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Report May Have Motivated Destruction of Torture Tapes
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Thursday 03 January 2008
When Congress returns from its winter break in mid-January and continues its
probe into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, the lawmakers
may be interested in speaking to Mary O. McCarthy.
McCarthy spent most of her career at the spy agency, most recently as deputy
inspector general. In 2004, she was tapped by the CIA's Inspector General
John Helgerson to assist him with several internal investigations.
One of those investigations included a closer look at the CIA's
interrogation methods. The report on this probe was completed in spring
2004. It concluded that some of the agency's approved interrogation methods
"appeared to constitute cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, as defined
by the International Convention Against Torture," according to a New York
Times story published in November 2005. That
was the
same month the CIA destroyed the videotapes.
Helgerson personally viewed the videotapes that showed two detainees being
subjected to waterboarding by CIA officers, which formed the foundation for
his still classified report on the CIA's interrogations methods. McCarthy
was also personally briefed on the existence and content of the videotapes,
according to several CIA officials who worked closely with her, however
it's unknown whether she viewed the material. McCarthy assisted Helgerson in
drafting the classified report on the CIA's use of specific interrogation
methods against high-level detainees.
"The officials who described the report said it discussed particular
techniques used by the CIA against particular prisoners, including about
three dozen terror suspects being held by the agency in secret locations
around the world," the New York Times story says. "They said it referred
in
particular to the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have
organized the Sept. 11 attacks and who has been detained in a secret
location by the CIA since he was captured in March 2003. Mr. Mohammed is
among those believed to have been subjected to waterboarding, in which a
prisoner is strapped to a board and made to believe that he is drowning.
"In his report, Mr. Helgerson also raised concern about whether the use
of
the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability," the
officials said, according to the New York Times account. "They said the
report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban
on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply
to CIA interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not
citizens of the United States."
According to a May 2006 Washington Post story, a friend said McCarthy "worried that neither Helgerson nor
the
agency's congressional overseers would fully examine what happened or why."
Another friend said, "She had the impression that this stuff has been pretty
well buried." The Post story reported, "In McCarthy's view and that
of many
colleagues, friends say, torture was not only wrong but also misguided,
because it rarely produced useful results."
McCarthy also oversaw the Inspector General's investigation into the
treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her "findings are secret," The Washington Post reported in May 2006. "According to a brief CIA statement about the
probe
in a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union,
investigators set out to examine "the conduct of CIA components and
personnel, including DO personnel" during interrogations. Tens of thousands
of pages of material were collected, including White House and Justice
Department documents, and multiple reports were issued. Some described cases
of abuse, involving fewer than a dozen individuals, and were forwarded to
the Justice Department, according to government officials."
The reports are seen by only a handful of people.
"When IG inquiries involve covert actions such as foreign interrogations,
for example, the agency briefs only the chairmen and ranking members of the
House and Senate intelligence committees, instead of the full panels,"
the
Washington Post reported. "So only a handful of people in Washington knew
what McCarthy knew."
But the timing of the November 2005 New York Times story regarding the
contents of the inspector general's report on interrogation methods, and the
publication of a separate, more explosive story in The Washington Post the
same month exposing the CIA's covert interrogation activities, suggests that
the CIA may have decided to destroy the videotaped interrogations because it
feared the tapes would become part of the public record and could expose its
agents to a federal criminal investigation.
The New York Times has reported that Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA's
clandestine division, destroyed the videotapes after receiving written
authorization from attorneys in the clandestine division. The reasons for
purging the tapes, according to one of the The New York Times' unnamed
sources, is that in the event of a leak "there was concern for the careers
of officers shown on the tapes. We didn't want them to become political
scapegoats."
If that's true, then the publication of Priest's CIA secret prison story,
and the Times story on the IG investigation into the agency's interrogation
methods in November 2005 - the same month and year the videotapes were
destroyed - would amount to a very strange coincidence.
Neither McCarthy, now an attorney, nor an attorney who had represented her,
Ty Cobb, returned emails or messages left at their offices for comment.
Helgerson's report into the CIA's interrogation techniques rankled some
officials at the agency, The New York Times reported, and his critique of
agency operations is said to have played a role in the decision by CIA
Director Michael V. Hayden to turn the tables on the watchdog and launch an
internal probe into Helgerson's work. Hayden alleged that Helgerson's
investigations into the agency's detention and interrogation policies were
not objective. Helgerson's office is just one of various federal agencies
investigating circumstances that led to the destruction of the videotapes
and whether any federal laws were broken as a result.
McCarthy was among a group of former intelligence officials who late last
year signed a letter opposing the nomination
of Attorney General Michael Mukasey on grounds he would not denounce
waterboarding. She alleged that - two years or so after she and Helgerson
completed their report into the agency's interrogation practices - CIA
officials lied to members of Congress during an intelligence briefing when
they said the agency did not violate treaties that bar, cruel, inhumane, or
degrading treatment of detainees during interrogations, according to a May
14, 2006, front-page story in The Washington Post.
"A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that 'CIA people
had lied' in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only
because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its
policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or
degrading," The Washington Post reported.
In his book, "At the Center of the Storm", former
CIA Director
George Tenet wrote that McCarthy was present at a meeting with Condoleezza
Rice in May 2001 where Tenet discussed Abu Zubaydah's alleged plans to
attack the US and Israel. Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan less than a
year later and was whisked to a secret CIA prison site in Thailand, where he
was interrogated and subjected to waterboarding. At the time, McCarthy had
been working as senior director at the National Security Council, according
to Tenet.
"For my regularly scheduled meeting with Condi Rice on May 30, [2001],
I
brought along [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin, [then director of the
CIA's counterterrorist center] Cofer Black, one of Cofer's top assistants,
Rich B. (Rich can't be further identified here). Joining Condi were [former
White House counterterrorism czar Richard] Clarke and Mary McCarthy," Tenet
wrote. "Rich ran through the mounting warning signs of a coming attack.
They
were truly frightening. Among other things, we told Condi that a notorious
al-Qa'ida operative named Abu Zubaydah was working on attack plans."
Truthout previously reported
that Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff advised the CIA between
2002 and 2003 that its agents had the legal authority to use interrogation
tactics on Abu Zubaydah that included waterboarding.
Chertoff was head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division when CIA
officials inquired whether its agents could be charged with violating the
federal anti-torture statute for employing interrogation methods such as
waterboarding. The tactic causes detainees to slowly drown, and is generally
terminated before the detainees die.
"The CIA was seeking to determine the legal limits of interrogation
practices for use in cases like that of Abu Zubaydah, the Qaeda lieutenant
who was captured in March 2002," says a January 29, 2005, New York Times
story. That story said unnamed sources told the newspaper that "Chertoff
was directly involved in these discussions, in effect evaluating the
legality of techniques proposed by the CIA by advising the agency whether
its employees could go ahead with proposed interrogation methods without
fear of prosecution."
During his Senate confirmation hearing in February 2005, Chertoff maintained
that he provided the CIA broad guidance in response to its questions about
interrogation methods and never specifically addressed legality regarding
waterboarding or other techniques.
Chertoff, according to intelligence sources who spoke to Truthout, was
briefed about the videotaped interrogations. Chertoff told former CIA
General Counsel Scott Muller and his deputy, John Rizzo, that an August 1,
2002, memo widely referred to as the "Torture Memo" put the CIA on
solid
legal ground and that its agents could waterboard a prisoner without fear of
prosecution. The memo was written by former Justice Department attorney John
Yoo.
Yoo's memo said that Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability
to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability
to direct troop movements on the battlefield."
At his confirmation hearing in 2005, Chertoff claims he did not advise Rizzo
or Muller on the legality of specific methods agents used during their
interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. Rather, he said, he answered general
questions the CIA had posed about interrogations.
"You are dealing in an area where there is potential criminality,"
Chertoff
said he told the agency. "You better be very careful to make sure that
whatever you decide to do falls well within what is required by law."
In his book, "The One Percent Doctrine," author Ron Suskind said
Zubaydah
was not the "high value detainee" the CIA had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah
was
a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates
and their families, Suskind says.
Abu Zubaydah's captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill
and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That
realization was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to
the
President and Vice President," Suskind writes. Tenet, though, says claims
that Abu Zubaydah was not a valuable prisoner are "hogwash."
McCarthy began working at the Inspector General's office in 2004, according to The New York
Times. She had taken a leave of absence from the CIA after 9/11 and spent
some time at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a
Washington think tank. She testified before the 9/11 Commission in late 2003
about methods that could enhance intelligence-gathering activities, in the
hope of avoiding another terrorist attack on US soil.
In 1998, she wrote an article in the
Defense Intelligence Journal under the headline "The Mission to Warn:
Disaster Looms" about shortfalls in intelligence gathering and how they
could lead to catastrophic events.
McCarthy also spent some time with the Markle Foundation group, "the Task
Force on National Security in the Information Age, working with academics as
well as current and former government officials on recommendations for
sharing classified information more widely within the government, according
to a report issued by the group. The report identifies Ms. McCarthy as a
'nongovernment' expert," The New York Times reported.
In April 2006, ten days before she was due to retire; McCarthy was fired from
the CIA for allegedly leaking classified information to the media, a CIA
spokeswoman told reporters at the time.
The CIA said McCarthy had spoken with numerous journalists, including The
Washington Post's Dana Priest, who in November 2005 exposed the CIA's secret prison sites, where in 2002 the CIA videotaped its
agents interrogating a so-called high-level detainee, Abu Zubaydah. The
videotaped interrogation of Zubaydah, which is said to have shown the
prisoner being subjected to waterboarding, was destroyed after Priest's
story was published, and is now at the center of a wide-ranging
Congressional and Justice Department investigation. Priest won a Pulitzer
Prize for her expose. The CIA did not say whether McCarthy was a source for
Priest's story.
Following news reports of her dismissal from the CIA, McCarthy, through her
attorney Ty Cobb, vehemently denied leaking classified information to the
media. However, the CIA said she failed a polygraph test after the agency
launched an internal investigation in late 2005. The agency said the
investigation was an attempt to find out who provided The Washington Post
and The New York Times with information about its covert activities,
including domestic surveillance, and it promptly fired her.
The Washington Post reported, "McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends
say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt that the
Bush administration's venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted US
counterterrorism policy. After seeing - in e-mails, cable traffic, interview
transcripts and field reports - some of the secret fruits of the Iraq
intervention, McCarthy became disenchanted, three of her friends say."
"In addition to CIA misrepresentations at the session last summer, McCarthy
told the friends, a senior agency official failed to provide a full account
of the CIA's detainee-treatment policy at a closed hearing of the House
intelligence committee in February 2005, under questioning by Rep. Jane
Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat," The Washington Post says. "McCarthy
also told others she was offended that the CIA's general counsel had worked
to secure a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the
agency's creation of "ghost detainees" - prisoners removed from Iraq
for
secret interrogations without notice to the International Committee of the
Red Cross - because the Geneva Conventions prohibit such practices."
Jason Leopold is senior editor and reporter for Truthout. He received a Project Censored award in 2007 for his story on Halliburton's work in Iran.
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