1 Boring Old Man

Former CIA station chief challenges claims that torture thwarted terror attacks
Raw Story
By Larisa Alexandrovna
June 2, 2009

Milton Bearden, a former Central Intelligence Agency Pakistan station chief who served at the agency for three decades, says claims that the Bush administration’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques saved American lives are likely false. The retired senior CIA officer also says that the former administration’s repeated assertions that attacks were foiled through torture are hurting US credibility abroad, endangering alliances and aiding the cause of would-be terrorists.

Bearden, who formerly headed the CIA’s Soviet/East European Division and served as station chief in Pakistan, Nigeria and Sudan, was a key figure in the funding and training of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. He retired in 1994 but says he has communicated with contacts who agree they’ve heard of no evidence to support Bush officials’ claims. If the Bush administration had proof of a plot stopped by enhanced interrogation, they would have produced it, Bearden says. “I cannot imagine that the system would not have leaked such a story,” he insists. “It would have been leaked in a New York minute”…

Two active CIA officers agree

Two other CIA officers, who have asked to remain anonymous due to their ongoing involvement in covert operations, seconded Bearden’s skepticism that any domestic plots of significance were disrupted during the Bush administration.

“Certain officials of the Bush administration would have had no qualms about exposing any of our officers, operational methods and sources of information if it meant scoring political points,” said one CIA covert officer, whose focus is the Middle-East, referring to the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. “The fact that [the Bush administration officials] continue to use the protection of sources and methods as a reason for why they can produce no evidence of a serious plot is not believable given what they have already made public.”

Another current CIA officer who works the Near East agreed that if any plot had actually been disrupted, someone from the Bush administration would certainly have leaked the proof, noting, “Nothing is sacred to them.”

More chatter. There have to be lots of people out there who know from their own experience that what Cheney is currently trying to sell us is irrational. The timeline just doesn’t work. He keeps talking about how the enhanced interrogation methods gave us lifesaving information, yet the main waterboarding period was before the invasion of Iraq, and before the Abu Ghraib photographs alerted us to what was going on. All of Cheney’s defense of these methods came much later, in 2005. We’d stopped with the waterboarding long before. They seem fixated on the fact that Democrat Congress members knew about it. I don’t know anything about that. But what I do know is that it looks to me like the timeline fits the allegations that the torture program came in the period when they were mounting a campaign for war.

And what Milton Beardon says is compelling to me. If the Bush Administration was biting at the bit to tell us that a two bit italian forgery about Niger uranium was real, or that missle casings were part of a plot to concentrate uranium, or that al Qaeda and Saddam were in cahoots, or pass on the fabrications of some I.N.C. guy the Germans called curveball who they’d never even met, then I think any real thwarted Terrorist Attack would have been shouted from the rooftop of the White House. And if it’s the release of documents that they want, how about they could’ve released them on January 19th, 2009. Or Cheney could just tell us about them.

Well, I would — you know, I’m, of course, a proud father, but I’d love to see her run for office some day. I think she’s got a lot to offer. And it’s been a great career for me. And if she has the interest, and I think she does, then I would like to see her to embark upon a career in politics.