COMPANY MAN BY JOHN RIZZO: A REVIEW BY MICHAEL MUKASEY
Eric Holder reopened investigations targeting CIA operatives without reading the memos describing why they had been closed.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303802904579334850751092042?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
John Rizzo spent 34 years as a lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency. This memoir of his service between 1976 and 2009 is emphatically a book for anyone who cares about the security of this country and about how the political classes treat those charged with protecting it.
This isn’t the first book to note that the U.S. has deep ambivalence about spies and their work. Jack Goldsmith, who served in George W. Bush‘s Justice Department, has noted that there are cycles of aggression and timidity. The popular branches urge intelligence operatives to push to the limits of the law but then fail to protect them from recriminations when things go wrong; that leads to retrenchment and risk aversion, which in turn leads to complaints that the intelligence community is too timid.
Mr. Rizzo saw this firsthand during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, which led to congressional hearings and purges at the CIA and a decade of retrenchment before 9/11, at which point the intelligence community was pilloried for its timidity. Now the pendulum has swung back yet again.
The author describes in detail what it’s like to endure these cycles from within the CIA and the wrenching toll it takes on the people who daily safeguard the homeland. Their successes for the most part aren’t publicly known; their failures make headlines.
Even the CIA’s lawyers were swept up by the urgent need after 9/11 to take Osama bin Laden‘s henchmen out of circulation and to get them to talk. The high-value detainees were taken to prisons whose locations were kept secret—they became known as black sites—not only for obvious security reasons but also because the countries that hosted them wanted it that way. Some prisoners were sent for questioning to their native countries, in a process known as rendition, which had begun during the Clinton administration. As to those who remained, it became the task of CIA interrogators to try to elicit information that would prevent subsequent attacks and at the same time to avoid violating applicable laws that related to prisoner treatment.
Company Man
By John Rizzo
(Scribner, 320 pages, $28)
In March 2002, Pakistani commandos captured and turned over to the CIA Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee sufficiently important to warrant intensive questioning. He was wounded when initially captured but resisted interrogation as he recovered. When interrogation techniques based on rigors to which U.S. Special Forces and Navy SEALs were subjected were proposed, Mr. Rizzo helped make certain they would be reviewed by the Justice Department so that CIA implementers would be protected. The proposals were reviewed, and beginning in August 2002 their legality was certified in a series of documents that became known popularly as “torture memos,” even though what they documented in detail were the reasons why the techniques weren’t torture.
In March 2006, Mr. Rizzo’s long tenure was rewarded with his nomination to serve as the CIA’s general counsel. (He had already served as acting general counsel for almost three of the four preceding years.) His nomination became controversial as the agency’s detention and interrogation practices leaked out and began to lose favor. The Democrats took control of the Senate in November 2006, and a confirmation hearing scheduled for June 2007 became an occasion to beat up on the Bush administration.
In the public session, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin demanded to know whether the CIA had ever rendered any prisoners to countries that practiced torture. Although President Bush had offhandedly, and incorrectly, denied that that was the case at a press conference in December 2005, the correct answer was yes. Mr. Rizzo, however, also knew that prisoners rendered to such countries in fact were treated humanely because the CIA kept track of them. Impaled on the horns of a dilemma, Mr. Rizzo said that he couldn’t answer the question in the public session but would be willing to do so in executive session. When the executive session convened, Mr. Levin didn’t even bother to show up; it had all been an act for the cameras at the public session. Mr. Bush refused to withdraw the nomination, but Mr. Rizzo himself ultimately did and returned to his work as acting general counsel without a murmur of objection from any quarter; GOP senators abandoned him.
In “Company Man,” Mr. Bush emerges as a hero. Mr. Rizzo recounts that although the president claimed in his memoir, “Decision Points,” to have approved the absurdly named enhanced-interrogation techniques before they were employed to loose a torrent of information from the few detainees subjected to them, the timing was such that he couldn’t conceivably have done so. Rather than resort to the plausible deniability that generally protects presidents, Mr. Rizzo writes, “Bush does the exact opposite: He squarely puts himself up to his neck in the creation and implementation of the most contentious counterterrorist program in the post-9/11 era when, in fact, he wasn’t. Now that’s a stand-up guy.”
Another hero is Leon Panetta, who became head of the CIA in 2009 and sought to protect agency operators from the pointless disclosure of the so-called torture memos long after the interrogation program they described had been terminated. But for the most part, the political appointees come off no better than the congressmen.
Consider the current attorney general, Eric Holder, who in 2009 reopened investigations of CIA operators that had been closed by career prosecutors without prosecution years earlier. He did so without even reading the memos describing why the investigations had been closed—only to close them himself without prosecution in 2012 after having spent millions of dollars and caused unnecessary anguish to the targets of these investigations. As Mr. Rizzo reports, even Mr. Holder’s statement closing the investigation again included a graceless slap at the agency: “It said the decision not to prosecute ‘was not intended to, and does not resolve, broader questions regarding the propriety of the examined conduct.’ The conduct Holder was referring to was that of the Agency, not his own.” Eric Holder, Carl Levin and their ilk are here portrayed as unworthy of the agency they are supposed to oversee. It is a judgment hard to argue with.
Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York (1988-2006).
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