In today's (Saturday's) Washington Post Walter Pincus writes about the publicly emerging Inspector General (IG) imbroglio at CIA. Pincus reports one critically important fact that had escaped my attention: the “review” of IG John Helgerson's activities is being conducted by DCI Gen. Michael Hayden's “Senior Counselor,” Robert L. Deitz.
It turns out that Deitz was Gen. Hayden's General Counsel at NSA when Gen. Hayden was the Director of NSA. In other words, Deitz was the NSA lawyer who crafted (or at least submitted over his signature to Gen. Hayden) the internal NSA legal opinions to justifiy the Bush/Cheney Administration's massive warrantless wiretapping, data-mining, and link analysis efforts.
So what conclusions can we draw from Hayden's assignment of Deitz to "review" the CIA IG?
More below the break.
In view of the results at NSA, Deitz must have been a first-class heel-clicker. If Deitz can justify violating FISA and shredding the Fourth Amendment to conduct massive collection and data-mining of phone records, e-mails, and other proprietary databases containing personal information on U.S. citizens, surely he will find it an easy task to justify CIA violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949; the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 1987 (ratified in 1994); and the U.S. Anti-torture Statute (Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 113C).
Dietz's current “review” seems to be focusing largely on Helgerson's investigation of approvals for, and active infliction of, “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees. Approvals obviously came down the chain-of-command, starting at the White House, down to the Department of Justice, and then to the CIA and its Office of General Counsel. In this context note the prosecutable “conspiracy” element under Chapter 113C of Title 18 (the Anti-Torture Statute):
A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.
One can understand why Gen. Michael Hayden and Robert L. Deitz are pulling out all the stops to undermine the CIA's IG office and its ongoing investigations under John Helgerson's leadership. At some largely suppressed level, even heel-clicking apparatchiks such as Hayden and Deitz fear being brought ultimately to justice for their crimes.