Tenet: “No Papers, No Opinions, No Program”
The WaPo has a very detailed story out about the 2004 IG Report. Most interesting, to me, is the suggestion that Tenet’s resignation on June 3, 2004 came amidst his refusal to continue the torture program without written authorization from the White House.
After the report was issued, then-CIA director George J. Tenet demanded that the Justice Department and the White House reaffirm their support for the agency’s harsh interrogation methods, even when used in combination, telling others at the time that "no papers, no opinions, no program." At a White House meeting in mid-2004, he resisted pressures to reinstate the program immediately, before receiving new legal authorization, according to a source familiar with the episode.
The Justice Department subsequently sent interim supporting opinions to the CIA, allowing its resumption after Tenet’s departure, and went on to complete three lengthy reports in 2005 that affirmed in detail the legality of the interrogation techniques with some new safeguards that the CIA had begun to implement in 2003.
And the story also explains–to a degree–why we got the three opinions we got in May 2005. The judgment of the report that the program was "degrading" was tied to the nudity involved.
The report also expressed particular concern that questioners had violated a legal prohibition against "degrading" conduct by stripping detainees, sometimes in the presence of women, according to a source who has read it.
Which partly explains why the Techniques memo includes nudity–after the CIA had used it for three years.
And the story ties the Combined memo to the combination of stress positions and sleep deprivation–which we know had already been found to be the cause of death in some detainees.
The report further questioned the legality of using different combinations of techniques — for example, sleep deprivation combined with forced nudity and painful stress positions, according to sources familiar with the document. While Justice Department lawyers had determined in August 2002 that the individual techniques did not constitute torture, the report warned that using several techniques at once could have a far greater psychological impact, according to officials familiar with the document.
"The argument was that combining the techniques amounted to torture," said a former agency official who read the report. "In essence, [Helgerson] was arguing in 2004 that there were clear violations of international laws and domestic laws."
What was it Jonathan Fredman had said–if the detainee dies it’s torture? No, wait, he said "if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong."
In any case, that still doesn’t explain why Steven Bradbury got a last minute fax preparing him to include waterboarding in the Combined memo.
The Pre-Release Pushback continues . . .
Lots to chew on here, but this jumped out at me from the article:
Sounds to me like the lower ranking folks in the trenches at Langley whom Panetta and Obama are so concerned about protecting aren’t worried about being protected, but the ones who feel the need to be protected are the upper-level folks.
This could be an interesting Friday.
Isn’t the WaPo suggesting that the report won’t be released on Friday?
I have a feeling that come Friday, we will see yet another delay until the first Friday on the August recess calendar!
They need time to redact the few lines not yet blacked out. /s
Remember that bad faith stuff I keep whining about that blows up their “good faith” reliance on justification? Well, here is some more of that.
yep .. reverse engineered opinions as get-out-of-jail-free cards ..
why am i not surprised that the right-wing STILL doesn’t possess the “minds” to not-get-caught ..
“ohhh.. still crazy ..after all these years … “
Do we know if the 1000 calories a day of “Ensure Plus” is part of the 30 day limit or is this what these guys dine on year in, year out when they’re not getting it force-fed through their nose?
no papers, no opinions, no program
“You said you’d never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?”
All these people are void of any moral or ethical base.
As long as they have someone or something to validate their actions they’re ok with it.The scapegoat or lever that they use to satisfy their guilt will never buy back their soul.
The perfect soldier has no conscience.
Does anyone think the report may contain information about Cheney’s interference as Jane Mayer documented in The Dark Side?
What about Lawrence Wilkerson’s statement last month that torture ended once the Abu Ghraib photos were published?
Are all the later memos CYA for pre April 2004 practices? Also, what started the CIA IG report anyway, if Tenet was hear no speak no see no evil? Wouldn’t he have had to authorize the IG investigation to begin with? (Sorry if I’m out of step or not up to speed– readily admit)
I’m not sure if this has anything to do with Helgerson’s report but I mention it because it took place, if I am not mistaken, during the time of Helgerson’s investigation and I am wondering if the probe prompted this or if things were just so out of control that the military interrogators were actually torturing detainees in a far more brutal way than the CIA.
A secret memo dated June 2, 2003, from General George Casey Jr., then director of the Pentagon Joint Staff, who warned General Michael DeLong at Central Command that “CIA has advised that the techniques the military forces are using to interrogate high value detainees (HVDs) . . . are more aggressive than the techniques used by CIA who is [sic] interviewing the same HVD’s.”
Not sure it does–that report relates to the same STF who referred to the Bush order giving them carte blanche–they were basically all out beating these guys.
But it’s of special interest bc it means it’s possible–and I think both MadDog and I suspect–that someone like Hassan Ghul (who was in Iraq for 6 months before his CIA HVD interrogation in another country) might have been waterboarded by DOD.
The June, 2003 memo to which you refer probably evolved into the following:
Here the Human Rights Watch report on Camp Nama, [scroll down to page 4]excerpt from my notes:
…CIA’s Baghdad Station sent a caable to HQTRS on 08/03/2003 raising concern that Special Ops (TF-6-26) troops who served with agency [CIA] officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. 5 days later [08/08/2003] the CIA issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the CIA barred its officers from working at Camp Nama, but allowed them to keep providing target info and other intel to the TF.
In summer of 2004 Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a HQ in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit’s ops are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.
this is fantastic! Thank you so much for weighing with this info.
You’re most welcome. Glad it’s a contribution. I see all these efforts shared here somewhat like Matt Alexander and Ali Soufan view the interrogation process – we’ve got to be smarter than ‘they’ are. Study them, learn their devious ways, detect their lies, sort out the truth if any is to be found, then proceed lawfully using the actionable intel we’ve gleaned.
It appears that Obama and Holder have drunk Lindsay Graham’s oily elixir. There are so many mountains of ’stuff’ left by Bush/Cheney, that it’s hard to know which pile to shovel at first.
Thanks for all your fine reporting.
I should have mentioned that I also am unclear if Casey’s memo was in reference to detainees interrogated at the black site prisons.
“In any case, that still doesn’t explain why Steven Bradbury got a last minute fax preparing him to include waterboarding in the Combined memo.”
I am also wondering about the focus of this sentence from the article:
“the report warned that using several techniques at once could have a far greater psychological impact, according to officials familiar with the document.”
Comey’s email makes it clear that the main concern he had about combined use was physical suffering:
While psychological effects are certainly bad, they are much less tangible than physical suffering. I wonder if this preview leakage is an indicator that we are going to be looking at a lot of redaction. I wonder whether they are going to keep really heinous details that may relate to physical suffering under wraps.
Remember though that the “suffering” was a new category from December 2004, as distinct from physical pain. So psychological pain and suffering, physical suffering, and physical pain. The suffering gets at the in-between stuff, it seems to me.
And I think they’ll release the report–but it’ll be badly redacted still, mostly just redacted pages, as it is now.
If the report is still with the CIA on Wednesday when it’s scheduled for release on Friday I’d say that you’re right. Evidently Obama is leaving it up to the CIA to decide how much detail of their crimes to reveal to the public.
I see what you are saying, but my point was that in the distinction between physical versus mental, which are clearly segregated in the combined memo, Comey specifically noted physical suffering. The WaPo article source points us toward the report’s conclusions about psychological impact of combined techniques. This leads me to wonder whether the CIA is prepared to surrender on questions of psychological suffering but is fighting like hell to keep redacted the physical suffering that had Philbin and Comey up in arms.
Fair or not, physical suffering is more “poignant” to the general public than psychological suffering. I can hear the Limbaugh chorus, “boo hoo, we made the terrorist depressed. Give me a break.” It would be harder to dismiss detailed medical descriptions of real physical pain, especially if it involved medical instrumentation or blood. It is this I think the CIA is working on hiding now.
by “real” physical pain, I mean “blatant”. Psychological pain is VERY real.
Yup, pmorlan, good point. You don’t review several thousand pages (including the appendices) for declassification in 2 days time.
A “last minute fax”. Interesting. I’d asked in this thread why the message was a fax and not and email.
In this case, it was a time constraint; an email can bounce around, as we who use email all know, but a fax is a phone call, direct from point-to-point and it’s finite, pin-pointable in time.
The only other reason one might send a fax through traditional point-to-point phonecalls is to avoid certain forms of scanning or monitoring.
Looks to me like any time we see a fax used in communications, we should focus on immediacy, timing.
A belated thank you for your response and insight on this.
From the National Journal ( http://www.nationaljournal.com…..0_9776.php ):
But the quoted official, CIA lawyer Jonathan Fredman, told the committee on November 18 that he had made no such statement. In fact, Fredman added in a heretofore confidential, five-page memo, he had stressed at the 2002 meeting with interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility described in the Levin committee’s report, “Interrogation practices and legal guidance must not be based upon anyone’s subjective perception” (emphasis added) but rather upon “definitive and binding legal analysis.”
Remarkably, the 18-page report issued by the committee (headed “Executive Summary”) does not mention Fredman’s vehement — and, in my view, quite plausible — denial of the horrifying words attributed to him in a document of debatable reliability that the report, and Levin, have treated as established fact.