realthog

Can't quite remember why I'm on the e-mailing list of Congressman Robert Wexler (https://www.wexlerforcongress.com/index.asp) except that he's among those Dems who seems genuinely to be trying to do his job rather than just toady up to the lobbyists and produce the occasional piece of faux-progressiveness to keep the proles at bay: he is A Good Thing, in other words. And almost every time one of his e-mails arrives I'm mighty glad I subscribe. Today's offering contains a transcript of an exchange he had in the House this morning with Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI:

RWexler: . . . An LA Times article from October, 2007 quotes one senior federal enforcement official as saying quote “the CIA determined they were going to torture people, and we made the decision not to be involved” end quote. The article goes on to say that some FBI officials went to you and that you quote “pulled many of the agents back from playing even a supporting role in the investigations to avoid exposing them to legal jeopardy” end quote. My question Mr. Director, I congratulate you for pulling the FBI agents back, but why did you not take more substantial steps to stop the interrogation techniques that your own FBI agents were telling you were illegal? Why did you not initiate criminal investigations when your agents told you the CIA and the Department of Defense were engaging in illegal interrogation techniques, and rather than simply pulling your agents out, shouldn’t you have directed them to prevent any illegal interrogations from taking place?

RMueller: I can go so far sir as to tell you that a protocol in the FBI is not to use coercion in any of our interrogations or our questioning and we have abided by our protocol.

RW: I appreciate that. What is the protocol say when the FBI knows that the CIA is engaging or the Department of Defense is engaging in an illegal technique? What does the protocol say in that circumstance?

RM: We would bring it up to appropriate authorities and determine whether the techniques were legal or illegal.

RW: Did you bring it up to appropriate authorities?

RM: All I can tell you is that we followed our own protocols.

RW: So you can’t tell us whether you brought it; when your own FBI agents came to you and said the CIA is doing something illegal which caused you to say don’t you get involved; you can’t tell us whether you then went  to whatever authority?

RM: I’ll tell you we followed our own protocols.

RW: And what was the result?

RM: We followed our own protocols. We followed our protocols. We did not use coercion. We did not participate in any instance where coercion was used to my knowledge.

RW: Did the CIA use techniques that were illegal?

RM: I can’t comment on what has been done by another agency and under what authorities the other agency may have taken actions.

RW: Why can’t you comment on the actions of another agency?

RM: I leave that up to the other agency to answer questions with regard to the actions taken by that agency and the legal authorities that may apply to them.

RW: Are you the chief legal law enforcement agency in the United States?

RM: I am the Director of the FBI.

RW: And you do not have authority with respect to any other governmental agency in the United States? Is that what you’re saying?

RM: My authority is given to me to investigate. Yes we do.

RW: Did somebody take away that authority with respect to the CIA?

RM: Nobody has taken away the authority. I can tell you what our protocol was, and how we followed that protocol.

RW: Did anybody take away the authority with respect to the Department of Defense?

RM: I’m not certain what you mean.

RW: Your authority to investigate an illegal torture technique.

RM: There has to be a legal basis for us to investigate, and generally that legal basis is given to us by the Department of Justice. Any interpretations of the laws given to us by the Department of Justice….
(talking over each other)

RW:  But apparently your own agents made a determination that the actions by the CIA and the Department of Defense were illegal, so much so that you authorized, ordered, your agents not to participate. But that’s it.

RM: I’ve told you what our protocol was, and I’ve indicated that we’ve adhered to our protocol throughout.

RW: My time is up. Thank you very much Mr. Director.

One very obvious point is that the House of Congress practice of limiting so inflexibly the time members are allowed to ask questions is not always in the service of democracy: I can quite understand how the rule came into place, to stop bullyboys with loud voices obstructing all other questioning of a witness, but at the same time it has its drawbacks -- as here: just when Wexler might have been putting Mueller under pressure to cast a little light on the administration of justice (or otherwise) in this fair land, he has to stop.

But a second point, and one that screams to be addressed, is that something has surely gone very awry if the country's major law-enforcement agency is not permitted to enforce the law.

In the fall of 2001, U.S. attention was focused on Osama bin Laden and rooting out Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. At the same time, something else was happening in Afghanistan: Iran was cooperating with the U.S. to a degree that hadn’t been seen since the days of the Shah. It was, as Ray Takeyh, author of Hidden Iran, put it, “the underreported story of the first episode of America’s war on terrorism.”

Before the U.S. began its air strikes against the Taliban in October 2001, U.S. and Iranian diplomats started to meet and coordinate on Afghanistan. (Iran had long opposed the Taliban, whose Sunni extremism brands Shia, Iran’s state religion, as heretical.) Iran invited the U.S. to use its airbases for emergency landings and offered to conduct rescue operations for lost American pilots. Tehran’s diplomats apparently also stepped in to save a U.S.-proposed power-sharing deal that the Northern Alliance initially opposed. Indeed, Iran even offered to help train the nascent Afghan Army—under U.S. supervision.

James Dobbins, then the Bush administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan, recounted his shock at just how cooperative the Iranians were being in a May 2004 Washington Post op-ed. Diplomats from a number of countries were helpful, wrote Dobbins, but “none were more so than the Iranians.” He duly reported the overtures back to Washington where, Dobbins noted, “none was ever taken up.”

Mid-level contacts between Tehran and Washington continued in fits and starts. In May 2003, Iranian leaders appear to have made a last-ditch effort at a deal. They may have been motivated by the speed with which the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. After all, Iran had fought an eight-year war with Iraq that ended in a stalemate; the U.S. march to Baghdad took three weeks. Whatever its inspiration, Iran’s offer put nearly everything on the table, from support for Hezbollah to Iran’s nuclear energy program. It has since been dubbed the “Grand Bargain.”

The exact provenance of the offer wasn’t initially clear. It came sans letterhead via a fax from the Swiss ambassador to Iran—Washington’s designated middleman for communications. But the offer does appear to have been serious. “I have talked to people in Iran who were responsible for editing and sending it,” says Gary Sick. “It was cleared at the highest levels as an offer in good faith.”

The offer wasn’t an easy story for journalists to nail down. The Iranians who had crafted a peace offering to the “Great Satan” had every incentive to stay mum, as did an administration in Washington that had little interest in negotiating. But the Financial Times published a short piece by diplomatic correspondent Guy Dinmore in July 2003 sketching out the overture and the U.S.’s lack of interest. “We are not reaching out at this point,” a State Department official told Dinmore.

And there the story sat. The first follow-up didn’t come for nearly a year, until Dinmore himself wrote another, more detailed piece in which he clarified that the fax was actually the culmination of a series of feelers. The added details still did not set off a rush for follow-up. The next story on Iran’s interest in a deal didn’t appear until the fall of 2004, roughly eighteen months after Dinmore’s first report, in The Washington Post. That story, the first to refer to a “Grand Bargain,” included more intriguing revelations:

• Through Swiss Ambassador Tim Guldimann, Tehran indicated a desire to discuss its nuclear program.

• The offer held the outlines of a “Grand Bargain,” but Washington balked. “We’re not interested in a grand bargain,” then U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said.

• Over eighteen months, the countries periodically discussed their mutual interests in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a Bush administration policymaker said “instructions were clear” to the U.S. negotiators: “Don’t bring up the nukes.”

All of which were mentioned roughly sixty paragraphs into the Post piece. . . .

In fact, Our Man Bolton went further than simply rejecting the Iranian proposal: the Swiss Ambassador was rebuked by the White House for his impertinence in having presumed to pass the offer along.

This story of diplomatic intransigence -- and it's not the fabled mad mullahs who're being diplomatically intransigent -- would be shameful enough in itself, but what's doubly shameful in any free society is the "news" media's role in burying it. In this instance, failing to inform the public is significantly to misinform it. Despite the growing influence of the internet, the vast majority of us still get the information upon which we base our opinions from traditional sources like TV news, newspapers, the bar, the post office queue, etc. It's not much of a wonder that, with the first two of those sources gagging themselves, the vast majority of us think of Iran as the unremittingly unreasonable "Axis of Evil" caricature our masters have created.

There is, of course, every possibility that the Iranian offer was disingenuous -- who knows? The vast majority of diplomatic offers traded between the world's governments are probably disingenuous in part or in all. Yet this alters not at all the reality-corrupting fraudulence of our media in going along with the falsehood that the Iranians have never made diplomatic overtures to us.

A further relevant story the media bury, of course, is that, before Our Glorious Leader's "Axis of Evil" speech, Iran was in the process of liberalization, and was making increasingly frequent overtures to the West, the US included. In fact, Iran seemed well along the way towards making itself democracy's major beachhead in the Middle East, the ally from whom much else could flow. The Bush Administration's response to this ongoing development was to declare Iran a foe -- with the result that the religious authorities clamped down again and that evil little clown Ahmadinejad was elected Iranian President. Granted that the position of President in Iran is largely a figurehead role (something else our media almost never make clear to us), his election was hardly an assistance to constructive relations. At the same time, it was not an insurmountable obstacle to them.

If some of the nutcases who currently pull the strings of power in DC get their way, we may soon be going to war with Iran. Doubtless a sizeable percentage of the US public, perhaps even a majority, will back this new war of aggression on the basis of the false information they've been given through the mainstream media that Iran has refused at every step to negotiate about their program to create nuclear weapons.

WMDs, anyone?