Silence Surrounds Revelations of Mueller’s Collaboration with CIA Torture Program

U.S. government photo of Robert Mueller

Over the past year, a series of revelations at the 9/11 Military Commissions (M.C.) proceedings at Guantanamo have exposed the fact the FBI worked far more closely with the CIA on the tortured confessions of “black site” detainees than we had heretofore known.

The revelations culminated in an admission via a new declassification in the M.C. trials that contrary to what was previously thought or asserted, the FBI under the leadership of then-director Robert Mueller had, according to a September 19, 2019 New York Times report, “assigned agents to the [CIA] black site program.”

Furthermore, the FBI “sent hundreds of questions into the secret prison network where the C.I.A. used torture to interrogate its prisoners, a collaboration that the bureau has never acknowledged.”

Real-time government censorship

According to reporter Carol Rosenberg, when FBI Special Agent (retired) James Fitzgerald testified in a recent military commissions session that he learned that another FBI agent had been “part of a C.I.A. team” interrogating alleged high-value detainee and current M.C. defendant Ammar al Baluchi, “the court security officer hit a censorship button and court audio was masked by white noise.”

The seal of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency inlaid in the floor of the main lobby of the Original Headquarters Building. [Public Domain}

This blatant attempt to cover-up in court revelations about the FBI’s coordination with the CIA on the torture of detainees has its analogue in the larger society, as reports, sparse as they are, of such FBI-CIA collaboration under the leadership of Robert Mueller, have been ignored and hence effectively suppressed.

Robert Mueller was the special counsel appointed to investigate President Donald Trump for alleged ties to Russia, in particular as regards supposed Russian attempts to control the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. At the time of writing this article, leading Democrats in the House of Representatives were deciding to what extent to use Mueller’s March 2019 report on his “Russiagate” investigation as part of the evidentiary basis of a Senate trial of impeachment charges against Trump.