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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paret who wrote (711794)	11/8/2005 12:07:30 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769667

The Post story referred to 'highly placed sources within the Intelligence community'.... Other news items have claimed that a number of C.I.A. --- or other Intelligence officials --- became fed up and were leaking to try to change the policies. Interesting Drudge post!

To: paret who wrote (711794)	11/8/2005 12:19:28 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769667

Official Reveals Budget for U.S. Intelligence November 8, 2005 By SCOTT SHANE nytimes.com WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - In an apparent slip, a top American intelligence official has revealed at a public conference what has long been secret: the amount of money the United States spends on its spy agencies. At an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion. The number was reported Monday in U.S. News and World Report, whose national security reporter, Kevin Whitelaw, was among the hundreds of people in attendance during Ms. Graham's talk. "I thought, 'I can't believe she said that,' " Mr. Whitelaw said on Monday. "The government has spent so much time and energy arguing that it needs to remain classified." The figure itself comes as no great shock; most news reports in the last couple of years have estimated the budget at $40 billion. But the fact that Ms. Graham would say it in public is a surprise, because the government has repeatedly gone to court to keep the current intelligence budget and even past budgets as far back as the 1940's from being disclosed. Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, said Ms. Graham would not comment. Mr. Kropf declined to say whether the figure, which Ms. Graham gave last Monday at an annual conference on intelligence gathered from satellite and other photographs, was accurate, or whether her revelation was accidental. Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed amused satisfaction that the budget figure had slipped out. "It is ironic," Mr. Aftergood said. "We sued the C.I.A. four times for this kind of information and lost. You can't get it through legal channels." Only for a few past years has the budget been disclosed. After Mr. Aftergood's group first sued for the budget figure under the Freedom of Information Act in 1997, George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, decided to make public that year's budget, $26.6 billion. The next year Mr. Tenet did the same, revealing that the 1998 fiscal year budget was $26.7 billion. But in 1999, Mr. Tenet reversed that policy, and budgets since then have remained classified with the support of the courts. Last year, a federal judge refused to order the C.I.A. to release its budget totals for 1947 to 1970 - except for the 1963 budget, which Mr. Aftergood showed had already been revealed elsewhere. In court and in response to inquiries, intelligence officials have argued that disclosing the total spying budget would create pressure to reveal more spending details, and that such revelations could aid the nation's adversaries. That argument has been rejected by many members of Congress and outside experts, who note that most of the Defense Department budget is published in exhaustive detail without evident harm. The national commission on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, recommended that both the overall intelligence budget and spending by individual agencies be made public "in order to combat the secrecy and complexity" it found was harming national security. "The taxpayers deserve to know what they're spending for intelligence," said Lee H. Hamilton, the former congressman who was vice chairman of the commission. Even more important, Mr. Hamilton said, public discussion of the total budgets of intelligence agencies would encourage Congress to exercise "robust oversight." The debate over whether the intelligence budget should be secret dates to at least the 1970's, said Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian who worked for the Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies by the Senate in the mid-1970's. Mr. Johnson said the real reason for secrecy might have less to do with protecting intelligence sources and methods than with protecting the bureaucracy. "Maybe there's a fear that if the American people knew what was being spent on intelligence, they'd be even more upset at intelligence failures," Mr. Johnson said. * Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

To: paret who wrote (711794)	11/8/2005 12:39:13 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Editorial: The CIA must not be allowed to detain terrorist suspects abroad in secret, where they are vulnerable to torture and other mistreatment. Nov. 6, 2005, 11:21PM AMERICAN VALUES Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle PROVING a negative is difficult. It becomes daunting when — as with the allegations of secret CIA prisons abroad — the accusations sound more plausible than the denials. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the CIA operates secret prisons in eight countries. The network, the Post reported, spread after 9/11 and includes complexes in Thailand, Afghanistan and two "democracies in Eastern Europe." More than 100 prisoners reportedly were funneled into secret detention camps. A day after the Post report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch made similar allegations, saying 2003 flight logs showed a CIA-commissioned plane shuttling frequently among Afghanistan, Iraq, Romania and Poland at the same time the United States was known to be moving key al-Qaida suspects out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Officials in Romania and Poland, which only recently shed communism and its culture of gulags, vigorously denied that such prisons exist on their soil. The CIA offers neither confirmation nor denial, but recent history makes the accusations believable. The CIA already stands accused of participating in the inhumane treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The agency has embraced a practice called rendition, in which it captures suspected terrorists around the world and turns them over to nations such as Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia known to practice torture — after receiving worthless assurances that the suspects will not be mistreated. The Washington Post story drew in part on accounts by CIA personnel who reportedly had grown weary of the moral and practical compromises secret detention creates. The officials' concerns echo in a debate in the Senate, which is considering a $445 billion defense bill. One provision, which the Senate overwhelmingly passed, bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of any detainee of the United States. But Vice President Dick Cheney insists that Congress exempt the CIA from this ban. Torture and mistreatment do not produce good intelligence. Even if they did, cruel treatment would remain against international treaties and American values. Yet the Bush administration remains impervious to the damage its position on torture does to the nation's stature abroad. There is no point in sending Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes to champion our values if the Muslim world knows our democracy makes room for torture and secret detention. Administration officials asked the Post not to identify the Eastern European democracies for fear these allies might suffer reprisals. If it really wants to protect our allies — as well as our own soldiers — the Bush administration must be able to show democracy's transcendent rejection of the cruelties of tyranny. Secret prison camps must close. Prisoners cannot be "disappeared" without access to lawyers. And no U.S. agency, on any country's soil, should be permitted to hold prisoners in secret where they would be vulnerable to torture or other mistreatment. HoustonChronicle.com -- houstonchronicle.com \| Section: Editorial This article is: chron.com