{"id":51491,"date":"2014-12-22T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=51491"},"modified":"2017-05-28T11:07:59","modified_gmt":"2017-05-28T10:07:59","slug":"tortures-queen-meet-alfreda-bikowsky-the-senior-officer-at-the-center-of-the-cias-torture-scandals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/12\/tortures-queen-meet-alfreda-bikowsky-the-senior-officer-at-the-center-of-the-cias-torture-scandals\/","title":{"rendered":"Torture\u2019s Queen: Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, the Senior Officer at the Center of the CIA\u2019s Torture Scandals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Alfreda<\/a><\/p>\n

19 Dec 2014 – <\/em>NBC News yesterday\u00a0called her<\/a>\u00a0a \u201ckey apologist\u201d for the CIA\u2019s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>article<\/a> dubbed\u00a0her \u201cThe Unidentified Queen of Torture\u201d and in part\u00a0\u201cthe model for the lead character in \u2018Zero Dark Thirty.\u2019\u201d Yet in both articles she was anonymous.<\/p>\n

The person\u00a0described by both NBC and\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em> is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted \u2014 even by some within the agency.<\/p>\n

The Intercept<\/em> is naming Bikowsky over\u00a0CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency\u2019s use of torture, and her active participation\u00a0in the torture program (including playing a direct part\u00a0in the torture of at least one innocent detainee). Moreover,\u00a0Bikowsky has already\u00a0been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts.<\/p>\n

The executive summary of the torture report released by the Senate last week provides abundant documentation that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately misled Congress<\/a> about multiple aspects of its interrogation program. Yesterday, NBC News<\/em> reported<\/a> that one senior CIA officer in particular was responsible for many of those false claims, describing her as \u201ca top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA.\u201d<\/p>\n

NBC, while withholding her identity,\u00a0noted that the\u00a0same unnamed officer \u201calso participated in \u2018enhanced interrogations\u2019\u00a0of self-professed 9\/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/em>\u2018s Jane Mayer, writing yesterday<\/a> about the\u00a0NBC article, added that the officer \u201cis still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.\u201d This officer, Mayer noted, is the same one who \u201cdropped 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.\u201d Mayer\u00a0also\u00a0wrote that\u00a0the officer\u00a0is\u00a0\u201cthe same woman\u201d identified in the Senate report who oversaw \u201cthe months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both news outlets withheld the name of this CIA officer even though her identity is widely known among journalists, and her name has been used by various media outlets in connection with her work at the CIA. Both articles cited requests by the CIA not to identify her, even though they\u00a0provided details making her identity clear.<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

In fact, earlier this year,\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em> identified<\/a> Bikowsky by name, describing her as a CIA analyst \u201cwho was tied to a critical intelligence-sharing failure before the Sept.\u00a011, 2001, attacks and the botched 2003 \u2018rendition\u2019 of an innocent German citizen thought to be an al-Qaeda operative.\u201d That Post\u00a0<\/em>report led to both McClatchy<\/a> and independent journalist Marcy Wheeler<\/a> raising questions about the propriety of\u00a0Bikowsky\u2019s former personal lawyer, Robert Litt, playing a key role in his current capacity as a top government lawyer in deciding which parts of the torture report should be released.<\/p>\n

The McClatchy article identified\u00a0Bikowsky by name as\u00a0the officer who\u00a0\u201cplayed a central role in the bungled rendition of Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri, who was revealed to be innocent, claimed to have been tortured by the agency.\u201d El-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped from Macedonia and tortured by the CIA in Afghanistan, was released in 2003 after it was revealed he was not involved in al Qaeda.<\/p>\n

Back in 2011, John Cook, the outgoing editor of\u00a0The Intercept<\/em>,\u00a0wrote an article<\/a> at Gawker, based on the reporting of\u00a0Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy,\u00a0naming Bikowsky and pointing to extensive evidence showing that she\u00a0\u201chas a long (if pseudonymous) history of being associated with some of the agency\u2019s most disastrous boondoggles,\u201d including a key role in the CIA\u2019s pre-9\/11 failure to notify the FBI that two known al Qaeda operatives had entered the country.<\/p>\n

Earlier that year, the Associated Press reported<\/a>\u00a0that a\u00a0\u201chard-charging CIA analyst [who] had pushed the agency into one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism\u201d (the rendering for torture of the innocent El-Masri) was repeatedly promoted. Despite internal recommendations that she be punished, the AP reported that she\u00a0instead\u00a0\u201chas risen to one of the premier jobs in the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center.\u201d<\/p>\n

The article\u00a0named her as \u201cFrances,\u201d explaining that the AP\u00a0\u201cagreed to the CIA\u2019s request to refer to Frances by her middle name because her first is unusual.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bikowsky\u2019s name, and her long string of controversial actions, have become such an open secret that she even has her own lengthy, detailed Wikipedia page<\/a>. The entry describes her as a \u201ccareer Central Intelligence Agency\u00a0officer who has headed . . .\u00a0the Global Jihad unit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the months leading up to the release of the torture report, the CIA and the White House fought to prevent the Senate even from assigning pseudonyms to the CIA officers whose actions are chronicled in the report. The Senate ultimately capitulated, making it difficult to follow any coherent narrative about what these officers did.<\/p>\n

As Mayer wrote in yesterday\u2019s article:<\/p>\n

Readers can speculate on how the pieces fit together, and who the personalities behind this program are.\u00a0But without even pseudonyms, it is exceedingly hard to connect the dots. \u00a0. . .\u00a0[W]<\/em>ithout names, or even pseudonyms, it is almost impossible to piece together the puzzle, or hold anyone in the American government accountable. Evidently, that is exactly what the C.I.A. was fighting for during its eight-month-long redaction process, behind all those closed doors.<\/em><\/p>\n

Naming Bikowsky allows people to piece together these puzzles and hold American officials accountable. The CIA\u2019s arguments for suppression of her name are\u00a0vague and unpersuasive, alluding generally to\u00a0the possibility that she could be the target\u00a0of\u00a0retaliation.<\/p>\n

The CIA\u2019s arguments focus on an undefined threat to her safety. \u201cWe would strongly object to attaching anyone\u2019s name given the current environment,\u201d a CIA spokesperson, Ryan Trapani, told The Intercept<\/em> in an email. In a follow-up voicemail he added: \u201cThere are crazy people in this world and we are trying to mitigate those threats.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, beyond Bikowsky, a number of CIA officials who oversaw and implemented the program have already been publicly identified\u2014indeed, many of the key architects of the program, such as\u00a0Jose Rodriguez, are frequent guests<\/a> on news programs.<\/p>\n

Trapani also argued that the Senate report is \u201cbased only upon one side\u2019s perspective on this story\u201d and that an article about Bikowsky \u201cdoesn\u2019t require naming a person who\u2019s never had a chance to rebut what\u2019s been said about them.\u201d When The Intercept<\/em> asked for the CIA\u2019s rebuttal\u2014or Bikowsky\u2019s\u2014to the critical portrayal of her in the Senate report, Trapani declined to offer one. He noted that CIA Director John Brennan had disputed the report\u2019s contention that the agency had misrepresented the value of the interrogation program.<\/p>\n

_________________________<\/p>\n

Email the authors: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a>, peter.maass@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency\u2019s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america","category-exposures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}