Washington Independent blogger Spencer Ackerman -- read his reporting on the torture issue, seriously -- follows up on Laura Rozen's post on John Kiriakou.

In 2007, Kiriakou famously went on television to describe waterboarding, and discussed the single incidence in which Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded. After just 30 or 35 seconds, Kiriakou said, Zubaydah started singing and never needed to be tortured again. 

But Kiriakou wasn't there for the waterboarding -- he was half a world away, in Langley -- and Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times. The New York Times first noted the difference in the two stories.

I remember wondering at the time why Kirkiakou was allowed to come forward and talk about interrogations so sensitive the Bush administration created a special "top secret" designation for them. Why didn't the CIA revoke his pension and prosecute him for leaking? 

The New York Times writes:

The C.I.A., which considered legal action against Mr. Kiriakou for divulging classified information, said last week that he "was not - and is not - authorized to speak on behalf of the CIA."

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said: "This agency did not publicly disclose the frequency with which the waterboard was used, noting only that it was employed with three detainees. If reporters got that wrong, they weren't misled from here."

The CIA didn't do much to repudiate or discredit Kiriakou at the time, despite the fact that he broke a central covenant of his profession. Here's the CIA response, as reported by ABC News: 

The former CIA intelligence official who went public on ABC News about the agency's use of waterboarding in interrogations, John Kiriakou, apparently will not be the subject of a Justice Department investigation, even though some CIA officials believe he revealed classified information about the use of waterboarding.

"They were furious at the CIA this morning, but cooler heads have apparently prevailed for the time being," a senior Justice Department official told the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, did sent out a classified memo this morning warning all employees "of the importance of protecting classified information," a CIA spokesperson told ABCNews.com.

Had they wanted to silence or punish him, surely they could have. It all seems a bit strange to me, and leads to one obvious possibility: John Kiriakou -- telegenic and well-spoken John Kiriakou, who never went to jail for blasting state secrets on television -- was told the story to tell and released onto an unsuspecting public. It's an impression the CIA will have difficulty dulling now. 

For, Kirkiakou went on to act as a "paid consultant" for ABC news after the interview, Laura reports.

There's been a wealth of information released on the treatment and torture of detainees in U.S. custody in the past days. Here's a capsule of the new news:

• The Senate Armed Services Committee released a declassified report, written in November, 2008.  The report describes how the Pentagon used SERE techniques, meant to help captured soldiers resist foreign interrogators, to break down U.S. detainees.

• A New York Times story pointed out that the CIA did no due diligence on the history of SERE techniques before using them on detainees.

• The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a narrative history of the harsh treatment of detainees like Abu Zubayda. It works through the myriad overlapping Office of Legal Counsel opinions pertaining to detainee treatment.  

• Last week, the Obama administration released four memos, requested by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act, detailing the Bush administration's legal case for torture. The memos, which had few redactions, described in intricate detail what happened to detainees during interrogations -- including forced nudity, forced wakefulness, beatings and slappings.  

• A blogger parsing released memos found that Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, two of the three people waterboarded at the hands of CIA interrogators, were waterboarded 266 times. 

• Questions arose about whether the brutal treatment of detainees ever led to actionable intelligence. To this end, in a Fox News interview, former Vice President Dick Cheney asked for the release of memos showing that waterboarding worked. Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, took to the pages of the Washington Post's editorial section to argue that enhanced interrogation prevented terrorist attacks.

• President Obama went forward and back about the prosecution for the CIA agents who tortured detainees; ultimately the decision belongs to Attorney General Eric Holder. Top torture reporter Jane Mayer at The New Yorker started to deconstruct the "invisibility cloak" President Obama cast last week. 

One of the most interesting things about the four newly released Bush administration memos on the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees in overseas secret CIA prisons has been what isn’t in there, rather than what is. The truly grotesque caterpillar revelation aside, the memos weren’t very revelatory. We already knew about the SERE techniques. We knew that medical professionals attended them -- and that Jay Bybee, then an administration lawyer, now a federal judge, felt the presence of medical professionals meant it wasn’t torture.

But Tom Malinowski, of Human Rights Watch, pointed me to one truly new detail, in a footnote in the May 2005 memo from Steven Bradbury to John Rizzo, a CIA lawyer. Here’s footnote 28:

“This is not to say that the interrogation program has worked perfectly. According to the IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have the information….On at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques. On that occasion, although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within CIA headquarters still believed he was withholding information. [REDACTED PORTION.] At the direction of CIA Headquarters, interrogators therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah.”

Which marks the first time a memo has admitted that waterboarding was “unnecessary.”

Ukraine says its security service says it caught three persons attempting to sell radioactive material, which they said was plutonium-239, for $10 million. A government spokesperson said the material could possibly have been used in a "dirty-bomb" attack, and that it was of Soviet origin.

Relatedly -- Jeffrey Lewis and Meri Lugo discuss the draw-down of nuclear weaponry in an excellent FP Argument post today. 

In a report made public today in The Guardian, a U.N. watchdog castigates Britain for its role in facilitating the United States' torture of detainees in secret prisons: 

The Special Rapporteur remains deeply troubled that the United States has created a comprehensive system of extraordinary renditions, prolonged and secret detention, and practices that violate the prohibition against torture and other forms of ill-treatment. This system required an international web of exchange of information and has created a corrupted body of information which was shared systematically with partners in the war on terror through intelligence cooperation, thereby corrupting the institutional culture of the legal and institutional systems of recipient States.

While this system was devised and put in place by the United States, it was only possible through collaboration from many other States. There exist consistent, credible reports suggesting that at least until May 2007 a number of States facilitated extraordinary renditions in various ways. States such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Georgia, Indonesia, Kenya, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Pakistan and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have provided intelligence or have conducted the initial seizure of an individual before he was transferred to (mostly unacknowledged) detention centres in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Thailand, Uzbekistan, or to one of the CIA covert detention centres, often referred to as “black sites”. In many cases, the receiving States reportedly engaged in torture and other forms of ill-treatment of these detainees.

The special rapporteur, Martin Scheinen, states that British intelligence officers interviewed detainees in "so-called safe houses where they were being tortured" and that they "conducted or witnessed just over 2,000 interviews in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq." He calls for whistle-blower protections and the revision of numerous policies to safe-guard human rights. The revelations aren't that revelatory, given past reports on the participation of European countries in rendition and "enhanced interrogation." But the tone's especially fire-and-brimstone in this iteration.

And, the report comes as concern over the Britain'ss collusion in the mistreatment of detainees comes to a fever pitch. Last month, Binyam Mohammed, a British national arrested in Pakistan, returned to the U.K. after seven years of detention. He told papers, "Mentally right now, the result of my experience is that I feel emotionally dead....When I realised that the British were co-operating with the people torturing me, I felt completely naked. They sold me out."

Additionally, members of parliament are calling for the government to release classified documents which detail its cooperation and participation with U.S. interrogators. And the country is considering accepting more prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, to hasten its closure.

All in all, it's an issue that's received an extraordinary amount of attention and garnered extraordinary public debate in Great Britain -- even more so than in the United States. And it isn't good news for poor Prime Minister Gordon Brown, just coming off the worst week ever.

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Since yesterday's item on Chas Freeman, more commentators have sallied forth to attack and defend President Obama's controversial pick to run the National Intelligence Council.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Gabriel Schoenfeld of the Witherspoon Institute says that Obama wants to place "a China-coddling Israel basher in charge of drafting the most important analyses prepared by the U.S. government." He argues that Schoenfeld's views on China should worry us as much as his thoughts about Israel and ties to Saudi Arabia:

On the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Mr. Freeman unabashedly sides with the Chinese government, a remarkable position for an appointee of an administration that has pledged to advance the cause of human rights. Mr. Freeman has been a participant in ChinaSec, a confidential Internet discussion group of China specialists. A copy of one of his postings was provided to me by a former member. "The truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities," he wrote there in 2006, "was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud." Moreover, "the Politburo's response to the mob scene at 'Tiananmen' stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action." Indeed, continued Mr. Freeman, "I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be."

The Daily Beast's Ashley Rindsberg explains another political strike against Freeman, his past business dealings with the bin Laden family:

As chairman of Projects International Inc., a company that develops international business deals, Mr. Freeman asserted in an interview with the Associated Press less than a month after September 11 that he was still “discussing proposals with the Binladen Group—and that won't change.”

In the same interview, Freeman also contested the notion that international companies who had business with the bin Laden family should be “running for public-relations cover,” noting that bin Laden was still “a very honored name in the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia]”, despite its family tie to the Al-Qaeda leader.

The New Republic's Martin Peretz adds his take, calling Freeman "bigoted and out of touch."

The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss defends Freeman here calling the campaign against him "scurrilous":

If the campaign by the neocons, friends of the Israeli far right, and their allies against Freeman succeeds, it will have enormous repercussions. If the White House caves in to their pressure, it will signal that President Obama's even-handedness in the Arab-Israeli dispute can't be trusted. Because if Obama can't defend his own appointee against criticism from a discredited, fringe movement like the neoconservatives, how can the Arabs expect Obama to be able to stand up to Israel's next prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu? 

My co-blogger David Rothkopf also takes up the issue, noting that while he vehemently disagrees with Freeman's views on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and China, his continued willingness to utter uncomfortable truths to power make him the perfect pick for Obama's intelligence briefer:

Part of the reason he is so controversial is that he has zero fear of speaking what he perceives to be truth to power. You can't cow him and you can't find someone with a more relentlessly questioning worldview. His job will be to help present the president and top policymakers with informed analysis by which they can make their choices. His intellectual honesty and his appreciation for what is necessary in a functioning policy process is such that he will not stack the deck for any one position. He wouldn't last five minutes in the job if he did.  (And Denny Blair, the wise and canny Director of National Intelligence wouldn't tolerate it.) Further, the chairman of the NIC does not directly whisper into the president's ear in a void. He helps prepare materials that will become the fodder for active debate among a national security team that is devoid of shrinking violets.  

FP's Laura Rozen is also following the Freeman debate closely. Stay tuned to "The Cable" for more details as they emerge.

Richard Perle and Doug Feith think Leon Panetta, a Democratic insider if there ever was one, is just the man to clean up the CIA:

Panetta is "a very smart, very capable guy with a lot of experience - I think he's the right sort of person to take a shot at improving the place," said Perle, an agency critic who, as chairman of President Bush's Defense Policy Board, was an architect of the Iraq war, and called the quality of the CIA's analysis "appalling."

"It's going to take somebody from outside to right that ship, if it can be done," Perle said. [...]

"One possible implication of appointing somebody from the outside is that the president recognizes that there are serious problems at the CIA and he wants somebody who is not a part of those problems," said Feith, who was Bush's Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Senate Democrats aren't so thrilled, particularly Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein, who will oversee Panetta's confirmation process and believes that "the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge."

Panetta may have been an "any port in a storm" pick as time ran out for the transition, but may in the end turn out to be a great one for an agency in dire need of a fresh set of eyes. That said, this clumsy leak is certainly not the way Obama wanted his outside-the-box pick rolled out. As Ezra Klein notes:

It doesn't look good that the worst leak of the Obama administration came in its spymaster.

RIA-Novosti reports:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin named on Thursday a mountain peak in the Caucasus in honor of Russian spies.

The former president's office has said that the one-time KGB agent signed a resolution to name the Sugan Ridge mountain peak the Peak of Russian Counterintelligence Agents.

It's not a catchy name, but the mountain is in North Ossetia near the Georgian border, so it may be an appropriate one. 

RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/Getty Images

Do we need another secret intelligence assessment to tell us that Pakistan is falling apart?

No.

If anything, that country's slow-motion collapse been reported to death over the past several months. Nonetheless, it's reassuring that the situation there is getting high-level attention in Washington.

Much has been made of Pakistan's troubles with terrorists and tribal militants, and there are lots of good ideas out there for how to address them. Less discussed? The country's economic meltdown.

As Fasih Ahmed reports for Newsweek, Pakistan's economy is in "free fall." The country's credit ratings are being slashed; creditors are making runs on banks; inflation is soaring; and capital is fleeing. If things continue to get worse, we may come to find that -- while the two issues are certainly related -- the global financial crisis did to Pakistan what the terrorists never could.

Great quote from Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency:

Ahmadinejad is our greatest gift," Halevy told the Arab language television network Al-Hurra on Tuesday. "We couldn't carry out a better operation at the Mossad than to put a guy like Ahmadinejad in power in Iran."

Underscoring the point, the Iranian president wrote on his Web site Wednesday that Israel is a "germ of corruption" to be removed soon.

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

Tonight, thousands of British fans will pack Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium for the finals of the Champions League soccer tournament. This year, the finals are an all-British affair played between Manchester United and Chelsea. But the most interesting drama may be in the stands.

Andrei Lugovoi, Scotland Yard's prime suspect in the London murder of ex-FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, has also scored tickets to the game and will be watching from the VIP section. Not only has Russia refused to extradite Lugovoi for trial in the UK, he was elected to parliament last December. Lugovoi's status has been a major sore spot for British-Russian relations and his presence at the game should be a humiliating reminder of Britain's powerlessness in the case.

The Guardian's Luke Harding also has a great interview with Lugovoi today in which the ex-KGB man denies involvement in Litvinenko's poisoning but doesn't seem all that broken up about it.

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

A piece in the USA Today this week highlights the use of open-source information in the U.S. intelligence community. As more information is available on the Web, it is becoming an increasingly important piece of the intel pie -- even making the President's morning briefing. There's a clash since some in the intelligence community feel that the classified sources are the most reliable, but others argue you can learn about your enemy by what he or she says in sources available for all to read. Robert David Steele, ex-CIA and Marine officer, advocates a flip-flop of spending in favor of open-source over more hush-hush sources:

I'm not a librarian saying open sources are cool and we can do this...I'm a very good former spy saying open sources are cool and we can do this."

Though it's always a battle to tell fact from fiction online, it's sure easier than getting access to classified material. Given that 19,000 FBI personnel are still waiting for desktop Internet access, it seems reasonable to devote some more resources to this type of intelligence.

In his piece "The Next Generation of Terror" for the current issue of FP, Marc Sageman describes the new reality of "leaderless jihad," in which extremist ideology and terrorist tactics spread through online social networks rather than hierarchical organizations. In light of this, it's encouraging to see some intelligence professionals shifting their focus to the dangers in plain view.

The U.S. intelligence community has taken a beating in some quarters for its National Intelligence Estimate (pdf) on Iran's nuclear program, which was released to the public last December. CFR.org recently got a hold of Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the body that produced the NIE in question.

Fingar says they would have framed the NIE differently had they known it was going to be made public:

There's been talk that the Iran NIE was narrowly written, excluding the civilian capabilities, excluding ballistic missile testing or capabilities, and I wonder if you can respond to those claims. And to follow, do you think it was poorly written? Would you have done it differently if you could?

No, we dealt at length with the centrifuge enrichment, and dealt with the missile program. It was not a narrowly crafted [document] — people are reacting to a two-and-a-half-page summary of a 140-page document with almost 1,500 source notes. And believe it or not, you can't fit the whole book on the book jacket. Was it badly written? The [still classified] estimate itself is very well written. The key judgments, knowing what we do now about the way in which they were spun, perceived, used by folks when released — if we thought for a minute they would be released, which we didn't, we would have framed them somewhat differently. The judgments would be the same. But we would have framed them somewhat differently that says: “Dear readers [not] following this: You can't have a bomb unless you have fissile material, [and] the Iranians continue to develop fissile material. A weapon is not much good if you can't deliver it—they have a missile-development program. But you don't have a bomb unless you can produce a device and weaponize it. That's what's stopped."

Read the whole thing.

Photo: FSB

From Shostakovich to Solzhenitsyn, Russian artists have always had good reason to be wary of the secret police. But the KGB's successor organization, the Federal Security Service (FSB), is looking to change that. The FSB has launched an annual competition to find the best artistic portrayals of its work. Categories include film, television, acting, music, and literature. According to the BBC, "the FSB wants to change the perception that artists and secret policemen are not always comfortable companions."

The 2007 awards were held on December 17 and from the photos on the FSB website, it seems a great time was had by all. Sculptor Vadim Kirilov took top honors in the visual arts for a piece depicting an FSB agent rescuing a child from the Beslan school siege. The prize for music went to singer-songwriter Alexander Rosenbaum who, incidentally, is also a State Duma member from Putin's United Russia party. The complete list of winners is here. (In Russian)

The Russian state security apparatus's previous significant contribution to the arts was the gigantic and intimidating statue of Soviet secret police founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky that once dominated Lubyanka square in front of KGB headquarters. The statue was pulled down with great drama by a crane in 1991, but can still be seen along with dozens of discarded Lenins at Moscow's Park of the Arts.