The Associated Press is reporting that members of the controversial CIA Interrogation program who committed serious mistakes that left people wrongly imprisoned or dead have suffered few consequences. The article highlights the case of a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri, who was snatched from a bus in Macedonia by security forces in 2003. Only a select group of CIA officers knew he had been whisked away to a secret prison in Afghanistan.
It turns out that el-Masri was the wrong guy, even though he was held for five months. The "hard-charging" CIA analyst whose actions were deplorable was never punished. In fact, the analyst was promoted. The botched el-Masri case is but one example of a CIA accountability process that even some within the agency say is unpredictable and inconsistent.
Two officers involved in the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan, for instance, received no discipline and have advanced into Middle East leadership positions. The AP investigation of the CIA's actions revealed a disciplinary system that takes years to make decisions, hands down reprimands inconsistently, and is viewed inside the agency as prone to favoritism and manipulation. When people are disciplined, the punishment seems to roll downhill, sparing senior managers even when they were directly involved in operations that go awry.
Not being punished and then getting promoted for wrongly imprisoning, "interrogating" and killing people is outrageous. Here is another travesty that inevitably the Obama administration is going to have to clean up.
Read more at Yahoo News.
In other news: Detroit Mayor Offers Police Officers Homes for $1,000.