DOCUMENT DESCRIBES BUSH ADMINISTRATION DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE'S OFFICE OF LEGAL COUNSEL OPINION ON CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM
Today Chairman Dianne Feinstein and I, with the agreement of Vice Chairman Kit Bond, have posted on the website of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a document newly declassified by the Obama Administration.
In so doing we conclude an effort that I began as Chairman of the Committee in the last Congress to provide to the public an initial narrative of the history of the interrogation and detention opinions of the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
Senator Rockefeller Statement:
"We have at last begun the task of fully setting the record straight, holding our government accountable, and learning from past errors in order to protect our country into the future. Thanks to the President's wise decision to release four of the opinions discussed in the narrative and to the ongoing work of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - change has come.
"In the wake of 9/11 we all wanted to leave no stone unturned in our pursuit of terrorists to prevent future attacks. At that time and since, the Senate Intelligence Committee sought to work in partnership with the Administration to keep America safe. But we now know that essential information was withheld from the Congress on many matters and decisions were made in secret by senior Bush Administration officials to obscure the complete picture.
"It is my hope and intention that the document we release today helps to fill in some of the facts, even as many other pieces of the puzzle are brought forth."
BACKGROUND
The genesis of the attached narrative is as follows:
Last year, I sought declassification of the August 1, 2002 OLC opinion, along with a short contextual narrative to accompany it. While declassification of that opinion was resisted, we engaged instead in a joint effort with Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey to declassify a broader narrative surrounding all of the OLC's opinions on these matters.
The objective was to produce a text that describes the key elements of the opinions and sets forth facts that provide a context for those opinions, within the boundaries of what the DOJ and the Intelligence Community would recommend in 2008 for declassification.
By late 2008, the DOJ, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) all had approved the public release of this narrative, but the Bush Administration National Security Council (NSC) held it and would not agree to its declassification.
I renewed the declassification effort as soon as Attorney General Eric Holder took office in early February 2009, and I am pleased to have received the support again of the DOJ, DNI and CIA, and now also of the NSC, for its release as a contextual description of the OLC memos.
*Readers of the narrative should bear in mind that its text is current through President Obama's Executive Orders of January 22, 2009, but has not been revised following the release of the four OLC opinions on April 16, 2009. While there is now more public information available about those four opinions, the narrative adds important facts about the approval of the interrogation program beginning in 2002 and about opinions subsequent to the four that have been released.
There is much to criticize Rockefeller for, including his support of the Military Commissions Act of 2005 and immunity for the telecoms that violated the law with the warrantless wiretapping program. But it is increasingly clear that Rockefeller and Pelosi were not fully informed. They should have been, but the guilty party in not informing them is the Bush administration and the CIA people involved in the torture coverup.
Senator Rockefeller can be added to the ever-growing and proud ranks of the Jump Up and Down Hysterically Club that wants investigations.
