The CIA Loses Control of the Narrative
As Aeon points out, the CIA’s spokesperson, George Little, is pissy about the coverage the WaPo gave to the latest partial declassification of detainee CSRTs.
The June 16 news story "CIA Mistaken on ‘High-Value’ Detainee, Document Shows" suggests that Abu Zubaida was an unimportant terrorist figure before his capture in 2002. That is wrong. Mr. Zubaida was a major terrorist facilitator with extensive knowledge of al-Qaeda. During questioning, Mr. Zubaida provided valuable information, including a detailed road map to al-Qaeda operatives that greatly expanded our understanding of the terrorist group and helped take other terrorists off the streets. Had your reporters asked, we would have made those points.
GEORGE LITTLE
Spokesman
Central Intelligence Agency
Thing is, it is George Little, and not Peter Finn and Julie Tate, who get it wrong–Little is mischaracterizing the WaPo story as a way to make his dubious claims about Abu Zubaydah. Here’s what they wrote about Zubaydah.
An al-Qaeda associate captured by the CIA and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques said his jailers later told him they had mistakenly thought he was the No. 3 man in the organization’s hierarchy and a partner of Osama bin Laden, according to newly released excerpts from a 2007 hearing.
"They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’ " said Abu Zubaida, speaking in broken English, according to the new transcript of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
President George W. Bush described Abu Zubaida in 2002 as "al-Qaeda’s chief of operations." Intelligence, military and law enforcement sources told The Washington Post this year that officials later concluded he was a Pakistan-based "fixer" for radical Islamist ideologues, but not a formal member of al-Qaeda, much less one of its leaders.
They in no way suggested Zubaydah was unimportant or important. They reported he was a "fixer," and not a member of al Qaeda, which is precisely what he was. But Little invents claims made by the WaPo, so he can make grand claims about Zubaydah’s importance and intelligence value.
And there are two other weird aspects to Little’s strawman complaint. First look at whom the WaPo sources their own description of Zubaydah to: "intelligence, military and law enforcement sources." While "law enforcement sources" probably means FBI, intelligence sources may well mean folks at the CIA.
Finally, note that the WaPo did call the CIA for this article; he refuted ACLU attorney Ben Wizner’s claim that the CIA is hiding the CSRTs to shield the CIA from legal accountability.
George Little, a CIA spokesman, said, "The CIA plainly has a very different take on its past interrogation practices — what they were and what they weren’t — and on the need to protect properly classified national security information."
(Though that appears to be a scripted statement that every CIA spokesperson was giving that day.)
The question is, why would Little go to the trouble of correcting an error that was not one–in the letters to the editor section that only sharp-eyed readers like Aeon will see?
I’ve got two theories–though they’re nothing but theories.
The first is that CIA anticipates it’ll have to make the argument about whether or not CIA oversold Abu Zubaydah’s position when they appealed for the right to torture. Since the "approval" granted by the Bybee Two memo rides on whether or not Abu Zubaydah was a high level operative, I can imagine that CIA would invest some (futile) energy in trying to pitch that story.
The second is that they’re trying to undercut obvious theories–such as they lied about Abu Zubaydah’s importance–that might make the FOIA battles upcoming in the next few weeks harder to win (or, alternately, the contempt charge from Judge Hellerstein).
Whatever it is, George Little’s making a desperate effort to take out a few windmills before the real battle begins. And he’s not doing a very credible job of even that.
This never would have happened if Dick Cheney were still running things.
/s
Something missing there, or something extra?
Both. Fixed now, I think.
Sorry, OT. But young Ethan was formerly an aide to our felonious friend Scooter Libby before going to law school, from which he graduated in 2005. Probably he did nothing more momentous than getting Scooter’s coffee.
It’s the Chicago way..,.offices must be passed from father to son….
Well, we’ve got a Duncan Hunter Jr. too, if you want nauseate yourself further.
Intelligence, military and law enforcement sources told The Washington Post this year that officials later concluded he was a Pakistan-based “fixer” for radical Islamist ideologues, but not a formal member of al-Qaeda, much less one of its leaders.
I missed the news that Abu Zubaydah was a fixer – does anyone know who he was supposed to have been assigned to work for? A fixer is only really useful if they have extensive local knowledge and connections – so it seems like a bit of a stretch to imagine a Palestinian as having much use as a fixer in Pakistan.
does anyone know who he was supposed to have been assigned to work for?
You know, I have a very good friend who was in the Coast Guard earlier in the decade. Back when the Iraq drumbeat was building but we had not yet attacked, he told me about how he went to a “Middle East” class and that he was taught (being common knowledge and not secret) about AQ’s cell structure and that they knew that wherever they attacked, terrorist (types, you know what I mean) would congregate wherever that was. “Al Qaeda in Iraq” was thus for me always a comedic term. They knew all of that would happen, and in fact, based on what he told me was common knowledge within the military, none of the Iraq War so far has deviated from that characterization.
This is actually a reply to you, I swear.
This is why I laugh whenever I hear politicians or the media or anybody assert that AQ is organized any way similar to Western gangs and/or bureacracies. It’s absolutely retarded and disingenuous for Americans to go on and on being told and believing that there’s even a such thing as a “#3 in Al Qaeda.” It ain’t like that, it’s much flatter and decentralized, but that’s too abstract for the 6pm news so it’s pablumized and spun for American consumption, I figure as a way to understand the conflict in a way that unites opposition toward the military’s enemy.
That said, a “fixer” is absolutely a Mafia metaphor. Zubaydah could have been anything, to anybody, given the definition of “terrorist” the US was working under at the time. Everything else has been an explanation or a description, but always mediated. Those interrogation tapes would have been gold.
The entire narrative is non-sensical.
A “fixer” is first and foremost a translator for somebody. Second, a body guard as they need to keep their client safe. I’m getting the impression AZ was in reality little more than a gofer, if that. Which, with his bizarre diary, makes him a rather sad and hapless wannabe jihadist groupie with no real skills to speak of.
fwiw, there’s a (hilarious) book that describes in detail the relationship between a fixer and a journalist: The Curse of the Al Dulaimi Hotel by Colin Freeman.
This just in from a Pakistani guest on The Amy Goodman Show: Barack W. Obama now has displaced 3,500,000 (3.5 million) people in order to go after 5,000 Taliban with his killer attack drones, helicopter gunships, tanks, and earth movers, creating a human catastrophe that has not been seen since, well, since Bush’s Iraq or Johnson’s Vietnam. The crops and farm animals in Pakistan have been decimated in a nation already suffering from a handcrafted “lousy economy” (wink, wink). I am so glad that the 0-man now is going for regime change in Iran in order to hand over all that oil to the Houston Oil Thugs, I mean to bring democracy to a freedom loving people. Hope is now become “4 more years of sacrifice.” Keep cheering the zero-man on. He is doing the same thing here in the American economy. Go back to Chicago, Mr. Zero.
OT (Sorta) but the CIA may very well regain the narrative – on keeping torture photos hidden. The Lieberman-Graham atrocity got passed out of the Senate by unanimous consent (!) so we are going to to have to fight it again like we did to get it out of the supplemental. I knew this was going to happen, but I just don’t want it to be forgotten about. Seems like the blogs are all about healthcare (yay!) and Sanford (who gives a f*ck) right now.
Just occurred to me that one of the real reasons behind keeping the photos hidden isn’t about the acts depicted in the photos.
It’s about the timing embedded in the photos’ metadata.
Now I’m wondering if POTUS and Panetta were made aware of info in the photos’ metadata or not — or were they simply told by the internal equivalent of Mr. Little that the content of the photos, consisting of acts which might raise the ire of certain entities, was enough reason to withhold the photos.
drational (10, EW (13) — wouldn’t it be possible that Mr. Little or his handlers already know exactly which intel folks Finn spoke with or didn’t speak with, making either Little’s claim that Finn didn’t talk with the CIA an outright fabrication, or a long stretch of the truth?
Marcy, I think your explanations are right, and I just wanted to add another possibility.
The CIA has been beaten up by Finn before on substantive problems with torture justification, and it looks like he only picked up this beat 9 months ago. So Finn may not have the deep relationships with CIA that I’d imagine might impair aggressive reporting. It seems that WaPo is particularly sensitive to charges of liberal bias these days, and willing to purge to prove it isn’t so. So I wonder if another part of this letter is a public note alleging that Finn’s reporting is shoddy to put in his personnel file. Maybe not to get him Froomkinned, but rather to communicate that he has an “anti-CIA agenda” and could they please send him back to Moscow.
Pure speculation….
FWIW, I don’t think Froomkin was canned for being “liberal,” per se.
That said, I think you might be right–this might be a slap at Finn to push for Joby Warrick to retain sole authority of the CIA beat.
Mr. Little can’t explain this:
Who is “they” who apologized to Zubaydah?
Nor can Mr. Little explain why “they” waterboarded a guy with a head injury 83 times when there was more intel to be gained using Geneva/UNCAT compliant methods.
But keep on typing those letters to the editor, Mr. Little. We enjoy hearing from you.
i sit here thinking how many man-hrs, how many man-days, how many man-years will the cia burn trying to cover up its latest bungle (torturing)?
i wonder that the cia management has time, or takes time, to do anything else, like maybe manage intelligence gathering efforts intelligently.
I read this slightly differently. This is a public signal from (the torture faction inside) the CIA to their Republican allies that there is a new past to replace the old one which is no longer useful. The new story will be that he was waterboarded because he was a major terrorist facilitator. If the Dems are anybody else makes an issue of this, it will be reported as ‘he said, she said’ and the torturers will win. I can hear Chris Cizilla, for example, saying the American people aren’t interested in this silly partisan debate over whether or not AZ was the al Qaeda #3 or a major terrorist facilitator, they just want Congress to pass a bipartisan health care reform bill.
I don’t think they’re losing control of the narrative at all. I think they’ll probably suceed at moving the goalposts.
Unless, of course, the dirty f*cking hippie bloggers can swamp the attempts at shifting the Overton Window back in the other direction.
All they have at this point is the Rove methodology of repeating the same story over and over again until it becomes conventional wisdom.
I read your excellent post and agree fully with your analysis, but one thing in it really struck me. In this paragraph,
“The first is that CIA anticipates it’ll have to make the argument about whether or not CIA oversold Abu Zubaydah’s position when they appealed for the right to torture. Since the “approval” granted by the Bybee Two memo rides on whether or not Abu Zubaydah was a high level operative, I can imagine that CIA would invest some (futile) energy in trying to pitch that story.”
You use the phrase, “the right to torture”. I found this rather disturbing. Maybe I’m being anal, but it seems to me that the way that we use language matters. I know it was not your intent to infer that torture is a “right”, but that’s how it comes out sounding (or reading). I can just image one of the lunatic fringe torture apologists pointing to your article and saying, “See, even Marcy Wheeler concedes that the CIA has the right to torture”.
Again, I know it was not your intent, but how we use language matters. Otherwise the CIA , the politicians, and the pundits, wouldn’t bother with the euphemisms like enhanced interrogation, sleep adjustment, and prolonged detention. They’d just call it what it is, torture.
Language does indeed matter and being accurate matters. The sentence as written was, and is, accurate. They were arrogating to themselves the right to torture. That is precisely what was occurring and it should be called such irrespective of your personal semantical distinctions.
It’s not “my personal semantical distinction.” It’s a fact. There is no “right to torture.” How can you make an appeal for a right that doesn’t exist? Just pointing out the unfortunate choice the wording. I meant no offense. I was only making a constructive criticism. No need to be angry.
wrong thread – let me see if I can move this
Oops! Unfortunate choice of wording.