CIA Counter-Terrorism Expert: Obama and Holder ‘At War’ with Agency
Monday, August 31, 2009 7:59 PM
By: Kent Clizbe
In the early days and weeks after September 11, 2001, a small cadre of men (and a few women) with vast amounts of intelligence experience reported to the Langley, Virginia headquarters of the CIA. These unsung heroes were then dispatched across the globe to run operations against the Al-Qaeda conspirators who leveled the World Trade Center and struck the nerve center of the US military.
The FBI, a domestic law enforcement agency, did not have the ability or skills needed to track down and strike the attackers overseas. The Pentagon, with F22s, nuclear aircraft carriers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and battalions of the best armor in the history of mankind, was like an elephant attacked by a mouse—mighty, but helpless in its mammoth rage.
Our best hope lay with the grey-bearded intelligence professionals who fanned out across the world. Supplementing the skeleton crew of staff officers left in the wake of the Clintons’ anti-intelligence scourging of the CIA, the volunteers went to the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, to the most remote and isolated outposts in the world. Sometimes they worked with friendly forces, and sometimes they worked alone. They focused like a laser beam on one thing — stop the next attack. Their mission: Seek and destroy the terrorist planners, facilitators, trainers, financiers, and their infrastructure wherever they were.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, CIA officers, both the contractors and the over-extended staff officers, launched dozens of initiatives. The Counter-terrorist Center’s motto, “Deny, Disrupt, Destroy,” became the reason for our living. We left our families for months on end and sacrificed personal and professional lives to fight the Global War on Terror. Google “Jihadists in Paradise,” for an unauthorized account of one of my contributions (which I have been advised that I can neither confirm nor deny).
As I did my part in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa, my family tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy at home. My son was in eighth grade in September 2001. I did not see him graduate the next summer. I was home less than six months for each of the first three of his high school years. Even with my nightly phone calls, his attitude and grades plummeted in my absence. He went from a happy, engaged, charming 13 year old with straight A’s and a focus on the future, to a sullen, uncommunicative, high school flunky. I put my successful and lucrative executive recruiting business on hold for eight years. Finally, after five years of constant travel, my family sacrifice account was overdrawn. Coming home was an option for me, and I took it.
Others did not take that option, and they sacrificed the quality of their marriages, participation in their children’s and grandchildren’s lives, the profitability of their businesses, and more. Personal and professional issues festered and rotted while they fought to keep America safe and prevented further attacks on our homeland.
In contrast, where was Eric Holder? Before leaving President Clinton’s employ, he orchestrated the pardons of several Puerto Rican separatist terrorists. Then in 2003, as a partner in the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, Mr Holder’s client, Chiquita Brands, admitted paying to support terrorist death squads in Colombia and paid a $25 million fine. During the time that my friends worked to disrupt and destroy terrorist networks threatening America, Holder’s firm represented — for free — 16 terrorist detainees held at Guantanamo.
Has he made any personal or professional sacrifices since his country was attacked in 2001? If he has, it is difficult to find them. When the Special Prosecutor comes calling, maybe someone from Covington & Burling can represent my colleagues for free, like they did for Lakhdar Boumedienne and ten other terrorists in Gitmo.
The Holder/Obama Global War on the CIA (GWCIA) has only just begun, as it debuted with “grisly revelations” of revving drills, gunshots in the next cell, and threats against a terrorist’s children. The GWOT is not for the faint of heart, nor the queasy. No war ever has been. There may be slight improprieties stashed in the CIA’s closets, but the liberal-appeasing GWCIA is foolhardy and dangerous.
Mike Spann, was the first to die in the GWOT. He won’t have to worry about the Holder/Obama GWCIA. But others in the Agency are very worried. While we sacrificed to achieve incremental victories, Holder and Obama plotted and schemed — not against those “evil-mongers” who killed our countrymen, but against those of us hunting the terrorists. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The odor is not from Langley, Mr Holder.
Kent Clizbe is a former member of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. In 2001, in the aftermath of Sept.11th, he returned to the CIA to serve multiple Counter-Terrorism deployments. In 2005, he was awarded the Intelligence Community Seal Medallion for his anti-terrorism work.
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Poor Mr. Clizbe. Apparently the sacrafice of normalcy he suffered is worthy of special dispensation that the thousands of members of our armed services (who also sacrafice normalcy each day while serving to protect and defend their country) aren’t entitled should they fail to follow the laws pertaining to treatment of prisoners or enemy combatants.
Comment by Michael Hiller — 9/3/2009 @ 3:32 pm
Michael…please read the article below. If you want to endanger yourself with your sympathy for terrorists, go ahead, but stop endangering my family and me in the process. You should be thanking the CIA for protecting your butt.
How a Detainee Became An Asset
Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding
By Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate
Washington Post
Saturday, August 29, 2009
After enduring the CIA’s harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency’s secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called “terrorist tutorials.”
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Speaking in English, Mohammed “seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology and operatives,” said one of two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified. “He’d even use a chalkboard at times.”
These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.
“KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete,” according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA’s then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.
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Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.
“What do you think changed KSM’s mind?” one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. “Of course it began with that.”
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“KSM almost immediately following his capture in March 2003 elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow airport,” according to a document released by the CIA on Monday that summarizes the intelligence provided by Mohammed. The agency thinks he assumed that Ramzi Binalshibh, a Sept. 11 conspirator captured in September 2002, had already divulged the plan.
One former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said Mohammed, like several other detainees, seemed to have decided that it was okay to stop resisting after he had endured a certain amount of pressure.
“Once the harsher techniques were used on [detainees], they could be viewed as having done their duty to Islam or their cause, and their religious principles would ask no more of them,” said the former official.
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Mohammed described plans to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, East Asia and the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, including using a network of Pakistanis “to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn bridge in New York.” Cross-referencing material from different detainees, and leveraging information from one to extract more detail from another, the CIA and FBI went on to round up operatives both in the United States and abroad.
“Detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals — many of who we had never heard of before — that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations,” according to the CIA summary.
Mohammed told interrogators that after the Sept. 11 attacks, his “overriding priority” was to strike the United States, but that he “realized that a follow-on attack would be difficult because of security measures.” Most of the plots, as a result, were “opportunistic and limited,” according to the summary.
One former agency official recalled that Mohammed was once asked to write a summary of his knowledge about al-Qaeda’s efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. The terrorist group had explored buying either an intact nuclear weapon or key components such as enriched uranium, although there is no evidence of significant progress on that front.
“He wrote us an essay” on al-Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions, the official said. “Not all of it was accurate, but it was quite extensive.”
Mohammed was an unparalleled source in deciphering al-Qaeda’s strategic doctrine, key operatives and likely targets, the summary said, including describing in “considerable detail the traits and profiles” that al-Qaeda sought in Western operatives and how the terrorist organization might conduct surveillance in the United States.
Comment by rob — 9/3/2009 @ 4:38 pm