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(h/t Michael.)

Well, well, well. Isn't this interesting:

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the new C.I.A. director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

Officials said that the C.I.A. did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune. Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.

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July 20, 2009 MSNBC Keith Olbermann

It's kind of funny, isn't it? We seem to get more transparency out of the CIA director than we do out of the president:

WASHINGTON -- Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon E. Panetta has told lawmakers that CIA officials misled Congress "for a number of years" since 2001, according to a letter released Wednesday from seven Democratic lawmakers.

The lawmakers say the CIA also withheld information about unspecified "significant actions."

The letter didn't identify when Mr. Panetta made the statements or to what they referred.

"This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods," the letter continued.

CIA spokesman George Little said "it is not the policy or practice of the CIA to mislead Congress." Mr. Little said the CIA itself "took the initiative to notify the oversight committees" about the lapses.

The release of the letter is the latest twist in a tussle between House Democrats and the CIA. Earlier this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA of misleading her in briefings about the agency's use of waterboarding, an allegation refuted by the agency and challenged by Republicans.

It also comes one day before the House is scheduled to debate an intelligence bill. President Barack Obama issued a veto threat on Wednesday over provisions that would require more expansive briefings of intelligence committee members on sensitive matters.

Why is it that, on the issues that count (Iraq, torture, FISA, secrecy), this administration is so much like the previous one? It really makes me wonder:

The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts.

In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called "sensitive operational information" about the interrogations.

The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union "could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed," Panetta argued.

Although Panetta's statement is in keeping with his previous opposition to the disclosure of other information about the CIA's interrogation policies and practices during George W. Bush's presidency, it represents a new assertion by the Obama administration that the CIA should be allowed to keep such information secret. Bush's critics have long hoped that disclosure would pinpoint responsibility for actions they contend were abusive or illegal.

Last month, President Obama said he would seek to bar the release of photographs being sought by other nonprofit groups that depict abusive interrogations at military prisons during the Bush administration.

Panetta argued that none of the 65 CIA documents immediately at issue, which the ACLU has sought for several years in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, should be released. He asked U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to draw a legal distinction between the administration's release in April of Justice Department memos authorizing the harsh interrogations and the CIA's desire to keep classified its own documents detailing the specific handling of detainees at its secret facilities overseas.

He said that while the Justice Department memos discussed harsh interrogation "in the abstract," the CIA information was "of a qualitatively different nature" because it described the interrogation techniques "as applied in actual operations."

Longtime Arlen Specter watchers are familiar with the phenomena: Are we going to see Good Arlen, or Bad Arlen? Well, this time, Good Arlen comes out to defend Nancy Pelosi - and attacks the CIA's record on honesty:

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) took the opportunity Wednesday to defend House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has come under fire in recent weeks over a controversy surrounding when she was told of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques being used by the CIA.

"The CIA has a very bad record when it comes to — I was about to say 'candid'; that's too mild — to honesty," Specter, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a lunch address to the American Law Institute. He cited misleading information about the agency's involvement in mining harbors in Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra affair.

"Director [Leon] Panetta says the agency does not make it a habit to misinform Congress. I believe that is true. It is not the policy of the Central Intelligence Agency to misinform Congress," Specter said. "But that doesn't mean that they're all giving out the information."

Because of leaks that have come from Congress, Specter said, he understands the agency's hesitancy to disclose all its information.

"The current controversy involving Speaker Pelosi and the CIA is very unfortunate, in my opinion, because it politicizes the issue and it takes away attention from ... how does the Congress get accurate information from the CIA?" Specter said. "For political gain, people are making headlines."

During our most excellent Live chat with the ACLU's Chris Anders, he revealed this very disturbing fact while answering your questions.

On holdover appointees from the Bush days, here is one that ought to get everyone on the phone to their member of Congress and the White House right now ---

Did you know that Panetta has kept John Rizzo as Acting CIA General Counsel? If you look at the newly released Justice Department memos, they were all addressed to John Rizzo. Truly unbelievable that he is still in charge of legal advice at the CIA.

What shocking news.
Here's the ACLU website with some documents addressed to John Rizzo.

A 18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] A 46-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] A 20-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] A 40-page memo, dated May 30, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]

As far as I'm concerned, anyone involved in memos penned by Jay ByBee and Steven Bradbury should not be working for the Obama administration.
I googled Rizzo's name and found this post from Marcy:

This suggests it's likely that Rizzo knew that CIA was intending to do one thing with waterboarding but tempering the description of that in the OLC memo. Also, I outlined ways in which it appears the information Rizzo provided to OLC was, at a minimum, under dispute when it was given. In other words, Rizzo may well be the key person who manipulated the OLC process to legalize torture.

As I've written many times, the OLC was compromised by the Bush administration.

The OLC, which is a component of the Justice Department, was created to provide objective legal advice to the Attorney General and to resolve legal disputes among federal agencies. During the Bush administration, however, the OLC became a facilitator for illegal government conduct, issuing dozens of memos meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law. Some of these memos have become public through leaks to the media and through the ACLU's litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. But most of them are still secret.

David "I can't talk about torture because al-Qaeda may be watching
Addington was the puppet master of the OLC. It's not surprising that in 2007, the Bush administration withdrew his name.

The White House on Tuesday withdrew the nomination of John A. Rizzo to become the Central Intelligence Agency’s top lawyer amid mounting opposition from Democrats over his role in the harsh interrogation of C.I.A. detainees. The nomination of the 32-year agency veteran to become general counsel is the most prominent casualty of the partisan fight over the spy agency’s program of detaining and questioning top terrorism suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks.
--

Mr. Rizzo has been the C.I.A’s acting general counsel on and off for most of the past six years, including the period in 2002 when the Bush administration was constructing a legal foundation for the agency’s then-secret detention and interrogation program.

At a Senate hearing in June, Democrats pressed Mr. Rizzo about whether he agreed with a 2002 Justice Department memorandum that gave legal guidance to the C.I.A. program. The memorandum argued that nothing short of the pain associated with organ failure constituted illegal torture.

The memorandum was issued in response to a request from the agency to authorize a slate of interrogation techniques to be used in secret jails abroad. Among the techniques was one known as waterboarding, a method that induced a feeling of drowning. Mr. Rizzo said in June that he raised no objections at the time to the Justice Department opinion but said that he now believed it was “overbroad for the issue that it was intended to cover.”

He's still the "acting counsel" because Stephen Preston has not been confirmed yet. There needs to be some heavy scrutiny on Rizzo and fast.

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Newsday columnist Ellis Henican took on Bill O'Reilly last night to talk about President Obama's decision to leave the door open for prosecutions of Bush administration officials for creating its now-defunct torture regime.

And frankly, he did as well I've ever seen anyone do in the canned, no-win setup that is The O'Reilly Factor. He went toe-to-toe with O'Reilly on the factual points -- and in fact started scoring so well that O'Reilly was reduced to blurting out increasingly outrageous pronouncements.

First, it's clear that O'Reilly was only familiar with the GOP Talking Points[tm] version of the letter written by National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair in which he talks about "high value information" obtained through these techniques. But here's the actual letter.

As you can see from reading it, unlike the edited-down version O'Reilly and the GOPTP offer, Blair makes clear that he probably would have opposed the use of torture and clearly disapproves of it now:

Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing. As the President has made clear, and as both CIA Director Panetta and I have stated, we will not use those techniques in the future. I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.

Moreover, Blair further clarified himself the next day in the New York Times, explaining exactly why he would not have approved it:

"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means," Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. "The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

O'Reilly clearly was unaware of this, so when Henican tosses it in his lap, he's at first confused, continuing to think that Blair and Henican have opposing views when they don't. It's kind of an amusing instance of O'Reilly so enrapt with his own narrative he doesn't recognize when it's been knocked out from under him.

Indeed, Henican essentially repeats Blair's words, and O'Reilly resorts to claiming that's "not exactly" what he said.

From then on, O'Reilly is reduced to barking increasingly strident charges at Henican:

O'Reilly: This was done to protect your life, you live in New York City. You -- this was done to protect your life, and it worked! That's No. 1.

Henican: We don't know whether it worked.

O'Reilly: Yeah, we know it worked, you're still alive! And the attack on Los Angeles was aborted.

[Crosstalk]

O'Reilly: Wait, wait, wait. We can establish facts. And the facts are, this worked.

Henican: Well, you say that.

O'Reilly: They did it to protect us.

Henican: You assert that. Well, let me assert a couple of things.

O'Reilly: That's the overwhelming evidence.

Henican: Well, that's what you're focused on. Let me focus on some other facts. One is that these kinds of things cause huge problems for us afterward.

O'Reilly: Oh, now we're in Theory World. Here we go!

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