– NEGATIVE AMERICAN IMPACT

 

* Jimmy Carter, the former President of USA in the years 1977-81, genuinely opposed CIA “dark operations”. He was a firm opponent to political subversion or political assassinations, which CIA conducted too often in non democratic countries such as South America, or supporting foreign militias in secret wars, in Africa for example. In his vision the only role of CIA was to gather and analyze information for the decision makers. He cut the budget of the CIA and made the CIA almost a passive Intelligence agency without an effective branch of Special Operations.

 

Despite his point of view, Jimmy Carter did not go further in prosecuting former CIA agents who acted under the authorization of other presidents, although no doubt that in some of those operations, such as the overthrow of the democratically elected socialist regime of Salvador Allende in Chile, on 09/11/1973, or supporting death squads in South America, which targeted all kind of left wing supporters, were highly unconstitutional and brought terrible suffering to millions. Relatively to the misdeeds of the CIA in the 70s’, the harsh interrogation methods of terror suspects, Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib, water boarding and the secret jails are nothing but children’s games.

 

Seven former directors of the US Central Intelligence Agency CIA: Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, George Tenet, John Deutch, James Woolsey, William Webster and James Schlesinger have urged the president Barack Obama to abandon a criminal investigation into interrogation techniques used against terror suspects during the Bush administration.

 

The ex-heads of the CIA, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Barack Obama, on Friday 09/18/2009, calling for the investigation to be cancelled.

 

Eric Holder, the current US attorney-general, said last week that he was appointing an independent investigator to assess whether CIA interrogations had gone beyond guidelines set by the Bush administration.

 

While George W. Bush was in office, the US justice department went into several cases but prosecuted, eventually, one case after an investigation into CIA interrogation techniques. David Passaro, a CIA contractor, was convicted and sentenced to eight years for beating an Afghan detainee in 2007. The detainee later died. There was, therefore, parliamentary and judicial supervision by USA justice and parliamentary systems on CIA methods and techniques and the parliamentary committees in charge on the issue were briefed.

 

“If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless,” the former CIA directors said in their letter to the White House.  

 

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