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Home Front: WoT
The Unidentified Queen of Torture
2014-12-21
From the New Yorker via the Puppy Blender. Just a taste here.

What's humorous about this, if anything can be funny, is how the media kowtowed to the CIA on shielding this woman's identity. Obviously she's not a Republican. The media is happy to name lots of people unless said person is a Democrat-gone-wrong or a demented rape 'accuser'.

Our brave, bold media could do us a favor by naming her; they won't of course. Jane Mayer at the New Yorker is as spineless, gullible and progressive (but I repeat myself) as the rest of the MSM.

And Jamie Gorelick should be in the front row of people wanting this woman to be named -- anything, ANYTHING to divert attention from her...
For the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in the devastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why.

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”
Posted by:Steve White

#9  Excellent question. My guess is.... self inflicted. But that is only a guess. From my readings, it appears they lost some very good employees. That Memorial Wall needed no more stars.
Posted by: Besoeker   2014-12-21 16:41  

#8  I'm wondering how much of the waiver of common sense was "suggested" and eagerly taken up by the COP and staff, or if it was self-inflicted.
Posted by: Pappy   2014-12-21 15:20  

#7  The failure to perform normal security protocols was another significant failure. Posted by Pappy


Exackery! I don't recall 'Normal security protocals' or tradecraft for a PM ever including a huddle or 'meet and greet' around the source's approaching vehicle. It pains me to say it, but you've got to give the bad guys credit.
Posted by: Besoeker   2014-12-21 12:32  

#6  Mathews was an analyst.

The failure to perform normal security protocols was another significant failure.
Posted by: Pappy   2014-12-21 12:24  

#5  I couldn't find it archived, but I do remember reading some open source traffic about the Chief of Post at Chapman [Mathews] being in direct coms with the White House situation room. As you may recall, there was an election approaching and the heat was on to locate UBL.

I seem to recall Mathews being an 'analyst' vs. a trained Case Officer (CO). This may, or may not have had something to do with throwing caution to the wind, which resulted in a disastrous meeting with the source.
Posted by: Besoeker   2014-12-21 12:01  

#4  Three cheers for affirmative action!
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2014-12-21 11:51  

#3  The gov't race for gender equality and the shattering of so-called glass ceilings didn't pan out so well at FOB Chapman either.

A Failure to Follow Security Procedures:
Had proper security procedures been followed, the attack should only have killed the security contractors, the vehicle driver and perhaps the Jordanian GID officer. But proper security measures were not followed, and several CIA officers rushed out to greet the unscreened Jordanian source. Reports indicate that the source had alerted his Jordanian handler that he had intelligence pertaining to the location of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. (There are also reports that al-Balawi had given his handlers highly accurate battle damage assessments on drone strikes in Pakistan, indicating that he had access to high-level jihadist sources.) The prospect of finally receiving such crucial and long-sought information likely explains the presence of the high-profile visitors from CIA headquarters in Langley and the station in Kabul — and their exuberance over receiving such coveted intelligence probably explains their eager rush to meet the source before he had been properly screened
.


Interestingly, the late Jennifer Mathews was also blamed for 9/11 failures.
Posted by: Besoeker   2014-12-21 03:40  

#2  Incidentally, the guys that ran the program swear up and down the "torture' they used produced results.
Perhaps it wasn't torture after all.
Posted by: Mikey Hunt   2014-12-21 01:20  

#1  Valerie is that you?
Posted by: Mikey Hunt   2014-12-21 01:18  

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