CIA Blogger Fired for Criticizing Torture Policy

PetManimal writes "A contract software developer for the CIA who had a blog on the CIA intranet was fired after criticizing torture in an entry. The title of the post: something along the lines of 'Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong.' The Washington Post reports Christine Axsmith is not the only CIA blogger -- the spy agency uses blogs to let agents and other workers share information and ideas." From the article: "Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith's case but said the policy on blogs is that 'postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do.'"

Re:Two things:

[joe 155]

as far as I know this is often called the Spanish water torture, I've heard that it is one of the worst things that you can do to someone because it cause the cloth to go into the throat and when it is removed it causes imense pain, not only that but you also get the feeling of drowning and suffocation. I wonder how (if this happened... I can't say either way) anyone in the CIA can claim to be civilised people at all. I would expect this behavious from the worst punishment in the Middle-Ages, not in a Western "Liberal" "democracy"

Re:Torture Saves Lives

[nanospook]

What happens when you are the one on the board because... *gasp* a mistake!

Re:Two things:

[JDevers]

I sure hope the local police don't take to these new techniques, otherwise anyone in your neighborhood is suspected of burglary they just might round everyone up and waterboard them all to see who knows something. After all, I guess the police just say please and thank you to people now.

There is a long divide between courtesy and torture. There are many ways to get someone to confess to their crimes or knowledge without torture. It is against everything we stand for to torture someone, even if it meant that a terrorist suspect would go free. After all, not all murderers are convicted because of confession. I figure under your system of goverment they probably would.

Re:Torture Saves Lives

[himurabattousai]

Anyone who considers torture to be a viable method of obtaining correct and useful information need only look to the Chicago Police Department of the 1970's. Check out http://chicagoreader.com/policetorture [chicagoreader.com] and keep in mind that these are suspected to be, but often innocent, low-life criminal thugs. If torture doesn't work on them, why on earth would one think that it works on terrorists that are trained not to be broken?

I can't tell if Sir Buzz is being fecetious or actually believes what he wrote. Whichever it is, his statement needs to be countered, lest someone actually buy into that line of nonsense.

Let's think about this for a second...

[EndlessNameless]

It's a place of employment, not a public forum for discussing social policy. Posting personal opinions on a company network is asking for trouble.

Also... people... read the article. It indicates her "security badge was revoked". If the government yanked or suspended her security clearance, she would no longer be able to access classified material or work on classified projects. If this is indeed what happened (the wording is a bit vague), then her employer had no choice but to fire her, as she was no longer able to perform her duties. BAE Systems is mostly a government defense contractor, so all of their programming positions may have required security clearance.

She made a dumb move by flagrantly criticizing the organization that contracted her employer. I know there are more than a few places where I would have gotten into severe trouble for doing exactly what she did. I'm not saying I'm sure I would have been fired, but it's something to at least think about first. Sniping at the organization that hired your employer is *never* wise, and I honestly wonder what was going through this woman's head. In the race to scream about censorship, I think some of us are forgetting that her decision was ill-advised by professional standards.

On the other hand, I would question the thought process of whomever decided to pull her security clearance. Was this decision subject to the normal procedure or review? Did the government overseer overreact (or intentionally respond) in a way that forced BAE to fire her without good cause, or was this another incident in a long line of discontented grumblings that made it look like her political attitudes went against the contracting agency? If this is the case, it may have been wise to yank her clearance. Having people work with organizations they despise is not particularly prudent, especially when it involves exposure to sensitive issues. This could be knee-jerk management, it could be pettiness, or it could be a prudent handling of an employee whose attitude was increasingly hostile to the organization for which she was employed. Without further details, I'm not sure there is a way to figure out which of these it is.

Torture CREATED the fundamentalist jihad movement

[NZheretic]

View the first chapter of Adam Curtis's documentary The Power of Nightmares [archive.org].

From Baby it's cold outside [telia.com]

VO: In the 1970s, this film was made, that showed what happened in Nasser's main prison in the '50s and '60s. It was based on the testimony of survivors. Torturers who had been trained by the CIA unleashed an orgy of violence against Muslim Brotherhood members accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser. At one point, Qutb was covered with animal fat and locked in a cell with dogs trained to attack humans. Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.

General FOUAD ALLAM, Interrogator Interior Ministry 1958-87 (speaking in Arabic; subtitled): Sayyed Qutb thought of himself as a superior sort of person. He saw himself as an important Islamist thinker and a strong character. And so on and so on. But at the end of the day, when he was in the military prison he gave us the exact details about his secret group and the orders he had given. The most dangerous was the order to flood the whole of the Nile delta and drown this corrupt land of infidels.

VO: Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful radicalizing effect on his ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western secular ideas simply created the selfishness and the isolation he had seen in the United States. But the torture, he believed, showed that this culture also unleashed the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings. Qutb began to have an apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West throughout the world. He called it jahilliyah--a state of barbarous ignorance. What made it so terrifying and insidious was that people didn't realize that they were infected. They believed that they were free, and that their politicians were taking them forward to a new world. But in fact, they were regressing to a barbarous age.

Re:Two things:

[Arker]

Actually, that's part of it, but don't forget the thorough purge there recently. They probably thought that, after firing the bulk of their senior analysts a couple years ago and radically politicising the office, the point had been made. Obviously this girl didn't get the memo somehow...

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

[glas_gow]

Now compare that to many other countries, even other Western countries such as the UK, German...etc which don't even garuntee freedom of speech and you can see how it is quite correct to call the US, civilized.

The UK and Germany are signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and have both integrated the chapters into their respective legislatures. See Article Ten of the ECHR, which concerns itself with, and is entitled, the right to freedom of expression, and Article Three, which prohibits torture regardless of nationality.

Re:Wrong all around

[Anonymous Coward]

So they pulled her clearance, and since clearance was required for her job, they fired her

You hit the nail on the head, her clearance getting pulled was what caused her to get fired.

While in general employees have some rights as far as what they can and can't be fired for, there are no such rights when it comes to security clearances. A security clearance can be pulled for anything that could be perceived as a security risk, whether it's just being sloppy about following security protocols, having a Chinese girlfriend, or maybe questionable political views. Security officers have notoriously low thresholds for what they consider a risk, and I'm certain the ones at CIA are probably among the most conservative of all.

Many criticize this as being unfair (many times they won't even tell you why your clearance was pulled/denied, and there are no appeals) but that's the way it is and has been for decades.

This is generally made abundantly clear to anyone holding a clearance or working in that world. Avoiding politics when it could endanger your clearance is generally a good idea if you need it to keep your job and put food on the table.

This woman exercised extremely poor judgement discussing anything in a classified area that wasn't directly related to her job (which was testing software, not policy or analysis). No "need to know". In the eyes of many security officers (either CIA or her employers), I'm sure it was regarded as an abuse of her clearance. So they pulled it.

Re:Two things:

[ndansmith]

When John McCain was being held in VietCong POW camps he was frequently tortured. When asked for the names of members of his flight squadron, John McCain gave five names: The offensive line of his favorite NFL team. No wonder he is also against torture for the reason that it produces faulty intel.

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

[Moofie]

"The current quibble is whether this ammendment applies to non-citizens as it does to citizens."

Nonsense. The amendment clearly restricts the authority of Government. It does NOT confer a Right on a Citizen: The Right already exists by virtue of the fact that they are a Person. (You remember that whole "We hold these truths to be self evident, blah blah, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."

The Government has no authority to perform cruel and unusual punishment on any person. They are explicitly forbidden to do so by the Constitution. You are absolutely wrong, as is everybody who agrees with you, up to and including the President.

Welcome to Government Contracting

[chezmarshall]

The woman in question was working for a CIA contractor, and the duties for which she was given access were software testing.

FYI, just having a security clearance is not enough to work at a particular facility. You need the requisite clearance AND access. Access is at the absolute discretion of whoever is running the facility.

Contractors in such a setting are always in a precarious circumstance. In many ways, they're encouraged to feel like part of the team, but they're not. Contractors who become nuisances or whose choices require the customer to spend time and effort usually get their access yanked.

At one place I worked, incoming contractors were explicitly cautioned about all the way in which some of their predecessors had gotten their access yanked. Because our customer was the only one the company had, losing your access to the customer's facitily meant you got fired. Some of the reasons that had resulted in losing access seemed incredibly petty.

I can think of many reasons this woman lost her access. The biggest problem is that she used her customer's computer system to criticize that very customer! As a contractor to the US government, she should have just known better than to critique foreign policy on a CIA intranet. A secondary problem is that she based her opinions on an interrogation transcript for which she apparently had need-to-know at some point. However, it's inappropriate in that setting to share even the fact that she had access to the transcript with anyone who didn't have a need to know about that.

Contractors who think independently and who aren't willing to follow even the most picayune of the customer's rules are problems (from the customer's point of view) that are very easily solved.

I'm not saying that I disagree with her comments or that I don't think this is all much ado about nothing. However, she should have seen that extending her comments from funny discussions about the cafeteria food to her opinion of the country's foreign policy was turning her into a nail that was sticking up. If there's one thing that places like the CIA can do very well, it's knowing how to hammer down any nail that sticks up.

Re:Two things:

[Bookswinters]

Waterboarding has been controversial for some time. (From New York Times 2004)
http://www.president-bush.com/torture-waterboardin g.html [president-bush.com]

The Government didn't do anything about it until the UN specifically asked them to stop.
http://www.worldrevolution.org/news/article1851.ht m [worldrevolution.org]

Now, according to Wikipedia, "Waterboarding is due to become a banned practice by U.S. personnel (including CIA officials) pending the release of a revised manual on interrogation procedures." It really upsets me that the Administration is willing to torture its prisoners if the UN turns a blind eye.

Re:Snark

[Valdrax]

And do you really know what goes on in Guantanamo Bay?
Yes.

Okay, you know the good event -- the press release events. Do you know the bad? Do you know about Sean Baker, [wsws.org] an MP that was beaten until permanent brain injury in a training exercise where the guards thought he was an actual inmate? Do you know about the repeated attempts at suicide by detainees that have lost hope? Do you know that the Red Cross has said that treatment of prisoners there is "tantamount to torture?"

How our our captured soldiers treated? We've had very few, but the enemy has gone out of their way to violate the Geneva Convention, has tortured and left beheaded bodies in the street, burned and left bodies hanging from a bridge. Do I need to go on?

Yes. Please do. Please explain exactly how just being better than the terrorists is the only moral end goal we should strive for.

Joseph Stalin killed about 10 million of his people, while Pol Pot killed only 2 million of his. Does that mean since Pol Pot didn't kill as many people that he's a decent and civilized fellow? Of course not.

Similarly, we've tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram. Our administration has fought tooth and nail for the "right" to continue torturing suspects and people "of material importance." Sure, we haven't beheaded any of our prisoners (though we have beaten to death a few). [wikipedia.org] We haven't been rounding up people and executing them like the Sunnis and Shia have been doing with each other, but is being better than freaking terrorists the best that we can do or should strive to do?

I disagree. I think it takes a sick level of moral sloth to advance the idea that we shouldn't care as long as our enemies are worse.

Re:Two things:

[demachina]

"The CIA is shocked by this opposing voice, since they have not heard within-group opposition lately."

Actually the CIA has historically been populated by a large number of well educated independent thinkers. People currently and formerly at the CIA have been mounting some of the most vocal opposition to the lies and outrageous excesses of the DOD and the White House. Something very hard to do when you have a security clearance hanging over your head that is designed to prevent you from getting truth out. In spite of that people in the CIA have been active leakers as they try to do just that. I get the impression Tenent was about the only person at the CIA who believed, or was willing to lie, that Saddam had WMD's. CIA had/has rogue elements in its operations areas who were/are really scary people but the analysts are a great national resource being destroyed by the Republicans. They strive hard to give correct answers with the available information, while the Bush administration wants the answers they want to hear.

The problem at the CIA is the same problem you have everywhere else in the Bush executive branch, ... DOD, State, Homeland security etc. Its the political appointees at the top who are incompetent, pushing torture, propagating false information and propaganda to support political objectives of the Bush administration. Porter Goss was sent in to the CIA specifically to break some heads, stop the leaks coming out of the CIA which was embarrassing the Bush administration. It was his job to force the people at the CIA in to the Bush party line or fire them. He however didn't submit to his new master Negroponte, Director of Intelligence, so he was pushed out to and they have a good robot to replace him in Hayden. I wager Hayden will do whatever his master tell him to do and one of his masters is the DOD further destroying CIA's independence. I could be wrong but I suspect one of the most dangerous people in America today is Negroponte. He is a sinister actor, who ran the illegal wars in Central America under the Reagan administration. He has no reservations about defying Congress or breaking the law. He is also a Yale graduate, went there with George W's unclue. Yale turns out more dangerous elitists than any institution around included George W and Dick Cheney though Cheney flunked out.

Re:Fired for blogging?

[Valdrax]

How do you define "equitable". Israel has given 98% of what Palistine has asked.

That's a farsical assertion. Israel still wants to permanently keep some of the best land in the West Bank and to deny the Palestinians the use of East Jerusalem as a capital. They've built a wall through the West Bank that cuts off portions of the land belonging to Palestine to make a de facto land grab. The abandonment of Gaza was explicitly done around the idea of consolidating the hold over the West Bank.

Israel's version of peace and a Palestinian state leaves them with complete control over the airspace over Palestinian territory, the waters, and the borders, leaving them imprisoned. It takes away the best land and the capital that they have their hearts set on. It provides no sharing of access to the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock. They don't care to set up the travel corridors between the two segments provided for in the Oslo peace accord.

It also does nothing for the "right of return" that the Palestinians grudingly gave up in that peace accord. That isn't "98% of what they asked for" in the peace accords, much less 98% of what they actually want (and probably shouldn't get; I don't like the idea of right of return at this late of a date).

Personally, I think Israel has bent over backwards trying to live in peace with its neighbors. Meanwhile, the surrounding countries have people sworn to the destruction of all Jews.

Israeli settlers are also religious fanatics dedicated to the idea of displacing all the Arabs from the area they claim for Greater Israel. [wikipedia.org] Some believe that the statements made by God in the Pentateuch and later books like Joshua and Judges are still in effect and that Israel must conquer all the lands given to them in those passages. Most Israelis are more reasonable than that, though.

So, please define "equitable" in terms that don't allow more bombs to be lobbed into a soverign state from its neighbors.

How 'bout a definition that doesn't allow either side to lob bombs into their neighbors.

Re:Gangster mentality.

[cayenne8]

"Also, your statistic figures appear racist. Most criminals are not in the projects dealing drugs..."

Hmm....where in my OP did I ever mention a person's race? Granted, NOLA is where my most recent experience comes from, and the projects are predominately black...but, the proportion of blacks to whites pre-Katrina was very lopsided...like near 70/25 or so for black/white. However, I again didn't speak to race...IMHO, it is more of a poverty thing if extrapolated to the rest of the US with more balanced populations. And if you can get and look at the charts the NOPD put out in years past with markings of the murders in the city, you could plainly see the dense areas of murder, where around the housing projects, which also coincided with where most drug dealing took place...at least in the open.

I agree with you, no one should be above the law, but, with limited resources, and what I think to be common sense...my worst crime fear is violent crime..murder in particular. I'd much rather limited resources be dedicated to preventing and cleaning up hotbeds of violence. While all crime is bad...at least you are still breathing in the end if you aren't murdered. I'd rather have the cops going after a murderous person or gang rather than sitting with a radar gun looking for a normal citizen trying to get to work about 10 mph over the limit. Let's face it, some crimes are worse than others, and need to be addressed as such.

But again...I said nothing in my OP that was racist at all. Just stating what my experience, and what the numbers/stats of my city in the past proved to be...I cannot think that the truth, no matter which way it points can be racist...

Poor criminals get caught quicker.

[elucido]

Poverty has nothing to do with the criminal mentality, and everything to do with the chance you have of getting caught. Yes poverty can motivate a person to commit crimes to survive, but a greedy rich person will commit crimes to keep up with their rich neighbors and stay ahead just as quickly. The difference is, white collar criminals almost never get caught, and when they do it's a slap on the wrist. Tabacco drug dealers, and Pharma drug dealers sell drugs all the time which are harmful, like Viox, and none of them go to prison for it because they can pay a fine. Even the big marijuana dealers, who deal in tons, and who operate in other countries are immune for political reasons.

The end result is, only the stupid drug dealer, who sells drugs by walking up to people and asking "wanna buy some drugs?" gets caught. Stupid criminals get caught, smart criminals almost never get caught, and thats the only point to make.

I agree with you completely, I think we should elimate the drug laws, and regulate drugs on safety, as a form of quality control. The more money we spend going after marijuana dealers the more money we arent spending going after the murderers. In gangwars, most gangsters arent killers or murderers, they are just like you and me, but because of the environment they live in, the lack of oppurtunity, the lack of education and in some cases dyslexia and inability to read, their options are a life of McDonalds or a life of crime. Most people in these desperate situations have nothing to lose.

We also must remember, that the entire world is just a group of gangs, factions, groups, networks. Yes there are street gangs, but theres gangs of lawyers, doctors, and everything else. Basically everyone is in some sorta group or community, including the slashdotter open source community which could just as easily be labeled a gang by anti open source groups.

We have to start viewing street kids as people, and yes maybe they are just as scared of being shot as you, and maybe because they are living in such a violent neighborhood they join a gang out of fear. Once we can see that there can be someone just like us in any gang we can see that it's not gangs that are bad, it's violent individuals in gangs that commit the violent crimes. Perhaps we could have more success fighting violent crime if we just faught violent crime instead of fighting entire groups, gangs, etc and treating every member as a violent criminal. The average drug dealer, does not support the murderer in their community anymore than you would. The average thief does not support the murderer. The non-violent criminals are not in some sorta suicidal alliance with the violent criminals, it's more that the non-violent criminals fear both the violent criminal, and the police, and they side with the violent criminal because they know the violent criminal better than they know the police. Maybe if there were better community policing, and maybe if there were better communication between kids in the hood, or ghetto, or gangsters with the outside world, this wouldnt be such a problem.

Why are there no websites on gangs from a gangsters perspective? It's nothing like those rap videos. Perhaps it is due to the code of silence, as all mafias have a code of silence, but in any case even with a code of silence, without any form of communication to the outside world, those who are inside this world are trapped.

The simple way to deal with violent crime is to track people who commit violent offenses or who are carrying a gun. If someone is a gang member, and we can see they carry a gun using advanced surveillance technology, we can track just these gun carrying persons. If someone is known to get into lots of fights and commit assaults we can track people with this criminal history. The violent criminal database would solve this problem. what do you think?

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

[Eunuchswear]

Duh, we're talking about drowning people to make them talk (waterboarding), not "stacking some people naked, or making them wear panties on their heads".

And if you didn't notice that some people were beaten to death in Abu Ghraib maybe you need get an ear and eye test.

EXACTLY as Evil as any Nazi was.

[mikelieman]

When you fell for the Fear Card, and gave up Due Process, and tortured your very first prisoner to death, you became EXACTLY as Evil as any Nazi was.

The ONLY differences being the methods and bodycount (so far.)

Do you think to the VICTIM it matters one bit if it's one, or 12 million?