Unredacting “The Interrogator” by Scott Horton

July 5, 9:50 AM, 2011

In June 2006, Ron Suskind’s best-selling book The One Percent Doctrine created ripples by reporting the success of a massive intelligence operation launched by the United States to cripple Al Qaeda’s financial network. The operation had captured Haji Pacha Wazir, a man described as “bin Laden’s banker,” and had infiltrated Pacha Wazir’s banking operation and seized vital information about the terrorist organization’s financing. Pacha Wazir was “not cooperating” with CIA interrogators, Suskind noted at the time, but they had seized his brother as part of an effort to make him more talkative. If Suskind’s report on Pacha Wazir were true, the case would indeed have marked an enormous intelligence breakthrough for the United States.

But an explosive new book by retired intelligence officer Glenn Carle contradicts the claims Suskind published about Pacha Wazir (which were no doubt faithful reports of what Suskind was told by sources in the intelligence community). As The Interrogator: An Education details, in the fall of 2002, Carle was the CIA case officer for a man identified as CAPTUS — but who was clearly Pacha Wazir — who had operated an informal money-changing and transfer business, known as a hawala system, that may have had customers with terrorist ties. As the man who handled Pacha Wazir’s interrogation and attempted to draw conclusions as to who he was and what he was up to, Carle concludes that his prisoner cooperated with his interrogators and told the truth about his operations, on the whole. The suggestion that Pacha Wazir was consciously managing bin Laden’s financial affairs was then, and remains today, utterly baseless — more or less the same as claiming that a clerk at Grand Central Terminal who unwittingly sold a train ticket to Osama bin Laden was Al Qaeda’s transportation logistics officer. Indeed, after learning of the accusations against him, Pacha Wazir had traveled to Dubai, determined to meet with American agents to explain to them why they were mistaken, only to be kidnapped and taken to an undisclosed country.

To read Scott Horton’s interview with Glenn Carle, click here.
Its contradiction of Suskind’s report aside, The Interrogator is most telling in its account of how Carle’s superiors at the CIA reacted to his conclusions: by ignoring them. Perhaps the CIA was afraid to acknowledge that it had wrongly held and mistreated a businessman for eight years, without access to the legal system, and under harsh and possibly illegal conditions. Or perhaps the CIA was concerned that claims about the greatest success of its financial intelligence program would be exposed as puffery. In any event, the CIA did not act on Carle’s recommendation that Pacha Wazir be released, even after it was embraced by Carle’s successor. American intelligence officials similarly resisted appeals by the Afghan government, ultimately including a 2008 order by Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanding his release. Not until February 2010, after eight years of American captivity, was Pacha Wazir finally set free and sent home. (Through his lawyer, Pacha Wazir declined a request to be interviewed for this post.)

Before it could be published, Carle’s book was redacted by the CIA’s Publications Review Board, which cut some forty percent of the text. While the PRB insists that its redactions cover only “disclosures which could be harmful to the national interest,” embarrassment about Agency operations and mistakes — not to mention their possible criminality — may have played a role in the redactions. Among the changes the PRB insisted on was that Pacha Wazir’s name be kept secret, and that Carle disguise the locations where the prisoner was initially and ultimately held. Ironically, this information can be readily derived from examining documents concerning the CIA’s now-banned extraordinary-rendition program, among them reports prepared by the Council of Europe and human rights groups, data collected in various criminal investigations in Europe, and pleadings and documents submitted in habeas corpus litigation involving Pacha Wazir.

remainder: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/07/hbc-90008135

with the CIA’s Publications Review Board, and the little I found seems to support the abuse of its
intended application in this case.




source: Studies in Intelligence (Spring 1998)

Reviewing the Work of CIA Authors
Secrets, Free Speech, and Fig Leaves
John Hollister Hedley

snip* What is involved in each review is neither censorship nor a declassification process, but rather a determination of the absolute minimum of deletions, if any, that would uphold both the DCI's authority and the individual's constitutional right to free speech under the First Amendment, a right the courts take especially seriously.

Permission to publish cannot be denied solely because information may be embarrassing to CIA or critical of it, or inaccurate. People have a right to their opinions, and they have a right to be wrong. People also have a right to write; our reviews are not aimed at discouraging them. My goal as the Chairman is to be an honest broker, not merely identifying problems but suggesting solutions. Our purpose is to help people to publish in a way that will not cause a problem for them, the Agency, or for the country.

It usually is not hard to write around a required deletion, even when it involves a paragraph or more, in a way that enables the author to retain the point of a passage and the flow of the text. Small changes often can do the job, such as referring to the "office" rather than the "CIA station," or describing a liaison official by an actual government or military title, or in general terms as a senior official, without a specific connection to an intelligence service.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/hedley.html