‘Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Should citizens be concerned with the CIA interrogation memos that we’ve all been talking about involving insects and waterboarding?

ISHMAEL JONES: Americans should be concerned about the use of the CIA memos to advance political agendas. Release of the CIA interrogation memos seems designed to please the American Left and to attack the Bush administration, not to bring about any real accountability.

The torture/interrogations issue was never about ethics or the humane treatment of prisoners. Choking a person on water is nasty stuff, all right, but I’ve never heard any voices from the Left express concern about the enemy’s behavior. Al-Qaeda in Iraq uses far more aggressive forms of torture in its interrogations. Before the surge, the Baghdad morgues filled with a hundred murders a day, many showing evidence of having been tortured to death using power drills and saws.

LOPEZ: Today supposedly begins the first of the interrogations about interrogation. Will the release of the memos trigger more investigations?

JONES: It will all just fizzle out. Ever since it came up several years ago, the purpose of the interrogations/torture issue has been purely political, and it has served its purpose. The Republicans have been defeated, and Bush administration officials have been put out to pasture.

Pragmatic Democrats should recognize that they’re in charge now and that they need good foreign intelligence, not political show trials. Foreign-policy crises — North Korea, Iran, Somalia — are coming up faster than expected. A foreign-policy debacle or a major terrorist attack, and not the economy, may be the real threat to President Obama’s re-election and the Democrats’ hold on power.

LOPEZ: But if the United States is in any possible way guilty of human-rights violations, shouldn’t there be a full accounting?

JONES: The Senate Intelligence Committee has already announced that the CIA employees involved in the actual interrogations — the low- and mid-level employees and contractors — will not be targets of investigations. That’s generous, because these people are patriotic Americans who were doing their best for their country, in remarkably difficult jobs, away from home and family. There are a lot of innocent people alive today because of what they did. The interrogations produced information that repeatedly stopped terrorist attacks from happening.

The CIA has mutated from being a “red” or conservative organization dedicated to toppling communist dictators into a bureaucracy that is “blue” and supportive of the American political Left. Through the Plame incident, bad intelligence on Iraq, and leaks on torture/interrogations issues, the CIA bureaucracy did more to help Democrats win in the last election than ACORN or MoveOn.org.

Investigations inspired by congressional Democrats will seek to avoid targeting political allies within the CIA. Having already announced that low- and mid-level CIA employees will not be targeted, this really just leaves Bush administration officials and CIA employees without close ties to politicians and the media. Prosecutions will be so selective and so obviously politically driven that they will not be convincing to impartial juries.

LOPEZ: When all is said and done, is there something constructive that can be learned from all of this review? Something constructive for American intelligence?

JONES: The interrogations controversy has served the CIA bureaucracy. A top goal of bureaucracy is to look busy, and whether one agrees with the interrogation methods or not, the impression given is that the CIA is both busy and aggressive. It relishes this “cowboy” image, and its greatest fear is that the taxpayer might figure out how little it actually is doing. Bans or restrictions on interrogations would have the constructive effect of removing this smokescreen, this distraction, and redirecting focus to what exactly the CIA is doing to provide the foreign intelligence the president needs.

A positive result, therefore, would be the focus on the basic task of an intelligence officer: the hard work of developing valuable intelligence from willing, motivated human sources, operating in foreign countries, outside the embassy environment, far from home and in difficult environments.

It would also be constructive if the attention paid to the CIA in these reviews led to better financial accountability. There are no viable whistleblower mechanisms within the CIA. If a single FBI agent, with full security clearances and a contact number, were assigned to the CIA with the ability to investigate reports of fraud and waste provided by CIA employees, it would set off a chain reaction of accountability.

LOPEZ: How is Leon Panetta doing?

JONES: Panetta began his job at a disadvantage because he was required to accept some of the CIA’s most entrenched bureaucrats as his top deputies. His deputies include people who successfully expelled from office the last director who tried to bring about any real reform, Porter Goss.

So far it’s been business as usual at the CIA. Panetta’s announcement that he will personally spearhead a drive to recruit linguists, especially among American Muslims, may seem at first glance to be a good idea, but it is a disturbing ploy. Throughout its history the CIA has periodically complained that it does not have the people it needs and that it needs more money and time to get these people. In fact the CIA has always had the talent it needs, but that talent is stifled by bureaucracy. Every few years, when the CIA feels pressure from Congress or just wants to look busy, it announces the same recruiting drive. Here we are, 60 years after its founding, eight years after 9/11, with billions of dollars spent, and the CIA supposedly does not have the talent it needs.

The CIA was never meant to be a domestic spy service, yet as much as 90 percent of the thousands of CIA officers now live and work entirely within the United States. Here’s an example of what that leads to.

Jose Rodriguez, the former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service, is under federal investigation for ordering the destruction of the 92 videotapes of terrorist interrogations. He was appointed chief of the clandestine service by former director Porter Goss, a Republican, to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Rodriguez’s predecessor, Steve Kappes. Kappes had quit in protest over disputes arising from orders to stop leaks of classified information to the press.

When Rodriguez took over, he worked actively to stop the leaks. After the leak of information on the CIA’s interrogation centers, for example, he ordered extensive questioning and polygraph examinations of CIA employees.

Kappes is embraced by congressional Democrats, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Kappes and other top CIA bureaucrats later engineered the ouster of Director Goss. Kappes then returned in triumph to the CIA. Kappes is one of the most formidable political infighters the CIA has produced, and you’ll never see him being investigated.

Jose Rodriguez is an excellent scapegoat. He was appointed by a Republican, he has no connections to congressional Democrats, and he was never an illicit source to the left-leaning media. Rodriguez was never a member of the club of top CIA bureaucrats. He was a good case officer, not a self-promoter.

CIA people, including Steve Kappes, are talented and well-meaning, but the CIA system is broken. For achievement and promotion, CIA managers need to live in the Washington D.C. area, and the top guys must develop relationships with politicians and the media. The system not only doesn’t reward, but actively discourages employees from living in a foreign country and developing sources to al-Qaeda or North Korea.

LOPEZ: Should the tapes have been destroyed?

JONES: If Rodriguez ordered the destruction of those videos, then I admire what he did. Imagine with what glee the political Left and America’s enemies would have greeted video of interrogations. When I began my work on intelligence reform, the first call I had was from a New York Times reporter. He was very focused — he wanted to know if I had any information on torture. That’s all he was interested in, not the gaps in our intelligence which threaten the lives of the readers of the Times, just torture information that could be used to attack the Bush administration. Subsequently I spoke to a couple of other Times reporters with the same result — an obsessive and exclusive interest in torture. They’ve invested a lot of emotion, time, and energy in this pursuit.