusory concept.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Adeyinka
Makinde is a Lecturer in Law. He is the author of two biographies on pugilists