Behind the CIA's Black Site Wall, Reporters Discover Another Cockroach

The CIA denied Congress and the 9/11 Commission access to a video of Abu Zubaydah and another unnamed detainee's "enhanced" interrogation - which, for each of them, might have involved a round of water-boarding or time in a tiny wooden crate called the "dog box." Today, the New York Times reported that the CIA destroyed these videos in 2005.

After the Times alerted the CIA that they were running an article on the subject, Gen. Michael Hayden justified erasing this evidence by crying "national security." If the video-tapes had been leaked to the public, he said, CIA officers and their families would've been exposed to "retailiation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers."

Come on, Hayden, we all know what you really mean. The statement should be re-edited to say "retaliation from Congress, the Supreme Court and their sympathizers."

New School President Bob Kerrey, who served on the 9/11 Commission panel, wrote me a brief but dire assessment over email: "They (CIA) lied to Congress, the Court and the 9-11 Commission. They admit they lied after a journalist uncovered the fact that they had destroyed the evidence. Finally, because they used illegal interrogation techniques, they compromised the legal case against Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. No good news here."

But at the very least, he noted, there is something to be said for the Times coverage. "The story this AM is another terrific example of something that can only happen in (relatively) open democracies."

The "enhanced interrogation" debate is pretty unnerving, if you consider the fact that Ramzi Yousef, who executed the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, told two FBI agents everything they needed to know during a conversation on an airplane flight. I don't think our administration's desire to torture has anything to do with intelligence gathering. If you ask me, using the CIA to do the work of prisoner holding and interrogation (which case officers have never been trained to do in the past), is merely the outgrowth of post-9/11 hatred of Arabs/Muslims, who of course are seen as one and the same, and an insatiable hunger for revenge.

Now, about 80 out of 300 Guantanamo detainees are facing military tribunals at a portable tent city called Camp Justice in Guantanamo Bay. Presumably, this military commissions court is too embarrassing a sight to be located on American soil. None of the detainees have been charged with a crime, but the prosecution is able to deny them access to lawyers inside the courtroom and use hearsay as evidence against them. So in a hi-tech and institutionalized mass-lynching, it looks like most of these "terrorists" will go to jail forever. Or, some Americans hope, they will go to Hell. Finally, America will have its tasty revenge.

George W. Bush will step out of office in January 2009, returning to his Texas ranch and a steaming plate of Huevos Rancheros. He and his cronies will leave the rest of America to rebuild our decimated legal system. Deeply embarassing and tragic discoveries about what happened at Guantanamo and in the CIA's "black sites" will eventually abound, no doubt. And only then will the Bush Administration establish a legacy that will persevere through the ages. I am not one to miss a historic moment, so I will be at the Hague when it happens.

Einstein in Carnegie Hall

Phillip Glass and the Phillip Glass Ensemble's performance of "Einstein on the Beach" last night was a sonic boa constrictor that ate Carnegie Hall whole, demanding that we examine every nuance of its innards.

The opera is composed of fast-paced arpeggios on three electric keyboards, clarinet, saxophone and violin, spoken word sections and a chorus' repeated intonation of "One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight," along with other phrases. For three hours, all of this went through subtle changes in time-signature and syncopation and drastic dynamic shifts. Intermittently, violinist Tim Fain would step out from backstage and tear through an awe-inspiring set of 16th notes. Fain's strings, the opera's serpent tongue, left my mouth agape long after he bowed and returned backstage.

Master Glass wrote the opera in the late 1970s, while he plumbed toilets and drove a taxi for a living. This was an abridged performance--the original lasted about 5 hours.

Like a dream, every last detail of last night's performance is sure to fade from memory--to be replaced, eventually, by some vague recollection. But I'm expecting that this arpeggiating Einstein, full of intoned phrases, will show up in one of my nightmares some day. Or return to me suddenly, like a visceral LSD flashback.

Former C.I.A. Agents Discuss Politics, Disrepute and Torture at the New School

Two former CIA agents joined New School President Bob Kerrey in a panel discussion at 55 West 13th Street earlier today, saying that the Bush Administration disregarded tried-and-true spying techniques to justify the invasion of Iraq, that Congressional oversight is good for the CIA, and that "enhanced interrogation" techniques are ineffective and legally questionable when adopted by the CIA.

The event could not have come at a more appropriate time. Today, the front pages of U.S. newspapers bore articles about a National Intelligence Estimate released the day before, which said Iran had halted its efforts to build nuclear weapons in 2003. The report, an assessment compiled by America's 16 intelligence agencies, stood in marked contrast to George W. Bush's comments in October that Iran is currently working to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs and propelling the United States towards "World War III."

Tyler Drumheller, the former director of covert operations for the CIA's division in Europe, who retired from the CIA in 2005, said that the Bush Administration has shirked the intelligence community's normal methods of "agent work, reporting and data collection."

"Intelligence is a story, a never-ending story," Drumheller said. Agents, analysts and policy experts constantly need to reassess their conclusions, he said, because their subjects of inquiry--for instance, states like Iran--are naturally given to making changes in their interests and policies.

But the Bush administration, Drumheller said, pursues "the magic bullet."

"This is the truth, the way it's gotta be," he said, elaborating.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Drumheller worked with other agents to investigate whether Iraq was hoarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. He later wrote On the Brink, an insider's account of how the Bush Administration relied on an unreliable Iraqi defector nicknamed "Curveball" to justify the war in Iraq, which hit bookstores in 2006.

He said that another Iraqi source kept "telling us that there were no weapons of mass destruction."

"If they could do it," the source told them, "they would do it."

He said that this source did not find a way into a National Intelligence Estimate released in 2002, which concluded that Iraq was manufacturing chemical and biological weapons and planned to revive its nuclear weapons program. After the United States invaded Iraq, it turned out that the NIE's conclusions were erroneously flawed.

There is a simple message this new intelligence report intends to send, Kerrey said: "We can be nonpartisan. You can trust us again."

A few moments after Drumheller started speaking, Lang sophomore Alex Cline and two students wearing orange jumpsuits and black hoods entered the room.

"We're the people you torture," Cline announced. The mock prisoners posted themselves to the left of the panel speakers, facing the audience, and stood in silence for the rest of the hour-and-fifteen minute long discussion.

Drumheller continued speaking, seemingly unfazed. Eventually the subject turned to the CIA's reputation in America. Margaret Henoch, who worked as an agent in Washington D.C. and across the world for twenty years, and who retired in early 2007, said that ever since the days of George Washington, Americans have felt a sense of "ambivalence, dislike, distrust" for their spy agencies.

"Americans like to know what their government is doing," Drumheller added, gesturing towards the two mock detainees in the room—who held signs saying things like, "Abolish the CIA," "We All Live in a Racist Police State," and "Close Guantanamo."

Kerrey said that, in some ways, the United States has never had a reliable intelligence agency—in part, because Congressional oversight limits the work of intelligence agencies here. Regardless, the two former agents and Kerrey agreed that they would not like to have it any other way.

Congressional oversight can make being a spy a "frightening, terrifying experience," Drumheller said, "but it makes you sharper."

During the question and answer session, asked if he thought the term "enhanced interrogation" justified the use of torture in interrogations, Drumheller said that he did not believe such techniques—which include water-boarding, stripping prisoners, threatening detainees with dogs, and putting them in rooms that are brightly lit or extremely cold for long periods of time—constitute acts of torture.

Using torture during civil and international conflicts violates the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which bans, "Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture," as well as, "Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

Drumheller said "enhanced interrogation" techniques are ineffective, since they usually yield unreliable information. He added that holding prisoners is not the "province of the CIA"—and Henoch nodded emphatically in agreement—since the FBI and the military are trained to interrogate prisoners and maintain prisons.

"The minute you get an intelligence service into prisoner, holding, interrogation, you're in a very murky, dangerous world," he said.

"Who should be held responsible? I don't know," he continued. "I could give you a list of people. But that would just be my personal prejudice."

The audience laughed.

Photo: New School President Bob Kerrey with former CIA agents Margaret Henoch and Tyler Drumheller. By them stand two mock detainees and Lang sophomore Alex Cline. By Sam Lewis.

Baby Eater

Sorting through my email, this is what I find:

On Dec 4, 2007 8:27 PM, Hannah Rappleye wrote:

peter, peter
baby eater
liked to eat baby pie
but one day
he ate too much
and got baby
in his eye!

No Modest Wisper

For those of you fond of the electronica artist Wisp (I'm guessing there are very few), check out The Wisp Archive, which contains free downloads of most of his releases to date. It is run by a self-described Wisp maniac. Wisp is off-kilter and invigorating, wet and juicy, and until he got a record deal he posted all of his music online for free. I am always excited to see a person who gives their great music away for nothing, and then lets other people do the same. And archives are always special. So that's why I'm shamelessly advertising this...

Macadamia: A Failure

The macadamia: "It's a complete failure as a nut," says Ryan. "Because it's not delicious..."

"It just tastes like a little shit-nut."

Excavations-Cum-Military Installations: Iraq's Occupied Historical Sites

The Iraqi Security Forces, aided by the U.S. military, are starting a construction project beside yet another historic site in Iraq.

This week, after seeing a disheartening collection of photos posted by journalist Jeff Emanuel in late September, archaeologists have been scrambling to figure out what has become of an excavation site for an Abbasid city once populated by Turkish princes in Samarra, where the Iraqi Security Forces began constructing new police barracks in September.

"It is a remarkable documentation, action photos of the work, US officers calmly observing, bulldozers in action flattening an Abbasid palace, details of the barracks being put up," wrote Dr. Alastair Northedge, Professor of Islamic art and archeology at the Sorbonne in Paris and an expert on Samarra's Islamic history, on the IraqCrisis email list. "I don't believe that any other destructive action with regard to antiquities in Iraq during the war has ever been documented in such detail."

Northedge told The Art Newspaper that the new barracks are beside the palace of Sur Isa, which experts believe was constructed by Caliph Al-Mutawakkil sometime between 852 and 853 AD. Northedge also said the new, drab, tan barracks were built over Abbasid houses once home to Turkish princes. Aziz Hamid excavated the houses in the 1960s. "They revealed very interesting stucco relief that lined the walls," wrote Lamia Gailani, a staff member of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, on IraqCrisis.

Northedge lived in a caravan park beside the houses in 1983, doing excavation work for the Iraq State Board of Antiquities. "The event is particularly poignant for me," he wrote.

This June, UNESCO declared Samarra's 9th-century site, littered with ruins of racing tracks, hunting grounds, mosques and palaces of the Abbasid empire, and the 52-meter tall spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Caliph Al-Mutawakkil, a World Heritage site. Now it is on the list of endangered World Heritage sites. But Christina Dahlman, the Program Specialist for the UNESCO Office for Iraq, told the AN that no staff have visited the area yet because of security concerns. She added that UNESCO wasn't consulted on the construction for the police barracks.

"To our knowledge the [Iraq] State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, which manages the site and is UNESCO's main partner in Iraq, was not consulted either," she added.

Dr. John Curtis, director of the Department of Ancient Near East at the British Museum, told me over the phone this summer that the State and Defense Departments have worked with the State Board of Antiquities since the looting of the Iraq Museum in April 2003, mostly to retrieve stolen artifacts and protect archaeological sites. During the days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, John Russell worked through the State Department as Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Culture. In 2004, he helped donate 20 pickup trucks to guards of Iraq's archaeological sites. These days, at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, archaeologist Ismail Hijaraut works as a liaison to the Ministry of Culture.

But Dr. Curtis, who has done extensive work on Middle Eastern history and has worked on preserving Iraq's cultural heritage with the U.S. government and various organizations since 2003, said there is no coordinated program to preserve Iraq's many ancient and Islamic landmarks.

Over the past several years, organizations like the British Museum, the Oriental Institute in Chicago, the British School of Archeology in Iraq, UNESCO, Safe Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE), and Interpol have filled the void with extensive databases documenting looted artifacts, research and consulting on Iraq's heritage and ancient sites, investigations to retrieve artifacts, and more. But since the invasion of 2003, the lack of U.S. support and coordination and Iraq's terrible security concerns have dogged their work.

“We have a very fragmented sort of situation," Curtis said. "What we have to rely on is very, very occasional visits, what we get told by the Iraqi side, or what we can see by satellite photographs."

This summer, Dr. Curtis visited another ancient site-cum-military installation, the Tallil Air Force Base, which surrounds the ancient city of Ur. The air base has a visitors' center built on top of an ancient suburb of the city, called Diqdiqa. On his visit, Curtis did not see much damage to the area, which had never been excavated. But he said the military had dug into the grounds - filled with ancient fragments of pottery and brick - in order to build a foundation and plumbing. Apparently, nobody consulted experts on the construction. “They would certainly have told him, 'Don’t build this,'" Curtis said. "Even the Iraqi guard could’ve told him that.”

His second trip to Iraq since the invasion, this one was short and limited. The day before Dr. Curtis' plane dove from the air safely onto the tarmac, insurgents had blasted 11 mortars onto the base. His security detail refused to take him to the entrance of the base, where the director of the State Board of Antiquities, Abbas al-Hussaini, had been arguing with military personnel for an hour. Hussaini refused to submit to a search, so the military refused his convoy entrance to the base. Without meeting Curtis, Hussaini and his colleagues headed back to Baghdad.

In June, the military sent 40,000 decks of cards to service members in Iraq. They bore images of Iraq's many cultural sites, including Babylon and Ur. "The suits have different themes: diamonds for artefacts, spades for digs, hearts for 'winning hearts and minds' and clubs for heritage preservation," reads a description of the cards by the Assyrian International News Agency. "The seven of clubs carries a picture of the Ctesiphon Arch in Iraq and a caption which asks: 'This site has survived 17 centuries. Will it and others survive you?'"

The cards seem geared as a gesture to raise awareness among troops about Iraqi heritage, in light of the U.S. military's past mistakes - which include the construction of a helicopter pad on the ancient ruins of Babylon and, in 2005, the periodic use of the spiral minaret at the Great Mosque of Caliph Al-Mutawakkil in Samarra as a firing position.

“That’s a gesture, I suppose, to raise the level of awareness of the troops," Curtis said. "But you’d have to ask the troops themselves” about what they think and what they’re doing to preserve Iraqi cultural heritage, he added.

One thing is certain about the state of Iraq's archaeological sites: the Coalition Forces and the Iraq Security Forces will continue to occupy many of them, unimpeded by international law. Northedge, the Paris-based Professor of Islamic art, noted on IraqCrisis that Jeff Emanuel's photos indicate that the U.S. military's Patrol Base Olson sits on the ruins of the Abbasid city in Samarra. Northedge wrote that the military is in the clear: "That point is outside the UNESCO fully protected area."

Photo: Hard at work on the Iraqi police barracks while, in the background, stands the 52-meter tall spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Caliph Al-Mutawakkil. By Jeff Emanuel.

Special note: a Q & A with Alastair Northedge is forthcoming.