Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), who called on Justice Department officials to fire John Tanner back in October, has a glass-half-empty view of Tanner's resignation. A statement just out:
"It's unacceptable that the Administration is simply shuffling deck chairs by moving Mr. Tanner to another important position in the Justice Department. During his tenure, he made offensive, intolerant comments about minorities in an attempt to defend voter identification laws that threaten voting rights, and that's why I called on him to be fired. It's time we restore confidence in the Department by appointing public servants who are truly committed to upholding our civil rights."
Only two days after the House intelligence committee inaugurated its inquiry into the CIA's torture tapes by hosting CIA Director Mike Hayden on Wednesday, the Justice Department instructed key CIA officials not to cooperate. The panel's leaders, Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) and Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), vowed not to back off in a just-released joint statement:
"Just two days ago, CIA Director Michael Hayden appeared before our Committee to address the CIA's destruction of videotapes. In that hearing, he committed to providing materials relevant to our investigation. Earlier today, our staff was notified that the Department of Justice has advised CIA not cooperate with our investigation.
"We are stunned that the Justice Department would move to block our investigation. Parallel investigations occur all of the time, and there is no basis upon which the Attorney General can stand in the way of our work.
"We strongly urge General Hayden to comply with our Committee's bipartisan request to produce documents and to make available John Rizzo and Jose Rodriguez for testimony next week. We will use all the tools available to Congress, including subpoenas, to obtain this information and this testimony.
"It's clear that there's more to this story than we have been told, and it is unfortunate that we are being prevented from learning the facts. The Executive Branch can't be trusted to oversee itself. Congress must conduct its own investigation."
A big part of the story here is how angry the news of the tape destruction has made Hoekstra. Usually the administration can count Hoekstra as an ally. But in a recent interview with TPMm homie Eli Lake of the New York Sun, Hoekstra came this close to straight-up calling Hayden a liar. Michael Mukasey, fresh from pissing off the Senate Judiciary Committee, just threw gasoline on Hoekstra's fire. This might just become a genuinely bipartisan outrage.
DOJ's national security spokesman, Dean Boyd, tells us he'll have a reaction to Reyes and Hoekstra imminently.
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is taking an enormous amount of criticism from the left -- see Glenn Greenwald and Christy Hardin Smith, for starters -- for putting the Senate intelligence committee's version of the surveillance bill on the floor as the "base text" for a vote on Monday and offering the Senate Judiciary Committee's version as a standing amendment. In a nutshell, Judiciary's version doesn't provide retroactive telecom immunity and offers more civil-liberties protections. (TPMm homie Julian Sanchez has a good rundown of the differences at Ars Technica.)
Reid spokesman Jim Manley tells us that Reid wants both bills to contend, doesn't intend to favor one over the other, and the reason why the intelligence committee's version is the base text owes to "the order in which they considered the bill." (Intelligence marked it up before Judiciary.)
In a floor statement today, Reid said that he "personally favor[s] many of the additional protections included in the Judiciary Committee bill, and I oppose the concept of retroactive immunity in the Intelligence bill." But it would "be wrong of me to simply choose one committee's bill over the other." He added that the "consensus" emerged between himself, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) that using intelligence's bill as the base text was the right way to go. Reid's full statement is after the jump.
But that decision certainly hasn't satisfied critics of the intelligence bill. Says Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies:
"As leader, Senator Reid chooses what bill to bring to the floor and under what procedures; he could choose to bring to the floor the bill as reported out of the Judiciary committee with much improved privacy protections and no immunity....
Senate Republicans blocked a bill Friday that would restrict the interrogation methods the CIA can use against terrorism suspects.
The legislation, part of a measure authorizing the government's intelligence activities for 2008, had been approved a day earlier by the House and sent to the Senate for what was supposed to be final action. The bill would require the CIA to adhere to the Army's field manual on interrogation, which bans waterboarding, mock executions and other harsh interrogation methods.
Senate opponents of that provision, however, discovered a potentially fatal parliamentary flaw: The ban on harsh questioning tactics had not been in the original versions of the intelligence bill passed by the House and Senate. Instead, it was a last-minute addition during negotiations between the two sides to write a compromise bill, a move that could violate Senate rules. The rule is intended to protect legislation from last-minute amendments that neither house of Congress has had time to fully consider.
The culprit? One-time torture opponent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham: "I think quite frankly applying the Army field manual to the CIA would be ill-advised and would destroy a program that I think is lawful and helps the country." So torture is counterproductive for the military but valuable for the CIA?
Update: Yeah, yeah, I misspelled Lindsey Graham's name initially. Sorry, senator.
Last week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) sent Attorney General Michael Mukasey a detailed list of questions about the Justice Department's knowledge of the CIA's torture tapes' destruction. What did DoJ officials know about the tapes while they existed? When did they learn they were to be destroyed? What communications did they have with the White House about it?
They were also eager to learn the details of the Justice Department's joint investigation with the CIA.
Today, Mukasey gave his reply: no. The Department "has a long-standing policy of declining to provide non-public information about pending matters," he wrote, in order to avoid "any perception that our law enforcement decisions are subject to political influence. Accordingly, I will not at this time provide further information in response to your letter, but appreciate the Committee's interests in this matter." You can read that letter here.
In a statement, Leahy responded that he was "disappointed" by Mukasey's reply (see below) and promised that he'd ask Mukasey about the tapes at the committee's first oversight hearing, which he said would be in the new year.
Apparently Mukasey sent similar letters today to a number of other Democratic lawmakers who'd asked about the tapes, in a move that The Washington Postcalls a "sharp rebuff." It is at least a contrast to Alberto Gonzales, who would ignore Congressional letters and requests for months before refusing to provide information.
First Alberto Gonzales was forced to resign in disgrace. Now they've stripped his Lawyer of the Year crown from him. What next?
Earlier this week, the American Bar Association Journal, to universal derision, named Gonzales Lawyer of the Year. They tried to make it clear that the recognition was merely for Gonzo's talent for stealing headlines, a talent unmatched among lawyers in 2007, but still, the jarring combination of his picture next to the words "Lawyer of the Year" proved too much for many to bear.
When this article was posted online on December 12, 2007, it was titled “Lawyers of the Year.” The article defined that term as the year’s biggest legal newsmaker, identifying former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as the major newsmaker of 2007. The Journal regrets that we did not make this theme clear.
We appreciate the feedback we’ve received, and we’re acting on it. So that there can be no confusion, the term “Lawyers of the Year” has been changed in the headline and story to “Newsmakers of the Year.” The story is otherwise unchanged from its original version.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) responding to John Tanner's resignation:
“Mr. Tanner had a clear record of undermining the core mission of the section – protecting the right to vote. In October, my subcommittee held an investigation on the Section, where it became clear that Mr. Tanner was actively seeking to curtail that cornerstone of American democracy. The right to vote is the foundation of all our liberties and it must be protected.
“Indeed, under Mr. Tanner’s leadership, the Justice Department essentially took positions that disenfranchised minorities and the elderly. The departure of Mr. Tanner presents an opportunity for a fresh start of the Voting Section. I urge the Bush Administration to take this opportunity to take politics out of voting rights enforcement by appointing a new chief with a commitment to the letter and the spirit of the Voting Rights Act.”
Update: And here's House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI):
John D. McKinnon blogs that Perino was asked yesterday why Bush didn't notice the epidemic of performance-enhancing drugs that was taking hold of the game when he was an owner.
Perino pointed to an ESPN interview in which he said that he's thought long and hard about it, but doesn't recall ever seeing or hearing evidence of a steroid problem.
Writes McKinnon: "A Fox News reporter, Wendell Goler, pointed out that former Ranger Jose Canseco has said 'he cannot comprehend why Mr. Bush didn't know that steroid use was going on on the team.' So does Bush regret not picking up on the problem, Goler asked?
"'I don't think it's a time for regret,' Perino said. 'I think it's time to do what the president has done, which is . . . to shine a light on the issue. And now we have a result . . . a report that is getting a lot of attention, and deservedly so.'"
We tried to figure out just what Kerik had been up to during his three-and-a-half months running the Interior Ministry in Iraq before. So, apparently, did the makers of the brutal Iraq documentary No End in Sight. Though Kerik was interviewed for the film, his section was left on the cutting room floor, but it will be included in a forthcoming book by the same name from the filmmaker. In an excerpt run by The New York Post, Kerik says that he was called in to see Defense Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in May of 2003 to discuss policing policies in Iraq. Ten days later, he was on his way to Iraq. He prepared for the job in part by watching A&E documentaries on Saddam Hussein.
Kerik may have been the "eyes and ears of the Oval Office on the ground" in Iraq, but he says he opposed perhaps the most disastrous decision made then, which was to disband the Iraqi military. And he opposed the "momentum" to do the same with the Iraqi police. Good call.
When the interviewer got on the topic of Kerik's trouble with the law, he was less forthcoming. Asked whether he thought it "raises questions about your judgment and whether it was wise to appoint you," he said no, then:
Ferguson: "How come so many legal problems?"
Kerik: "It's a political year... Look, I'm not here to talk about my case. I'm here to talk about Iraq, so let's talk about Iraq."
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis on Friday morning delayed for six weeks the beginning of Rep. William Jefferson’s corruption trial, rejecting a request from the Louisiana Democrat’s lawyers to push the start date back four to six months.
The trial is now scheduled to begin Feb. 25.
So nearly two and a half years after the feds found $90,000 in Jefferson's freezer (he'd accepted a briefcase full of $100,000 in cash from an FBI informant in a hotel parking lot), he'll finally get his day in court. We're looking forward to it.
An environmental advocate who provided Jack Abramoff's entree into the Interior Department was sentenced Friday to two months in a halfway house and four years probation.
Italia Federici, who pleaded guilty in June to tax evasion and obstructing a Senate investigation, was spared prison only because she has become a key witness in the Justice Department's ongoing corruption investigation.
(I would be remiss if I didn't amusedly note the AP's description of Federici as an "environmental advocate." She did indeed head a group called Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), so the word "environmental" was in her group's title. But her advocacy was definitely against the environmental movement, not with it.)
Federici was key in helping the feds bag Steven Griles, formerly the deputy secretary of the Interior Department (and formerly her boyfriend). Griles was sentenced to 10 months in prison back in June. And for that, she's been rewarded.
The scheme went this way: Jack Abramoff's tribal clients gave CREA at least $500,000 in contributions, providing practically the entire operating budget for the group. In return, Federici used her close connections to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton (for whom she used to work) and the #2 Steven Griles (whom she was dating) to make sure that Abramoff's concerns were addressed. Here's the whole rundown.
Today, John Tanner resigned from his position effective immediately as chief of the Civil Rights Division's voting section. His resignation email, with the subject line "Moving On" was sent out at approximately 11 AM to voting section staff. He said that he will be moving on to the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices. The email is reproduced below in full.
With Tanner, it had seemed like a matter of not if, but when. As we reported late last month, his travel habits had angered attorneys in the voting section, leading to an investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.
And that was after his comments about the tendency of minorities to "die first" led Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and others to call for his removal. When he went before the House Judiciary Committee in October, he was lambasted for his tendency of "basing your conclusions on stereotypes" (like, say, claiming that African-Americans have IDs more than whites because they're always going to cash-checking businesses).
But most of all, Tanner's reign is notable for his collusion with the political appointees who oversaw the section, an ongoing effort to reverse the Civil Rights Division's traditional role in protecting minority voters, particularly African-Americans, into one of aiding thinly disguised vote suppression measures (most infamously Georgia's voter ID law). It was an effort that some career DoJ attorneys later described as "institutional sabotage."
Who'll be taking over? We've got a question into DoJ to see.
Blink and you'll miss it in today's New York Times piece on the House's torture ban. But Jose Rodriguez, the CIA's ex-operations director who ordered the interrogation tapes destroyed in late 2005, has hired one of Washington's most prominent criminal attorneys:
Mr. Rodriguez has hired Robert S. Bennett, a well-known Washington lawyer, to represent him in Congressional and Justice Department inquiries into his handling of the tapes.
Mr. Bennett has represented a number of high-profile clients — among them former President Bill Clinton, Caspar W. Weinberger, the former defense secretary, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and World Bank president.
“Mr. Rodriguez has been a loyal public servant for 31 years and has always acted in the best interest of the country,” Mr. Bennett said. “He’s done nothing wrong.”
How in the world does a retiring CIA official have the cash to hire Robert Bennett?
Update: An answer, from a knowledgeable source. Rodriguez, like many CIA officers, bought a very generous insurance policy in anticipation of getting into some kind of legal jeopardy of one sort or another.
Let it be known: House Democrats oppose waterboarding -- the process of drowning a detainee that's so severe even those who think it "works" don't think we should do it -- and House Republicans support it. The House yesterday voted to restrict CIA interrogation methods to the Geneva Conventions-compliant provisions outlined in the Army's field manual on interrogation. The bill passed on a nearly party-line vote. President Bush, a self-described Christian, promises a veto.
By Adrianne Jeffries and Peter Sheehy - December 14, 2007, 9:54AM
A House panel has begun looking into a former Halliburton/KBR employee’s allegations of rape and forced detention. In a “hearing next Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will hear testimony relating to allegations made by Jamie Leigh Jones that in 2005, a group of Halliburton/KBR employees in Baghdad drugged her and gang-raped her less than a week into her time in the country.” Meanwhile, the head of KBR, Bill Utt, has sent a memo to employees stating that press reports have mischaracterized the sexual assault and his company’s response. Utt will certainly have time to defend his company in front of Congress or in federal court, as Congress has also begun “asking questions about another ex-employee of government contracting firm KBR who claims she was raped in Iraq.” (ABC’s, “The Blotter”)
Newsweek (via Think Progress) reports that the interrogation techniques used on Abu Zubaydah “sparked an internal battle within the U.S. intelligence community” to such an extent that one agent, so offended by the methods, “threatened to arrest
the CIA interrogators.” (Newsweek)
Salon has new testimony from witnesses and victims of Blackwater's September 16th shootings that “provides the most in-depth, harrowing account to date of the U.S. security firm's deadly rampage in Iraq.” One man describes how he “identified his son from what was left of his shoes. His forehead and brains were missing and his skin completely burned. He identified his wife of 20 years by a dental bridge.” (Salon)
And here you thought Stuart Bowen was a paragon of integrity.
Bowen is the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR). Despite being an old buddy of George W. Bush's back in the Texas days, Bowen has earned a reputation as a tireless investigator of waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq contracting.
The quarterly reports issued by SIGIR have not hesitated to name names of both crooked contractors and crooked contracting officials. Bowen's appearances on Capitol Hill have been remarkably candid and free of euphemism. When I was in Baghdad in March, military public-affairs officers jumped at the chance to show me how they interface with SIGIR and boasted of the enormous respect they have for an office that's all up in their business.
But now, reportsThe Washington Post, the worm has turned. SIGIR faces four separate investigations -- including one by a federal grand jury -- looking into everything from its own profligacy to its alleged abundance of ego:
Current and former employees have complained about overtime policies that allowed 10 staff members to earn more than $250,000 each last year. They have questioned the oversight of a $3.5 million book project about Iraq's reconstruction modeled after the 9/11 Commission report. And they have alleged that Bowen and his deputy have improperly snooped into their staff's e-mail messages.
The employee allegations have prompted four government probes into the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), including an investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors into the agency's financial practices and claims of e-mail monitoring, according to law enforcement sources and SIGIR staff members. Federal prosecutors have presented evidence of alleged wrongdoing to a grand jury in Virginia, which has subpoenaed SIGIR for thousands of pages of financial documents, contracts, personnel records and correspondence, several sources familiar with the probe said.
Bowen, with no evident irony, dismisses many of the charges as the result of "disgruntled" employees. Yet some of the overtime that certain SIGIR officials have racked up is downright gaudy (1400 hours?).
One SIGIR official spoke anonymously of a climate of fear that pervades the office. SIGIR's chiefs are "gripped by paranoia. It's almost a siege mentality." Such alleged paranoia, according to federal prosecutors, has led top officials to illegally snoop on their employees. One of them, Ginger Cruz, Bowen's deputy, allegedly used, um, witchcraft to intimidate subordinates:
The Miami "Seas of David" terror bust was such an important blow in the War on Terror that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales himself gave a press conference in July of 2006. Federal agents had stopped a plot to blow up the Sears Tower, he said. The group had planned to "accomplish attacks against America," the FBI's deputy director said at Gonzales side. "We pre-empted their plot."
But, as we wrote at the time, "the more we learn, the less this crew looks like they could have toppled a tree house, let alone the Sears Tower." The clique, adherents of a sect "that mixes Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Freemasonry, Gnosticism and Taoism," met in a windowless warehouse they called the "Temple." The leader of the group, Narseal Batiste, was described as a "'Moses-like figure' who would roam the streets in a cape or bathrobe, toting a crooked wooden cane and looking for young men to join his group." And when the group met in their Temple, the men "took turns standing guard outside the door, dressed up in makeshift military uniforms and combat boots. Sometimes they covered their faces with ski masks." Nobody ever charged them with being subtle.
And it was unclear whether the group really had any plans themselves, or whether they got all their ideas from the FBI informant. When the FBI raided the Temple, FBI agents found only one knife and a blackjack. The group trained by shooting paintball guns in the woods.
Sure enough, the government's case ended today with one exoneration and six mistrials. "The government wants to try them again next year," the BBC reports.
Remember that fateful day? March 17, 2005? When House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) held his hearing into steroids in baseball, and Mark McGuire disgraced himself for all time? When Jose Canseco named names? And Sammy Sosa pretended not to speak English?
Well, there may not be do-overs in baseball, but it's time for a rematch of sorts. Davis, now the committee's ranking member, and Henry Waxman (D-CA), the chairman, announced today that they'll ask steroids investigator George Mitchell, baseball commissioner Bud Selig and players' union chief Don Fehr to testify next week. Unfortunately, none of the implicated players -- Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, the whole gang -- will be "invited" to speak. However, reliable sources tell us the official soundtrack for the hearing will be Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days."
The military commissions at Guantanamo Bay have plenty of critics. But here are two in particular worth mentioning.
Earlier this week, the former chief prosecutor at the tribunals, Col. Morris Davis blasted the system in an op-ed, calling the system "deeply politicized" (that same day, the administration arbitrarily barred him from testifying to Congress).
Back in 2002, a master’s degree candidate at the Naval War College wrote a paper on the Bush administration’s plan to use military commissions to try Guantánamo suspects, concluding that “even a good military tribunal is a bad idea.”
It drew little notice at the time, but the paper has gained a second life because of its author’s big promotion: Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann of the Marines is now the chief judge of the military commissions at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The system, Judge Kohlmann wrote in 2002, would face criticism for the “apparent lack of independence” of military judges and would have “credibility problems,” the very argument made by Guantánamo’s critics.
He said it would be better to try terrorism suspects in federal courts in the United States. “Unnecessary use of military tribunals in the face of reasonable international criticism,” he wrote, “is an ill-advised move.”...
Prior terrorism and organized crime cases, he wrote, showed that “the existing United States criminal justice system does not have to be put aside simply because the potential defendants have scary friends.”
Kohlmann appears to have taken the attitude that it's better to work to fix the system from the inside than criticize it from outside. He hasn't disavowed the paper, the Times reports, though he's changed his original opinion that "President Bush’s original order establishing military commissions 'essentially states' that fundamental fairness would not be a part of commission trials." Comforting.
Last August, we united with Porkbusters.org and GOP Progress to unmask the senator who was holding up a bill introduced by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) to create a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts.
For days, we worked the phones and gathered responses that hundreds of TPMm readers had received from senators' offices, eventually eliminating 98 senators as being behind the hold. And indeed, there turned out to be not one, but two pork-happy senators behind the hold: Sens. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Robert Byrd (D-WV). (The two didn't seem to appreciate the irony of holding up a government transparency bill in a singularly nontransparent way.) After being unmasked, the senators lifted their holds and the bill sailed through to passage.
Commenter Joe Corrao takes me to task in my last post for cherry-picking a data point from the Mitchell Report that reflects badly upon my hated Boston Red Sox. He goads me into citing some Yankees named in the report who were part of the Bronx Bombers' torrid 1996-2000 teams. Sure, I mentioned both Clemens and Pettitte in the last post, but you know what, Joe? Fair enough. Behold, the horrible coda to one of the strangest psychological tales in baseball: the case of Chuck Knoblauch's wonky arm.
Every Yankee fan remembers the horror of Knoblauch. Knoblauch was a fantastic second basemen who, starting in 1999 and accelerating in 2000, lost the ability to throw to first base. Sure-fire outs sailed into the stands or into the home-team dugout. The conventional wisdom said it was a vicious circle of self-inflicted psychological pressure, as Knoblauch buckled under the freight of playing for the Yanks. Buster Olney devoted a whole chapter to Knoblauch in his book The Last Night of The Yankee Dynasty.
The fallout from George Mitchell's 409-page report (pdf) into baseball's Steroids Era (Mitchell's words) is yet to fully drop. We're still combing the report for the most explosive revelations -- no big surprise that Yankee greats Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte juiced -- but for now, this Yankee fan wants to bring you his moment of schadenfreude. To wit: the 2007 World Champion Boston Red Sox. According to Mitchell, Sox general manager Theo Epstein acquired flop reliever Eric Gagne nearly a year after learning of serious circumstantial evidence of Gagne's steroid use.
Gagne and Paul Lo Duca were teammates in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2004. During that time, Gagne used Lo Duca, who went on to a beloved career catching for the Mets (sorry, Paul), as his hook-up to steroid and human-growth hormone pusher Kirk Radomski. The Red Sox scouted Gagne, once a valuable relief pitcher, after the 2006 season, when Epstein began overhauling the Sox pitching staff. Yet a certain concern lingered. On November 1, 2006, Epstein emailed his scout, Mark Delpiano, "Have you done any digging on Gagne? I know the Dodgers think he was a steroid guy. Maybe so. What do you hear on his medical?"
Earlier we noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee had voted to approve contempt resolutions against Karl Rove and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten for failing to comply with subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney firings probe.
The final vote tally was 12-7, with two Republicans, Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA) Chuck Grassley (R-IA) crossing over.
Now, it's up to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) as to when (or whether) he'll scheduled a vote on the Senate floor. When we asked a Reid aide last week about it, we were told the Reid would consult with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) about it when the time came.
Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee's contempt citations against Harriet Miers and Bolten have been sitting on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) desk since July. After much delay, Dem House leadership aides said last month that the vote had again been delayed to December. So now's the time. Perhaps the Senate and House will team up and schedule both votes before the New Year, sending the White House contempt citations against Rove, Miers, and Bolten as a Christmas gift. Or maybe nothing will happen. Stay tuned.
Although Jose Rodriguez might have felt he had good reason to destroy the CIA's 2002 interrogation tapes, the destruction threatens to break the agency's surprisingly sterling record of escaping prosecution for torture, so not many people would defend it as a wise move. But surely an even dumber move is the 2002 decision to videotape the interrogations in the first place.
Various explanations abound, but none of them are definitive -- least of all CIA Director Mike Hayden's.
Very little is known, and none of it for certain, about why the tapes ever existed. It's astonishing that in 2002, CIA officials wouldn't have realized the tapes were evidence of potential criminal conduct. Clearly they realized shortly thereafter, since the CIA spent years trying, and failing, to get outside legal authority to destroy them.
Last Thursday, Hayden ventured an explanation to CIA employees. Via Marty Lederman:
The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages. At one point, it was thought the tapes could serve as a backstop to guarantee that other methods of documenting the interrogations---and the crucial information they produce--were accurate and complete. The Agency soon determined that its documentary reporting was full and exacting, removing any need for tapes.
Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts at Giuliani Partners have insisted he's no lobbyist. But there's mounting evidence to the contrary. Maybe he's so averse to the term because his firm lobbied illegally.
Exhibit A is today's Time story, which for the first time reveals details about just what Hank Asher, Giuliani's troubled buddy, paid him so much money to do.
As we laid out in a series of posts last week, Giuliani struck a pretty sweet deal with Asher during his first year of business. Asher's Seisint was hocking its data-mining software, code-named MATRIX, to the government. Rudy's job was to serve as a kind of front man for the company, in part so that Asher's drug-running past wouldn't be an issue. The contract, for a previously untold amount of money, was based on a $2 million yearly fee, commissions, and stock options. A stock holder in the company was so alarmed by the giveaway that he sued Seisint; the case was settled.
Today, Timeputs a price tag on all that: $30 million, $24 million of that from stock options. And what did Rudy do for the money? It turns out, plenty.
Well, first and foremost, he lobbied. A shareholder in Seisint tells Time that "nobody knew us; everybody knew him," and that with Giuliani, "the doors were wide open. It was almost a flood of business opportunities." The company's in-house lobbyist says that Giuliani set up a meeting at the Department of Homeland Security.
The White House looks like another one of those doors that Giuliani opened. In January of 2003, just a month after Seisint hired Giuliani, Asher gave a presentation to Vice President Dick Cheney, FBI director Robert Mueller, Homeland Security director Tom Ridge, and Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on MATRIX, according to documents obtained by the ACLU back in 2004. (The ACLU doggedly opposed MATRIX; Asher responded by once joking that the ACLU "is probably funded" by Al Qaeda. I'm sure he and Cheney got along fine.)
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to hold two top aides to President Bush in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in its probe of fired federal prosecutors.
On a largely party-line vote of 11-7, the Democratic-led panel sent contempt citations against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to the full Senate for consideration.
As with many of Bush's battles with the Democratic-led Senate, the president may ultimately prevail since his fellow Republicans may be able to block the citations with a procedural hurdle.
Bush has claimed executive privilege to protect aides from complying with congressional subpoenas demanding documents or testimony in an investigation into the firing last year of nine U.S. attorneys. The committee has rejected his privilege claim as unfounded.
By Adrianne Jeffries and Peter Sheehy - December 13, 2007, 9:45AM
The U.S. has just released 15 more Guantanamo Bay detainees, bringing the total number of detainees who have never been charged or tried to 485. This leaves approximately 290 detainees, of which the government plans to prosecute about 80 in military tribunals. A portion of the remaining 200 have been cleared for transfer provided some nation will accept them. 1 detainee has been convicted in the history of the Guantanamo system. (USA Today)
Despite the failures of the military tribunal system at Guantanamo, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says that his push to close the prison camp has run into “obstacles” from the administration’s lawyers and Dick Cheney. Cheney “opposes bringing detainees to the US under such a system, because they would receive greater legal rights.” (Financial Times)
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed an ethics complaint with the Senate alleging that senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) violated rules by “contacting the U.S. Attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico, David C. Iglesias, and pressuring him about an ongoing corruption probe.” Now, Domenici wants to use campaign funds to pay his legal fees from the ethics investigation. (CREW)
Federal law enforcement has subpoenaed the financial records and employees of Rev. Al Sharpton’s 2004 presidential campaign. The FBI declined to comment but Carl Redding, Sharpton's chief of staff for eight years during the 1990s, said "it was like a sting or a raid... they converged on everybody." (Chicago Tribune)
Today's New York Times carries a valuable analysis by Scott Shane running through how the revelation of the destroyed CIA torture tapes underscores the agency's fears of having the administration turn on it. That is, after manipulating the law to justify ordering the CIA's torture of Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other al-Qaeda detainees, the Bush administration might finally prosecute someone low on the CIA food chain for doing what they ordered him or her to do. The agency watched Donald Rumsfeld, William Haynes and Ricardo Sanchez walk while Lynndie England and Charles Graner took the fall for Abu Ghraib. No one wants to be the Lynndie England of the Black Sites.
The administration hasn't gone down this road yet. But, from the CIA's perspective, the destruction of the tapes might bring it dangerously close. After all, if the Justice Department-CIA probe finds that Jose Rodriguez committed a crime by destroying evidence when he had the tapes junked, it raises the question of what those tapes contained evidence of. There are reams of evidence -- legal guidance from John Yoo, for instance, some still classified -- of what the underlying crime is.
So how does the CIA get out of it? Why, blame the system. Consider this passage from Shane:
Since we're talking about destroying tapes of interrogations, why limit it to those made in secret CIA prisons? The Chicago Tribunereports today that Abu Omar, a suspected terrorist abducted in Italy and flown to Egypt by the CIA, says that "his captors made audiotapes of his extensive interrogations in an Egyptian prison that recorded 'the sounds of my torture and my cries.'"
That raises several questions, says Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and he asked them in a flurry of letters today.
In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he asks whether she knows if interrogations of detainees rendered by the United States to foreign countries were recorded, and if so, whether any have been reviewed "to verify compliance with diplomatic assurances not to torture detainees?"
In his letter to CIA Director Michael Hayden, he asks whether he knows of any such recordings and whether the CIA has any -- and whether, well, they've already destroyed them.
And his letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requests that the Justice Department's investigation into the destruction of the tapes include possible tapes of interrogations of rendered detainees -- and they're possible destruction.
Yep, that's right. The American Bar Association Journal has named Alberto Gonzales Lawyer of the Year. Wait a minute, you say, isn't that like naming Alec Baldwin Father of the Year?
But there's a rationale. Gonzales makes the cut for being the "most talked-about" lawyer around, not for the quality of his lawyering. True, most of the talking had to do with how he should resign, but there was undoubtedly a lot of talk. Other administration figures like Monica Goodling, Scooter Libby, and David Addington -- also much "talked-about" -- got honorable mention.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has a choice. Both the Senate intelligence committee and Senate Judiciary Committee produced versions of the surveillance bills last month. But there's a crucial difference between the two. The intelligence committee's bill contains retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that collaborated with the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. The judiciary committee's does not.
Today, fourteen senators (thirteen Dems and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)) wrote Reid to urge him to have the judiciary committee's version be the base bill for the Senate debate. "As this is such a controversial issue, we feel it would be appropriate to require the proponents of immunity to make their case on the floor," they write. Presidential candidates Sens. Joe Biden (D-DE), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Chris Dodd (D-CT), and Barack Obama (D-IL) signed on. The letter is below.
In an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times this morning, Attorney General Michael Mukasey came out in favor of the Senate intelligence committee's bill.
What a difference a scandal makes. Coming out of his briefing to the House intelligence committee today, CIA Director Michael Hayden was penitent: "particularly at the time of the destruction we could have done an awful lot better at keeping the committee alerted and informed."
It's a markedly different tone from the one he took last week. Then, he released a statement about the tapes' destruction and claimed that the intelligence committees had received ample notification of the intention to destroy the tapes and then their actual destruction. Both committees said that wasn't true. Now he apparently agrees.
Today was the second of Hayden's initial briefings on the scandal. Yesterday's was to the Senate intelligence committee, where he said that even though he's in charge at the CIA, he's not really the guy to be talking to: "Other people in the agency know about this far better than I." Hayden says he learned of the tapes' destruction as far back as last year, when he was the principal deputy director of national intelligence and before he took over at the CIA in May of 2006.
Accordingly, Senate intelligence committee Chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) says that former CIA General Counsel John Rizzo and current General Counsel John Helgerson will testify in the next week. Jose Rodriguez, who decided to destroy the tapes, will also be up.
The same people will likely appear before the House committee. Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) says that Hayden's testimony today was "just the first step in what we feel is going to be a long-term investigation." So there's plenty of apologizing left to do.
Here's a court order that appears not to have an easy out.
From a press release just out from the ACLU:
The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a motion asking a federal judge to hold the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in contempt, charging that the agency flouted a court order when it destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the harsh interrogation of prisoners in its custody. In response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by the ACLU and other organizations in October 2003 and May 2004, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the CIA to produce or identify all records pertaining to the treatment of detainees in its custody. Despite the court’s ruling, the CIA never produced the tapes or even acknowledged their existence.
Make that two State Department officials overseeing Blackwater to resign. On November 30, Kevin Barry, a top official at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security -- Blackwater's liaison office -- opted to spend more time with the family. Barry joins the Bureau's chief, who quit in October.
Barry's departure is surprising, as his star was so recently on the rise at Foggy Bottom. Shortly after an internal State review in October recommended a massive overhaul of the Bureau's process for overseeing State's security contractors, ABC News reported that Barry and a colleague, Justine Sincavage, nevertheless received promotions. And on December 4th, TPMmuckraker published State Department cables showing that despite Blackwater's Nisour Square shootings becoming State's biggest scandal this year, both Barry and Sincavage were slated to receive pay bonuses of between $10,000 and $15,000 for "outstanding performance," effective December 20.
But apparently, Barry couldn't wait that long to get out. A message sent to his work e-mail at State bounced back with instructions that he "will be in and out of the office during the week of November 26 and retiring on November 30." No word yet on whether he got his holiday cash early. Or whether his retirement is long-standing or Blackwater-related.
Here's another data point for the timeline. From the AP: "The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics." But the CIA has an "out": the videotapes and the detainees were being held at the CIA's black sites, which were not revealed until November of 2005.
Consider the timeline.
In June of 2005, the AP reports, "U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay."
But both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Al-Qaeda members whose brutal interrogations were videotaped in 2002, were being held by the CIA overseas. The tapes, which were also kept overseas, were reportedly destroyed the same month The Washington Post broke the black sites story, November of 2005. In September of 2006, President Bush announced that fourteen high value detainees were being transferred to Guantanamo Bay; both Zubaydah and Nashiri were among them.
That may mean that the tapes were "beyond the scope of the court's order," the AP reports, adding "CIA director Michael Hayden told the agency in an e-mail this week that internal reviewers found the tapes were not relevant to any court case." Neat trick.
By Adrianne Jeffries and Peter Sheehy - December 12, 2007, 9:57AM
Air Force Brig. General Thomas Hartmann, the top legal adviser for the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, refused to say if waterboarding is torture and would not even answer senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) hypothetical question about whether it would be considered torture if Iranians were to waterboard a downed U.S airman. Instead, Hartmann, who took a drubbing from senator Durbin (D-IL) about the entire tribunal process, asserted that if interrogation techniques provide evidence that “is reliable and probative, and the judge concludes that it is in the best interest of justice to introduce that evidence, ma'am, those are the rules we will follow.” (Washington Post)
A federal appeals court ordered the Bush administration to preserve any evidence that might prove that a former Baltimore resident was tortured during his three years in secret CIA custody. Majid Khan is one of 15 high-value detainees who once were held by the CIA but are now being held at Guantanamo Bay. (McClatchy)
Sen. Trent Lott’s (R-MS) son claimed the domain name breauxlott.com this fall, which is a strong indication that the retiring minority whip will join forces with another senator-turned-lobbyist John Breaux (D-LA) on K Street. Chet Lott, a registered lobbyist, registered the name on Oct. 16 — six weeks before his father's unexpected announcement, which could mean Lott was pre-negotiating his new position before he should have. (The Hill, Think Progress)
The top attorney prosecuting representative William Jefferson (D-LA) has requested 10 subpoenas for witnesses to appear at Jefferson’s trial. This indicates that despite Jefferson’s efforts to delay the January 16 start, prosecutors expect a timely start. (The Hill)
Yesterday, The New York Timesreported that the White House and Justice Department had advised against destroying the interrogation videotapes of -- but CIA officials said that advice was less than direct (of the "probably wouldn't be a good idea" variety). As Newsweekreports, that seems to have been the pattern for CIA, White House, and Justice Department officials who failed to unequivocally direct that the tapes be preserved. (For those who haven't already, check out our monster timeline telling the tale of the tapes.)
Thankfully for investigators, "an extensive paper—or e-mail—trail exists documenting the contacts between [the CIA's] Clandestine Service officials and top agency managers and between the CIA and the White House regarding what to do about the tapes." Both directors of the CIA during that time, George Tenet and Porter Goss, were no more explicit, only indicating "that they believed it would be unwise to destroy the tapes." The CIA's general counsel is characterized as "never comfortable with the idea of the tapes being destroyed."
The discussions about the comfortability and wisdom of destroying the tapes unfolded in "fits and starts" between 2003 and late 2005, the mag reports, when Jose Rodriguez of the Clandestine Service made the clear and irrevocable decision that the tapes should be destroyed. That move came after a lawyer in the Clandestine Service advised that "there is no explicit legal reason why the Clandestine Service had to preserve the tapes." But a source whispers to Newsweek that the advice did not "directly authorize the tapes' destruction or offer advice on the wisdom or folly of such a course of action." I guess the joke's on Rodriguez.
Newsweek provides a little more detail about the tapes. For the entirety of their existence, they were kept in a secret location overseas, where they were eventually destroyed. At one point "portions... were electronically transmitted to CIA headquarters," but those traces have likely been rubbed out. Finally, there's a "detailed written transcript of the tapes' contents," which apparently still exists.
All of this, of course, doesn't do anything to explain why the tapes -- or their descriptions -- were kept from those seeking them, including the 9/11 commission and a federal judge.
The administration didn't let Col. Morris Davis, the former chief war crimes prosecutor, testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today. But they did send Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, a legal advisor to the officials who oversee the military commissions, to defend the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) took advantage of the opportunity, asking Hartmann what he thought about the fact that after six years and 775 detainees, the commissions had only produced one conviction. "I cannot explain that," replied Hartmann, citing "various legal delays," adding "I'm as disappointed in that as you are."
But when Durbin pressed, asking whether Hartmann ever thought that maybe this wasn't the best way to do things, he demurred. The military commissions are an "honor to the American justice system," he said, of which Americans should be "very proud."
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) responding to today's news that the Justice Department had weighed in with an amicus brief in support of Indiana's voter ID law:
“Once again the Bush Justice Department has gone to court to disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, and minorities. Voter I.D. laws have rightly been struck down in the past. The Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which I chair, recently held a hearing on this very subject. The evidence we obtained clearly demonstrates that these laws do nothing to protect the integrity of elections, but do a great deal to erect a needless barrier to voter participation. The Justice Department is charged under the law with the duty to protect the right to vote. Sadly, the Bush administration has chosen to oppose voting rights.”
By Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel - December 11, 2007, 4:18PM
For years, the CIA denied recording any interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees. For years, the Bush administration denied issuing any legal authorization for torture. And for years, members of Congress claimed ignorance of what the CIA and the Bush administration had in store for detained members of al-Qaeda. All of these denials have proven false.
There's a tremendous amount that remains unknown about CIA interrogations of al-Qaeda, the recording of those interrogations, and the destruction of those recordings. Determining just what is known is confusing, as is sorting out when crucial developments occurred. To provide a measure of clarity, TPMmuckraker has compiled a timeline of relevant events over the past five years. Since the core of the current controversy isn't about the destruction of the tapes but the interrogation methods those tapes captured -- which is of course unknown -- we included milestones on the administration's road to developing interrogation policy.
Invaluable research assistance was provided by Adrianne Jeffries, Peter Sheehy, and Andrew Berger. Mistakes in compiling this information are entirely our own, and we hope you'll alert us in comments to any errors we've made.
February 7, 2002: President Bush signs an executive order that says Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions does not apply to al-Qaeda detainees.
2002: Al-Qaeda members Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri are captured and interrogated in secret CIA prisons. At least some of the interrogations are videotaped.
The precise date of the interrogations that were taped is not known. However, there are some clues. As early as the spring of 2002, the CIA began using "harsh interrogation methods" on Zubaydah, including waterboarding. As for Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, he was not captured until the fall, as late as November. He told a military tribunal in March of this year that "from the time I was arrested... they have been torturing me," and that he'd made up stories in order to get interrogators to stop.
August 1, 2002: Jay Bybee, the chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, issues a memo that restricts the definition of torture to physical pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." A still-classified memo from roughly the same time period, known as the Second Bybee Memo, reportedly gets specific about the legality of certain prospective CIA interrogation techniques.
September, 2002: The leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees receive a CIA briefing on interrogation techniques considered for al-Qaeda detainees. The content of that briefing is highly disputed. Both Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and ex-Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) say they were not briefed on actual interrogation techniques in use by the CIA. Ex-Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) says otherwise. The briefing or briefings do not mention any interrogations being recorded. There is no known protest from any member of Congress present.
In August, the ACLU made an unorthodox request to the FISA Court. It wanted the Court to declassify the early 2007 rulings on President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program that led the administration to seek broad new authority from Congress to conduct surveillance.
And while the ACLU petition was a long shot, a few days later, the Court went back to the government and asked what the harm in declassification would be. After all, as the ACLU wrote, the facts behind the rulings had direct bearing on an ongoing legislative debate over the scope of surveillance powers. As far-fetched as it still seemed, perhaps the Court would buck its long tradition of secrecy.
The nation's spy court said Tuesday that it will not make public its documents regarding the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in a rare public opinion, said the public has no right to view the documents because they deal with the clandestine workings of national security agencies....
Writing for the court, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates refused. Releasing the documents would reveal closely guarded secrets that enemies could used to evade detection or disrupt intelligence activities, he said.
"All these possible harms are real and significant and, quite frankly, beyond debate," Bates wrote.
And yet the debate continues. The Protect America Act expires in under two months. President Bush opposes all its Democratic alternatives. And the facts of the rulings that prompted this new round of legislative overhauls to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act won't be up for discussion.
"The decision is deeply disappointing," says Melissa Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project. "Basically, the Court is saying it will keep its interpretation of an important federal law secret, and we don't think in a democracy there should be any secret body of law." But the real harm, she says, comes to the public, since the "orders are at the center of the legislative debate" over surveillance. Disclosure "would have helped the public be a meaningful participant in that debate." Now, not so much.
Signaling that things haven't changed all that much at the Justice Department, the DoJ has filed an amicus brief (pdf) with the Supreme Court in support of Indiana's voter ID law.
The decision to file the brief in and of itself will prove controversial, but beyond that, opponents say that the brief's argument would set a standard that stacks the deck in favor of vote suppression measures and against those who challenge them. Arguments in the case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, are set to be heard by the Court in January.
In the 42-page brief (pdf), the Department argues that Indiana's law is a "reasonable administrative rule that furthers the State's compelling interest in combating voter fraud." Alleged voter fraud, of course, has been a continual preoccupation of the Department, even leading to the firing of at least two of the nine U.S. attorneys in the Gonzales-era purge, despite overwhelming evidence that such fraud is extremely rare and even then hardly ever intentional.
In a statement, the Brennan Center for Justice, which has filed an amicus brief against the law and calls the case "the most important voting rights case since Bush v. Gore," denounced the Department's argument as an "extreme legal position." If accepted, the group argues, the standard set would mean "that there could be virtually no challenges to laws suppressing the vote before an election....
This means that any law meant to suppress the vote would have already accomplished its goal of disenfranchising voters before it could be challenged in Court. Their position, taken to its logical extent, would allow jurisdictions to suppress the votes of tens of thousands of voters before a single aggrieved voter could get their day in Court."
In an exclusive interview with ABC News President Bush said Tuesday he did not know about the destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations.
The President said he was told just a few days ago.
"My first recollection of whether the tapes existed or whether they were destroyed was when [CIA Director] Michael Hayden briefed me," Bush said.
When Col. Morris Davis stepped down as the Pentagon's chief war crimes prosecutor in October, the reason given seemed to be a somewhat bureaucratic one. He stepped down, it was reported, "in a dispute over whether Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, legal advisor to the administrator overseeing the trials, has the power to supervise aspects of the prosecution."
But in an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times, Davis is crystal clear. "I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly," he writes.
It's a taste of what he would have said had he been allowed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, during its hearing on the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) announced at the beginning of the hearing that the committee had invited Davis to testify, but that "the Defense Department has ordered him not to appear."
Update: Here's video of Feinstein's comments:
"We assured the administration that Colonel Davis would not be asked about open and pending cases," Feinstein said. "But we were told simply that Colonel Davis was active duty military, and because he was active duty military, they could issue an order he had to follow." Calling it a shame, she added, "I wish the administration would allow him to appear. Unfortunately, I have to conclude that by prohibiting Col. Davis from testifying, the administration is trying to stop a fair and open discussion about the legal rights of detainees at Guantanamo."
In Davis' op-ed, he gives three reasons for his resignation, all deriving from a complaint that control of the military commissions at Gitmo had been taken from the military and given to political appointees. He targets Susan Crawford, who oversees the commissions, and William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel, in particular. The system was rigged, he complains, in order for the appointees to micro-manage the trials which they insisted take place behind closed doors, another decision he disagreed with.
One more thing from today's must-read New York Times piece. Mazzetti and Shane also report that a former CIA detainee claims to have seen cameras in his interrogation chamber. Although CIA Director Mike Hayden said "videotaping stopped in 2002" in his Thursday message to the CIA, the ex-detainee, Muhammad Bashmilah, was in CIA custody from 2004 to 2005.
The former prisoner who reported seeing cameras, Muhammad Bashmilah of Yemen, was seized by Jordanian intelligence agents in 2003 and turned over to the C.I.A., according to an investigation by Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy organization. He was flown from Jordan to Afghanistan in October 2003 and held there until April 2004, when he was flown by plane and helicopter to a C.I.A. jail in an unidentified country, Amnesty found. Mr. Bashmilah and two other Yemeni men held with him were flown to Yemen in May 2005 and later released.
Meg Satterthwaite, a director of the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University who is representing Mr. Bashmilah in a lawsuit, said Mr. Bashmilah described cameras both in his cells and in interrogation rooms, some on tripods and some on the wall. She said his descriptions of his imprisonment, in hours of conversation in Yemen and by phone this year, were lucid and detailed.
Maybe Bashmilah is lying. Maybe he's misremembering. But, to be blunt, why believe Hayden? The CIA lied for years about the existence of videotaped interrogations, so there's no reason to credit Hayden's account of when the recordings ceased.
What's more, there's sworn evidence to the contrary: in an October 25th court filing (pdf), U.S. attorneys Chuck Rosenberg, David Raskin and David Novak acknowledge recently learning of two currently-existing CIA interrogation tapes. Their letter is heavily redacted, so it's unclear whether the tapes the attorneys viewed and listened to were made in 2002 but survived the 2005 destruction or were made sometime after 2002 -- or even after 2005 -- contrary to Hayden's statement. What is clear is that we shouldn't assume the CIA has accounted for every videotaped interrogation.
You didn't think there'd be a scandal involving the destruction of potential evidence of torture without Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter getting involved, did you?
Leahy and Specter, the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote yesterday to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requesting a thorough understanding of the Justice Department's inquiry into the CIA's destruction of secret interrogation tapes. If Mukasey ever had a honeymoon at DoJ, it's already a distant memory.
The Dyspeptic Duo demand to know what the Justice Department knew about the tapes before their destruction -- after all, DoJ warned against junking them, so someone at DoJ knew they existed. And in a press release accompanying the letter, they threaten to turn next week's confirmation hearing for Mukasey's would-be deputy, Mark Filip, into "a public forum for Senators to query Filip about the Department of Justice’s reported investigation."
By Adrianne Jeffries and Peter Sheehy - December 11, 2007, 9:37AM
Jamie Leigh Jones has filed a federal suit against Halliburton and its former subsidiary KBR, asserting that she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone and that the company and U.S. government are covering up the assault. After the rape, she says, she was put under guard in a shipping container with a bed and told that if she left Iraq for medical treatment she’d be fired. (ABC)
A lawyer for a Guantanamo prisoner is urging U.S. authorities to preserve CIA photos that would prove his client was tortured when the CIA allegedly flew him to Morocco for questioning about al-Qaeda. The lawyer for British resident Binyam Mohamed says his client was subjected to "medieval torture" during 18 months in captivity, and that any evidence against him came from torture. (AP)
A government lawyer is arguing that Christine Todd Whitman, a former Environmental Protection Agency chief, should not be held personally liable for her reassurances to N.Y.C residents that the air near the World Trade Center wreckage was safe to breathe right after the 2001 terrorist attack. The precedent it could establish, that of holding public officials personally responsible for their actions, is considered too dangerous. (Boston Globe)
And now there's a paper trail in the saga of the CIA's destroyed interrogation videotapes. A former senior intelligence official tells The New York Times's Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane that lawyers within the agency's clandestine wing advised Jose Rodriguez Jr. in 2005 that junking the tapes was legal. For the investigations opening into Rodriguez's actions by the House and Senate intelligence committee, that written advice will be key -- if it hasn't already been shredded.
It's unclear exactly which attorney from the Directorate of Operations (now called the National Clandestine Service) gave Rodriguez the go-ahead. A bevy of administration and intelligence officials have acknowledged that attorneys from the White House (including Harriet Miers), the Justice Department, and the CIA's general counsel advised against destroying the tapes. Interestingly, a clearly pro-Rodriguez ex-CIA official tells the Times that such advice was less than ironclad:
“They never told us, ‘Hell, no,’” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘You cannot destroy them,’ we would not have destroyed them.”
Behold another pivot point for the joint DOJ-CIA Inspector General inquiry and the Congressional probes: how clearly did the Bush administration warn the CIA against destroying the tapes? Did Rodriguez, faced with widespread administration opposition to the destruction of the tapes, simply keep asking for guidance until he found the legal advice he wanted? Or did the administration, including the CIA's own acting general counsel, John Rizzo, give equivocal, I-don't-want-to-know guidance?
Friday, Senate intelligence committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said that his committee had already begun looking into the tapes' destruction. Over the weekend, the Justice Department and the CIA's inspector general announced a joint investigation. And today, House intelligence committee Chair Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) and ranking member Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) announced a full committee investigation.
The investigation "will review issues surrounding the destruction of videos, the CIA’s failure to notify Congress of this important matter, and related questions concerning the CIA’s interrogation program," according to a release. It kicks off Wednesday when CIA Director Michael Hayden will meet with the committee in a "closed, on-the-record briefing."
So far, the view on Capitol Hill seems to be that the two Congressional investigations and joint DoJ-CIA inquiry are enough -- with the notable exception of Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), who's called for a special prosecutor.
Paging Michael Mukasey. The leader of the CIA interrogation team that handled Abu Zubaydah, head of al-Qaeda's military committee, says he had Abu Zubaydah waterboarded -- which was torture, and, he says, necessary to prevent "maybe dozens of attacks." ABC has the bombshell interview:
In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.
"The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson" and "Nightline."
"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
Kiriakou is now the first official to acknowledge the use of waterboarding on any detainee in CIA custody. But his account of Abu Zubaydah's intelligence value contradicts Ron Suskind's 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine, which reported that Abu Zubaydah was borderline retarded and didn't have more than minor, tactical information about al-Qaeda. Needless to say, Kiriakou is also the first official to say unequivocally that Abu Zubaydah or any other detainee was tortured.
As we noted earlier, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) statement yesterday about a briefing on CIA interrogation techniques left a couple things unclear. A Pelosi aide, responding to our queries, walked us through.
According to the aide, the briefing Pelosi received in September 2002 -- when she was the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee -- did not cover any interrogation techniques then in use by the CIA. Administration officials "said these were possible techniques they might use in future but [were] not being used yet," says the aide. The aide doesn't know "if the term 'waterboarding' was used" by the briefer.
No objection was raised at the time by Pelosi to what she was told were "possible techniques." But the aide is unsure if Pelosi left the briefing clear on what those possible techniques actually entailed: "Her briefing [was] not as extensive as the Post story implies."
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) took Pelosi's spot on the committee in 2003. It was only then that the administration told the committee chiefs that the techniques listed in the 2002 briefing "were actually being used." Harman, and not Pelosi, was briefed at the time. "Harman objected, which Pelosi thought was the right thing to do and would have done if she had been ranker," the aide says. Pelosi, however, did not sign her name to a letter Harman sent to the CIA that Harman sent that February after receiving the briefing. Harman has asked the CIA to declassify the letter, which she has described as expressing concern over the interrogation techniques put into place and warning the CIA against destroying any interrogation recordings. "Harman told her she was sending it and Pelosi agreed with that decision," the Pelosi aide says.
"Pelosi and Harman [are] on same page on this," the aide adds, contradicting my earlier read on Pelosi's statement.
There remains a dispute about what exactly that September 2002 briefing detailed. The Washington Postquoted former House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss as saying, "among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," which implies that the briefing discussed techniques then in use. But the then-Democratic chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Bob Graham, told the Post that he didn't know, despite the briefings, what the CIA was up to. "Personally, I was unaware of it, so I couldn't object," Graham said. How much of this is buck-passing and ass-covering and how much is true -- and who's engaged in which -- isn't at this moment clear.
When we compiled our vast catalog of the Bush Administration's war on information, we had to devote a whole section on global warming, so unrelenting was the administration's effort to stifle dissent.
Well, today House oversight committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) has released the results of the panel's 16-month investigation into political interference in government climate change science. You can see the 37-page report here. It details how the administration censored climate scientists, edited climate change reports, and involved itself in the Environment Protection Agency’s legal opinions.
The takeaway? "The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming."
My favorite part, from the committee's summary of its report:
The White House played a major role in crafting the August 2003 EPA legal opinion disavowing authority to regulate greenhouse gases. [Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality] James Connaughton personally edited the draft legal opinion. When an EPA draft quoted the National Academy of Science conclusion that “the changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities,” CEQ objected because “the above quotes are unnecessary and extremely harmful to the legal case being made.” The first line of another internal CEQ document transmitting comments on the draft EPA legal opinion reads: “Vulnerability: science.” The final opinion incorporating the White House edits was rejected by the Supreme Court in April 2007 in Massachusetts v. EPA.
Attempts to find out what Congress actually knew about the 2002 torture of detainees held by the CIA are running right into the brick wall of classification. Only this time, it's not just CIA stonewalling that's keeping the facts concealed. Members of Congress are quick to put the classification muzzle on themselves.
In February 2003, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) wrote a letter to the CIA cautioning "against destruction of any videotapes" of al-Qaeda interrogations. It's not clear whether she objected to any actual interrogation techniques in the letter, and she says that because the letter is classified, she was "not free to mention this subject publicly until Director Hayden disclosed it yesterday." Harman is seeking to have the CIA declassify the letter.
Similarly, Jay Rockefeller said he wrote to the CIA in May and September 2005 to seek clarification about interrogation techniques. Unfortunately, those letters are also classified, and neither Harman nor Rockefeller appear inclined to release them.
But wait: neither Harman nor Rockefeller are CIA employees. How could letters they send to the CIA be classified? When would they become classified? If Harman and Rockefeller kept the letters in a drawer and never mailed them, would they still be classified?
I asked the country's preeminent classification expert, Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, to enlighten me on this. Whenever an official receives information known to be classified -- as Harman and Rockefeller did through their perches on the intelligence committees -- "they are obliged to protect that document and to treat it as classified," Aftergood says. "Even if it is never circulated."
One year after eight U.S. attorneys were fired without explanation, The Los Angeles Timeschecks in to see how they're doing. It turns out, pretty well:
A year later, most have landed on their feet, in law partnerships or private-sector jobs where their compensation dwarfs government pay. Some carry scars from the experience. Six of the attorneys marked the anniversary of their firings at a private dinner in San Diego 10 days ago, where they toasted one another for persevering.
"The great irony of this is, it has hardly tarnished any of our reputations," said Paul Charlton, the former U.S. attorney in Phoenix, who hosted the reunion.
Charlton, now a partner in a Phoenix law firm, says that as a group, the attorneys have fared much better than the department officials who orchestrated their demise.
Just in time for the Justice Department probe into the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is cutting to the heart of the issue.
Feingold today sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking for his analysis of the legality of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. At his confirmation hearings, Mukasey pleaded ignorance as to whether waterboarding is torture, saying he needed to be confirmed as attorney general before he could venture an opinion on the subject.
Feingold writes:
It is my hope that, under your leadership, the Department of Justice will take a fresh look at the CIA’s program, and that you will urge the President not to veto legislation that would end the use of so-called “alternative interrogation techniques.” I request that you provide current and any past Department legal analyses to Congress, and that you provide your views on the program to Congress at the earliest possible date.
There's legislation pending that would restrict CIA interrogation techniques to the Geneva Conventions-compliant provisions of the Army Field Manual on interrogation, a measure that the White House opposes.
More pertinently, given the interrogation-tapes controversy, Mukasey is in a real bind on the torture question. If he finds the techniques used by the CIA to have been torture, which he said is illegal, then he will come under tremendous pressure to prosecute the interrogators and possibly even the administration officials who approved the illegal behavior. If he doesn't conclude that they're torture, he'll be embracing a politically convenient and euphemistic definition of the law. Expect Mukasey to send a big fruitcake to John Yoo and David Addington this Christmas for bringing him to this point.
Top-tier intelligence reporter Siobhan Gorman, now at the Wall Street Journal, profiles Jose Rodriguez, the outgoing CIA operations chief who in 2005 reportedly ordered the destruction of the CIA's interrogation videotapes. In doing so, she talked to a number of former intelligence officials familiar with Rodriguez. To raise the curtain for you, dear reader, oftentimes active-duty CIA officials use their retired colleagues on the outside to communicate information to reporters that their active status prevents them from discussing. I obviously can't know if that's at play in this case. But here's how some former officials explained Rodriguez's motivations in destroying the tapes:
Mr. Rodriguez had long been concerned that the CIA lacked a long-term plan for handling interrogations, they say. He also worried, given the response to Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, and an earlier agency scandal involving the shooting-down of a plane that turned out to be carrying Peruvian missionaries, that lower-level officers would take the fall if the videos became public, the former colleagues said.
One former official said interrogators' faces were visible on at least one video, as were those of more senior officers who happened to be visiting. He said Mr. Rodriguez was concerned that "they were carrying out the direction from higher-ups in the administration, yet the people who would end up getting in trouble are going to be some GS-12s," referring to a midlevel rank in the federal bureaucracy.
"Jose was concerned about how all this would end," another former senior intelligence official said. "He wasn't getting instructions from anybody."
The president's commutation saved Scooter Libby from the terrible excess of a 30-month jail sentence. But it looks like Libby has resigned himself to accepting the injustice of the fine, probation, and felony conviction that will remain with him always. Breaking from the AP:
Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is dropping his appeal in the CIA leak case, his attorney said Monday....
"We remain firmly convinced of Mr. Libby's innocence," attorney Theodore Wells said. "However, the realities were, that after five years of government service by Mr. Libby and several years of defending against this case, the burden on Mr. Libby and his young family of continuing to pursue his complete vindication are too great to ask them to bear."
Update: Back in July, after the president's commutation, then-spokesman Tony Snow refused to discuss the Valerie Plame leak at all because Libby's case was still on appeal. After Libby's appeals were exhausted, he said, "we'll deal with it." Well, no time like the present!
Here's House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) statement about what she knew about CIA's treatment of detainees from her time on the House intelligence committee:
"On one occasion, in the fall of 2002, I was briefed on interrogation techniques the Administration was considering using in the future. The Administration advised that legal counsel for the both the CIA and the Department of Justice had concluded that the techniques were legal.
"I had no further briefings on the techniques. Several months later, my successor as Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, was briefed more extensively and advised the techniques had in fact been employed. It was my understanding at that time that Congresswoman Harman filed a letter in early 2003 to the CIA to protest the use of such techniques, a protest with which I concurred."
So, couple things here.
One: Pelosi isn't saying that she knew how detainees were interrogated. She's saying she was told that all techniques used in those interrogations were considered legal. So did she know what those techniques were, and what they entailed? We'll find out, or get stonewalled trying.
Two: Never mind the brief mention of Jane Harman's protest. Pelosi just threw Harman under the bus. It's no secret that the two Californians don't get along. But she didn't need to put the blame on her committee successor in her statement on this controversy.
By Adrianne Jeffries and Peter Sheehy - December 10, 2007, 9:56AM
The Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency's internal watchdog began a joint effort on Saturday to determine whether a full inquiry into the destruction of hundreds of hours of videotaped interrogations of top al-Qaeda operatives is needed. White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the CIA in 2003 against destroying tapes of interrogations of two al-Qaeda operatives, government officials said Friday. (New York Times)
Rudy Giuliani stuck to his guns, affirming on Sunday that the client list of his old security company, in which he still holds a financial stake, will be kept secret. Giuliani also defended the work of his company in Qatar, where al-Qaeda sympathizers in the Qatar government in 1996 helped the man who would be the orchestrator of the 9/11 terrorist attacks escape U.S. arrest. (Washington Post, Wall Street Journal)
What happens when one is released from Guantanamo Bay after being held for five years? The Saudi citizen Jumah al-Dossari has returned home where he has been treated like a VIP with a monthly stipend, a job, and food and lodging. The government’s “reintegration program” will also help him find a wife. (Washington Post)
Add this to our list of legislators who knew about the CIA's recording of interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees: in September 2002 and again in 2003, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees were briefed on what goes on in those interrogations. That means ex-Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Sen. Richard Shelby, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and ex-Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) knew about waterboarding prisoners like Abu Zubaydah, leader of al-Qaeda's military committee. Publicly, The Washington Post reports, they said nothing, because privately, they didn't object -- until waterboarding became public knowledge, and some of the lawmakers expressed outrage. But some are disputing that account, though they're not giving specifics. From the Post:
Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."
Congressional officials say the groups' ability to challenge the practices was hampered by strict rules of secrecy that prohibited them from being able to take notes or consult legal experts or members of their own staffs. And while various officials have described the briefings as detailed and graphic, it is unclear precisely what members were told about waterboarding and how it is conducted. Several officials familiar with the briefings also recalled that the meetings were marked by an atmosphere of deep concern about the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack.
"In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic," said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. "But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.' "
That U.S. official is clearly engaging in pushback. The revelation that the CIA videotaped interrogations in 2002 and then destroyed their recordings in 2005 threatens to lead to the agency's nightmare scenario: prosecution for potential war crimes. On Saturday, the Justice Department, along with the CIA's inspector general, opened an investigation into the destruction. The agency wants to make clear that it thought it had legal cover from the White House and Justice Department in 2002 to torture detainees -- and political cover from the relevant leaders of the intelligence committees in Congress. On the former point, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-Justice Department official John Yoo made sure of it. And on that latter point, it's clear from the Washington Post story that Congress did indeed sign on. As the investigations proceed, the agency will argue that they were not in this alone.
Bob Graham, who left the Senate in 2005, has said he has no recollection of the briefings. So that's one denial. Porter Goss, who became CIA Director in 2004, says all involved knew about the interrogations. Jay Rockefeller's story is complicated -- he began public objection to waterboarding in 2005 -- and is liable to change. Jane Harman says she won't discuss anything classified: a cynic might say that at least she's consistent. Pat Roberts didn't return my Friday phone call.
Ramona Cunningham's job was to help unemployed Iowans. Instead, she and other executives of the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium (CIETC) are charged with stealing millions of taxpayer dollars targeted toward the effort. That may seem an egregious crime. But really, who better to teach wayward job seekers how to seize opportunity when it comes?
Cunningham was the chief executive officer at CIETC, a non-profit that used to be the primary state-funded job training organization in central Iowa. During its heyday, it ran on millions in federal, state, and local grants. But a state audit in the spring of 2006 revealed that between $1.3 and $1.8 million in taxpayer funds designated to train unemployed Central Iowans were instead used to inflate the salaries and bonuses of the three top CIETC executives. Cunningham's salary during the 30 months that public money was being pilfered was $795,384, three times that of Iowa's governor. Four CIETC officials were indicted and two have pleaded guilty.
Besides dipping into public funds, Cunningham went on trips to casinos across the state with favored CIETC employees who drank and gambled during business hours, time they claimed to be working. CIETC workers also skipped all or part of out-of-town training conferences to gamble in Las Vegas, Reno, St. Louis and Kansas City. All of those activities took place during times when government paperwork showed that the employees were working. One employee, who prosecutors characterized as Cunningham’s favorite, made more than 100 workday gambling trips between 2003 and early 2006 (if his co-workers who testified are to be believed). Victor Scaglione said he felt that the trips were kosher because he felt compelled by Cunningham to participate (and don't good employees always listen to management?). He will serve 16 months in a halfway house and home confinement for lying to the grand jury during its investigation of the misused funds.
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