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AP report: Source claims Obama intel pick tied to CIA torture program

By Ron Brynaert

Published: June 4, 2009
Updated 5 months ago




Update: In 2006, FBI agents feared Mudd wanted them to engage in ‘ethnic targeting’ and mocked him as ‘Rasputin’; Once allegedly ordered FBI agents to search falafel sales records to find Iranian terrorists

A former Bush administration official nominated by President Barack Obama to serve at DHS was linked to the CIA’s torture program, a source tells the Associated Press.

An AP article claims that a congressional aide “who spoke on condition of anonymity,” and wasn’t “authorized to discuss the matter publicly,” has “confirmed that [Philip] Mudd, who was deputy director of the Office of Terrorism Analysis at the CIA during the Bush administration, had direct knowledge of the agency’s harsh interrogation program.”

The AP notes it could wind up becoming “an issue during Philip Mudd’s confirmation hearing, which is expected next week. Mudd was nominated to be under secretary of intelligence and analysis at Homeland Security.”

An updated AP story reveals that “Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said her staff is looking into the extent of Mudd’s involvement in these interrogation program.”

“Mudd’s analysts used information obtained through harsh interrogations, and the official said that Mudd is likely to be questioned on whether the analysis branch pressured interrogators in the field to use harsher methods because they believed detainees were not telling the truth,” the AP adds.

The Washington Times reported last month that Mudd was being tapped to take the place of Roger Mackin, the author of a “controversial report that suggested veterans were being recruited to commit terrorist acts in the U.S.”

However, a DHS spokesperson told Think Progress that the replacement of Mackin “was ‘categorically unrelated’ to the right-wing extremism report.”

Mudd coined the phrase “Pepsi jihad” in “the intelligence leaders’ wide-ranging annual review of global threats before the House Intelligence Committee,” the AP reported in January of 2007.

Though the U.S. is not immune to the grass-roots extremism that has inspired attacks in Europe, the inclusiveness of American society may help against radical Islam’s spread here, intelligence officials said Thursday.

Philip Mudd, a senior official in the FBI’s National Security Branch, termed the U.S. domestic threat a “Pepsi jihad” — an outgrowth of extremism he said has spread among young people over the past 15 years and has been popularized by the Internet.

“We see in this country on the East Coast, on the West Coast and the center of this country — kids who have no contact with al-Qaida but who are radicalized by the ideology,” Mudd said.

In October of 2006, the New York Times reported that some FBI agents worried that Mudd wanted them to engage in “ethnic targeting.”

Philip Mudd, who had just joined the bureau from the rival Central Intelligence Agency, was pitching a program called Domain Management, designed to get agents to move beyond chasing criminal cases and start gathering intelligence.

Drawing on things like commercial marketing software and the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping without warrants, the program is supposed to identify threats. Mr. Mudd displayed a map of the San Francisco area, pocked with data showing where Iranian immigrants were clustered — and where, he said, an F.B.I. squad was “hunting.”

Some F.B.I. officials found Mr. Mudd’s concept vague and the implied ethnic targeting troubling. How were they supposed to go “hunting” without colliding with the Constitution? Would the C.I.A. man, whom some mocked privately as Rasputin, take the bureau back to the domestic spying scandals of the 1960’s? And why neglect promising cases to, in Mr. Mudd’s words, “search for the unknown”

The Times added, “Mr. Mudd said agents were encouraged to postpone the arrest of a terrorism suspect until his ties to other operatives, financial supporters and foreign networks were fully understood.”

“I don’t want to take him down too quickly,” Mudd said. “I want to understand what we know and what we don’t know. If we’re focused solely on cases, I can’t have confidence that we know what’s going on.”

In November of 2007, Congressional Quarterly reported that Mudd had FBI agents search falafel sales records to find Iranian terrorists.

“Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists,” CQ reported.

The LA Times’ Amina Khan mocked, “Never mind, of course, that the falafel is not an Iranian dish. It’s a “uniting, pan-Middle Eastern” meal, as well as a popular alternative American fast food rivaling the burrito and chow mein (other plates plundered from unsuspecting immigrant cultures). Thus, along with unfairly targeting innocent Americans, the FBI would have caught in its net rabid vegans — not to mention homesick Israelis.”

CQ’s article noted, “The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.”

In a followup column, CQ National Security Editor Jeff Stein wrote, “The Bureau took strong exception to last week’s attention-getting column, which reported on an FBI counterterrorism experiment that involved sifting through marketing data gathered by grocery stores in the south San Francisco area to see if they could find terrorists by examining sales of Middle Eastern food.”

In an email to CQ the FBI’s Assistant Director for Public Affairs John Miller claimed that Stein’s report was “too ridiculous to be true.”

CQ Editor Mike Riley wrote the FBI back:

Like you, we take the issues of national security and civil liberties very seriously, which is why Jeff Stein thought it important to write about the domain management program. His sources described to him the intelligence-gathering program that involved the sales of Middle Eastern food in some detail, and we had no reason to believe that those sources inaccurately portrayed it when the column was published. After conferring further with them upon receipt of your letter, Mr. Stein and Congressional Quarterly stand by the column.

The FBI’s San Francisco office was given repeated opportunities by Mr. Stein to respond to his column before it was published, and declined. An FBI spokesman in Washington did respond, choosing neither to confirm nor deny the existence of the program, and his comments were included in the column. An after-the-fact denial is of less use to readers than one that could have run with the column, but, in the interest of fairness, we will publish it with Mr. Stein’s next column.

The FBI posted their official response to the “so-called ‘Falafel investigation’” on their web site.

In an interview with PBS’ Frontline, a year after he “joined the FBI in 2005 as deputy head of the Bureau’s National Security Branch, tasked with transforming the FBI into a domestic intelligence agency,” Mudd seemed to dismiss concerns about the US Department of Justice Terrorist Watchlist..

“And the other side of the coin is once you get people on these watch lists, many of them, as you know, get stopped repeatedly, and it turns out they just have the same name, and it’s very hard to get your name off that list,” Frontline’s interviewer asked.

That’s correct. My answer to that is we have tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of bits of data that contain names, from technical information, human information, media information. There’s an army of people who sort through that data and make very quick considerations. …

The question I’d have is, … do you want to say you need a relatively modest level of certainty that this person is bad, or do you want to say you want a very high level of certainty to pull them out of a line when they’re getting on an aircraft and look in their luggage? …

The Frontline interviewer pressed, “You are the professional; you tell me what’s the most effective way of doing things: Pulling people out of line and spending a lot of resources doing that, or targeting the list and making it much more reliable?”

… I think the systems and the way we do this is more efficient and smarter than it used to be, and I suspect over time we’ll get better at avoiding having multiple people stopped who never did anything wrong. But I would argue at the outset, going back two or three years ago, that it was the right thing to do to say, “As we perfect this, we’d better put a pretty serious lens on who’s coming in here.” …

Late Thursday afternoon, in another follow-up AP article, a second Republican senator said that Mudd could expect to hear questions regarding his knowledge about the harsh interrogation program at his confirmation hearing, which is expected to take place next week.

The AP reports, “Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday Mudd’s ties to the program will be probed.”

“Even though members of this committee did not object to the program until it became politically risky, I expect the nominee will be questioned on his involvement,” Bond told The Associated Press.





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