Priest writes: “The Americans and their counterparts at the centers, known as CTICs [Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers], make daily decisions on when and how to apprehend suspects, whether to whisk them off to other countries for interrogation and detention, and how to disrupt al Qaeda’s logistical and financial support.” In other words, the CIA and its freelancers are completely out of the accountability loop and are free to kidnap anybody they want, mostly Arab and Muslim cab drivers and dirt farmers, and torture, rape, and kill them. Of course, this does not put an end to terrorism but instead make sure more terrorism is created, as the victims of this abuse and sadism are certain to become “al-Qaeda” terrorists or sympathizers, that is to say they will support attacks against the United States (since “al-Qaeda” is more a state of mind than an actual organization).

“The network of centers reflects what has become the CIA’s central and most successful strategy in combating terrorism abroad: persuading and empowering foreign security services to help. Virtually every capture or killing of a suspected terrorist outside Iraq since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks—more than 3,000 in all—was a result of foreign intelligence services’ work alongside the agency, the CIA deputy director of operations told a congressional committee in a closed-door session earlier this year.”

As usual, a bit of translation is in order. The CIA’s “central and most successful strategy,” as it has remained since the terror organization was created with implementation of the National Security Act of 1947, is to align itself with fascists far and wide, military dictators and the sadistic goons that rise to the surface of the political cesspool favored by the CIA (a natural occurrence since the CIA nurtured “extensive relationships” with “former Nazi war criminals,” including “at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann” and “at least 100 officers within the [Reinhard] Gehlen organization” who were “former SD or Gestapo officers,” see The CIA and Nazi War Criminals at the National Security Archive). Thus “empowering foreign security services” means allowing various morally repugnant scumbags and bottom-feeders to wantonly torture and kill, something the CIA has done at the behest of various presidents since Truman created the agency.

“The initial tip about where an al Qaeda figure is hiding may come from the CIA, but the actual operation to pick him up is usually organized by one of the joint centers and conducted by a local security service, with the CIA nowhere in sight. ‘The vast majority of successes involved our CTICs,” one former counterterrorism official said. “The boot that went through the door was foreign.’”

Again, this is nothing new and Priest’s report is hardly revelatory. From its very inception in 1947, the CIA has employed proxies to do much of the actual dirty work—from fascist Greek Colonels mass murdering “communists” (anybody who opposed their regime) to “Baby Doc” Duvalier hacking to death the opposition with machetes in Haiti—the CIA has often lurked in the shadows and is usually “nowhere in sight.”

“The centers are also part of a fundamental, continuing shift in the CIA’s mission that began shortly after the 2001 attacks. No longer is the agency’s primary goal to recruit military attaches, diplomats and intelligence operatives to steal secrets from their own countries. Today’s CIA is desperately seeking ways to join forces with other governments it once reproached or ignored to undo a common enemy.”

In fact, recruiting “military attaches, diplomats and intelligence operatives to steal secrets from their own countries” has never been the CIA’s “primary goal,” but rather window dressing. As noted above, the purpose of the CIA is to make sure fascist and authoritarian governments rule for the sake of the “investment climate” on Wall Street and other neolib rat holes. As the former CIA agent John Stockwell has noted, the “CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other,” in other words the CIA, and in fact the U.S. government in general, does the bidding of transnational corporations. “Now more clearly than ever, the CIA, with its related institutions, is exposed as an agency of destabilization and repression. Throughout its history, it has organized secret wars that killed millions of people in the Third World who had no capability of doing physical harm to the United States,” Stockwell writes elsewhere. As for the “common enemy” mentioned by Priest, this happens to be most of the people in the world.

“The White House has stepped up its criticism of Uzbek President Islam Karimov in the past year for his authoritarian rule and repression of dissidents. But joint counterterrorism efforts with Tashkent continued until recently. In Indonesia, as the State Department doled out tiny amounts of assistance to the military when it made progress on corruption and human rights, the CIA was pouring money into Jakarta and developing intelligence ties there after years of tension. In Paris, as U.S.-French acrimony peaked over the Iraq invasion in 2003, the CIA and French intelligence services were creating the agency’s only multinational operations center and executing worldwide sting operations.”

Isn’t that special. No mention here of the fact “Bush welcomed Uzbek President Islam Karimov to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures [i.e., money provided for torture and murder],” according to the New York Times. In fact, Uzbekistan is an important stop along the bloody trail of Bush’s rape and torture gulag. “Uzbekistan’s role as a surrogate jailer for the United States has been confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The CIA declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent is in the dozens…. Details of the CIA’s prisoner transfer program have emerged in recent months from a handful of former detainees who have been released, primarily from prisons in Egypt and Afghanistan. In some cases, the prisoners said they were beaten and tortured while being held.” Islam Karimov, the dictator of Uzbekistan, “is very much George Bush’s man in central Asia,” according to Craig Murray of the Guardian. “There is not a senior member of the US administration who is not on record saying warm words about Karimov. There is not a single word recorded by any of them calling for free elections in Uzbekistan,” or criticizing Karimov for shooting down hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators or boiling to death opponents, such as Muzafar Avazov and Husnidin Alimov in the Jaslik prison in 2002.

As for Indonesia, the Nazi-infused CIA has a long and sordid relationship with the country—or rather its fascistic military. According to former CIA agent Ralph McGehee, “the CIA universally compiles local ‘Subversive Control Watch Lists’ of leftists for attention by the local government,” in other words the CIA has specialized in providing death lists to fascist governments. McGehee elaborates:

After the CIA’s overthrow of Arbenz’s government in Guatemala in 1954, the U.S. gave the new government lists of opponents to be eliminated. In Chile from 1971 through 1973, the CIA fomented a military coup through forgery and propaganda operations and compiled arrest lists of thousands,
many of whom were later arrested and assassinated. In Bolivia in 1975, the CIA provided lists of progressive priests and nuns to the government which planned to harass, arrest and expel them. To curry the favor of Khomeini, in 1983 the CIA gave his government a list of KGB agents and collaborators operating in Iran. Khomeini then executed 200 suspects and closed down the communist Tudeh party. In Thailand, I provided the names of hundreds of leftists to Thai security services. The Phoenix program in Vietnam was a massive U.S.-backed program to compile arrest and assassination lists of the Viet Cong for action by CIA-created Provisional Reconnaissance Unit death squads. In fact, former Director of the CIA William Colby compared the Indonesian operation directly to the Vietnam Phoenix Program. Colby further admitted directing the CIA to concentrate on compiling lists of members of the PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia] and other left groups.

Thus in Indonesia, in 1965 and 1966, between 250,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed, many of them as a result of the diligent work of the CIA. “The CIA desperately wants to conceal evidence of its role in the massacre, which it admits was one of the century’s worst. The U.S. media seem equally determined to protect the American image from consequences of covert operations.” Dana Priest, as an official stenographer tasked with writing glowing reviews of how the CIA protects us from CIA-created terrorism, certainly does not put any of this into context. Of course, it should be noted that the Washington Post was, under the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, probably the numero uno disinformation and propaganda asset for the agency (Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, was a documented CIA agent).

“The first two CTICs were established in the late 1990s to watch and capture Islamic militants traveling from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Chechnya to join the fighting in Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia, two former intelligence officers said,” Priest writes.

Translation: the CTICs were facilitating the movement of terrorists into these countries, in particular Chechnya and Bosnia. “As was revealed during the Kosovo crisis,” writes Anup Shah, “some NATO members (e.g. the U.S.’s CIA) had long trained the KLA against Yugoslavia” and “other western-trained Islamic terrorist groups have also been operating in Chechnya in the past.” Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab, the main Chechnya rebel leaders, were trained and indoctrinated in CIA and sustained by Pakistan’s ISI, according to Michel Chossudovsky. “Despite Washington’s perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin.” As fits the CIA’s list of job requirements, Basayev “has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia’s oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials.”

Priest expends a few thousand glowing words, making excuses for this massive terror organization, based on Nazi intelligence and initially staffed with Nazi war criminals, while never telling us the truth about the CIA: in addition to being the largest, most organized, and well funded terror organization in the world, it is a primary example of the Hegelian dialectic: it utilizes the Fichtean “thesis—antithesis—synthesis” model, first covertly creating terrorism, then reacting as our saviors to its custom-made terrorism, and finally proposing draconian measures to combat the terrorism it initially fabricated, thus dismantling our liberties and erecting a police state, as all faithful Nazis demand authoritarian government.