CIA chief sacked for opposing torture

"The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed."

"Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been” in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks."

"Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: "It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists."

It's nice to know we do have some spies with principals. Not all are sadists, and fortunately, not all are willing to keep their mouths shut. I hope that no matter how many "Chiefs" they replace, those leaks keep coming. It's one thing to oppose the necessary evils of activities of intelligence agencies, but quite another to oppose, and reveal activites of operations that clearly cause more harm than good to our national security, national interests, and international moral standing. Before continuing, I should define what I mean by "national interests". I don't mean the interests of corporate geopolitics, but rather that which average Americans want our nation to stand for. Perhaps we need different words to describe the two, since they're diametric opposites.

We need leaks like the ones we've been getting because they highlight actions that cause hatred towards us. Every time we abuse people, particularly ones who only happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, we create another enemy of the U.S.. When they're already guilty of some crime against us, that's one thing, but we're doing irreparable harm to our nation by kidapping, torturing, killing, and any amount of other cruel treatment we place upon the innocent. Mistakes are bound to happen, but with a "gulty until proven innocent" approach, we seem to end up just collecting people to kick around just for the hell of it, rather than getting any real intelligence benefit. There are way too many stories of people caught up in the dragnets of this war on terror, that have nothing to do with it. Some of them will try to restart their lives the best they can, but others will see legitimacy in those that support some terror cause against us, and join them.

The leaks, as well as vocal opposition to these policies from within intel agencies (that cause some to be "relieved of their posts"), are what the people here need to know, so they can stop pretending that there's no reason in the world for anyone to hate us. They need to be able to awaken from the dreamworld their President has painted for them by lies of the terrorists "hating us for our freedoms", and other intelligence-insulting nonsense. They've grown far to dependant on official propaganda spread through mainstream media. Stories like this get almost no widespread coverage (outside the internet), or they're spun in the opposite direction, and the public just follows along believing what they're told is important, because the government and media emphasis is shifted from what was revealed, onto who revealed it. In the mainstream, it's more important to stop those criminal leakers, than stoping the crimes they've actually leaked about. This is why, the more leaks, the better. Leaks don't hurt us when they reveal crimes, the crimes do. One revelation can cause temporary problems for those in charge, but constant leaks help to pull the delusional public back to reality, if only for a while. Denial of reality is very hard to overcome.