{"id":55426,"date":"2015-03-16T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T12:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=55426"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:25:58","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:25:58","slug":"cia-director-describes-how-the-u-s-outsources-terror-interrogations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/03\/cia-director-describes-how-the-u-s-outsources-terror-interrogations\/","title":{"rendered":"CIA Director Describes How the U.S. Outsources Terror Interrogations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Spencer Platt\/Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

13 Mar 2015 – <\/em>In rare remarks about a sensitive issue, the director of the CIA confirmed today that the U.S. government works with foreign intelligence agencies to capture and jointly interrogate suspected terrorists.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are places throughout the world where CIA has worked with other intelligence services and has been able to bring people into custody and engage in the debriefings of these individuals\u2026through our liaison partners, and sometimes there are joint debriefings that take place as well,\u201d said John Brennan, the CIA director, speaking<\/a> at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.<\/p>\n

Brennan\u2019s remarks<\/a> confirm what journalists have long reported<\/a>: that the Obama administration sometimes helps other countries do the dirty work of snatching and interrogating terror suspects\u2013keeping the U.S. at arm\u2019s length from operations that are ethically and legally dubious.<\/p>\n

During a question-and-answer session, it was Fox News\u2019 Megyn Kelley who questioned Brennan about \u201ccapturing terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAre we still doing that?\u201d she asked. \u201cAnd where are we keeping them and how are we interrogating them?\u201d<\/p>\n

Brennan responded that the U.S. is able to work with \u201cpartners\u201d to \u201cidentify individuals and to have them captured\u2026 although there are not a lot of public pieces on Fox News about somebody that might be picked up in different parts of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one of his first moves after taking office in 2009, President Obama famously shut down the CIA\u2019s Black Site program, which was begun under President George W. Bush. After 9\/11, more than 100 alleged terrorists were captured and sent to secret CIA-run detention centers where they were tortured and interrogated by agency operatives.<\/p>\n

Although the Black Sites have been shut down and no new prisoners sent to Guantanamo Bay, detentions of terrorists\u2014and attacks against them\u2013remain a murky issue. The administration has brought several alleged terrorists to face trial in the United States, and it has killed thousands more in drone strikes, along with hundreds<\/a> of civilians. Obama has also maintained<\/a> the authority (as President Bill Clinton did in the 1990s) to render people to third countries, where laws are looser.<\/p>\n

The Intercept\u2019s<\/em> Jeremy Scahill and others have detailed cases during the Obama administration in which terror suspects were held in foreign custody at the behest of the U.S. In 2011, Scahill reported<\/a> for The Nation<\/em> on a secret prison in Somalia\u2019s capital, Mogadishu. Though officially run by the Somali government, Scahill wrote, \u201cUS intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners\u201d at the facility.<\/p>\n

Brennan\u2019s comments today are a rare confirmation that the CIA remains actively involved in the arrest and interrogation of terrorist suspects overseas. He also discussed a restructuring of the CIA that was announced<\/a> this week, which will blur the traditional distinction between intelligence analysts and on-the-ground operatives. The overhaul\u00a0brings them together along the model of the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center, which has spearheaded the agency\u2019s hunting and killing of terror suspects since 9\/11. Brennan said\u00a0 it had become common in the \u201cwar zone\u201d to have \u201canalysts and operators who are working cheek to jowl,\u201d and that the agency needed \u201cto migrate those efforts to other areas.\u201d<\/p>\n

While there have been periodic reports that the Obama administration wants to shift the primary responsibility for drone strikes from the CIA to the military, where there would ostensibly be more transparency, Brennan said the CIA will still maintain \u201cparamilitary skills and capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his wide-ranging remarks, Brennan also discussed cyber threats, saying government networks are under \u201cconstant assault\u201d and \u201cprivate companies are spending enormous sums of money to defend against hacking attempts, denial of service attacks, and other efforts to disrupt their networks.\u201d He was silent, naturally, on the CIA\u2019s own attempts to get inside private tech companies\u2019 operations, like its multi-year effort to crack the security of Apple\u2019s iPhones and iPads, revealed<\/a> by The Intercept<\/em> this week.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: cora.currier@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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

Brennan’s remarks confirm what journalists have long reported: that the Obama administration sometimes helps other countries do the dirty work of snatching and interrogating terror suspects-keeping the U.S. at arm’s length from operations that are ethically and legally dubious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55426","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=55426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}