Julia Davis

Recently released Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture featured a key character in the agency’s string of horrific misdeeds. Alfreda Frances Bikowsky is a career CIA officer, who remains in a senior position at the agency, having headed the Bin Laden Issue Station (also known as its code name, Alec Station) and the Global Jihad unit. She is a former Soviet analyst, who has worked in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and in the Al Qaeda unit since the mid-1990s. While the agency refuses to publicly name Bikowsky, her name was deduced by Salon reporters Rory O'connor and Ray Nowosielski, as well as a contemporary historian Kevin Fenton, in 2011. Bikowsky had been referenced in Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side,” by her middle name, Frances. As a supervisor and an analyst in the pre-911 world, Bikowsky dropped the ball when the CIA was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Continue reading:  http://www.examiner.com/article/...

Bruce Jessen (pictured on the left), one of the chief architects of the CIA's torture program, bemoaned the exposure that caused him to resign from his position as the bishop of his Mormon church in Spokane, Washington. On December 11, 2014, Jessen told Reuters that he had to quit after civil liberties and human rights activists criticized his past activities in the local newspaper. “This was due to concerns expressed about his past work related to interrogation techniques,” said Eric Hawkins, a national spokesman in Salt Lake City for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Local leaders met with Jessen and together determined that it would be difficult for him to serve as an effective leader in that position,” Hawkins added. Former Air Force psychologists, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, ran a company that received compensation of a whopping $81.1 million from the CIA, according to a U.S. Senate report released on December 9, 2014. Neither one of them had any experien...