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Following up on my earlier post, here's a reminder of what Leon Panetta said:
Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed." Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.
1. The contemporaneous records (that is, the CIA briefer's own notes on the briefing) show that the briefers "briefed truthfully ... describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed'" on Zubaydah.
2. It is up to Congress to evaluate this evidence and "reach its own conclusions about what happened."
Now, first of all, Panetta is not saying (nor has anyone said, not even Porter Goss) that the briefers briefed Congress that these techniques had been used. I know this sounds weasely, but until someone says, in plain language, that the CIA told Congress those techniques had already been used on Abu Zubaydah, we should assume that's not what the notes reflect, because if they did, you can be sure both the briefing list and the public statements would say so. But no one is saying that. And against that background, Panetta is reiterating the statement that Congress should determine what happened--a reiteration of the admission that CIA's own briefing records are not the totality of the story.
The CIA briefing list records that the following people participated in the briefing: Nancy Pelosi, her staffer Michael Sheehy, Porter Goss, his staffer Tim Sample, briefers from the CounterTerrorism Center (CTC), and the Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA; elsewhere, we've been told four people, total, from CIA attended).
While CIA doesn't say it, the chances are very good that the head of CTC was among the four CIA officials who attended that briefing--he probably led the briefing. On September 4, 2002, the head of CTC was Jose Rodriguez.
Jose Rodriguez, you'll recall, is one of the key suspects in the torture tape destruction.
digby has an interesting view of Panetta's parsing:
I will take the simple route here and just point out that if Panetta's statement "ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened" isn't weaselly, CYA language then nothing is. He doesn't know what happened in those briefings and he knows very well that those notes aren't reliable. After all, the most anal retentive politician in Senate history has already disputed these briefing memos by going back to his own infamously detailed notes.
My rule of thumb on this stuff is when politicians use awkward tenses and odd phrases instead of a simple declarative answer in response to a simple question, they are playing lawyer games.
Keep in mind too the CIA briefer's notes came at the same time that then Vice President Dick Cheney was putting undue pressure on the CIA. From the Washington Post on June 4, 2003:
Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.
With Cheney taking the lead in the administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here," one senior agency official said yesterday.
Considering Cheney was pressuring the CIA to fix the intelligence around the agenda and the Bush administration ordered the torture of detainees to get false confessions to justify the Iraq invasion, there is little reason to trust the CIA's account of intelligence briefings to members of Congress.
As Sen. Jay Rockefeller said on April 16 in regards to the Obama administration releasing of the four torture memos:
"The Senate Intelligence Committee has been pressing for years for greater openness regarding interrogation, particularly as it became clear over time that the Congress had not been fully informed. In the wake of 9-11 we all wanted to leave no stone unturned in pursuing terrorists and preventing future attacks, but some serious mistakes were made with lasting implications and very senior Bush Administration officials made a concerted effort to distort and hide the truth, at the time and in the years that followed.
Defending torture insistently means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell. I continue to believe it's essential to confront the dangerous and evil lie that torture "works" and that we're all going to die if we respect human rights, follow the law, or dare to investigate - let alone prosecute - the people responsible for these horribly shameful and criminal policies. However, as many have noted, that we are "debating" torture's usefulness at all means we've failed somehow as a society.
snip
Torture is the very antithesis of freedom. The key dynamics are not truth, security or patriotism. They are power, dehumanization and sadism. As Rear Admiral John Hutson observed, "torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough."
Entire post, with numerous links, is well worth reading.
Like a good boss, Leon Panetta is wanting to cover for his people, but - via TalkingPointsMemo - Greg Sargent notes that Leon Panetta's statement is less than an unequivocal denial:
But Panetta is also amplifying and repeating the agency's refusal to promise that the recently-released documents offer a reliable version of how and when members of Congress were briefed on the use of torture techniques.
Panetta sent a note today to CIA employees, which you can read right here. Here's the key part:
Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed." Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.
That's pushback against Pelosi, to be sure. But that's not all it is. The agency also restated the agency's earlier unwillingness to vouch for the overall reliability of what the docs say about what happened. He's saying, in effect, that only Congress can determine the truth about what members of Congress were told.
That's not a call for a Congressional probe. But it does seem like a suggestion that such a probe is the only way the truth can be established. If nothing else, the CIA is redoubling its efforts to distance itself from the political charges some are making - on the basis of CIA info - about who knew what and when about torture.
But as Sargent notes in his earlier link, the Panetta's reiterated that the accuracy of the CIA's records has to be verified. Considering how many visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA to successfully fix the intelligence that he wanted in the runup to the Iraq war, the accuracy of the CIA's contemperaneous records is questionable, particularly when Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Sen. Bob Graham have called the accuracy into question as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
This is yet another reason for a full investigation into the torture and coverup by the Bush administration. If Democrats also were complicit, so be it. I've stated before this is an issue that rises above mere politics. But at this point, the efforts by the rightwingers are nothing more than an attempt to play politics, hoping that attempts to link Democrats to the scandal will create a poison pill. So far, and this is highly indicative that the rightwinger's effort is failing, Pelosi, Rockefeller and Graham welcome that investigation.
Attorney General Eric Holder should appoint a special prosecutor immediately. I recommend due to his experience and expertise it should be U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald who has shown in the past he pursues a case regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were involved.
Update: Think Progress has an excellent piece on how the rightwingers have miscalculated, thinking they could shut down investigations by trying to drag Pelosi and other Democrats into the debate:
For weeks, conservatives have been launching hypocritical and disingenuous attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) regarding her level of knowledge of the Bush administration's torture program.
Fox News conservatives are revealing one of the underlying motives for these attacks - to diminish calls for a truth commission on torture.
snip
Pelosi has been clear that recent questions about her level of knowledge about Bush's torture program only add more - not less - need for an investigation to take place. "Until a truth commission comes into being, I encourage the appropriate committees of the House to conduct vigorous oversight of these issues," Pelosi said.
If conservatives were being honest about their criticisms, they'd be taking up Pelosi's desire for a full investigation, an inquiry that would not only examine what members of Congress knew but also the prominent role Cheney played in authorizing illegal acts.
The rightwingers are terrified about what will come out which is why they are desperate to stop it by dragging in Democrats. Pelosi and Rockefeller are for full investigations and if they did something wrong, they'd have the most to lose by such inquiries. Yet they're for them. Why other Democrats are fearful of the truth coming out is a mystery.
The rightwingers eager to change the subject from the fact President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the torture of people in 2002 and 2003 for political reasons to justify the Iraq war are trying to claim Sen. Jay Rockefeller and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were complicit in the torture. This is a denial of reality by the rightwingers.
Here's a statement from April 22 by Sen. Jay Rockefeller on the timeline:
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.
Politico had more on the CIA providing false information on when Rockefeller was briefed, quoting extensively from a Rockefeller aide:
Senator Rockefeller has repeatedly stated he was not told critical information that would have cast significant doubt on the program's legality and effectiveness. With more information coming to light in 2004, Senator Rockefeller became increasingly concerned about the program, and in early 2005 he launched a full-scale effort to investigate. The Senate Intelligence Committee's review is ongoing and he believes it is critically important that there be a full accounting of the Bush Administration's interrogation policies.
Senator Rockefeller can be added to the ever-growing and proud ranks of the Jump Up and Down Hysterically Club that wants investigations.
I am upset that Obama, who, by the way, I supported during the election and continue to support as President, has caved to those who would hide the torture we conducted in Iraq by not releasing the photographs documenting those activities.
The idea that our position in the world and the opinions of us held by other countries would suffer if these pictures were made visible is a crock. We're in the age of the Internet. Everyone in the world knows what we did and trying to hide the fact actually makes us look worse.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff Larry Wilkerson joins the Jump Up and Down Hysterically Club and says torture was used to obtain false confessions to justify an Iraq invasion:
Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.
There in fact were no such contacts.
This part earlier in Wilkerson's post is spot-on:
First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney's watch than on any other leader's watch in US history. So his constant claim that no Americans were killed in the "seven and a half years" after 9/11 of his vice presidency takes on a new texture when one considers that fact. And it is a fact.
There was absolutely no policy priority attributed to al-Qa'ida by the Cheney-Bush administration in the months before 9/11. Counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke's position was downgraded, al-Qa'ida was put in the background so as to emphasize Iraq, and the policy priorities were lowering taxes, abrogating the ABM Treaty and building ballistic missile defenses.
Second, the fact no attack has occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11--much touted by Cheney--is due almost entirely to the nation's having deployed over 200,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and not to "the Cheney method of interrogation."
Those troops have kept al-Qa'ida at bay, killed many of them, and certainly "fixed" them, as we say in military jargon. Plus, sadly enough, those 200,000 troops present a far more lucrative and close proximity target for al-Qa'ida than the United States homeland. Testimony to that fact is clear: almost 5,000 American troops have died, more Americans than died on 9/11. Of course, they are the type of Americans for whom Cheney hasn't much use as he declared rather dramatically when he achieved no less than five draft deferments during the Vietnam War.
Third--and here comes the blistering fact--when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops "the Cheney method of interrogation and torture", the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.
My investigations have revealed to me--vividly and clearly--that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering "the Cheney methods of interrogation", simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.
"There's so many points here that it's hard to pick them all apart. There's the point that it's wrong. There's the point that it's ineffective. There's the point that it's illegal. There's the point that in order to get there they had to disrupt and wreck a lot of American democratic process in order to get there"
mcjoan does a great job of summarizing the high points.
* Does Mountaintop Removal cause flooding? The best science says: it's complicated. (My take... like the relationship between global climate change and hurricanes, mountaintop removal and strip mining almost certainly make the severity of floods worse, even if they don't change the frequency of high rainfall events.)
But, here in West Virginia the WV DEP either doesn't care or doesn't have the resources to find out. That hasn't stopped Gov. Manchin from declaring W.Va. floods "an act of God". Read the entire Coal Tattoo post (and comments) for further insights into Gov. Manchin's unabashed support for Mountaintop Removal.
* What is the inevitable consequence of an underpowered stimulus bill? Layoffs. In It's Time to Pay the Piper BarbinMD points out the House GOP is perversely celebrating this. Why does Rep. Shelley Moore Capito hate workers?
The House majority leader said Tuesday that Congress should investigate whether the Bush administration authorized the torture of terrorism detainees, and he contended that the Republican focus on what Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned about harsh interrogation methods was a distraction.
Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., was asked at a news conference about a controversy over what Pelosi was told during a 2002 intelligence briefing. Saying the focus of upcoming hearings should be on the interrogation tactics, he also responded: "What was said and when it was said, who said it, I think that is probably what ought to be on the record as well." [...]
Republicans have tried to turn the issue to their advantage by complaining that Pelosi and other Democrats knew of the tactics but didn't protest. Pelosi was briefed in 2002 while on the House Intelligence Committee.
Asked at the news conference whether Democrats were inviting political problems by holding hearings, Hoyer said: "I think the facts need to get out. I think the Republicans are simply trying to distract the American public with who knew what when. My response to that is, look, the issue is not what was said or what was known; the question and focus ought to be on what was done."
He then added: "What was said and when it was said, who said it ... is probably what ought to be on the record as well."
One of the complaints some have had is that the American people don't want to see low-level soldiers and agents investigated and punished. But the truth is they have already been punished - by the hundreds - for carrying out the policies set by Presudent George W. Bush.
By definition, Dick Cheney is about government secrecy before pretty much any particular work of specific evil. But with his on-going round of aggressive public appearances he not only seems to be inviting a public inquiry into Bush administration anti-constitutional practices -- as in tempting fate -- but actually inviting it -- in the sense that he really seems to be pushing for it to happen.
I think we are all used to the notion that there are monsters among us: Charles Krauthammer is as divorced from both morality and reality as one could possibly be, which is precisely why he continues to retain supposedly respectable venues for his scribblings long after every one of his prognostications has proven to be as wrong as his arguments are corrupt. It is another thing, though, to find the stomach to accept that indeed, an even share of our supposed greatest minds truly find any of this to be a quandry. Can we follow this law, if important people violated it? Or would asking that our laws be followed even by the powerful be -- shudder -- vengeful?
Mora says, as cited by Hunt, that prosecutions of political elites would "tear the country apart." It is astonishing how well-travelled that particular canard is. It made it from the age of Nixon to our present day with surprisingly little wear and tear, so carefully has it been tended to by our political betters (mostly the same tenders now as then, uncannily enough.)
But again, what is the greater danger to a nation: that the law be applied to the politically powerful, or that the politically powerful be declared immune from inconvenient laws? Is this truly something worth pondering? Is there any bulb so dim, in our political string of lights, to honestly, genuinely believe that this country cannot stomach abiding by the laws it sets out for itself?
It seems an argument that could only spring from insipid cowardice. The author of the "tear our country apart" argument is saying, by proxy, that they themselves cannot bear to see the law applied in a particular case, and fear chaos because they naturally assume the rest of the nation is as corrupt as they are, or as enamored with the privileged as the privileged themselves are. I think neither is likely to be the case, but I am fairly certain that a continued history of immunity from the consequences from their actions would be a corrupting influence.
I am honestly not sure what else could possibly be said. Last week saw President Obama state, directly: "I believe waterboarding is torture." He need not have put the qualifier, "I believe," because waterboarding has been considered torture since long, long before we currently pretended at a debate about such a thing. Torture is a violation of both American and international law.
That should be the last words on the subject from the president's mouth: from here we should expect to see not a "truth commission", or a "blue-ribbon panel", or any of the other vacuous approximations of justice that are hastily constructed when something abominable is done by somebody too significant to be merely judged by the standards and laws held out for every last one of the rest of us, but a criminal investigation that uncovers what was done, how it was done, and who did it.
Emptywheel at FireDogLake raises an interesting point:
But put in the context of Jello Jay's ten month quest to force the Administration to assess whether or not its torture program violated (among other things) the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, the behavior of the Administration makes much more sense.
Jello Jay demanded they review whether we were complying with CAT--and he insisted that they deal with not just the Fifth, but also the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Bradbury came up with a very clever response, if you don't mind the idea of US citizens in a county jail hanging "from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest." And then Zelikow called him on it.
Zelikow demonstrated to the Administration that they had not solved the problem Jello Jay had given them ten months earlier.
So David Addington or some other enforcer did the only thing he could do to do to maintain the fiction that the Administration had answered Congress' questions: rip up Zelikow's dissent.
Remember how we said that destroying the memo was evidence of criminal intent--an attempt to preserve the appearance of good faith reliance on Steven Bradbury's memos? All the more so when Zelikow was making the same point Congress was making.
Often it's the coverup of the underlying offense that gets people in Washington caught.
On a related torture topic, Tim F. has a post on how torture was seen as highly ineffective in gathering intelligence during World War II and the best interrogators never resorted to it.
Just think if we had followed the British method instead with our prisoners becoming double-agents. Osama bin Laden could be dead or in prison. Instead we gave bin Laden a recruitment tool.
Low-level soldiers convicted of prisoner abuse including West Virginia's own Lynndie England are appealing their convictions because the newly released torture memos show their actions were approved by the White House.
Prison guards jailed for abusing inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are planning to appeal against their convictions on the ground that recently released CIA torture memos prove that they were scapegoats for the Bush Administration.
The photographs of prisoner abuse at the Baghdad jail in 2004 sparked worldwide outrage but the previous administration, from President Bush down, blamed the incident on a few low-ranking "bad apples" who were acting on their own.
The decision by President Obama to release the memos showed that the harsh interrogation tactics were approved and authorised at the highest levels of the White House.
snip
Ms England, a poorly educated Army reservist, was pictured holding a dog leash attached to a naked detainee, and also pointing at another being forced to masturbate. She was convicted in September 2005 of abusing prisoners and one count of an indecent act. She was sentenced to three years in a military prison and was paroled after 521 days. Shortly after leaving Iraq she gave birth to a son fathered by Graner. She lives in her home state of West Virginia.
Mr Gittins said the refusal by the Bush Administration to acknowledge that it had authorised such techniques during the trials of the prison guards - and the judges' refusal to call senior administration officials to testify - undermined their defences.
Concerns that the American public won't stand for low level people being caught up in torture investigations miss that such prosecutions already happened under George W. Bush when he was looking for scapegoats.
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