Alfreda Frances Bikowsky (born 1965) is a career Central Intelligence Agency officer who has headed the Bin Laden Issue Station (also known as its code name, Alec Station) and the Global Jihad unit. Bikowsky’s identity is not publicly acknowledged by the Agency, but was deduced by independent investigative journalists in 2011.[1] In January 2014, theWashington Post named her and tied her to a pre-9/11 intelligence failure and the extraordinary rendition of Khalid El-Masri.[2] The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, released in December 2014, showed that Bikowsky was not only a key part of the torture program, but one of its chief apologists.[3][4]
Brennan Draws on Bond With Obama in Backing C.I.A.
But in the 67 years since the C.I.A. was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama has forged with Mr. Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the debate over the nation’s war with terrorist organizations, as well as the agency’s own struggle to balance security and liberty. And the result is a president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it.
“The quandary that Brennan faces is similar to the quandary that Obama faces,” said David Cole, a national security scholar and law professor at Georgetown University. “Both are personally opposed to what went on and deeply troubled by what went on and agree that it should never happen again. And both are ultimately dependent on the C.I.A. for important national security services.”
.. “He was a pretty good analyst. He was a bright guy,” said Melvin A. Goodman, a former C.I.A. officer who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a sharp critic of the agency. “But he always had a reputation of sucking up to power and moving in the direction of power and not being able to exercise any independence.”
.. “Somebody like the president, who doesn’t have that background, will end up gravitating to someone who does,” Mr. Daley said.
.. But neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Brennan was eager to take on the C.I.A. too often. “The C.I.A. gets what it needs,” Mr. Obama declared at one early meeting, according to people there. “He didn’t want them to feel like he was an enemy,” said a former aide.
Comment: We should be grateful for men like Mr. Brennan, because without them we may become slaves to who knows who. We are free men (and women) because of him. We need more like him (and Obama).
Backing C.I.A. Tactics, Cheney Ramps Up Criticism of Senate Torture Report
He denied that waterboarding and related interrogation tactics were torture, noting that three of the last four attorneys general had agreed with his view.
“Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said. “There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.”
Mr. Cheney was also pressed to answer questions on detainees who had faced lengthy incarceration before being found not culpable. The former vice president responded that, in his mind, the greater problem was “with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield.”Asked again whether he was satisfied with a program that erroneously locked up detainees, he replied, “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.”
.. “I urge everyone to just read the report — these are the communications within the C.I.A. as to what happened. You can’t claim that tying someone to the floor and having them freeze to death is not torture.”
.. The Senate committee’s report, researched and written by Democratic staff members after Republicans dropped out of the project, is a 6,000-page study based on a review of more than six million pages of C.I.A. records. It is by far the most ambitious look at the program to date, and its damning conclusions are based strictly on what C.I.A. officers were themselves reporting at the time.
.. Waterboarding was not used, as least with official approval, after 2003. So Mr. Cheney is, in part, defending his own influence in the first Bush term against the retreat from the most aggressive methods in the second term.
Q. & A.: Ali Soufan: Torture and Censorship
You were involved in the same sequence of events—the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. How does your memory of them differ from the story Rodriguez is telling?
In this area it’s not a question of memory but of factual record. There are now thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports that thoroughly rebut what Mr. Rodriguez and others are now claiming. For example, one of the successes of the E.I.T.s claimed in the now declassified memos is that after the program began in August, 2002, Abu Zubaydah provided intelligence that prevented José Padilla from detonating a dirty bomb on U.S. soil, and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Rodriguez has been repeating this claims.
The reality is that both of those pieces of intelligence were gained by my partner and me, with C.I.A. colleagues, in early April, 2002—months before the August, 2002, start of the E.I.T. program. But in the memos they were able to promote false facts, even altering dates, to make their claims work. In the so-called C.I.A. Effectiveness Memo, for example, it states that Mr. Padilla was arrested in May, 2003. In reality, he was arrested in May, 2002. But saying 2003 fits with the waterboarding narrative. When the Department of Justice asked Steven Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the author of the 2005 O.L.C. memo to reinstate E.I.T.s, why he didn’t check the facts, he replied, “It’s not my role, really, to do a factual investigation of that.”
What about the identification of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
The claim about waterboarding leading to unmasking of K.S.M. as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks is similarly false. We got that information in April, 2002, before the contractors hired by the C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center even arrived at the site. One by one, the successes claimed by E.I.T. proponents have been shown to be false.
.. The more accurate way to portray it is that it’s the professionals from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. versus bureaucrats in Washington. The C.I.A. professionals in the field weren’t happy that outside contractors with no Al Qaeda or terrorism experience were put in charge and they were pushed out. One C.I.A. colleague even left the secret location where we questioning Abu Zubaydah before I did—in protest of what was happening. Mr. Rodriguez, too, was not an Al Qaeda or terrorism expert, as he himself writes.
.. Some of the redactions are blatantly ridiculous even without knowing what’s underneath, such as censoring a portion of a public exchange between myself and U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham that was broadcast live on national television and that is still available on a government Web site. The redactions also expose double standards: while I’m prevented from talking about certain things, they allow others to talk about the same things, even to talk about me, as long as it fits their narrative.
.. ironically, in the long run, they’ve done a great service to the truth: Because you only redact what is true, when people eventually get to read the book unredacted, they’ll know it contains the truth. Also, despite the redactions, it’s pretty obvious what happened and what people are trying to cover up—so the thinking public can work it out.
.. On the contrary, using torture only makes us less safe. Not only does it generate false leads and unreliable information, passing up chances to get actionable intelligence, it also helps terrorists recruit—as we saw with Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Under torture, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi gave the information they wanted to hear, which turned out to be false, and that information was used to justify the Iraq War—it even made it to Colin Powell’s speech at the U.N.