ANOTHER CASE OF BUSH REWARDING FAILURE

I noted before that the criminal Bush regime rewarded 8 people despite the fact that they failed miserably. Thanx to Glenn Greenwald, I now know of another case: the CIA officer who wrongly insisted that Al-Masri was a terrorist.

The Secret History
Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past?
by Jane Mayer
June 22, 2009
The New Yorker

The C.I.A. has apparently done nothing to penalize the officer who oversaw one of the most notorious renditions—that of a German car salesman named Khaled el-Masri. He was abducted while on a holiday in Macedonia, and flown by the agency to Afghanistan, where he was detained in a dungeon for five months without charges, before being released. From the start, the rendition team suspected that his case was one of mistaken identity. But the C.I.A. officer in charge at Langley—the agency asked that the officer’s name be withheld—insisted that Masri be further interrogated. “She just looked in her crystal ball and it said that he was bad,” a colleague recalls.

Masri was released after a hundred and forty-nine days. But the officer in charge was not disciplined; in fact, a former colleague says, “she’s been promoted—twice.”