The NYT had a good op-ed in today in which Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, made an eloquent plea for the US Supreme Court to uphold the principle that all detainees under US control should enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
From 1986 through 1989 Bearden was “the senior American intelligence officer during the final three years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.” In the op-ed he describes how his experience persuaded him that that respect of the Geneva Conventions by the CIA and its allies there brought two notable benefits:
- 1. It offered the best chance (on the grounds of reciprocity) that operatives for the US and its allies who might be taken captive by their opponents would receive something like decent treatment, and
2. It offered the best chance that captured opponents would be kept alive if captured by CIA allies in Afghanistan; those captives might then become willing sources of intel for the CIA and its allies, and when released– either during or after the war– might become spokespeople for the view that the US was a decent, humane country. (He has a particularly good story there about Aleksandr Rutskoi.)
Well, I am sure that Milt Bearden’s insistence on strict observance of the Geneva Conventions was too frequently honored by the anti-Soviet “mujahideen” in Afghanistan only in the breach. Still, he seemed quite insistent in his piece that he and the rest of the CIA folks there had tried to enforce strict Geneva observance– and also that those attempts to uphold Geneva really helped the US effort in Afghanistan.
That was, of course, the “old”– pre-Porter Goss– CIA. Very 20th century. How much of that ethos still survives there, after Bush put his old buddy Porter Goss in as Director with instructions for a broad house-cleaning? Who knows? (Mind you, Wednesday’s story about the CIA’s global gulag did reveal that there are some present-day qualms inside the Agency about the way it treats detainees. So maybe the ‘old’ CIA is not completely dead…)
I guess, though, that this is really a measure of how bad things have become in the US imperium these days. If even wily old former CIA operatives like Milt Bearden now feel they need to speak out to protest the administration’s abuses– well!