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CIA INVOLVED IN TORTURE

The problem, of course, is that torture is a crime - one of the most heinous crimes anyone can authorize, commit, or cover up. If officials can get away with torture, there is no limit to the crimes they may commit. And if American officials can get away with torture, what hope is there for holding foreign dictatorships accountable, as the United States and its allies did at Nuremberg?

Nor does one have to be a law professor to know that the president's duty is not to exempt government officials from prosecution; it is to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Obama has no authority to suspend the operation of some laws or to exempt his secret agents from their application. These powers, known as the "suspension" and "dispensation" powers when asserted by the Stuart kings, were expressly outlawed by the British Declaration of Rights in 1689. They were so beyond the pale that Congress saw no need to repeat them a century later when it drafted the American bill of rights.

Obama does not appear to have authorized his lawyers to claim unlimited and illimitable powers on his behalf, although they may have done so in a still secret memorandum purporting to justify assassination by drone (Becker and Shane 2012). Even so, by exempting from prosecution any CIA agent who relied in "good faith" on secret legal memos authorizing torture, Obama has, in effect, claimed such powers for himself and his successors.

Che was an anti-sectarian revolutionary intellectual "motivated by profound feelings of love" who criticized the Stalinism of the Soviet Union and its foreign poUcy and carried in his Bolivian backpack books by Leon Trotsky and Georg Lukács. He viewed internationalism as "not only a duty for the peoples who struggle for a better future" but "also an inescapable necessity." A highly cultured man, he wrote magnificent books, essays, and poems. He liked to play chess and soccer. While suffering from asthma attacks all his life, he maintained an ironic wit. He loved cameras and took stunning photographs. He led major economic projects for the Cuban Revolution and championed subjective factors in the transition to sociaUsm in hopes of creating "the new man." He led freedom fighters in Africa and Latin America and spoke eloquently against imperialism in the United Nations and other international settings. By courageously practicing the values and ideals for which he lived and died, he epitomized - in the words of José Martí - the "only practical man, whose dream today will be the law of tomorrow."

Hearings conducted by the U.S. Senate's "Church committee" (named after Senator Frank Church who headed the investigation) to examine CIA- and Presidentially ordered political assassinations faced a barrage of claims that "we didn't do it, honest, we didn't," most notably from CIA agent Rodriguez, who claimed he received the order to have Che killed from higher-ranking Bolivian officers. Ratner and Smith do a thorough job of revealing Rodriguez's grisly past and propensity for murder and mendacity both before and after Che's murder. Today, lying and the spreading of half-truths continue to consume a lot of energy in the U.S. political class and mass media - and in the still secretive and protected confines of the CIA and all branches of government. While the abundant evidence provided by Ratner and Smith as to how the CIA and the U.S. presidency masterminded Che's murder is damning enough, additional suspicion is aroused by Paco Ignacio Taibo II in his excellent biography Guevara, Also Known as Che. There, Taibo II writes about the legend of "Che's curse" that emerged when several key players known to have been involved in Che's capture and assassination, as well as the disappearance of his body, "died unnatural deaths" in the next fifteen years. For example, President René Barrientos, not long after confirming the order to execute Che as he had earlier promised the chief CIA operative in Bolivia, died when his helicopter burst into flames and crashed; the commanding officer when Che was captured was killed in a car crash; and in 1981 the army captain who captured Che was shot and left paralyzed. CIA agent Rodriguez himself experienced attacks of asthma, which he had never experienced before, but when allergy tests turned up nothing the doctors concluded it was either psychological or "Che's curse."Cockcroft, J. D. (2012). Who killed che? how the CIA got away with murder. Monthly Review, 64(1), 54-58. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1011081991?accountid=40611

CIA AIDS SAUDI ARABIA AND TALIBAN

Coll's meticulous research and 200 interviews put ample flesh on the bare bones of the foregoing generalizations. He highlights the ambiguous position of Saudi Arabia, particularly that both Prince Turki al-Faisal, the kingdom's former intelligence chief and principal Saudi liaison with Pakistan, and the United States in supporting the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation. Prince Turki and his deputy, Ahmed Badeeb, had later financed the Taliban, and for this reason, the sincerity of the Prince's 1998 effort to get Taliban leader Mullah Omar to surrender Bin Laden has been questioned. The Prince nonetheless managed to maintain close working relations with the CIA while other elements of the Saudi establishment, notably Turki's uncle, Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz, were suspicious of the United States and rebuffed American requests for intelligence cooperation. Like everyone else involved in Afghanistan, the Saudis seemed to speak with more than one voice.Dunbar, C. (2006). Ghost wars: The secret history of the CIA, afghanistan, and bin laden, from the soviet invasion to september 11, 2001, updated with new documents from the 9/11 commission. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 38(2), 332-334. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/195594533?accountid=40611

CIA DID NOTHING TO STOP AL-QA'IDA

Mahle seems excessive in blaming Tenet for failing to target al-Qaeda before 9/11 with the sort of vigor that occurred after 9/11. "Where Tenet failed as the spy chief is in the recognition that al-Qa'ida and ideologically related groups represented an existential threat to the American way of life." An existential threat? Does al-Qaeda have the power to end America's existence, in the way, say, the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany did? Of course not. But Mahle is on safer ground when she points out that Tenet's CIA did not even commission a National Intelligence Estimate on al-Qaeda and that the CIA did not have a good grasp of the nature and extent of Islamist extremism. Dreyfuss, R. (2005). Denial and deception: An insider's view of the CIA from iran-contra to 9/11. Middle East Policy, 12(4), 164-166. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/203685072?accountid=40611

Max Weber wrote about this phenomenon extensively at the end of the nineteenth century. The question is: how well does this hypothesis fit the modern intelligence community in the United States? In fact, at the end of the Cold War in 1991, this set of 13 (now 16) agencies moved with remarkable nimbleness to confront changes in the world. During the Cold War, some 60 to 80 percent of America's intelligence resources were focus on the Soviet Union, Communist China, and their allies; by Fiscal Year 1993, that figure had dropped to 13 percent, as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) reoriented intelligence missions toward new threats. That is not just change; it is massive change. Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 by Amy B. Zegart. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2007. 352 pp. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abuanas41 (talk • contribs) 18:12, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Reference

• Dreyfuss, R. (2005). Denial and deception
• Amy B. Zegart Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2007. 352 pp.
• Dunbar, C. (2006). Ghost wars
• J. D. (2012). Who killed che?
• C. H. (2012). The law: Barack obama and civil liberties. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 42(4) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abuanas41 (talk • contribs) 16:37, 1 April 2015 (UTC)