CIA Blogger Fired for Criticizing Torture Policy

PetManimal writes "A contract software developer for the CIA who had a blog on the CIA intranet was fired after criticizing torture in an entry. The title of the post: something along the lines of 'Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong.' The Washington Post reports Christine Axsmith is not the only CIA blogger -- the spy agency uses blogs to let agents and other workers share information and ideas." From the article: "Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith's case but said the policy on blogs is that 'postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do.'"

Two things:

1) Blog derives from 'weblog.' She's an ilogger (intranet), not a blogger :-)

2) For those wondering - waterboarding [wikipedia.org]

The modern practice of waterboarding involves tying the victim to a board with the head lower than the feet so that he or she is unable to move. A piece of cloth is held tightly over the face, and water is poured onto the cloth. Breathing is extremely difficult and the victim will be in fear of imminent death by asphyxiation. However, it is relatively difficult to aspirate a large amount of water since the lungs are higher than the mouth, and the victim is unlikely to actually die if this is done by skilled practitioners. Waterboarding may be used by captors who wish to impose anguish without leaving marks on their victims as evidence.

Charming thing for a civilized country to be practicing & defending.

Re:Two things:

Charming thing for a civilized country to be practicing & defending.

Who claimed the US was a civilized country??? That's pretty subjective, and the perception about the US from within her walls are a lot different than the perception outside her walls.

Re:Two things:

Look, from a social psychology perspective, this is just an example how is being punished for voicing opposition to the party-line. The CIA is shocked by this opposing voice, since they have not heard within-group opposition lately. This is because they have a culture of cohesive groupthink.

Re:Two things:

Actually, that's part of it, but don't forget the thorough purge there recently. They probably thought that, after firing the bulk of their senior analysts a couple years ago and radically politicising the office, the point had been made. Obviously this girl didn't get the memo somehow...

Re:Two things:

"The CIA is shocked by this opposing voice, since they have not heard within-group opposition lately."

Actually the CIA has historically been populated by a large number of well educated independent thinkers. People currently and formerly at the CIA have been mounting some of the most vocal opposition to the lies and outrageous excesses of the DOD and the White House. Something very hard to do when you have a security clearance hanging over your head that is designed to prevent you from getting truth out. In spite of that people in the CIA have been active leakers as they try to do just that. I get the impression Tenent was about the only person at the CIA who believed, or was willing to lie, that Saddam had WMD's. CIA had/has rogue elements in its operations areas who were/are really scary people but the analysts are a great national resource being destroyed by the Republicans. They strive hard to give correct answers with the available information, while the Bush administration wants the answers they want to hear.

The problem at the CIA is the same problem you have everywhere else in the Bush executive branch, ... DOD, State, Homeland security etc. Its the political appointees at the top who are incompetent, pushing torture, propagating false information and propaganda to support political objectives of the Bush administration. Porter Goss was sent in to the CIA specifically to break some heads, stop the leaks coming out of the CIA which was embarrassing the Bush administration. It was his job to force the people at the CIA in to the Bush party line or fire them. He however didn't submit to his new master Negroponte, Director of Intelligence, so he was pushed out to and they have a good robot to replace him in Hayden. I wager Hayden will do whatever his master tell him to do and one of his masters is the DOD further destroying CIA's independence. I could be wrong but I suspect one of the most dangerous people in America today is Negroponte. He is a sinister actor, who ran the illegal wars in Central America under the Reagan administration. He has no reservations about defying Congress or breaking the law. He is also a Yale graduate, went there with George W's unclue. Yale turns out more dangerous elitists than any institution around included George W and Dick Cheney though Cheney flunked out.

Re:Two things:

I agree, groupthink is a dangerous thing. I'll bet all of your co-workers argee with you too. Let's all stomp out groupthink!

Re:Groupthink? I dont think so.

Um, no. It's NOT that simple.

The CIA is part of the US Government. The US Government is supposed to work for the people of the United States.

When the "bosses" in government fail in their duties (as is currently occurring in the United States Government) it is the responsibility of those in a position to do so to go over the heads of their direct "bosses" to their real bosses - the people.

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

The current quibble is whether this ammendment applies to non-citizens as it does to citizens.

It's pretty sad that the only thing apparently keeping the government from torturing us is that some people have a right not to be tortured.

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

I can't speak for those "other countries", but the Canadian constitutional applies to everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike, just like the rest of the laws.

It's also why we're reluctant to extradite death-penalty cases unless we get assurances that the death penalty won't apply. Once they're here, they have the same right not to be put to death for a crime as anyone else.

It must work - our murder rate is 1/3 the US rate.

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

You're right - correlation isn't causation.

Take the murders caused by hand guns out of the US stats, and our murder rates are similar.

Guns don't kill - stupid people with guns kill.

Per capita, Canada has more firearms, but WAY less hand guns, than the US. There's the causative difference - pretty much unregulated hand gun ownership.

Poor criminals get caught quicker.

Poverty has nothing to do with the criminal mentality, and everything to do with the chance you have of getting caught. Yes poverty can motivate a person to commit crimes to survive, but a greedy rich person will commit crimes to keep up with their rich neighbors and stay ahead just as quickly. The difference is, white collar criminals almost never get caught, and when they do it's a slap on the wrist. Tabacco drug dealers, and Pharma drug dealers sell drugs all the time which are harmful, like Viox, and none of them go to prison for it because they can pay a fine. Even the big marijuana dealers, who deal in tons, and who operate in other countries are immune for political reasons.

The end result is, only the stupid drug dealer, who sells drugs by walking up to people and asking "wanna buy some drugs?" gets caught. Stupid criminals get caught, smart criminals almost never get caught, and thats the only point to make.

I agree with you completely, I think we should elimate the drug laws, and regulate drugs on safety, as a form of quality control. The more money we spend going after marijuana dealers the more money we arent spending going after the murderers. In gangwars, most gangsters arent killers or murderers, they are just like you and me, but because of the environment they live in, the lack of oppurtunity, the lack of education and in some cases dyslexia and inability to read, their options are a life of McDonalds or a life of crime. Most people in these desperate situations have nothing to lose.

We also must remember, that the entire world is just a group of gangs, factions, groups, networks. Yes there are street gangs, but theres gangs of lawyers, doctors, and everything else. Basically everyone is in some sorta group or community, including the slashdotter open source community which could just as easily be labeled a gang by anti open source groups.

We have to start viewing street kids as people, and yes maybe they are just as scared of being shot as you, and maybe because they are living in such a violent neighborhood they join a gang out of fear. Once we can see that there can be someone just like us in any gang we can see that it's not gangs that are bad, it's violent individuals in gangs that commit the violent crimes. Perhaps we could have more success fighting violent crime if we just faught violent crime instead of fighting entire groups, gangs, etc and treating every member as a violent criminal. The average drug dealer, does not support the murderer in their community anymore than you would. The average thief does not support the murderer. The non-violent criminals are not in some sorta suicidal alliance with the violent criminals, it's more that the non-violent criminals fear both the violent criminal, and the police, and they side with the violent criminal because they know the violent criminal better than they know the police. Maybe if there were better community policing, and maybe if there were better communication between kids in the hood, or ghetto, or gangsters with the outside world, this wouldnt be such a problem.

Why are there no websites on gangs from a gangsters perspective? It's nothing like those rap videos. Perhaps it is due to the code of silence, as all mafias have a code of silence, but in any case even with a code of silence, without any form of communication to the outside world, those who are inside this world are trapped.

The simple way to deal with violent crime is to track people who commit violent offenses or who are carrying a gun. If someone is a gang member, and we can see they carry a gun using advanced surveillance technology, we can track just these gun carrying persons. If someone is known to get into lots of fights and commit assaults we can track people with this criminal history. The violent criminal database would solve this problem. what do you think?

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

I'm striving to underdstand your logic. You claim that the USA is civilized because it has laws banning torture. Yet, in spite of the fact that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, there is uncertainty over whether the illegality of torture applies to non-citizens. This would suggest that non-citizens are not all men, but something else. Indeed, this wholly undermines any claims that the outlawing of torture are based on moral considerations. How can it be moral not to torture me, but to torture my neighbour?

The USA may guarantee freedom of speech. But it doesn't gaurantee freedom from execution from the state -- and many other things. Furthermore, when you think about recent concepts such as 'free speech zones', you see that the utility of freedom of speech extends only as far as the 'right' can be excercised -- which in the current US political climae is not very far at all.

Finally, if you use countries that practice infanticide or honor killing as your yardstick, then something is wrong. After Abu Ghraib, I heard people like yourself pointing out that 'at least we aren't as bad as Saddam was'. This sort of reasoning strikes me as very worrying.

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

The reason he has to used honor-killings as a yardstick is because of people like you have who have absolutely no perspective.

I reject this argument entirely. Looking to the lowest common denominator and striving to be "a little better than they are" is sickening. We should strive to be the best at everything and look to the best at any given thing for our ideals. Anything else results in not reason, but rationalization of wrongdoing. "Someone else is still worse," is no excuse for wrongdoing.

The US used to be civilized. Then came Bush.

I find interesting the cognitive dissonance that allows for members of the right-wing to claim that there is an objective moral authority above and beyond the laws of man on issues like gay rights but that only the law and points of technicalities of citizenship are all that matters when the ability to torture foreigners suspected of knowing terrorists is on the line. Pick one or the other, and if you pick the "objective moral authority" side, then do try and strain your brain to think of what Jesus would've thought of torturing people to save your own skin.

There's no quibble about whether the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments apply to our current law enforcement procedures. The restrictions are on the government, and they apply anywhere the government acts, and nowhere in the amendments is government only barred from action against citizens. Go, and see if you can find limitations to bar injustice against citizens only in the Constitution. Furthermore, given the results of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, it's pretty damn clear that torturing people is flat out illegal in the opinion of the Supreme Court.

Re:The US is absolutely civilized.

Can you provide a single example of an American citizen being dragged from US soil to be held as an enemy combatant without due process? A link to a reputable news source would be sufficient.

How about the BBC? [bbc.co.uk]

Re:your vote, your responcibility.

yes, it is your fault, you voted didnt you?. And if you didnt, then it's still your fault as you didnt do your duty to ensure that your voice was heard.

I appreciate the sentiment, because in an ideal, fair world, people can be happy that their guy lost because 'the other guy' is still 'pretty good.' And American politics did have that happy medium for the first ~60 years of its existence (writings of a French author.. agh what was his name.. starts with a T.. wrote a book about US politics in the 1840's...).

But that kind of political climate disappeared a long time ago, so I've never liked this argument.

Voting for the 'lesser of two evils' is still voting for an evil - and you still have every right to complain about what they do. Once, we didn't have to vote for an evil - just a potentially less effective politician. And to be fair, of course there were corrupt politicians in the early days of the US. Just fewer of them, because the education was different, the values were different, and the laws were different.

Re:Two things:

as far as I know this is often called the Spanish water torture, I've heard that it is one of the worst things that you can do to someone because it cause the cloth to go into the throat and when it is removed it causes imense pain, not only that but you a

One Question:

and the victim is unlikely to actually die if this is done by skilled practitioners.

Who'd they practice on before they became so skilled?

Gov't Torturer: I only lost 3 this week.
Superior: Good enough. Here's your "Skilled in Waterboarding" cert. And no, I don't want to know what you did with the bodies.
Gov't Torturer: Thanks. BTW, you might want to avoid the "mystery meat" at the cafeteria.

Re:Two things:

I guess we should just say please and thank you instead to get the info we need?

I guess if we torture someone (maybe to death) who actually doesn't have any info we need and/or isn't actually an enemy we just say "oops"?

Re:Two things:

I sure hope the local police don't take to these new techniques, otherwise anyone in your neighborhood is suspected of burglary they just might round everyone up and waterboard them all to see who knows something. After all, I guess the police just say please and thank you to people now.

There is a long divide between courtesy and torture. There are many ways to get someone to confess to their crimes or knowledge without torture. It is against everything we stand for to torture someone, even if it meant that a terrorist suspect would go free. After all, not all murderers are convicted because of confession. I figure under your system of goverment they probably would.

Re:Two things:

Right, because we've NEVER gotten information by any other means. Spying never works. Bribery never works. Negotiation never works.

In fact, name a single piece of valuable correct information the US has ever gotten by means of torture. Didn't we supposedly overthrow Saddam because he was a vicious dictator who tortured his own people (that's the line these days)? Then how is the US government any different if they torture people?

Re:Two things:

I suggest you read up on Ali Soufan's work in investigating the Cole bombing and the networks that make up Al-Quaeda. As the author of a recent article on Soufan related in an interview [newyorker.com]:

Q: In your article, you describe Soufan's interrogation techniques. He engaged the suspects; he won their respect; he debated them on theological issues. In interrogations he carried out just after 9/11, these techniques worked very well; he got crucial information about the hijackers and their connections. His methods were very different from the "extreme measures" that we've been hearing about--waterboarding, sleep deprivation, humiliation--and that are being justified on the grounds that they're the only way to get this kind of information. Have we been given a false choice between abusing prisoners or letting something terrible happen?

A: Ali Soufan has shown that intelligent and careful interrogation can achieve real results. And it helps immensely, obviously, to have the language and cultural skills that he does. There are very few people in the American intelligence community that have his set of talents. The U.S. is known to have used these sorts of tactics. You mention the C.I.A.'s impulse has been to deliver Al Qaeda suspects to foreign intelligence agencies that could torture them and extract information the C.I.A. thought it couldn't otherwise obtain. However, what this abuse has yielded from the top Al Qaeda lieutenants is questionable. And I think that's because it's untrustworthy information obtained under torture.

Q: So the problem with torture isn't just that it's torture-- that it compromises America ethically, morally--but that torture doesn't always work.

A: It doesn't work. It often is misleading, as in the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda lieutenant who was tortured into saying that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction. That was the information that the U.S. was trying to get out of him, and he gave it to the interrogators under torture, and that became part of the rationale for the U.S. going to war with Iraq--a disastrous consequence of choosing an unethical approach to gaining information.

Re:Two things:

When John McCain was being held in VietCong POW camps he was frequently tortured. When asked for the names of members of his flight squadron, John McCain gave five names: The offensive line of his favorite NFL team. No wonder he is also against torture for the reason that it produces faulty intel.

Re:A 3rd thing (what got her fired)

I'll forgive you because you've apparently never worked in a beaurocracy before, but "timecard fraud" is simply the normal way to fire somebody you don't like in a beaurocracy. It's the "crime" that 100% of employees are guilty of. Watch anybody for a while and you'll catch them not furiously working away, at some point.

But seriously, do you believe she would have been fired if the content of her speech had been something else?

Snark

I don't get it... the CIA doesn't torture people. The USA doesn't torture people. Why should the CIA care if a contractor says torture is wrong? They must have fired her for goofing off on company time/equipment.

To determine if this was appropriate.

Have any of the posters expressed approval of the government or CIA in a non-work related fashion and not been fired?

If they fire contractors who "waste" time, that's okay.

If they only fire contractors who "waste" time criticizing the government, that's no

Re:Snark

And do you really know what goes on in Guantanamo Bay?
Yes.

Okay, you know the good event -- the press release events. Do you know the bad? Do you know about Sean Baker, [wsws.org] an MP that was beaten until permanent brain injury in a training exercise where the guards thought he was an actual inmate? Do you know about the repeated attempts at suicide by detainees that have lost hope? Do you know that the Red Cross has said that treatment of prisoners there is "tantamount to torture?"

How our our captured soldiers treated? We've had very few, but the enemy has gone out of their way to violate the Geneva Convention, has tortured and left beheaded bodies in the street, burned and left bodies hanging from a bridge. Do I need to go on?

Yes. Please do. Please explain exactly how just being better than the terrorists is the only moral end goal we should strive for.

Joseph Stalin killed about 10 million of his people, while Pol Pot killed only 2 million of his. Does that mean since Pol Pot didn't kill as many people that he's a decent and civilized fellow? Of course not.

Similarly, we've tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram. Our administration has fought tooth and nail for the "right" to continue torturing suspects and people "of material importance." Sure, we haven't beheaded any of our prisoners (though we have beaten to death a few). [wikipedia.org] We haven't been rounding up people and executing them like the Sunnis and Shia have been doing with each other, but is being better than freaking terrorists the best that we can do or should strive to do?

I disagree. I think it takes a sick level of moral sloth to advance the idea that we shouldn't care as long as our enemies are worse.

Overreacting

On Monday, Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping the CIA test software.

Wow, they really don't take this stuff lying down. Many bloggers died to bring us this information!

So does anything go in YRO now??

Im I the only one wondering what the hell this has to do with our online rights?? It was on a private INTRANET for god sakes...

Re:So does anything go in YRO now??

A private classified network to which you only get access if you agree to a set of rules that distinctly limit your freedoms with information under those rules.

It's on YRO because there are a bunch of goddamn children around who think "TOP SECRET" means "I won't talk about it unless I'm of a mind to."

Well at least

she was only fired and not tortured for her views on torture.

Had something similar happen to me

I was working for a huge meat packing company and we had internal company blogs so we could share ideas and generally make the company run better. You know, totally Web 2.0. I am a committed vegan so I posted a blog entry called "Meat is Murder and Murder is Wrong" and guess what happened to me? I was fired! Can you believe that!?!?!? Freaking fascists.

This wasn't the peoper place for her to complain

Jeez, she had no right to use the CIA intranet to complain like this. She should have used the proper CIA procedure with regards to such complaints--take them to the New York Times.

-Eric

She has an outside blog here...

http://econo-girl.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

from the BoingBoing story a day or two ago..

In other news...

A contract software developer for the CIA was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA. Details to follow.

http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]

So?

So, let us review. A software developer had access to a blog set up specifically for collaborating on software issues. She instead uses it as an opinion journal, and even go so far as to reveal classified information that she has seen in the course of her previous job. Regardless of the clearance required to access the site, she shouldn't have been using the resource the way she was and she certainly shouldn't have been discussing interogation transcripts in her roll as a software developer!

Being fired seems like the logical concequence.

Maybe you should keep your mouth shut

Maybe if you want to keep your job you should keep your mouth shut and not criticize your employeer. There are plenty of people who can fight the fight for you, we are all well aware that the CIA practices waterboarding on foreign nationals on a regular basis. And occationally it is practiced in government institutions against American citizens (prisons and mental hospitals).

It has shown many times that torture often produces falses confessions, so I'm skeptical of its effectiveness for gathering information. I will not deny its effectiveness for punishment though. Punishment that leaves no scars is a step up from the usual beatings that take place.

Wrong all around

Go read the actual article: she was fired for writing about the contents of a transcript of an interrogation she read.

This was undoubtedly at least SECRET codeword information, and she posted it on a network where, with certainty, not everyone on the network had been "read into" the compartment. In other words, she violated "need to know."

So they pulled her clearance, and since clearance was required for her job, they fired her.

She's lucky they didn't arrest her. Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.

Re:Wrong all around

Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.

Err, yes it is.

Should she have been fired for breaking security? Yes.

Should she have done it anyway? Yes.

This is a classic case for civil disobedience. There come times when following the law violates your own integrity as a person, and the dual virtues of loyalty and compassion conflict. At that point, you must showcase you humanity and be willing to take the punishment for it.

Might I have the strength to choose as wisely.

Re:Wrong all around

That's not how clearances work. There are two aspects that must be satisified to allow access to classified material:

1. Clearance. You must have a sufficient clearance level to view the material.

2. Need to Know. You must need to know the information in order to properly carry out your job.

She clearly violated the second part: the need to know. Personally, while I agree that torture is wrong (and useless as an information gathering technique), she didn't need to reveal that she knew about instances of it from secured information. If all she had said was "I think waterboarding is bad" she probably wouldn't have gotten into any trouble. However, she clearly violated the need to know, clearly demonstrating herself to be a potential security risk.

There are rules about how security is handled, and when the US government desides to trust you to follow them, you'd damned better follow them! In this case, American lives may not have been at stake, but make no mistake: there are instances when information is classified because revealing it will endanger Americans and allies, and I'd much rather she follow the rules and disagree with the CIA than decide she can determine when it's OK to break them.

Security in the armed forces and the CIA is not a laughing matter. There are arguably times when it's time to break the rules and reveal terrible things. One of the side effects you must be prepared for, though, is losing your clearance and potentially being arrested and jailed for it. Part of civil disobedience is accepting the consequences of your actions.

Torture CREATED the fundamentalist jihad movement

View the first chapter of Adam Curtis's documentary The Power of Nightmares [archive.org].

From Baby it's cold outside [telia.com]

VO: In the 1970s, this film was made, that showed what happened in Nasser's main prison in the '50s and '60s. It was based on the testimony of survivors. Torturers who had been trained by the CIA unleashed an orgy of violence against Muslim Brotherhood members accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser. At one point, Qutb was covered with animal fat and locked in a cell with dogs trained to attack humans. Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.

General FOUAD ALLAM, Interrogator Interior Ministry 1958-87 (speaking in Arabic; subtitled): Sayyed Qutb thought of himself as a superior sort of person. He saw himself as an important Islamist thinker and a strong character. And so on and so on. But at the end of the day, when he was in the military prison he gave us the exact details about his secret group and the orders he had given. The most dangerous was the order to flood the whole of the Nile delta and drown this corrupt land of infidels.

VO: Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful radicalizing effect on his ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western secular ideas simply created the selfishness and the isolation he had seen in the United States. But the torture, he believed, showed that this culture also unleashed the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings. Qutb began to have an apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West throughout the world. He called it jahilliyah--a state of barbarous ignorance. What made it so terrifying and insidious was that people didn't realize that they were infected. They believed that they were free, and that their politicians were taking them forward to a new world. But in fact, they were regressing to a barbarous age.

Torture will always give you a confession...

...whether the person being tortured did it or not.

Confessing to a crime is always better than being tortured by another.

White House responds in 3...2...

So when will we have a White House press release accusing Washington Post of endangering National Security by revealing that the CIA has records of using waterboarding torture?

EXACTLY as Evil as any Nazi was.

When you fell for the Fear Card, and gave up Due Process, and tortured your very first prisoner to death, you became EXACTLY as Evil as any Nazi was.

The ONLY differences being the methods and bodycount (so far.)

Do you think to the VICTIM it matters one bit if it's one, or 12 million?

When you're a human being

Make as much noise about torture as possible.

Re:Torture Saves Lives

[after all] we are trying to save the children. We wouldnt want these children to be harmed by terrorists just because we didnt have the fortitude to torture them.

Your ideas intrigue me. Please tell me more about how torturing children will keep them safe from terrorists. Also, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Fired for blogging?

I call bullshit. Do you think the situation for women has gotten much better now that Afganistan is free from the Taliban?

If by "better" you mean "women are no longer dragged out into what used to be a soccer field in front of a crowd at lunchtime and shot in the head for daring to teach their daughters to read," then... yes, better.