The Somali Connection -- Further questions about Obama's interrogation and detention policies..

[Ubiquitous]

To what extent is the CIA still involved in detaining and interrogating
terrorist enemy combatants? Yesterday we noted that past Petraeus
paramour Paula Broadwell had claimed on Oct. 26 that the agency was
holding three Libyan detainees in Benghazi at the time of the 9/11
attacks there. Fox News Channel's Jennifer Griffin mentioned the three
detainees in a report the same day. Yesterday Griffin added that
according to her sources, "other prisoners from additional countries in
Africa and the Middle East" had also been held there, though "most . . .
had been moved two weeks earlier."

The agency issued a categorical denial: "The CIA has not had detention
authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any
suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is
uninformed and baseless."

Executive Order 13491, issued on President Obama's second full day in
office, provides: "The CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any
detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any
such detention facility in the future." It also bans the enhanced
interrogation techniques the agency used during at least part of the Bush
administration: Detainees under U.S. custody or "effective control" are
not to "be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any
treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed
in [the] Army Field Manual."

But it turns out Benghazi isn't the only place where the CIA has been
reported to have acted in contravention of Executive Order 13491. In July
2011, The Nation, a hard-left magazine, reported that the CIA "uses a
secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia's National Security
Agency (NSA) headquarters" in Mogadishu. There, according to the
magazine, detainees from Al Shabab, "an Islamic militant group with close
ties to Al Qaeda," are held and interrogated.

"While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA," The
Nation reported, "US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of
intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners." The
following month, the New York Times published a substantively similar
report, in which it added the detail that some Somalis call the detention
facility " 'Guant�namo' for its ties to the United States."

These reports--published, we should note, before David Petraeus became
CIA director--prompted a letter from Human Rights Watch to President
Obama, dated Sept. 6 (the day Petraeus was sworn in): "These allegations,
if true, would raise serious questions regarding whether the United
States is acting in compliance with the requirements of Executive Order
13491 and other legal obligations."

Fourteen months later, Human Rights Watch tells Best of the Web Today
that the letter went unanswered.

Assuming that these reports are accurate--that the CIA is involved in
detention and interrogation in Mogadishu, Benghazi and perhaps
elsewhere--the Petraeus sex scandal has drawn attention to a policy
scandal. Obama sold Americans a complete bill of goods when it comes to
counterterror policy.

In 2008 he promised to reverse Bush policies that raised the hackles of
Europeans and left-leaning human-rights types. In area after
area--Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, surveillance--he failed to do so. He
even stepped up the use of lethal drones against terrorists, including
U.S. citizens. Detention and interrogation policy was supposed to be the
one case in which the policy had actually changed.

This column is on the opposite side from our friends at Human Rights
Watch, which is to say that we generally approve of the administration's
actual policies. We favor drone strikes, indefinite detention, enhanced
interrogation and the rest of it. We'd rather Obama break his promises
than endanger Americans by keeping them. It's galling that many Obama
partisans, including Obama himself, are now willing to countenance
policies they self-righteously denounced just four years ago. But that's
politics.

If the CIA was running a detention facility at Benghazi, it's possible it
was a rogue operation, or it's possible the president secretly authorized
an exception to Executive Order 13491. Either way, there would be
extraordinary _political_ pressure to keep it quiet. That might explain
why, as Jennifer Griffin reported, the CIA repeatedly refused requests
for military backup during the 9/11 attacks on the consulate and the
nearby CIA annex. (A CIA spokeswoman denied the agency refused such
requests and said "the Agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues.")

According to Griffin, former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty
defied orders to "stand down" and traveled from the annex to the
consulate, where they helped evacuate Americans. They then returned to
the annex, where they were killed by a mortar shell. If military backup
was denied for fear of exposing continuing CIA detention activity, then
they paid with their lives for Barack Obama's moral and political
posturing.


--
"Re-electing Obama is like backing The Titanic up and hitting the
iceberg a second time."