The CIA “Wehrmacht"--Harper's Magazine Blog

http://www.harpers.org/sb-cia-wehrmacht.html


The CIA “Wehrmacht”
Posted on Wednesday, April 19, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.



With the war in Iraq an utter debacle and public opinion turned against the White House, anger within the armed forces towards Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Administration is growing, and the Pentagon is fighting back (see “Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics” in the April 16 New York Times). But what's been little noted thus far is what looks to be a similar revolt brewing at the CIA. An ex-senior agency officer who keeps in contact with his former peers told me that there is a “a big swing” in anti-Bush sentiment at Langley. “I've been stunned by what I'm hearing,” he said. “There are people who fear that indictments and subpoenas could be coming down, and they don't want to get caught up in it.”

This former senior officer said there “seems to be a quiet conspiracy by rational people” at the agency to avoid involvement in some of the particularly nasty tactics being employed by the administration, especially “renditions”—the practice whereby the CIA sends terrorist suspects abroad to be questioned in Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, and other nations where the regimes are not squeamish about torturing detainees. My source, hardly a softie on the topic of terrorism, said of the split at the CIA: “There's an SS group within the agency that's willing to do anything and there's a Wehrmacht group that is saying, 'I'm not gonna touch this stuff'.”

Other signs of serious military anger toward the administration were apparent by the spring of 2004 when a group of very senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the legal arm of the U.S. armed forces, were so upset about the administration's loosening of rules against torture that they complained in private to Horton, who was then a committee chair at the New York City Bar Association. Horton and the Bar subsequently prepared a groundbreaking report on U.S. interrogation tactics, “Human Rights Standards Applicable to the United States' Interrogation of Detainees,” which challenged the Pentagon's actions. Horton and the Bar also were involved in publishing the “torture memoranda” and used them to disprove Rumsfeld's claims that the abuses at Abu Ghraib resulted from a few low-ranking “bad apples” (to use the administration's phrase).

Today's “Wehrmacht” officers at the CIA are right to be worried about subpoenas: a legal analysis prepared by a senior FBI attorney in 2002 deemed that renditions to countries that torture detainees were illegal. The attorney concluded that such actions were designed to circumvent American laws against torture and that anyone even discussing such a plan could be found criminally liable. If the political winds shift, some “bad apples” in the CIA could find themselves indicted for torture.

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This is The CIA “Wehrmacht” by Ken Silverstein, published Wednesday, April 19, 2006. It is part of The Washington Editor, which is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.



THERE'S A GOOD DEAL MORE WORTH READING--MY ONLY RESERVATION IS COMPARING THE ENTIRE CIA TO THE NAZIS--I WOULD HOPE IT WASN'T THAT BAD....

It was the army of Germany. Some were Nazis some weren't. The officer corps were professional soldiers of the highest ability but not necessarily Nazis.

The SS on the other hand was a political branch of the military and they were Nazis first and foremost. They were Hitler's bullies before the war and his most rabid enforcers during it.

I'm a Boomer--born long after the fact.

Another way to look a the Wehrmacht versus the SS is that it was a case of the professional soldiers versus the ideological whackos.

The imagery used in the article is deep, because the SS officers would frequently make military decisions that the career officers knew to be wrong, but they couldn't fight it because of the Nazi party loyalty to Bush Hitler.

In today's CIA, an analyst has to look loyal to HitlerBush but worries about the impact of these neocon thugs on him and the world.

I'm a boomer as well, but was always interested in military history growing up and took a really great military history in college. Some of the teaching assistants were career military officers getting graduate degrees.