Crooked Dusty Foggo Helped Set Up CIA Black Sites

In a story more baroque than could have been imagined, The New York Times reports that Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, a senior former CIA official and key figure in the corruption scandals that brought down Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham — the guy even wanted to run for Cunningham’s congressional seat, if you can believe it — helped set up the agency’s undocumented prisons. And when there’s Foggo, there’s his best friend, corrupt San Diego contractor Brent Wilkes:

The business provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

You have to rely on locally built waterboards. It’s the most cost-efficient way to torture someone and provide needed foreign assistance.More substantively, does it surprise anyone that a master of graft would bring his shady connections into CIA’s torture prisons? By the account provided by The Times — and, really, hats off for getting Foggo to talk while he’s serving prison time for fraud — Foggo did his job well. The black sites were secret. Foggo needed to equip them. Who better to turn to than his best friend? And if there were a few kickbacks, isn’t that to be expected? It seems surreal to expect that undocumented torture chambers be run according to the highest standards of governmental integrity.