Did Addington Oppose 9/11 Commission Questions to Avoid Independent Evaluation of Torture Program?
Shortly after news broke that CIA destroyed the torture tapes, the 9/11 Commission issued a letter complaining that they had not been told of–much less been allowed to review–the torture tapes.
The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.
They released a memo from Philip Zelikow describing how the Administration refused to allow the 9/11 Commission direct access to detainees in early 2004.
The full Commission considered this issue in a meeting on January 5, 2004 and decided the CIA responses were insufficient. It directed the staff to prepare a letter to administration officials that would make the dispute public. There were then discussions between Hamilton and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and several meetings of CIA lawyers with Commission staff. The Commission offered various compromises to avoid disrupting the interrogation process, including direction or observation of questioning in real-time using one-way glass, adjoining rooms, or similar techniques. In a January 15, 2004 memo to Gonzales, Muller, and Undersecretary of Defense Steve Cambone, Zelikow wrote, “We remain ready to work creatively with you on any option that can allow us to aid the intelligence community in cross-examining the conspriators on many critical details, clarify for us what the conspirators are actually saying, and allow us to evaluate the credibility of these replies.”
But these negotiations made little progress. Hamilton and commissioner Fred Fielding then met with Gonzales, Tenet, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Chris Wray from the Department of Justice. The administration offered to take sets of written followup questions, pose them to detainees, relay answers back to the Commission, and take further questions. In a January 26, 2004 meeting the Commission accepted this proposal as the best information it could obtain to address its longstanding questions.
Today’s document dump includes an interesting snapshot of the Administration response to the Commission request. (PDF 25-30)
It appears that David Addington took the lead on refusing the 9/11 Commission’s request. It appears Addington got the draft of the letter from 9/11 Commission–which was addressed to Rummy and George Tenet. Tenet and Addington clearly had a conversation about how to respond. But it seems that Addington drafted the response, got Condi, Andy Card, and Alberto Gonzales to review it, and then sent it to Tenet (and, presumably, Rummy) to okay and sign the letter.
In other words, OVP had the lead in refusing the 9/11 Commission’s request for more information from the detainees.
The document is also interesting for the underlining on the letter from the Commission. While it’s not clear who made the markings (though it seems likely to be Addington since that version of the letter clearly came from him), whoever made them appears to have reacted strongly against the Commission’s intention to independently evaluate the detainees and their interrogations. Here are the passages underlined:
We are prepared to work with you on procedures which will not supplant the role of the familiar interrogators, but which will allow our staff members to observe questioning in real time and then to put forward to the interrogators immediate, essential follow-up questioning, with the opportunity to independently evaluate the replies. We believe that one-way glass, adjoining rooms or similar techniques can accommodate our mutual concerns.
[snip]
The procedures we have proposed will enable the Commission to form its own independent evaluation of the credibility of the conspirators’ statements.
In other words, it appears that whoever made these annotations appears to have been most worried that Commission staff members could make independent judgments about the detainees and the interrogations.
Addington–or whoever this was–didn’t want anyone to independently evaluate the interrogations conducted in the torture program.
One more point: the Commission made it clear that they needed to view interrogations directly because they had identified gaps in the narrative as early as the previous October, but in several rounds of clarifying questions the Administration hadn’t been able to close those gaps.
In October we provided two memoranda detailing many specific anomalies and gaps in the reports, and listing certain questions we asked to be posed to the conspirators. The intelligence community answered as best it could in November, but only a few of our submitted questions have been addressed. The various substantive problems remain after analyzing even the most recent information we have received. We cannot detail these problems in this unclassified letter.
Particularly given that the 9/11 Commission used only 10 pieces of intelligence from Abu Zubaydah (and just 16 from Rahim al-Nashiri) you can imagine what would have looked like gaping holes. Here were al Qaeda’s number 3 and the purported mastermind of the Cole bombing, and yet they provided little information about those subjects (or at least, little that Commission staffers found credible). Indeed, by the time the Commission made their request, most of the information they had received had to do with the popularity of different al Qaeda figures (the accuracy of some of which the Commission doubted), another doubted claim about KSM’s plan on 9/11, and about Osama bin Laden’s response to the Cole bombing. They were probably wondering why some of the only credible information unique to AZ pertained to a training camp–Khalden–that wasn’t even formally affiliated with al Qaeda.
They were probably wondering why it looked like Abu Zubaydah wasn’t really part of al Qaeda at all.
At the very least, letting Commission staffers view the interrogations would have showed that the interrogators were incompetent at what they were doing (which, Zelikow has made clear, was already becoming apparent from the interrogation reports anyway).
But, too, there was another risk. If Commission staffers saw some of these detainees in person, it would become clear that they weren’t who the Administration claimed them to be.
This was the first document in the dump that really jumped out and caught my eye.
With what we know about Tenet’s talent for toadyism, Addington’s letter reads like he’s the actual head of the CIA. Particularly this part:
I thought the above passage perfectly captures Cheney’s and Addington’s Clint Eastwood-like mentality:
But Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so how do we square his actions with this award (snark).
Maybe it’s just me, but probably not, those tapes would have shown the lowest level of degradation of another human that would have made Eichmann blush – or be proud of his accomplishments.
Evil Fuckers. And who knows what level of blowback we can anticipate for who knows how far into the future?
Junya thought it entirely appropriate as Tenet’s resignation meant Tenet was finally free from Presidential control.
And who are we to tell him differently? *g*
Shorter Addington: “They want to watch us criminally torturing folks?”
Shorter Cheney in response: “Fuck that! Those are my videos! Pass me the Kleenex.”
Yuck.
Couldn’t help myself. After Jane’s slapdown of Dave Wiegel, I’ve got Kleenex on the…brain. *g*
I saw you over there; you get around for a retiree!
When Jane brings her fire and brimstone, it makes even a retiree hot. *g*
Maaahnnnn. Now I cannot share this post with my high schooler. He’ll think I hang out with a bunch of sickos!
EW,
I am not finding anything referencing any of this in the 9-11 report. Am I missing something?
This sicko sincerely apologizes…as he wipes his…eyes with a Kleenex. *g*
Yeah, uh huh; like he hasn’t figured that one out already.
Discussion of this issue and links here:
EDIT ADD: discussion of the 9-11 commission issue- and not the tissue issue.
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2008/01/cia-obstructed-911-commission-probe.php
Page 146 of the 9-11 Commssion report according to Jurist link above.
Thanks for the page reference in the 9-11 Report.
And the edit irt “tissue”. Otherwise I would have stayed clear of the link!
The only place this shows up in the Report itself is in a text box talking about the difficulties they had getting the information.
I don’t think they DID release this letter, presumably bc they came to some agreement on the interviews. But the discussion is really limited to the two docs I link to and a few earlier posts I did (and I think this is one of those topics on which I probably wrote more than anyone, cause I did a lot of f-up on what they did get).
? 9-11
and good night.
Torture is the refuge of the incompetent and depraved. We see here that the incompetency and depravity reached the highest level of government in America. The 9-11 commission couldn’t make headway because they were faced with a bunch of blockheads running America’s reputation into the ground.
But that’s just fine, because nobody except America matters, and Fox News has our six.
O/T. So are we looking forward so much that we’re no longer responding to FOIAs?
ACLU sues to obtain basic data, legal justification for Predator drone program
“The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit after federal agencies neglected to answer a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents pertaining to the legal basis for the military’s Predator drone program.”
LINK.
Well, if it’s true that The commission’s mandate was sweeping . . .
sweep away.
In a case of curious timing, documents are released (linked above) regarding withholding of information requested by the 9-11 Commission;and now this story appears at The Huffington Post “CIA Hoped To Turn ‘Gay Terrorist’ Spy Against 9/11 Planners” and the link there is:
http://www.observer.com/2010/politics/gay-terrorist
Which goes to the New York Observer story “The Gay Terrorist”
By Aram Roston March 16, 2010 | 9:14 p.m
A few quotes from Roston’s story :
“
Khalid al- Mihdhar was on flight 77 on September 11 when it crashed into the Pentagon.
Roston apparently interviewed both Philip Zelikow and Thomas Kean for this story.
An interesting passage in Roston’s story is this one:
That happened in 2004 with the publication of an article by Stephen Hayes
in the Weekly Standard. I do not know why the word recently is used by Roston. The fact is correct that Mr. Shakir did make a brief reappearance in the press.
But before that happened, the November 24, 2003 issue of The Weekly Standard published this Stephen Hayes article ” Case Closed – The U.S. government’s secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.”LINK:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/378fmxyz.asp
The memo described ( from Hayes 11/24/03 article):
This was the article Dick Cheney recommended as the ‘best source of information’ (best source of information on how Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were working together to plan and execute among other attacks 9/11) as this editors note appended to the beginning of the article shows:
“
The reappearance of Shakir in 2004 was due to the diligent intelligence analysis of one Christopher Carney- at least according to the story by Stephen Hayes
“The Connection” From the June 7, 2004 issue “Not so long ago, the ties between Iraq and al Qaeda were conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom was right.”LINK
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/152lndzv.asp
Now to the report of the ‘discovery’ of Mr. Shakir and the ‘connection’ to Saddam Hussein’s security force. An excerpt from the 06/07/04 story by Stephen Hayes:
“
This article does not report that Christopher Carney was working with Douglas Feith at this time. An amazing piece of intelligence work by Feith’s shop. It was later discredited.
Now this story with a new claim about Shakir.
Stephen Hayes authored the book “The Connection: How Al Qeada’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America”
The author of the article that prompted this post Aram Roston authored the book “The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi “
One of your quotes got me thinking… a bit OT…
You know, I have been, at times, surprised that Chalabi is Shi’a Islam. The name Chalabi also has a Sephardic Jewish history and Syrian Jews from Allepo are called chalabi, if I understood what I read in a religion book years ago.
Iraqi Jews were permitted to leave the country, in 1950, within a year provided they gave up their citizenship. From 1949 – 1951, 104,000 Jews were evacuated from Iraq in Operations Ezra & Nechemia.
There was a sizable Jewish population in Baghdad back in the 1940’s.
Enough mental ping-pong…back to the subject…
EW,
I had totally forgotten about this until I went back to your link to your Jan 2008 post. Jeepers, I even linked to Jason Vests article on politicized espionage.
Dec 30, 2003 USAG John Ashcroft recuses himself [from Plame investigation]. Dep AG James Comey appoints PatFitz as special counsel to investigate the CIA leak.
Jan 14, 2004 Novak is interviewed at his lawyer’s office.
(Anatomy of Deceit, Wheeler, p. 141)
EW Ghorbanifar Timeline offers up the following context in which Cheney’s claims occured:
October 24, 2003: Franklin [a DOD employee working under Feith] tells a foreign official that work on the policy document had been stopped
October 29, 2003: SSCI staff meeting with DOD officials
October 29, 2003: State Department ready to resume negotiations with Iran
And shortly afterward,February 2004: SSCI adds OUSD(P) activities into scope of Iraq intelligence review
From the EW Ghorbanifar Timeline:
May 2004: FBI catches Franklin leaking sensitive information and flips him
May 20, 2004: US raids Chalabi’s Iraqi compound
June 2, 2004: NYT reports that Chalabi alerted Iran that US had SigInt code
June 8, 2004: SSCI staff imterview with DIA employees
June 10, 2004: SSCI staff interviews former DIA Director Wilson
July 9, 2004: Franklin passes information on US intelligence about Middle Eastern country to Weissman
July 21, 2004: Franklin passes on information about foreign government’s covert actions in Iraq to Weissman
Very interesting, and not surprising. Addington angrily typing some memo, often on a subject completely out of his purview, is a common occurrence in Angler.
See Cheney quoting Weekly Standard as the best source for the link between Saddam and Al Qaeda? That was manufactured with the intention for the VP to refer to it at the direction of one William Kristol.
Now pull back and look at the entire landscape. Both the Cole Bombing and 9/11 were Mossad Jobs, and they were conducted with the blessing of their co-conspirators, the GHW Bush Shadow Government. All of the noise surrounding torture and every other related issue is part of a knowing and willful cover up of Israel’s direct role in these two events.
When apparent incompetence and law breaking by US Government Officials is woven through every aspect, such that no actual trial of alleged “terrorists” could ever lead to a conviction, the massive conspiracy is confirmed. If you keep the patsies under lock and key, or torture them until they are mad, or kill them, they can never reveal the truth.
It’s all just smoke and mirrors, and all of the “Actors” know it.
Not that he had any actual role in 9/11, but even Eric Holder admits Bin Laden is Dead.
When you see “apparent incompetence” woven throughout the narrative, yet none of the alleged incompetents is fired, and in fact most are promoted – assume it is all by design from the outset.
When you see this administration covering the tracks of the prior one – assume they are all in on the same conspiracy.
The truth is plain to see, it you just allow yourself to think like an imperialistic criminal.
Just a thought, there may be more than one reason that Addington opposed the commission. Besides torture, that could have exposed the lack of an Iraq connection and possibly discovered forged or knowing false intelligence.
I think his real concern was having his boss have to testify publically and under oath. Or worse, having Bush and Cheney testify separately in private and then having their stories publically compared.
Boxturtle (From Addingtons viewpoint, would there be anything worse than Dick having to take the 5th?)
At a minimum.
And that doesn’t even touch the Secret Energy Task Force that Cheney started up within 2 weeks of taking office at OVP. Nor does it address whatever ‘computer system’ MZM installed.
Look at qweryous’s dates, then EW’s timelines.
Yegawds.
Did folks see Chris Matthews interview with former CIA interrogator John Kirikau last evening. Focused on waterboarding. Over at Hardball “defining torture”
Something is up with that interview that Chris Matthews did with Kiriakou last evening about what the CIA did and did not know about how many times Abu Zabaydah was tortured. Over at Hardball you can pull up every other clip of Chris Matthews program last night. But not the interview he did with John Kiriakau about waterboarding and how many times
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ49bOBGyWE
Thanks. That is the interview. Interesting that you can not watch it over at Hardball
Shocking in so many ways. The moral confusion, the logical confusion — and of course he’s lying about the timeline — either that, or he just hasn’t kept up.
Matthews is a preening babbling idiot and Kiriakou is mentally touched. Yeah, very compelling.
I bet that’s not all Addington opposed/obstructed vis the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. Addington was one of the few staffers in the bunker underneath the White House, along with Cheney and Rice when the shots/audibles were being called.
Frontline’s “The Dark Side” account places Addington walking home on 9/11 after the Pentagon hit, only to urgently be called back to the White House (when cell coverage began to work). The same Frontline program also places John Yoo on “emergency duty” over at DOJ’s OLC – who just happened to pick up the phone when the bunker called. What luck.
Also cannot overlook the significance of Fred Fielding as a 9/11 Commissioner. Fielding and Cheney go back to Nixon and Ford. Interesting that it was Fielding and Hamilton that met with Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Tenet and Wray. Where was Kean?
Also, Phil Zelikow needs to tell us more.
He told us about his draft memo, and all the copies that were hurriedly collected by OVP.
Now he tells us that the Admin refused access.
Zelikow is a protegee of Condi Rice’s. When the Bush Admin came in, he was on the transition team and expected a big role in gov’t. But he pretty much got nothing. I bet that fella has some lingering animosities.
Well, we also know that OVP (specifically, Scooter) was a bit spooked that 9/11 wanted their emails. TH eonly emails that show up in the report are NSC. So OVP may have been hiding its failure to respond to this.
Thanks!
Also on the subject of e-mails, I am recalling that OVP was able to get itself automatically bcc’d to all group emails coming from (and also to?) the NSC principals. (Not relevant, but a lingering factoid).
I believe you read 31 Days where the author describes Dick Cheney’s penchant for fishing memos out of his colleagues inboxes back in the Nixon/Ford days?
Sept 28, 2003: A WaPo article (known as the 1x2x6 article) strongly suggests that the leak of Valerie Wilson’s identity was intentional.
Oct 4, 2003 Novak reveals that Valerie Wilson used her CIA cover company, Brewster & Jennings, on FEC records.
Oct 7, 2003 FBI interviews Novak. [Bush publicly doubts the leaker will be found.]
Oct 14, 2003 FBI first interviews [Scooter] Libby.
[dates from Anatomy of Deceit, Wheeler, p. 141]
Chris Wray, like Larry Thompson (godfather to Wray’s son), drops off the torture pages too often. Wray was one of the guys who
Addingtonsomeone invited on the torture field trip and Zell Miller was a big fan of Wray’s, when it came time to kick out Chertoff (who wouldn’t let Crim Div pre-approve torture) and stick someone nice and pliable in as head of Crim Div.So when Maher Arar is alleging US involvement in torture – the shipment to Syria that Thompson couldn’t wait to sign off on once he got back from being pumped up on his torture trip, the guy running the Crim Div was – – someone who had asked Thompson (who had been a former mentor) to be the godfather of his son and someone who had also been on the team building torture field trip.
And once Comey invokes states secrets to cover for Thompson and others in the Arar suit – an invocation that supposedly is not to be made if it is covering up Exec branch criminal activity (and apparently the head of the Crim Div wouldn’t think there was anything all that criminal about what happened …) and Thompson is protected, Wray resigns and goes back to the bucks. [BTW EW – wasn’t he the guy briefing Ashcroft on the Plame stuff as well? Not that OPR would have a problem with a lawyer in crim div investigating the AG fundraiser going and filling the AG in on how the investigation is going …]
Anyway – I’m guessing that in early 2004, with al-libi back in US hands, no one wanted any kind of a commission to get access to him.
Really, really obvious and important point, Mary. In the report they acknowledge that al-Libi had recanted, so they would figure out within two months that he had been tortured.
Don’t you kind of wonder how it is that he ended up back in US hands on that timeline? Bc obviously by then, it was more convenient for the US to leave him in Egypt. That’s a part I’ve never really seen discussed much or been able to follow.
I think Andy Worthington had something on that not long ago.
Thanks – I’ll have to check that out, it’s one of those pieces I can’t fit in.
Well, maybe all they didn’t want the commssion to find out about was the torture, but maybe there was more. If you look at the footnotes to the section of the 9/11 Commission Report on the operational details of 9/11, most of the sourcing is to testimony by detainees, some of whom we now know were tortured, all of whom were subject at least to pressure.
Torture may not be a good way to get valid intelligence, but, as Stalin’s secret police well knew (and as U.S. intelligence knows from the Soviet experience,) it’s a very good way to get prisoners to testify to what the torturers want.
So maybe a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq was not all the torturers wanted the detainees to lie about, maybe they also wanted them to lie about what happened on 9/11.
At the very least, this is a powerful reason to feel no confidence at all in the government’s version of what happened on 9/11.
There was a piece on John Yoo in the New York Times a few years ago that said that, on the morning of 9/11, when the Justice Department building was evacuated, somebody told Yoo to stay behind in his OLC office.
I just don’t get that.
The entire city of Washington was evacuating. Granted, it was gridlock and no one was going anywhere. But all federal employees were told to evacuate, flee, run, etc.
You’d think a fella might recall who the ‘someone’ was who told him to stay – given that such advice would be counter to the prevalent survival instinct at the time.
No kidding; that whole sequence of events that day and night would be forever seared into my conscience.
Here’s the language in that New York Times article, A Junior Aide Had a Big Role in Terror Policy, by Tim Golden (Dec. 23, 2005):
No indication of who asked Yoo to stay behind in the DOJ building.
By the way, isn’t it kind of unusual for a government lawyer to have a TV in his office?
Very interesting stuff. My caution is that much of this makes for intriguing hypotheses; not sure for myself how many solid conclusions can be drawn. Just because the dots can be connected in a logical and feasible way doesn’t mean that is what happened.
I’m sure Congress and the DOJ will get right to the bottom of all of this.
The only thing I’m surprised about in all of this is that the 9/11 commissioners are actually still making public comments (despite the ones where both Kean and Hamilton said they were “set up to fail” and that they were actively deceived by The Pentagon, FAA, etc.). But hey, we’re looking forward, not back.
marcy, you have been the inspiration behind a raw story front pager;
Thank you for this!