“Morale at the CIA has been shaken to its foundation.”

Terrorism 208 Comments

Former CIA director Porter J. Goss

Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.

208 Replies to ““Morale at the CIA has been shaken to its foundation.””

  2. [quote]However, there is an upside. Obama has now made an enemy of the CIA. I expect leaks to be forthcoming putting the Obama administration in a bad light. And of course they have given us an issue. [/quote] Greg in Dallas
    Leaks! Leaks!… “plug the leaks Panetta” has his hands full.. Dam, do you think the foreign agencies may have leaks too. All the media & Senators misbehaving in other countries caught on tape.

  3. Please don’t feed the naive,leftard,pansy-assed troll!!!He’s just playing a game,trying to keep us off the real track,which as many have pointed out,is that the DemocRATS, and The Owe LIED about not knowing anything about the “torture”. He is playing the same trick his Zero Hero is doing,deflecting away from the multi-trillion buck debt and the socialism he is pushing on the USA.

  4. Allow me to share my confusing view on this. My father spent most of WW2 in Stalag VIIIB in Poland as a prisoner of war. They weren’t tortured (unless you consider a beating or a rifle but in the head torture) and they starved for years. My father was a stick figure when the war was over. He couldn’t even eat solid food for weeks after he was liberated or it would have killed him. My dilemma is I think we should hook up the car batteries to these terrorist but at the same time I can’t help but think of The Old Man. I really think it’s wrong to torture prisoners but I can appreciate why you’d want to.
    Plus I’m sure my dad would have thought Guantanamo is a holiday camp.
    Weird footnote here. As the war was ending the Germans guards marched all the prisoners west to escape the Russian advance. The Germans (Nazis?) protected the prisoners from the Russians (Communists?) because they knew the Russians would probably kill all the Allied prisoners of war. Who the good guys are and who the bad guys are gets very grey at war time.
    I apologize for the long post.

  5. Mark:
    Americans did use torture in WW2 (and WW1 and Korea and Vietnam) just as the CDNs did and the other allies with the tacit approval of the higher ups or even more than tacit.
    In fact Tarantino is just about to release a movie about one group that apparently did a lot of it:
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361748/
    torture is a necessary evil. What needs to be created is a torture warrant just as we have search warrants – this is not a new idea.
    You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

  6. Tarantino’s releasing a movie, huh? Well, that proves that.
    Maybe he should consider studying the war for five years, reading all the censored material keptb out of the papers in this country, and talking to veterans all his life.
    Let’s see some facts about Canadians torturing prisoners in WWII. Real units, real dates, not “I heard about these guys who captured some Germans” guff.

  8. When you are in a war, you are in to win. It is no coincidence that the west really hasn’t won a war since WWII. Since then, the fifth column in the west has continually insisted that the west “disarm” itself when engaging in war.
    Oh and Mark…it is pretty clear you haven’t seen a day of service in your life. Much of what goes on is never reported anywhere. The further from the real world your thinking is, the more difficult it is for you to think logically.

  10. Obama is just trying to get some distraction for awhile while he screws over the US economy. Selling out the c CIA . . . no worries, those kids no how to play hardball and what Obama will get his back when it is appropriate.
    Meanwhile, in secret, answers will be found out and the bodies will never be found.

  11. gord @7:14 – That footnote is incredibly interesting. I would never have guessed such a thing.

  12. Why doesn’t the US just contract out the interrogation part of their wars and then they will get the info without getting their hands dirty. They pretty much do that with everything else don’t they. I mean you can’t even get an American to run a freaking 7-11.
    Obama is the president of what’s left of the United States. When the USA was it’s former self, a half wit like him would never have had a change and not because of his skin.
    His successors will have the job of selling off what’s left of the assets to China, then moving to Canada for some free, but not available health care.
    The USA is personified in Mohamad Ali. Once the greatest, now just a pitiful mumbling shadow of his former self.
    None of these sell outs matter, there is little left to save at this point. There will never be peace in the US society because the Left will never quite and the right will never give up trying to take it back to saner times.
    A civil war settle it in the end and that damage will not likely be recovered from. Others will come in to plunder the spoils. Hell, they already are.

  13. Phantom, another prediction, armed forces commanding officers will delay the call to cease fire after engagement in a fire fight and delay the call to look for enemy wounded. Why should an officers stick his neck out to protect enemy combatants with people like Nancy Pelosi watching his back.

  14. Mark
    Don’t be asking for actual facts from these guys. Come on. The facts are what they say they are. Just “believe” that what they say is the truth. The same way they believed Bush when he implied Iraq was gonna nuke us, when Cheney said it was a certainty that Iraq had WMD.
    If you follow their arguments you will always find that the things they ask you to “believe” without providing any factual basis are always things that lead to people engaging in Nazi-like behaviour – whether it’s actual torture such as the Nazis engaged in, or “pre-emptively” invading sovereign nations.
    Now…I wonder why that would be, do you think?

  15. This whole sorry story, supported be the media, is, to distract from the reckless spending proposed by the current president.
    The tea parties showed the president that people mean business when they say that he is out of control. This is his way to control, although it is not in his power to control, the situation.
    Of course he is only nominally the president; he is more of a puppet on a string pulled hither and yon by the real control freaks, Soros and company.
    If you follow closely what is happening, this president does not have a clue of what he should be actually doing. What he does is proclaim. Proclamations that his followers swallow like manna do not a president make.
    ET adequately explained many times, what sort of individual this president is. It is supported by vast amount of evidence for those that want to see. There is large number of people that came to the same conclusion.
    As for Bourrie, the chap lives mostly in never, never land of lotus eaters:
    “The Americans did not torture people during the war.”
    He does not know, nobody knows, only those who know, know and they will not talk, its history, better not spoken about.
    War has no rules, however much some warm and fuzzy people would like to have it. Like the general said, you shoot the bastard before he shoots you.
    If the bastard has vital information you need, he better talk or you are going to make him.
    To say to the bastard: tell me what I need to know or you hurt my feelings will by all sensible accounts not work.

  16. Mark:
    the tarantino movie is based on the truth
    There were lots of US military-approved videos shot of torture and waterboarding in Vietnam.
    CDN troops were very rough on German POWs after the Falaise gap was closed and the SS atrocity revealed. And of course there was the torture and murder of a somali by the paratroopers.
    But the documented stuff is clearly just the tip of a huge iceberg – for the likes of you and Pelosi to willfully pretend that it doesn’t happen is disgusting and harmful to the security of all free peoples.

  17. bleet:
    There are no national socialists here.
    That’s another utopian totalitarian philosophy that submerges individuals to the will of the state, much like your marxist heroes.
    How do I know you’re a marxist?
    Because only a marxist would consider a national socialist a ‘right winger,’ as it appears you are trying to do.
    Based on the fact of this particular attempt to re-define the meaning of torture (re-definition being a favourite tactic perfected by Bill Clinton) and based on the fact Nancy Pelosi let the idea of enhanced interrogation pass, then Pelosi should also be thrown in the slammer.
    Nobody here is in favour of torture, especially the tortured arguments used by marxist such as yourself.
    The fact is that if Nancy Pelosi did not object to what you define as torture, then she should also be jailed for letting down the American public.
    Instead of admitting what the US did was not torture, Pelosi is playing cute and now denying what her lying ears heard.
    Now, piss off.

  18. Oh, set your free
    I didn’t accuse anyone here of being a national socialist.
    I merely observed that you all are lustily defending – and in some cases, rejoicing in – the exact same torture tactics as were carried out by the Nazis.
    You keep bringing up Pelosi, which only highlights what a moral non-entity you are. By all means, if Pelosi approved, throw her in the slammer, right behind Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al.
    Because you see, set you free, there are some issues which transcend partisan politics. One of these is the basic values which define Western civilization and define us as opposed to the barbarianism of Islamic terrorists or Nazis. And they have to be non-negotiable.
    If Democrats had a part in torture along with the Repubs, sure, lock’em up. Clear the decks.
    What’s puzzling, though, are the “good Germans” like you and others on this board, who seem to think torture should be a permanent part of Western civilization, to be carried out in perpetuity.
    It’s not too much of an overstatement to say that it’s the “good Germans” who provided cover for, and on whom the Nazis depended, to carry out their atrocities.

  19. “do your worst and we shall do our best’…
    …within our moral confines of course…which confines are vastly superior to the enemy’s…
    so…next question…?

  20. bleet:
    Never presume to tell me what I think.
    That makes people believe your a class A a**hole.
    Just deal with the facts, stick to accepted dictionary definitions of torture and everything will be fine.
    This issue has nothing to do with Nazis, Germany or your pitiful attempts to re-define long-understood meanings of words.
    Instead of trying to understanding and honestly communicate, your tactic of attempting to re-define words to suit your political purposes has no place in an intelligent, civil debate.
    It’s unfortunate your lack of intellectual capacity continues expose an inability to discern a technique that was approved by the US Congress and equate it with true tortures that are happening in other parts of the world.
    If you’d like to rage about torture, there are plenty of real-life examples happening in the world right now. Stop living in the past and vent your outrage against those who practise real dictionary-defined tortures.
    Deal?

  21. Bleet I don’t think you even know the basic values of Western Civilization. Western values are based on the Christian ideal of loving your neighbour as yourself. This basic idea does not allow one to stand idly by as others slaughter innocents. If you capture someone conspiring to slaughter innocents and do not do everything you can to prevent that slaughter then you are part of the slaughtering mass not a moral beacon.

  22. Hilarious… nowadays depriving some idiot of cable tv is considered torture.
    Mark Bourrie… you asked a poster what unit he was with… sunshine, I’m with a unit that paid for its share of Afghanistan in blood, and little shite like sleep deprivation and other disorienting measures designed to weaken resistance to interrogation is fair game. So take your sanctimonious arm-chair generalship and shove it where the sun don’t shine. You either leave your panty-waist sensibilities at home or you throw in the towel. Any interrogation in war has its share of resistance weakening techniques. The comfort of one muhjid isn’t worth the life of one of our soldiers, and if making a mujhid so dozy that he doesn’t know whether or not he’s revealing the location of the latest IED factory is the price to save one of our own, then so be it. Mark Bourrie, how the heck do you think we’ve only lost 118 troops in A’stan so far? Because we’ve found the muhj who wanted to increase that figure and got them to tell us where the IED factories were.
    Mark, the day you have to face the hard questions in a nasty, nasty world is the day you can be sanctimonious. Until then, you pissant, STFU.

  23. Posted by: bleet at April 25, 2009 8:02 PM
    Posted by: bleet | April 25, 2009 9:04 PM
    Whew – for a minute there, I thought the thread would go ’round & ’round interminably without somebody invoking Godwin’s law. Thanks for stepping up to the plate, bleet; you never fail to disappoint.
    As noted above, sleep deprivation, playing loud music, humiliating prisoners isn’t “torture”. And waterboarding, while extremely unpleasant and certainly tormenting, isn’t either; contrast waterboarding and its permanent effects with the sort of treatment saddam’s prisoners received, or those captured by the taliban. Even christopher hitchens, who volunteered for waterboarding, is alive, well and healthy after his very brief ordeal.
    As for those who still maintain waterboarding doesn’t work, I’d suggest talking to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for a first-hand perspective.
    It comes down to a simple question: if we believe there is a plot to kill hundreds or thousands and we can prevent same by waterboarding some islamist, would we rather simulate dying (in a non-permanent harmful fashion, yet) in a terrorist or actually witness it in the deaths of innocents?
    Bourrie, it might be mean-spirited to suggest that in this case if you’re still against waterboarding Achmed or Mohammed, it could be apt for you to find yourself or your loved ones amongst the innocent dead, and I won’t say that. But you might ponder it for some other perspective, however.
    mhb23re at gmail d0t calm

  24. It would be crazy politics and a breach of national security to rule out pressure tactics in the search for information about future terrorist attacks. In fact, this is the only argument in favour of keeping the higher-ranking captives alive at all, otherwise I would be quite content to see them summarily executed once their identities had been proven.
    Note that I call waterboarding a pressure tactic and not torture. No doubt it is quite unpleasant, how else would we induce these determined zealots to reveal any useful information?
    Is there any limit to what we should do? This sounds like the ideal question to pose to candidates for a theological degree. I would wait until the day after the next major terrorist strike to pose it, just so there was some context available. This is what is missing here, the gruesome deaths of over three thousand mostly civilian victims on 9-11, another thousand in various other large terrorist attacks of recent years, and the additional thousands spread out over hundreds of smaller actions, none of them conducted by the accepted rules of military engagement, 99% of them not even aimed at plausible military targets.
    If Obama wants to start a civil war, he should keep this sort of crazy politics going a few more months. The outrage on a Canadian website is one thing, you need to check out what they’re saying on large American forums and blogs.
    Already, within the first hundred days, Obama has more or less exposed himself as a radical anti-American with Marxist and Islamist sympathies. The CIA should be waterboarding him for information at this point.

  25. Peter:
    A fist-pump just went up in the air after I read your comments.
    Piss-ants like bleet are the vocal minority.
    It’s up to the rest of us to stand up to his marxist propoganda and let our voices be heard.

  26. Also, to equate waterboarding with “Nazi atrocities” tells me that our left-leaning schools are churning out a vast army of useful idiots — no wonder so many deceptions and lies are being accepted blandly at face value by many of the sheeple in recent years. Your analogy overlooks the fact that Nazi Germany was not attacked by terrorists and forced to improvise a defense against their ruthless choices of how and where to attack.
    I have to wonder where the outrage over torture has been hiding for all these years that Cuba and China have been torturing political prisoners. Oh right, I forgot, they weren’t socialists or Islamists.

  27. Mark Bourrie By your idea of torture we would have no Special Forces, no SAS, no JTF2, no SEALS etc. These men are run to the edge of physical and mental collapse. Some die in training, some die in the field. I read of a SAS unit dropped into Iraq and captured. One would get an enemy to beat him so he could get a cigarette and grin about it..moral victory. The mice stay home.

  28. we’re in WW4…as podhoretz rightly describes it…and in war, as has been expressed long before thesetimes, “all is fair’……having said that i would argue without fear of disputation that WE are far far more decent and honourable than THEM.
    what more need be said ?…after all we ARE in a war..in their mind a ‘guerra a cuchilla….’
    doubtlessly prayers and manumission to a CHRC will pacify them…?

  29. Hey Black Mamba@7:53
    The liberation of the POW camps was a pretty interesting part of the war that never really got much coverage. As you might know the POW camps that did get over run by the Russians fared very badly. Most of the prisoners went to forced labour camps in Russia. My Dad told me that one day the German officers gathered the POW’s in their section together and told them that they had been ordered to kill all of them and that the Russians were coming. Not only did the Germans disobey orders, which was frowned upon by the Nazi’s, but they could also could have just run for it and saved themselves. Instead they marched a rag tag army of sick and hungry prisoners away from the Russians. Saving their lives.
    Sometimes good and evil overlap.

  30. Set you free:
    Waterboarding is torture according to John McCain – who might know a little more about the subject than you.
    Waterboarding is torture according to Bush-fellator Christopher Hitchens, who stated (after being waterboarded) that if “waterboarding is not torture, nothing is torture”.
    Waterboarding is torture according to the US when they executed Japanese soldiers who carried out waterboarding.
    Waterboarding was carried out in the Spanish Inqusition, by the Chinese commmunists, by the Nazis, by the Japanese.
    A Pentagon official has admitted that the US tortured.
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5514239.ece –
    However, the CIA has admitted that no info from torture has actually saved anyone from an attack, contrary to the fever dreams of several on this board and of unAmerican traitor Dick Cheney:
    http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66895.html –
    Now, I’m not sure how I’m ‘re-defining words’ when so many agree with me – even Republicans.
    And I’m sure that the indisputable facts I’ve presented will, for you, have no place in an ‘intelligent, civil debate’.
    But the fact is that waterboarding is torture and has always been regarded as torture. the only time when that was even called into question was when it was known the US had engaged in waterboarding.
    Far from living in the past, myself and many others are insisting that the US purge itself of barbaric practises which unite them, rather than differentiate them, from the Islamic barbarians who wage war against them. Especially when such practises aren’t even effective!
    Too bad you’re on the other side.
    Not sure why you call me a Marxist. I’m a money-grubbing capitalist. Just one who thinks, like McCain and Htichens, it’s possible to be capitalist while opposing Nazi-esque practises.
    Don’t you?

  31. bleet:
    Opinions are like a**holes. Everybody has one.
    McCain still thinks the 9/11 guys came across the border from Canada.
    Hitchens’ stuff is readable, but he obviously lacks any moral compass.
    If the dictionary and Nancy Pelosi was OK with enhanced interrogation in 2002, who am I to try and re-define?
    Other than being an interesting distraction, it’s obvious neither one of us is going to change the other’s minds.
    Can’t be grubbing any money wasting time in revisionist history.
    I can’t even vote in the US elections for freak’s sake. I’ll let the US public decide why so much energy is being expended on this pointless witch-hunt (and no, I’m not taking a shot at Pelosi).

  32. Waterboarding is torture according to John McCain – who might know a little more about the subject than you.
    Would that be the same John McCain who just the other day, while defending Janet Napalitano, emphatically stated that the 9-11 terrorists entered the US through Canada?

  34. That’s right set you free
    I’ll stay on the side the US was on in WW2 when they defeated the facsists and executed the perpetrators of waterboarding.
    And you defend the other side.

  36. set you free….please go read Kate’s rules regarding trolls.You are no better if you give them something to crow about(or think they can crow about),Thought by now you knew better then to argue with letarded socialists and revisionists! Want to argue wuth them,go to rabble or Cat man’s place and waste their bandwidth.This place is for adults,not kiddies in Mom’s basement.Or in Mark’s case,up Turdeau’s et.al.s a&&es.

  37. Yeah by the time, the Soviets were overrunning Eastern Europe, the Soviets were already preparing for what became the COLD WAR. As far as the Soviets were concerned, Allied POWs were Western troops easilly bagged and interned.
    “War is hell and there is no refinning it.”
    William Tecumseh Sherman
    Although not condoning “mistreatment” of prisoners it is non-the-less an unavoidable feature of war. That said it was less common with US/Commonwealth troops…..a signal distinction. Eg: Free French Troops were noted for vicious treatment of Axis prisoners.
    Ian Flemming wrote extensively about British “black ops”…..a neccessary feature of national defense. 007 a war-criminal???

  38. I would like to see Pelosi waterboarded , but it would be pointless .
    It is meant to extract itelligence after all.

  39. America has given the keys to a car that is the most powerful and sophisticated piece of machinery the world has ever known – to a 16 year old with no driving experience.
    The consequences are most predictable.

  40. Doug @ 4:07
    I was not aware France won WWII. After capitulating in May 1940 and establishing a puppet Nazi government in 1/3 of France, the next French offensive action action (I don’t count the surrender of Vichy forces in North Africa as “an offensive action”)was engaging a single armoured division (fully equipped by the Yanks)in the NW Europe campaign.
    They did win in the sense France received a permanent seat on the UN Security Council whereas Mackenzie King failed to get Canada anything except the right to pay the UN’s bills.

  41. Bourie, reality is what you need to be dealing, not your idiotic kindergarten-like ‘liberal’ fantasies. You referring to that corrupt, lying sack of s… as a ‘great man’ shows how pathetic your ideals are. Yeah, lawyers writing deals on the back of napkins…

  42. sasquatch @ 10:59 – oh, it was the relative humanity (God, even heroism, and it gives me the creeps to type it, but there you go) of the Nazis in gord’s account that took me by surprise, not the Soviet depravity. The depravity I expect.

  43. That bit about the 911 hijackers coming in from Canada was in the newspapers shortly after it happened. There was a story about the Boston hijackers coming in from Canada to get on the flights. If anybody wants to get to the bottom of it, I would suggest that they look at papers in Sept-Oct of 2001.

  44. The cry babies here and elsewhere think that a world of no unpleasant consequences is more humane and honourable. It’s not.
    In fact, the lack of commensurate consequences for the most heinous actions has turned the world into a much more dangerous, barbarous place.
    As a teacher in the public education system, I have seen student (and adult) behaviour steadily deteriorate over the past four decades. In the “bad old days” (sic: people were eminently more civil and reliable), there were serious consequences for anti-social behaviour, even the strap. Guess what? Almost no one got the strap. How come? The kids understood that the adults were in charge and that they meant business. For the most part, this meant secure, reasonably well behaved, respectful children and adults who could more or less count on the kids to behave responsibly. Win, win.
    It’s the addle-brained adults some of these kids turned into, who decided that everyone—especially if they belong to some minority—had to be treated “nicely” all the time, no matter what, that’s turned our society into a meaner place. How come? Bullies take advantage of such a dispensation. They figure out really fast that no matter what they do, nothing too unpleasant will happen to them. Then what? They escalate their anti-social behaviour, making the lives of those around them miserable. Believe me, the lowest common denominator bullies now run the asylum.
    Example: the cold blooded killer of Jane Creba. I’ve taught kids like that guy. I’ll bet he was no poster child for civil behaviour at school. I’ll also bet that no one did anything decisive to disabuse him of his bullying attitude and ways. In my experience, minority thugs like him are treated with kid gloves, from the school system all the way up to the justice system: this drug gang murderer might be out on parole in only four years—he’s already served three of his seven: yes, only seven!—year mandatory sentence.
    Remember that a guy like this has almost no conscience: a seven year hiatus, from big money making, in a relatively comfortable detention centre is just the price of doing business.
    Making the world a safer, more comfortable place for murderous thugs, while putting the rest of us at great risk is madness. Lose, lose.
    People who don’t understand this are both intellectually and morally blind.

  45. Meh, Rick, my uncles in the States who fought the Japanese were up against tougher people than Taliban bullies and bomb-planters.
    I’m still waiting for one specific instance of Canadian/American/British troops torturing a prisoner.
    I have a book on my desk that talks of a Canadian sailor getting 20 days in the brig for spitting on a German POW. The reference is Naftel, William D., Halifax at War. Halifax: Formac Publishing, 2008, p. 91. So let’s see some unit names, dates, places, etc. and some written or film proof.
    As for the tards who can’t spell my name right, well, there’s always adult high school.

  46. In 1995 a plot to bomb a dozen American airliners crossing the Pacific was uncovered by torture. I and my coworkers flew across the Pacific multiple times during that period. I assume that you would have felt better had a couple thousand people, including families, children, non combatants of every sort had died during that time as long as nobody was ever tortured. I don’t lose a wink of sleep worrying about the poor wannabee mass murderer’s suffering might be the only way I and or my friends and family(on round trip) are alive today.

  48. And if this is the dubious case of the supposed al Quada agent being tortured by Philipine police to reveal a bomb plot that resulted in no arrests and no other physical evidence, then all it proves is a guy under torture will come up with a damn interesting story to make the torture stop.

  50. On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, Intelligence Committee hair Diane Feinstein (D-Cal) said she would have preferred to have her bipartisan committee go over the issues first before any documents were released.
    She put a timeline of 6-8 months for a thorough examination of the issues, including whether there was an criminal intent in protecting the US from further attacks.

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