Wiki: Jose Rodriguez

Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr. (born October 21, 1948) is a former director of the National Clandestine Service (D/NCS) of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was the final CIA deputy director for operations (DDO) before that position was expanded to D/NCS in December 2004.[1][2]

Born in Puerto Rico in 1948, Rodriguez attended the University of Florida, earning both a bachelor's degree and a law degree. He joined the CIA in 1976 and served for 31 years. According to Gen. (ret.) Michael Hayden, "Jose built a reputation for leadership in the field and here at headquarters, and he guided some of the agency's greatest counterterror victories. He has done much to protect our country by strengthening its Clandestine Service." Other colleagues cite him as "one of the best" field operatives in his time at the CIA.[3]...

In the aftermath of 9/11, this was the focal point within the Agency to orchestrate the global campaign against Al Qaeda. In this capacity, Rodriguez was responsible for driving the CIA operations and the targeting analysis necessary to uncover terrorists in the Al Qaeda network.[10] In the time period that Rodriguez stepped in, the Counterterrorism Center grew sharply. The number of analysts quadrupled, and the number of operations officers doubled.[11] In 2004 Rodriguez advised the organizers of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, including the chief organizer, Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, on security matters and counterterrorism. "The actions we took in the aftermath of 9/11 were harsh but necessary and effective. These steps were fully sanctioned and carefully followed. The detention and interrogation of top terrorists like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi yielded breakthroughs which have kept this country safe," Rodriguez said in a press release.[12]...

Like many officers in the Latin American Division, during the Iran–Contra affair, Rodriguez was questioned by the FBI about his role in the scandal after allegations of CIA involvement emerged.[15] No charges or actions were brought against him in connection with Iran–Contra.

Much later, in 1997, Rodriguez interceded in the drug-related arrest of a friend in the Dominican Republic, trying to get the Dominican government to drop the charges.[16] According to the New York Times, the CIA's inspector general criticized Rodriguez for a "remarkable lack of judgment."[17]...

In 2005, while head of the Clandestine Service, Rodriguez ordered that videotape recordings of two 2002 CIA interrogations be destroyed.[18] CIA officials initially stated that the recordings were destroyed to protect the identity of the interrogators, after they were no longer of intelligence value to any investigations.[19] "He would always say, 'I'm not going to let my people get nailed for something they were ordered to do,'" said Robert Richer, Rodriguez's deputy recalling conversations with his boss about the tapes.[20] It was later revealed that the deputy to Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, then executive director of the CIA, wrote in an e-mail that Rodriguez thought "the heat from destroying is nothing compared with what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain—he said that out of context they would make us look terrible; it would be 'devastating' to us."[21]...

After an exhaustive three-year investigation into the destruction of the videotapes of the interrogations (including pictures of the interrogators), the Justice Department announced in November 2010 it would not pursue any charges against Jose Rodriguez.[27...

After reportedly being heavily recruited to join the international security firm Blackwater, Rodriguez instead joined the privately owned National Interest Security Company in Fairfax, Virginia, which combined several formerly independent companies.[33][34][35] In NISC, Rodriguez was made a senior vice president in Edge Consulting, an intelligence assessment and strategy consulting group.[36][37]Edge Consulting (now a part of IBM) was founded by Chris Whitlock and Frank Strickland to assess intelligence performance with special emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan, while also working issues in the broader intelligence community.[38][39] NISC was purchased by IBM in March 2010.[40] ...

In 2012, Rodriguez's book "Hard Measures" was published....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Rodriguez_(intelligence_officer)

Wiki: Gina Haspel

Gina Cheri Haspel is a US intelligence officer. She joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1985.[1] In February 2017, she was selected as Deputy Director of the CIA by President Donald Trump.[2][1][3][4] According to the CIA she is the "first female career CIA officer" to receive that appointment.[1] Meanwhile various news agencies reported she was the second woman.[5][6] Oliver Holmes, writing in The Guardian, pointed out that Avril Haines had been appointed by Barack Obama in 2013.[7]

While at the CIA, Haspel was Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service and the National Clandestine Service for Foreign Intelligence and Covert Action.[8] She ran Cat’s Eye, a CIA black site prison in Thailand where terror suspects Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded in 2002.[8][9][10] Haspel later was the chief of staff to Jose Rodriguez, who headed the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. In his memoir, Rodriguez wrote that Haspel had "drafted a cable" in 2005 ordering the destruction of dozens of videotapes made at the black site in Thailand.[10]

Haspel is the recipient of the George H. W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism, the Donovan Award, the Intelligence Medal of Merit and the Presidential Rank Award.[1]...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Haspel

An Ex-CIA Officer Speaks Out: The Italian Job

Related: http://news.yahoo.com/ex-cia-agent-ordered-face-rendition-conviction-italy-173327871.htmzl

Wiki: John Rizzo

...Rizzo was hired at the CIA in 1976, just after the Church Committee released its report on the assassination of foreign leaders. By 1979, Rizzo became the staff lawyer for the Directorate of Operations, the CIA's clandestine branch.[5] He served as the liaison between the CIA and the congressional investigators studying the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s.[7] Rizzo became Acting General Counsel of the CIA in November 2001, a position that was traditionally filled by someone from outside the agency.[8]...

...The Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which ran the U.S. military's SERE program to train U.S. personnel to resist harsh interrogation methods, issued a memo with an attachment written to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense in July 2002.[15] The memo, which was passed on from the Pentagon to Rizzo, referred to the use of extreme duress on detainees as "torture" and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."[16]

Rizzo sent a request to the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel for an opinion as to whether certain interrogation techniques would violate the prohibition against torture. The OLC issued a memo signed by Jay S. Bybeeto Rizzo on August 1, 2002; this was the first of what became known as the Torture Memos, in which Justice authorized specific techniques to be used in interrogations.[17] It approved 10 techniques, including waterboarding.[14] Rizzo concurred on the legality of these techniques and saw to it that they were implemented by the CIA.[18]

Rizzo traveled with David Addington, the Vice President's chief of staff; William Haynes, General Counsel of the Department of Defense; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, to consult with officers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in late September 2002. One week later, a CIA lawyer told personnel with the military intelligence interrogation team at Guantanamo that, "if the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."[19]...

...In early 2005, White House Counsel Harriet Miers told Rizzo not to destroy the tapes without checking with the White House first.[29] Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the chief of the Directorate of Operations, sent a cable to the CIA's Bangkok station ordering the destruction of the tapes on November 8, 2005.[29][30] Rodriguez informed Goss and Rizzo of the destruction on November 10.[29]...

...Rizzo signed off on all CIA directed drone strikes from the start of the program soon after September 11, 2001 until his retirement in October 2009.[3] He claims to have seen one "request for approval for targeting for lethal operation" per month and that roughly 30 individuals were targeted at any given time.[6]

In July 2011, the human rights group Reprieve and Pakistani lawyers called for the prosecution of Rizzo in Pakistan for murder for approving drone attacks that killed hundreds of people.[31][32][33][34] In April 2015, the Islamabad High Court ordered police to open a criminal case against Rizzo and former CIA Islamabad Station Chief Jonathan Bank for murder, conspiracy, terrorism and waging war against Pakistan.[35]...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Rizzo

Symbols of Bush-era Lawlessness Flourish Under Obama

"During the George W. Bush years, two of the most controversial elements of what was then called the Global War on Terror were the CIA's rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) program and the creation of the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay. The RDI program included waterboarding and other forms of torture, as well as so-called black site prisons where detainees were held incommunicado after being abducted by the CIA, and sometimes tortured by members of the host country's security forces.

Guantanamo Bay and the RDI program are both back in the news now, each for their own unsavory reasons, and their reemergence should be a reminder of how fully the Obama administration has embraced the logic underpinning the Bush regime's response to 9/11. The Pentagon is now requesting nearly $200 million for Guantanamo Bay infrastructure upgrades, including $49 million for a new unit for "special" prisoners – likely the so-called high-value detainees currently housed at Camp 7, which include self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Pentagon's reasoning is that neither the president nor Congress have any plans to close the prison anytime soon, so these repairs are necessary..."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/symbols-of-bush-era-lawlessness-flourish-under-obama-20130402#ixzz2PT5Ynesn