America Ball Land: Dick Cheney's fantasy war

New revelations about the Bush administration's secret post-9/11 anti-terror operations demand a full investigation

When the 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum debuted, in the twilight of the Bush administration, critics viewed its plot as a metaphor for post-9/11 America's excesses. The movie features a CIA deputy director who oversees the agency's post-9/11 "black ops", casually ordering the killing of a reporter for the Guardian who published details of CIA activities, and lectures a subordinate on the agency's extraordinary new authority:

Full envelope intrusion, rendition, experimental interrogation � it is all run out of this office. We are the sharp end of the stick now... No more red tape. No more getting the bad guys caught on our sights, then watching them escape while we wait for somebody in Washington to issue the order.

It turns out the movie wasn't quite so purely metaphorical. Over the past week there's been a steady drip of disquieting revelations on America's post-9/11 intelligence programmes, and the reality is starting to look something like the Bourne Ultimatum's sharp end of the stick. The most surprising new information came on Sunday, when the Wall Street Journal reported:

Amid the high alert following the September 11 terrorist attacks, a small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al-Qaida operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.
"It was straight out of the movies," one of the former intelligence officials said. "It was like: Let's kill them all."

This particular idea was never implemented, but the Wall Street Journal reported that the agency continued to look at ways it might assassinate suspected terrorists until last month, when CIA director Leon Panetta cancelled the effort, which had been concealed from Congress � reportedly, though not surprisingly, at the behest of Dick Cheney.

Last week a report by inspectors general at five federal agencies offered more insights into the efforts of the National Security Agency and CIA on warrantless eavesdropping. It turns out there not just one, but an entire suite of secret efforts that the report helpfully labelled "the President's Surveillance Programme" (PSP). On top of this came the news that attorney general Eric Holder wants an investigation into the Bush administration's use of waterboarding and other torture techniques.

Each new report makes it clearer that Cheney's stated determination to "take the gloves off" resulted in the creation of a shadowy bureaucratic archipelago of highly secret anti-terror programmes accountable to virtually no one (except, theoretically anyway, Cheney himself). Like Hollywood's macho preening, it was a world in which anything might be possible in the service of catching, extracting information from and killing terrorists. If it wasn't legal, ways were found to make it nominally so (or, as in the case of warrantless surveillance, Congress simply changed the law).

Defenders of this approach say almost anything would be justified to protect America from another 9/11, while Bush and Cheney have made extravagant claims about the American lives it saved. But there's little public evidence showing these new programmes actually foiled terrorists. We don't know if waterboarding or other "enhanced interrogation techniques" culled any information that couldn't have been obtained by other means. The justice department's inspector general wrote that "most [PSP] leads were determined not to have any connection to terrorism".

Setting aside the legal-moral issues for the moment, the big problem with highly secret envelope-pushing anti-terror programmes is that for all their movie-thriller mystique, they're still government programmes. They're bureaucratic. They don't function well. They make blunders. Without oversight, the people running those programmes had every incentive to paper over their mistakes and continue making them.

America needs to do two things at this juncture: come to terms with what was done in the name of national security post-9/11, and use that knowledge to deploy an effective anti-terror strategy going forward (preferably one that doesn't rely so heavily on the ideas of screenwriters and Tom Clancy novels).

Neither is possible without a thorough investigation of Cheney's black ops. We still know very little about what these programmes actually did. The lines of responsibility � who authorised what when, who can be held ultimately responsible � remain mostly unknown. And the CIA has damaged its already-tattered credibility by keeping more secrets from congressional leaders and intelligence committees (lending some added credibility to Nancy Pelosi's claims that the agency misled her on waterboarding).

Barack Obama has opposed such an investigation, fearing it would ignite a partisan conflagration that could stall his ambitious agenda. But events have overtaken him. Holder seems determined to assign a prosecutor to look into torture. Members of Congress, outraged over being kept in the dark, are pushing for an investigation into the CIA's secret programmes. So we will learn more.

The main problem with multiple investigations, though, is that they inevitably produce a fragmentary, at times contradictory picture of what went wrong. Only a very ambitious effort � like the much-praised 9/11 commission � can really examine the links between widely disparate activities across the government: CIA interrogations, NSA signals intelligence, the briefs of lawyers in the White House and justice departments and, of course, the mostly-unseen hand of Cheney's office.

It appears only far more shocking revelations could move Obama to sign off on that. But after the past weekend's info-dump, you never know.