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White House Torture Advisers •
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Cheney, Others OK'd Harsh Interrogations
By Lara Jakes Jordon and Pamela Hess
The Associated Press
Friday 11 April 2008
Washington - Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney
on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected
terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The
Associated Press has learned.
The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings
where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning,
were discussed and ultimately approved.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described
them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday.
The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not
authorized to publicly discuss the issue.
Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its
Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including
ones that critics call torture.
"If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a
correlation," the former intelligence official said. Those who attended
the dozens of meetings agreed that "there'd need to be a legal opinion
on the legality of these tactics" before using them on al-Qaida detainees,
the former official said.
The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately
following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush
aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director
George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
The White House, Justice and State departments and the CIA refused comment
Thursday, as did a spokesman for Tenet. A message for Ashcroft was not immediately
returned.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., lambasted what he described as "yet another
astonishing disclosure about the Bush administration and its use of torture."
"Who would have thought that in the United States of America in the 21st
century, the top officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in
the White House to approve torture?" Kennedy said in a statement. "Long
after President Bush has left office, our country will continue to pay the price
for his administration's renegade repudiation of the rule of law and fundamental
human rights."
The American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to investigate.
"With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation
was managed and directed out of the White House," ACLU legislative director
Caroline Fredrickson said. "This is what we suspected all along."
The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security
officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA's interrogation program during
months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.
At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail
how they worked, to make sure the small group of "principals" fully
understood what the al-Qaida detainees would undergo. The principals eventually
authorized physical abuse such as slaps and pushes, sleep deprivation, or waterboarding.
This technique involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered
face to create the sensation of drowning.
The small group then asked the Justice Department to examine whether using
the interrogation methods would break domestic or international laws.
"No one at the agency wanted to operate under a notion of winks and nods
and assumptions that everyone understood what was being talked about,"
said a second former senior intelligence official. "People wanted to be
assured that everything that was conducted was understood and approved by the
folks in the chain of command."
The Office of Legal Counsel issued at least two opinions on interrogation methods.
In one, dated Aug. 1, 2002, then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee defined
torture as covering "only extreme acts" causing pain similar in intensity
to that caused by death or organ failure. A second, dated March 14, 2003, justified
using harsh tactics on detainees held overseas so long as military interrogators
did not specifically intend to torture their captives.
Both legal opinions since have been withdrawn.
The second former senior intelligence official said rescinding the memos caused
the CIA to seek even more detailed approvals for the interrogations.
The department issued another still-secret memo in October 2001 that, in part,
sought to outline novel ways the military could be used domestically to defend
the country in the face of an impending attack. The Justice Department so far
has refused to release it, citing attorney-client privilege, and Attorney General
Michael Mukasey declined to describe it Thursday at a Senate panel where Democrats
characterized it as a "torture memo."
Not all of the principals who attended were fully comfortable with the White
House meetings.
The ABC News report portrayed Ashcroft as troubled by the discussions, despite
agreeing that the interrogations methods were legal.
"Why are we talking about this in the White House?" the network quoted
Ashcroft as saying during one meeting. "History will not judge this kindly."
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Associated Press writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.
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White House Torture Advisers
By Dan Froomkin
The Washington Post
Thursday 10 April 2008
Top Bush aides, including Vice President Cheney, micromanaged the torture of
terrorist suspects from the White House basement, according to an ABC News report
aired last night.
Discussions were so detailed, ABC's sources said, that some interrogation sessions
were virtually choreographed by a White House advisory group. In addition to
Cheney, the group included then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice,
then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then-secretary of state Colin Powell,
then-CIA director George Tenet and then-attorney general John Ashcroft.
At least one member of the club had some qualms. ABC reports that Ashcroft
"was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision
to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal.
But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the
grim details of interrogations, sources said.
"According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting:
'Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this
kindly.'"
Here's the video of last night's report by Jan Crawford Greenburg and a text
version by Greenburg, Howard L. Rosenberg and Ariane de Vogue.
They write: "Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed
off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects - whether they would
be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called
waterboarding...."
"As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took
place in the White House Situation Room."
The discussions started after the CIA captured al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah
in the spring of 2002, ABC reports. "At a time when virtually all counterterrorist
professionals viewed another attack as imminent - and with information on al
Qaeda scarce - the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a potentially critical
breakthrough."
According to ABC, the CIA briefed the White House group on its plans to use
aggressive techniques against Zubaydah and received explicit approval. Zubaydah
is one of the three detainees the CIA has since confirmed were subjected to
waterboarding, a notorious torture technique that amounts to controlled drowning.
Such techniques were later authorized in a controversial August 2002 Justice
Department memo, signed by then head of the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee.
ABC reports that the memo "was referred to as the so-called 'Golden Shield'
for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable if the harsh interrogations
became public."
Nevertheless, even after the memo was in place, "briefings and meetings
in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued, sources said.
Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the
NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal. . . .
"According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters
would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for
specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would
await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees,
two CIA sources said. . . .
"At one meeting in the summer of 2003 - attended by Vice President Cheney,
among others - Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine
several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method
at a time, according to a highly placed administration source."
ABC reports that, in at least once case, the group's approvals of CIA techniques
continued even after the Justice Department formally withdrew the August 2002
memo in 2004.
Will They Be Held to Account?
Marc
Ambinder blogs for the Atlantic that "it remains one of those hidden secrets
in Washington that a Democratic Justice Department is going to be very interested
in figuring out whether there's a case to be made that senior Bush Administration
officials were guilty of war crimes."
But legal blogger Jack
Balkin says no way. "[S]ections 8 and 6(b) of the Military
Commissions Act of 2006 effectively insulated government officials from
liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed
during the period prior to 2006. Moreover, as [fellow blogger Martin
Lederman] has pointed out, there's a strong argument that a later Justice
Department would not prosecute people who reasonably relied on legal advice
from a previous Justice Department. . . .
"And putting aside the purely legal obstacles to a prosecution for war
crimes, there's also the political cost. Why would an Obama or Clinton Administration
waste precious political capital early on with a politically divisive prosecution
of former government officials? . . .
"It is not that certain members of the Bush Administration haven't committed
war crimes. I'm pretty certain that at least some of them have. The point rather
is that it is very unlikely that they will ever be brought to justice for it,
at least in our own country- despite the fact that there are statutes on the
books which assert that the commission of war crimes violates our laws. . .
.
"As
I noted in a previous post, the most likely prosecution for war crimes will
not occur in the United States; if it occurs at all, it will come through the
use of universal jurisdiction against Bush Administration officials who make
the mistake of traveling outside the United States."
About Zubaydah
There's one serious flaw in the ABC report: It allows the administration's
version of Zubaydah's value as an intelligence asset to go unrefuted. ABC calls
Zubaydah a "top al Qaeda operative" and reports that "[a]ter
he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up valuable information that
led to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11
plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh."
But as I've written,
administration statements about Zubaydah have been almost entirely contradicted
by authoritative accounts from author Ron
Suskind and New York Times reporter David
Johnston.
Zubaydah, it turns out, was a mentally ill minor functionary, nursed back to
health by the FBI, who under CIA torture sent investigators chasing after false
leads about al-Qaeda plots on American nuclear plants, water systems, shopping
malls, banks and supermarkets.
The most valuable information Zubaydah gave investigators
about Mohammed was his nickname, which, as Dan
Eggen and Dafna Linzer reported in The Washington Post, the CIA had already
learned seven months earlier.
Gitmo Watch
When the administration announced in February that
it had filed capital murder charges against half a dozen men allegedly linked
to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the message was clear: The White House
wanted a 9/11 trial before the end of Bush's
term.
But as William
Glaberson writes in the New York Times: "[T]he Sept. 11 case immediately
hit a snag. Military defense lawyers were in short supply, and even now, two
months later, not one of the six detainees has met his military lawyer. . .
.
"[T]here is a growing consensus among lawyers inside and outside the military
that few of those cases are likely to actually come to trial before the end
of the Bush administration. . . .
"The road to a trial is difficult in some cases partly because they involve
potential death penalties and claims of torture by interrogators, issues that
raise thorny legal questions that could take months or longer to sort out. But
even comparatively simple cases without capital penalty issues are proceeding
slowly."
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