Add your own: CIA prof's post-9/11 ethics class scenarios

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Add your own: CIA prof's post-9/11 ethics class scenarios

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Oct 21, 2008 12:51 am

.

Here's a game. I'm curious if anyone here answers "yes" to any of the following set of 10 hypothetical dilemmas supposedly typical of those facing the CIA in the "post-9/11" world, as currently being presented by a former CIA covert operations official to his ethics class at Texas A&M. (I mean, after suspending disbelief; pretend the terms are valid and the facts given are true.)

More importantly, I'd appreciate good ideas for a response I'd like to draw up to the cases and the world-view presented by author James Olson. This should also be in the form of short hypothetical scenarios. (Olson's bio: served in the CIA directorate of operations and teaches at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.)

The excerpt, which ran in this month's Harper's, is taken from the following article: Olson, James M. (1941-), "Intelligence and the War on Terror: How Dirty Are We Willing to Get Our Hands?" SAIS Review, 28:1, Winter-Spring 2008, 37-45.

---

James Olson wrote:
The following scenarios are shortened versions of fictionalized case studies I developed for classroom use and then adapted for inclusion in my book on intelligence ethics. Read the following case studies and decide whether the given course of action in each of the ten case studies below is morally acceptable or not. Exclude practical, legal, or operational considerations from your decision, and focus on whether you are comfortable with U.S. intelligence agencies engaging in the indicated activities.

Case Study #1

A senior al-Qaida operative, known to have masterminded a major terrorist attack in the United States (killing 700 U.S. citizens), is in hiding in Sudan. The CIA learns from intelligence sources exactly where he is, and has the capability of inserting an assassination team into Sudan. Other options, such as kidnapping or extraditing him, are excluded for operational and political reasons. Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA to assassinate this terrorist inside Sudan?

Case Study #2

U.S. forces capture a high-level terrorist leader in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan. There is no doubt that he has extensive information on the identities and locations of other terrorists, their communications, finances, and future attacks. He is not talking. Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA to use full-fledged torture, including beatings and electric shock, to extract his information?

Case Study #3

An Albanian member of the terrorist group Egyptian Jihad is running a large cell of this organization in Sofia, Bulgaria. Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA, in collaboration with its official liaison within Bulgarian security, to kidnap this terrorist on the streets of Sofia, send him secretly to Cairo, and turn him over to Egyptian authorities for interrogation that will likely include beatings and torture?

Case Study #4

A CIA officer under business cover in Tehran becomes friends with a young Iranian official working for the Iranian Ministry of Defense. The young Iranian reveals that he is secretly opposed to the Iranian regime. The CIA's assessment is that he would never knowingly work for the CIA, but he might be enticed to cooperate with a reputable international organization. Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA officer to tell the Iranian (falsely) that he works for Amnesty International in order to recruit him as a reporting source from inside Iran?

Case Study #5

A Cuban intelligence officer is working undercover as a second secretary at the Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York. FBI surveillance of him in New York indicates that he frequents gay bars and engages in promiscuous homosexual sex. Homosexuality is grounds for dismissal from the Cuban intelligence service, and the Cuban has concealed his sexual orientation from his family, friends, and colleagues. Would it be morally acceptable for the FBI to attempt to recruit this Cuban as a source on Cuban intelligence operations by blackmailing him on the basis of his homosexuality?

Case Study #6

The CIA has an extremely productive clandestine relationship with a Chinese official who announces that he will soon be reassigned to a high-ranking position with the Chinese Communist Party in the city of Kunming. The CIA wishes to continue its secret meetings with him in Kunming but has very limited cover options for inserting an officer there. Only one option presents itself: Christian missionary cover. Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA to place an officer undercover with the U.S.-based Divine Word Outreach (which has a presence in Kunming) to maintain clandestine contact with the Chinese source?

Case Study #7

A female CIA officer is operating undercover in Rome. To expand her spotting opportunities for potential recruits, she joins a local tennis club. She strikes up a friendship with the Deputy Chief of Mission of the Iranian Embassy, who is an avid tennis player. Over time, it is clear to the CIA officer that the Iranian is infatuated with her and can be easily manipulated. Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA officer to seduce the Iranian (she is willing to do so) as a means of drawing him into espionage on behalf of the United States?

Case Study #8

The FBI is interested in recruiting Chinese graduate students at U.S. universities who will return to China in sensitive defense jobs. If these students are recruited in the U.S., they will be turned over to the CIA for clandestine handling inside China. Would it be morally acceptable for the FBI to recruit a Chinese-American professor at a major university (who agrees to assist without payment) and to task him/her to befriend Chinese students and to report to the FBI on their personalities, potential vulnerabilities, and activities?

Case Study #9

A Middle Eastern graduate student at a U.S. university walks into the local FBI office, and volunteers his services as a penetration of an Islamic terrorist cell of which he is a secret member. In exchange, he wants the FBI to assist him in completing his Ph.D. dissertation, with which he says he is hopelessly bogged down. Would it be morally acceptable for the FBI to assist the student in plagiarizing his dissertation in return for his cooperation against the terrorist cell?

Case Study #10

The CIA has recruited a penetration of an important al-Qaida cell in Hamburg, Germany. He is providing valuable intelligence on terrorist activities and personnel, not only in Germany but throughout Europe. At a secret meeting at a safehouse in Hamburg, the terrorist asks his CIA handler to provide him with a prostitute. He says it would be dangerous for him to frequent red-light districts in Hamburg because he knows the German police patrol there heavily, and he fears disease. He adds that if the CIA does not comply with his request, he will break off contact and the CIA will lose him as a source. Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA to procure a medically-cleared prostitute for this terrorist?

If you found nine or ten of these case studies morally acceptable, you probably subscribe to the Doolittle principle that "long-standing American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered" in the face of today's terrorism threat. If you were comfortable with seven or eight of them, you are aggressive and forward-leaning, but draw the line at certain activities. You want to play hardball, mostly by the rules, but are willing to cut a few corners if necessary. If you found three to six of the case studies acceptable, you are not willing to abandon the moral high ground, but understand that the moral terrain has shifted since September 11, 2001. This is likely the mainstream opinion in the U.S. If you found two or fewer of the case studies acceptable, you probably do not fully understand the magnitude of the threat the U.S. faces and the means that must be employed to defeat it. An important lesson from this exercise is recognizing that good, thoughtful, decent, and patriotic Americans can and do disagree on these difficult moral issues. But there is no excuse for inaction.
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Harpers Magazine and Congress for Cultural Freedom

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Tue Oct 21, 2008 1:18 am

The short answer to those scenarios is:
"It is not ethical to belong to a terrorist organization like the CIA or a racist Gestapo like the FBI."

So the CIA is still working on the American intelligentsia to see things their way.
No doubt for the post-inauguration surge in Afghanistan and against future moves in Congress to restrict bad behavior by alphabet boys.

Guess college grads with health care and 401K's didn't go see this summer's Batman movie which introduced Game Theory 101 in the form of the classic 'Prisoner's Dilemma' to SweetTart-tingled 14-24 year-olds.

Spooks at The New Yorker like Jane Mayer and Lawrence Wright are working hard to bring around the dangerous reading demographic. Why not Harpers, too?

Regarding Harpers Magazine staff-
Lewis Lapham's brother, Anthony, was the CIA's lawyer during the Pike and Church Committee era.
wink wink nudge nudge.

Image

http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/04/12/cold_war/index1.html
Can you say 'Partisan Review' and 'Congress of Cultural Freedom?'
I knew you could.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/obituaries/15lapham.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Anthony A. Lapham, 70, Former C.I.A. Lawyer, Dies

Published: November 15, 2006

Anthony A. Lapham, who was the Central Intelligence Agency’s top lawyer in the 1970s when the agency was reeling from Congressional investigations into questionable and illegal activities, died on Nov. 11 near Burnsville, N.C. He was 70.

Mr. Lapham died of a heart attack while fishing for trout on the Cane River, his son Nicholas said.

Mr. Lapham, a quiet, modest man who preferred to work in the background, served two C.I.A. directors, George H. W. Bush in the Ford administration and Adm. Stansfield Turner in the Carter administration.

Mr. Bush, under scrutiny in 1975 as the first politician appointed to head the agency, searched to find someone outside the political and intelligence worlds. Mr. Lapham came from the Washington law firm Shea & Gardner, which was later absorbed by the firm Goodwin Procter, whose headquarters are in Boston.

President Bill Clinton chose his C.I.A. director, R. James Woolsey, from the same firm. Stephen J. Hadley, the current President Bush’s national security adviser, was also a partner there.

After news reports of C.I.A. misdeeds in 1974, President Gerald R. Ford the next year appointed a commission to analyze the agency, and the Senate and the House set up investigatory panels. They found that the agency had engaged in spying on Americans, plots to assassinate foreign leaders and other questionable activities.

Mr. Lapham began work on June 1, 1976, and quickly found himself atoning for the agency’s past sins. For example, he wrote letters to the University of Pennsylvania and other universities accepting responsibility for C.I.A. research on mind control on their campuses in the 1950s.

In March 1977, he sent a memorandum to congressmen and policy makers urging care in rewriting laws governing intelligence leaks. He pointed out that the phrase “information relating to national intelligence” could mean vital military secrets or something as simple as daily stock market reports. He also argued for precision in defining who and what should be covered by the law, and for prompt and independent review of any questions raised.

He said the agency favored “a narrower and more discriminating approach.”

In a statement yesterday, Michael V. Hayden, the current director of the C.I.A., praised Mr. Lapham’s contributions “during a period of momentous change and challenges for the agency.”

Anthony Abbot Lapham was born on Aug. 22, 1936, in San Francisco. His father, Lewis A. Lapham, was president of several shipping companies and of the Bankers Trust New York Corporation, and helped create the professional golf tour.

Anthony Lapham graduated from Yale and earned a law degree from Georgetown. He moved to Washington and worked as an assistant United States attorney for the District of Columbia and then for the Treasury Department in its enforcement area.

While doing those two jobs, he served in Army intelligence and then in a legal unit in the Navy, sometimes on active duty but mostly in the Reserves. Nicholas Lapham said his father had entered the Navy after fulfilling his Army duty because he enjoyed being in the military.

In 1967, Mr. Lapham joined Shea & Gardner, and he became a partner three years later. He returned there after his C.I.A. tenure.

His great enthusiasm was conservation, and he was recently elected chairman of American Rivers, which works to protect river systems. He was a past chairman of the Ocean Conservancy.

After his time at the C.I.A., as a private lawyer, Mr. Lapham represented figures including Adolfo Calero, leader of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, a contra group; the chief paymaster for the brutal government of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president; and his own former boss, Admiral Turner, who sued the C.I.A. for heavily censoring a book he had written.

Mr. Lapham is survived by his wife, the former Burk Bingham; his sons Nicholas P. and David A. Lapham; his brother, Lewis H. Lapham, editor of the history journal Lapham’s Quarterly and a former editor of Harper’s Magazine; and two grandsons.

This April, in an interview with The New York Times, Anthony Lapham revisited the issue of leaks of government secrets, coming down on both sides of a complex question. He judged the debate over measures used by intelligence agencies to fight terrorism so important that it justified the leaking of knowledge of the measures’ existence. But he could not bring himself to approve of the leakers themselves.

“There’s a premise that it’s O.K. for someone to leak because they’re serving a higher purpose, a higher loyalty,” he said. “Well, the next thing you know, you have a whole building full of people with a higher loyalty, each to a different principle. And pretty soon you don’t have a functioning intelligence agency.”
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Postby barracuda » Tue Oct 21, 2008 1:33 am

This whole problem set is such a mind-fuck propaganda read. As we pretty much know around here, "al-Qaida operatives" are the CIA. Of course the super-spy world of American intelligence requirements includes lots of sex and torture and assassinations. How boring it would be otherwise. I see very little here that isn't accepted as routine by your average citizen these days, and it all follows the plotlines of innumerable Hollywood script treatments. Most of these moral questions are thrown out the window by your average corporate attorney around six months into his first year on the job at Prudential. It's no wonder the state of global affairs, with these Bozos running around procuring medically-cleared prostitutes for phoney terrorists. The size of the black budget is infinitly accomodating. Quick re-phrase:
A few CIA guys are hanging out at their condo in Hamburg. Their buddy gets them good heroin from Turkey and mules it all over Europe for them. At a big-time secret drinkfest at a nearby nightclub in Hamburg, the mule tells his CIA connection he thinks they are drunk enough to score some hookers and take them back to the condo. He says "You do it, and don't get the ugly one this time!" He adds that if the CIA does not pay for the hookers, he's going to bed. Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA to score hookers for the mule, knowing that to maintain "cover", they will have to join in the fun? 'Cause otherwise, the terrorists have won!! And the American way of life is over, or at least in deep peril!!

Some of these are quite funny. I like the one where the FBI helps the Islamic terrorist cell member cheat on his homework. Whoa, the moral compromise! And they accomplish this by plagiarising. Oh great.
But there is no excuse for inaction.

This is the money message. Do it or die. Access your most complicit self and agree that the world must be this way. Surrender to the wisdom of the CIA or you are naive.

These things go on every day. The CIA should be kneecapped and put out to pasture for all the ROI we get in the real world. Well, at least we know a bit more about Harper's magazine now. Fuck them. The American way of life ended generations ago, if it ever existed as a pipe-dream of Henry David Thoreau. These scenarios evidence the expression of the preservation of a worldwide criminal enterprise built around exploitable emotional stereotypes for the benefit of a club that could care less about "Americans."
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Postby JackRiddler » Tue Oct 21, 2008 2:02 am

.

Thanks for an excellent suggestion, Barracuda.

HMW wrote:The short answer to those scenarios is:
"It is not ethical to belong to a terrorist organization like the CIA or a racist Gestapo like the FBI."


But of course. I'd like to elaborate on that with counter-examples.

HMW, I believe Harper's ran the excerpt in its "Readings" (ironically titled: "The Imprisoner's Dilemma") as a prompt to criticize, not to celebrate or normalize. It's a real low point in current-day sophism. Lewis Lapham, who has retired, makes no secret of his family's ruling class and spook connections, and speaks out with force against the insanity and violence of the system these classes preside over. I'd like to vote for him for president.

PS - In the OP, I bolded the two sentences that I felt were the most obvious attempts at subtle brainwash in a brainwashing screed.

Why the fuck is this guy teaching anyone?
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Postby jingofever » Tue Oct 21, 2008 3:01 am

JackRiddler wrote:Why the fuck is this guy teaching anyone?

Because he is at Texas A&M. They are very keen on the military there. (And I suppose other things that have to do with state sponsored violence.)

Some hypotheticals:

You and your colleagues at the NSA record a vigorous session of phone sex between two leading Hollywood starlets. After they refuse to be blackmailed you decide to post the audio online. Is it morally acceptable to upload the conversation to YouTube, forcing listeners to click on several ten minute segments? or should you upload the file to Google Video where listeners can hear the entire phone call on one page?

Or how about one with health care. Say x number of people will needlessly die in the coming years because of a shoddy health care system unless a better one is put in place. The dilemma is whether it is moral to tax people to save some measly little lives. Of course, if they answer wrong:

"you probably do not fully understand the magnitude of the threat the U.S. faces and the means that must be employed to defeat it."

Or how about: You are a Justice Department lawyer and receive a tip that some operatives in the CIA have killed a detainee during a vigorous session of interrogation. Is it morally acceptable to denounce the tipster as a terrorist?

Or something along those lines.
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Postby Eldritch » Tue Oct 21, 2008 7:50 am

A class on ethics by a "former" CIA operative is a little like having a class on virginity taught by a whore.
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Postby nathan28 » Tue Oct 21, 2008 10:30 am

I love the way the thing pretends to be an "exercise" but frames every question as a yes or no. You don't get to answer with an alternative proposition.

Case Study #9

A Middle Eastern graduate student at a U.S. university walks into the local FBI office, and volunteers his services as a penetration of an Islamic terrorist cell of which he is a secret member. In exchange, he wants the FBI to assist him in completing his Ph.D. dissertation, with which he says he is hopelessly bogged down. Would it be morally acceptable for the FBI to assist the student in plagiarizing his dissertation in return for his cooperation against the terrorist cell?


For real? Are you telling me that we used taxpayer dollars to write a dissertation for someone for "national security"? it's crap like that that makes me want to vote libertarian

Case Study #23

A CIA payroll administrator notices that his department is direct-depositing large quantities of money into the accounts of known terrorists every pay period. If he leaks this information to the press or his congressional representatives, should he be tortured "for the hell of it"?




More seriously, I'm amazed by how these "scenarios" ascribe almost no subjectivity to the people on the other end. People can either be tortured for information, recruited to gather information (probably by torture) or executed summarily. That's it. Totally reductionistic logic behind every decision.

Which is why it occasionally gets sideswiped, because it neglects that those people who are information-carriers have agency. Smearing Sayyid Qutb in bacon fat and throwing him to a bunch of dogs didn't help extract information from him, it just convinced him that his analysis of the West as a depraved, amoral, materialistic society was correct and led him to radicalize one Ayman Zawhiri. Whoops.

I have little doubt that Gitmo and the other 20+ "secret" overseas prisons are producing at this moment all manner of new Qutbs. Once as tragedy, twice as farce.
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Postby vanlose kid » Tue Oct 21, 2008 10:30 am

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"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
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Postby Luposapien » Tue Oct 21, 2008 10:40 am

Exclude practical, legal, or operational considerations from your decision


In other words, turn off your brain and assume that there are no other options available to resolve the situation, and it's either do this or do nothing. Accepting any of the actions pretty much demands that you adopt an "ends justify the means" mindset, which, I believe, is logically unsound in a world where cause and effect exists. The ends are not justified by the means, they are determined by them.
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Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 21, 2008 11:12 am

Case Study #11

The Joker is threatening to destroy the world with a green Kryptonite asteroid unless the CIA agrees to stretch your mother on the rack. Would it be morally acceptable for Harper's to publish this fantasy?
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Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 21, 2008 11:34 am

This makes me think of the documentary Soldiers of Conscience, regarding US military resisters, which I saw on public tv the other night. The "give war a chance" position is represented by a professor from West Point, who trots out the same old arguments for violence and agression that we always hear. Stuff along the lines of "stopping a violent attacker would be an ethical thing to do, whether or not you had to hurt or kill them". Sure, but his argument is totaly divorced from a social and political analysis of US hegemony, and posed in opposition to the straw man of Ghandian pacifism.

The video is quite intense and is visible in its entirety, till the 23rd of October only, at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... amdo1fp49d
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Postby JackRiddler » Tue Oct 21, 2008 11:51 am

Here we seem to disagree.

MacC wrote:Would it be morally acceptable for Harper's to publish this fantasy?


I consider it a moral duty for Harper's to inform a wider public when a CIA prof uses transparent sophistry to indoctrinate public university students into a depraved world-view and recruit them as warriors against democracy and the principles of an open society. One could string out a long list of further approbations that apply to the text and its governing mentality: corruption, authoritarianism, irrationality, projection, imperialism, God complex or supremacism/narcissism, self-delusion and, almost certainly, a hatred of self and others (anti-humanism).
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Postby JackRiddler » Tue Oct 21, 2008 12:01 pm

.

Contacts at the White House inform you that the president is preparing a surprise speech warning Americans to "beware the military industrial complex" and calling for deep cuts in Pentagon and intelligence agency funding. These are likely to shut down your department's activities. You have evidence that the president may have engaged in an extramarital affair prior to taking office. Do you provide these documents to the press?

.
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Postby barracuda » Tue Oct 21, 2008 12:24 pm

At a CIA run rendition camp in eastern Turkey, four thousand persons are held, all having possible ties to anti-american activities including but not limited to: insurgency against US supported dictatorships, unknowably belonging to a CIA-developed false flag unit, being in the wrong place when Afgani warlords needed payroll cash, being an Iraqui ciotizen or knowing someone who may fall into one of these categories. Some of these individuals are suspected of having information about something, you are not sure what. It is within the realm of possibility that one or more of them may know something which you wish to know, or may not know something, and you want to know if they don't, all in the ultimate name of national security. After intensive standard interrogation, do you move into stress positions and sexual humilation routines to break the prisoners, even if they include large amounts of children and elderly women? It is possible, if improbable, that American lives could be saved.

The routine polling of presidential job favorability has been steadily declining for months if not years. There is an undercurrent of public dissatifaction with the administration which is coming to a head. The NSA's data mining has shown high concentrations of low-level keyword markings concentrated in US coastal seaboard cities. These keywords have generated a list of administration opponents and unhappy citizens which can be culled down to two million individuals, each with the potential to become a homegrown instgator of terror. Is it ethical to have the IRS pay particulary strong attention to their tax returns? How about sending the FBI to visit each person o the list? Or send a letter to each persons employer? Should a black budget item for detainment facilities be rushed through a senate committee and the no-bid contract hurriedly given to Halliburton?

A CIA operation in a vital south american country has incurred a huge level of popular sentiment manifesting in blowback guerilla activities against american corporations in the region. The deep cover operatives within the terrorist guerrilla groups can easily manipulate the leaders of these groups to intensify activities which would adversely effect the stock prices of several of these corporations. Would it be unethical to purchase large amounts of PUT options against these stocks in order to further fund the CIA operation and forge a path towards freedom?
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Postby Luposapien » Tue Oct 21, 2008 12:30 pm

Your "Ex"-CIA ethics professor presents you with a list of decontextualized scenarios designed to coerce you into accepting a worldview wherein the interests of "The United States of America" (whatever that may be), a priori trump any or all ethical considerations. Is it morally acceptable to play along with his mind-game, and complete the assignment within the false parameters dictated, or do you call him out on his bullshit in front of the class and refuse to participate?
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