- Michael Hayden wrote an op-ed mourning the death of truth
- Trump, he says, is an unhinged liar
- Hayden's strategies of obfsucation in the CIA and NSA gave a platform for Trump to lie with impunity
- The logic of 'national security,' legitimated by Hayden, is now being used by Trump
By Ty Joplin
The New York Times recently published an opinion piece entitled “The End of Intelligence,” bemoaning the death of truth and trust in U.S. institutions thanks to Trump’s continuous lying and spats with the intelligence community.
The piece is an obituary on truth, and yet another voice warning that our post-truth era is a precursor to fascism. But those who wish to see the re-emergence of truth as a powerful force in politics should do well to stay clear of the author of the it.
The author, Michael Hayden, was the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) before taking on the role of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In other words, Hayden is essentially the physical embodiment of the intelligence community.
Despite its history of torture, extra-legal killings and sowing chaos abroad, Democrats found an ally in the CIA after he came under attack by Trump. Democrats fell in love with the agency in 2017, when opinion polls showed Democrats favored the agency by a net 32 percent. Those who were loyal to Hillary Clinton were even more enthusiastic, supporting the CIA by a net 39 percent.
“How the erosion of Enlightenment values threatens good intelligence was obvious in the Trump administration’s ill-conceived and poorly carried out executive order that looked to the world like a Muslim ban,” Hayden writes.
However, it was also obvious when Hayden directed massive and warrantless surveillance programs on American citizens, downplayed reports of torture, and defended destruction of evidence related to torture.
Not exactly acting on Enlightenment values like human worth and respecting human dignity and transparency.
Michael Hayden, the NSA and the CIA are not the vanguards of truth by any stretch of the imagination. To the contrary, they often are responsible for instituting ‘post-truth’ practices of deceiving the American public about their activities, while justifying it all under the auspices of national security.
Michael Hayden, NSA Director, Didn’t Seem to Like Rights
NSA Headquarters (AFP/FILE)
Between 1999 and 2005, Hayden was the director of the NSA, one of the largest intelligence organizations in the United States. In the wake of 9/11, Hayden oversaw the launch of several mass surveillance programs that included warrantless wiretapping on millions of U.S. citizens.
One of the first designed, codenamed Stellar Wind, gave the NSA the ability to mine the data of phone calls, texts and emails of citizens all without obtaining a warrant to do so. The operation was meant to fast-track surveillance on suspicious individuals, but the program ended up targeting countless unwitting and innocent civilians who had no plans on attacking the United States or engaging in terrorism.
Importantly, Stellar Wind gave the NSA the requisite procedures and infrastructure to expand its surveillance operations, sweeping millions of Americans’ data. One such program, codenamed PRISM, involved mining data from telecommunications and internet companies such as Google and Verizon.
Once revealed, the legality of the program was hotly contested. The NSA argued that imminent security threats mandated such drastic action. This is a line Hayden has consistently relied on defend the programs he oversaw, despite there being little evidence of such programs stopping terror attacks and more tangible evidence, including federal court opinions, that they violated Americans’ rights.
Later, when much of the NSA’s surveillance programs were revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Hayden publicly threatened Snowden with his life. Journalist Mehdi Hasan asked him about this in an interview, and Hayden at first denied that he ever threatened Snowden before relenting and admitting, in his ‘darker moments,’ he wished Snowden were dead.
“In my darker moments, I have thought about that [killing Snowden]... because he’s been tremendously destructive to American security,” Hayden said to Hasan.
The CIA's Troubled History
The Tehran Radio Station during the coup d'etat (Wikimedia)
The CIA has an even longer and more troublesome history than the NSA. Long before Hayden took the helm of one of the most secretive and powerful clandestine spy operations with the world has ever seen, the CIA had established itself as a foe to transparency.
It was deeply involved in foreign entanglements in Latin America and the Middle East, changing some regimes while propping others up, in addition to kidnapping and torturing U.S. citizens in the mid-20th century.
One of the most notable examples of the CIA’s meddling abroad was in Iran, overthrowing Iran’s leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and centralized power around Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, also called the Shah. The coup was meant to ensure Iranian oil flowed westward and was not under the control by an Iranian national oil company.
The Shah’s pro-Western stances garnered resentment within Iran and in 1979, he was overthrown in a popular revolution and replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, a staunchly anti-Western religious cleric; also a man noted for his endorsement of violence.
Many of Iran’s contemporary geopolitical goals and alignments can be understood and partially explained thanks to the CIA’s history of meddling in the country and the local backlash it caused.
The CIA in the 21st Century is Not Much Better
Michael Hayden appearing before the Senate in 2006 (AFP/FILE)
Skipping forward to the 21st century, the CIA was given immense discretionary power in the post 9/11, fear-stricken atmosphere. It began setting up black sites around the world, where they interrogated and tortured suspected extremists.
Appointed as the director in 2006 and serving until 2009, Hayden defended the destruction of evidence related to torture, downplayed the cruelty and illegality of waterboarding, and viciously hit back against reports hinting that waterboarding did little to enhance U.S. security.
At this time, the CIA was engaged in waterboarding, a brutal form of interrogation that simulated drowning, which can leave individuals unconscious and struggling to breathe, convinced that they are dying.
The CIA videotaped several of its waterboarding sessions with suspected terrorists, and then destroyed those videotapes. Hayden defended the destruction of evidence on the grounds of national security, telling reporting: “Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al Qaeda and its sympathizers."
Human rights watchdogs and politicians called out the destruction of the tapes as a tactic to obfuscate investigations into waterboarding.
A visual depiction of waterboarding (Mike Licht)
Further, he downplayed the cruelty of waterboarding, refusing to call it torture and instead relying on the euphemism “enhanced interrogation.” Human Rights Watch, however, said unequivocally “Waterboarding is torture, and torture is a crime,” in a statement.
In justifying the potentially illegal torture methods, Hayden repeatedly relied on saying that the U.S. was experiencing an imminent threat against which extraordinary reactions were needed.
When Hayden first acknowledged the use of waterboarding to the public, he defended the tactic under the "belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable." He further noted that the "circumstances at the time," justified the use of waterboarding as a legal and pragmatic solution to intelligence gathering if there is fear of an imminent attack.
This type of justification relied on the theory that waterboarding, though terrible, extracted useful and actionable intelligence that protected Americans. This turned out to be false.
A 2006 Senate report noted internal memos within the CIA stating that people subject to waterboarding gave out false and misleading information in order to distract officers or absolve themselves of wrongdoing; anything to stop the torture.
The bombshell report also noted that Hayden had ordered subordinates to misrepresent the total number of detainees the CIA had. Hayden had “instructed me to keep the detainee number at 98,” an officer was recorded saying. In addition, CIA officers leaked misleading and false information to journalist in an attempt to win the public over on the torture techniques used.
The report indicated that the CIA was lying and misrepresenting its own intelligence to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which helped lead oversight on the interrogation program, and even the White House.
Hayden, Trump and the ‘Terrorism Narrative’
The White House (AFP/FILE)
Hayden’s reaction to the Senate report was not one that reflected Enlightenment-era virtues of truth, transparency, and democracy. Immediately after its release, Hayden dismissed it as a partisan hack job, and essentially called it fake news, despite there being hundreds of pages of well-documented, substantiated claims that include sources and international documentation from the CIA itself.
Hayden’s CIA engaged in a manipulative form of post-truthist obfuscation, veiling to the public the true nature of the program his agency was involved in.
Here, we can draw an useful analogy between Hayden’s behavior and Trump’s.
Hayden defended the secretive and illegal activities of the CIA as necessary against imminent threats to the U.S. Experts have pointed out that Al Qaeda has been a limited threat to security and has actually trapped the U.S. in a proverbial ‘terrorism narrative.’
“Al Qaeda has never presented a strategic, existential threat to the United States,” Scholar Fawaz Gerges told a reporter in an interview. “The war on terror is the oxygen that has sustained Al Qaeda… In the eyes of many Muslims and many Arabs, the United States was waging a war against Islam and Muslims. And thus, Al Qaeda used that particular invasion of Iraq to recruit fighters.”
This ‘terrorism narrative’ has justified the proliferation of clandestine and extra-legal activities from the NSA and the CIA; activities that Hayden has consistently and vociferously defended despite being ineffective at extracting information and far more effective as a recruitment tool for extremist groups.
Trump has picked up this terrorism narrative, using what Hayden had built and expanding the fear-mongering rhetoric to Mexicans.
In the speech announcing his presidential run in 2016, Trump called Mexicans rapists who are trying to take advantage of the U.S. in order to ruin it.
The same type of rhetoric was used to paint Muslims as a dangerous, global gang of terrorists that need to be refused entry into the U.S. and added into registries if they already reside inside the country.
Make America Great Again (Rami Khoury/Al Bawaba)
These extra-legal and illegal procedures depend on precisely the same type of ‘imminent threat’ logic Hayden legitimated. It is surprising then, to see Hayden sell himself as a martyr for truth and sensible policies, condemning the Muslim Ban in his NYT opinion piece as “ill-conceived and poorly carried out,” despite piggy-backing off his logic of an imminent threat of Islamist extremists.
Hayden later gives advice to young CIA and intelligence officers struggling to cope with Trump’s authoritarianism. “Protect yourself. Take notes and save them. And above all, protect the institution. America still needs it,” Hayden writes.
In previously defending the destruction of evidence, of bending rules to torture, and of misleading Congress, the White House and the public about the efficacy and scope of the CIA’s and NSA’s operations, Hayden would have done well to follow his own advice.
Even if we live in an era where truth is dead and has been eulogized by Hayden, it wasn’t put in the ground solely by Trump.
He was helped by Hayden, who in effect showed Trump the manual on exaggerating fears to justify lies and illegal actions, degrading trust in institutions and contributing toward the ‘post-truth’ era.
