Back when Barack Obama was running for President, he promised “a break with the past” on how America’s intelligence machinery was managed: no more renditions, no more torture, no more secret prisons.
Odd, then, as this excellent piece in the Washingtonian from back in March observes, that the President then confirmed Steve Kappes as Leon Panetta’s deputy at the CIA – in large part at the behest of Democrats on the Hill. Consider:
When Obama’s intelligence transition team had visited Langley, it had gotten a pitch from Kappes and other CIA officials to “retain the option of reestablishing secret prisons and using aggressive interrogation methods,” according to an anecdote buried in a Washington Post story.
“It was one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I have had,” David Boren, the moderate Oklahoma Democrat and former Senate Intelligence committee chair who led the transition team, told the Post.
Or:
…the case of Khaled El-Masri, a German car salesman abducted by the CIA. Masri was picked up while on vacation in Macedonia in December 2003, flown to Afghanistan, and thrown into a secret dungeon, where he was interrogated and tortured for five months. Eventually he was released with no charges against him, flown back to Albania, and dumped onto a highway. In 2007, the Supreme Court let stand an appeals-court ruling that rejected Masri’s suit against the CIA, saying it posed a “grave risk” of damage to national security by revealing “state secrets.”
“From the start, the rendition team suspected that his case was one of mistaken identity,” Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker last year. “But the CIA officer in charge at Langley—the agency asked that the officer’s name be withheld—insisted that Masri be further interrogated.”
Even after it was determined that Masri’s German passport wasn’t a forgery and that he wasn’t the man the CIA was looking for, the officer in charge refused to release him, Mayer and others say. Masri went on a hunger strike, losing 60 pounds, until finally “skeptics in the agency went directly over the officer’s head to [CIA director George] Tenet, who realized that his agency had been brutalizing an innocent man,” Mayer wrote.
Despite all this, the woman in charge of the operation has been promoted—twice—by Kappes, according to Mayer and sources who corroborated her story.
