A Cheap Ploy to Avoid Giving Testimony, Jose Rodriguez

/34 Comments/in , /by

Today’s article from Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus answers a lot of questions we’ve been asking about the torture tapes–the biggest being that the tapes were stored and destroyed in Thailand. And it has a lot of interesting details I’ll return to in a follow-up post, after I enjoy some rare MI sun with my dog. But the most important detail readers should take away is its function, as suggested by the following two passages. First, the recognition that John Rizzo will testify before HPSCI today.

John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s acting general counsel, is scheduled to discuss the matter in a closed House intelligence committee hearing scheduled for today.

And second, the incorporation of long excerpts from a written statement from Bob Bennett to present Jose Rodriguez’ justifications for his actions.

Those three circumstances pushed the CIA’s then-director of clandestine operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved. Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.

[snip]

Rodriguez, whom the CIA honored with a medal in August for "Extraordinary Fidelity and Essential Service," declined requests for an interview. But his attorney said he acted in the belief that he was carrying out the agency’s stated intention for nearly three years. "Since 2002, the CIA wanted to destroy the tapes to protect the identity and lives of its officers and for other counterintelligence reasons," Bennett said in a written response to questions from The Washington Post.

"In 2003 the leadership of intelligence committees were told about the CIA’s intent to destroy the tapes. In 2005, CIA lawyers again advised the National Clandestine Service that they had the authority to destroy the tapes and it was legal to do so. It is unfortunate," Bennett continued, "that under the pressure of a Congressional and criminal investigation, history is now being revised, and some people are running for cover." [my emphasis] Read more →

No Immunity, Yet, for Rodriguez

/62 Comments/in /by

Well, Crazy Pete Hoekstra hasn’t managed to slip a little immunity deal to Jose Rodriguez–at least not yet.

The former CIA official who destroyed videotapes showing harsh interrogation tactics has been granted a temporary reprieve by the House intelligence committee, officials said last night.

The committee had demanded that Jose Rodriguez Jr. testify before it on Wednesday, but after being told that he would not answer questions without a grant of legal immunity for his testimony, the panel withdrew its demand, according to officials familiar with the arrangement.

[snip]

Officials said that a subpoena for Rodriguez will remain in effect and that talks between lawmakers, Justice Department officials and Rodriguez’s attorney, Robert S. Bennett, will continue.

I’m not sure what to make of the description of on-going talks. Hopefully, HPSCI has agreed not to do anything to impede the criminal investigation. But I’d be a lot more comfortable if HPSCI said it would hold off entirely on Rodriguez testimony until DOJ gave the okay.

John Solomon’s Phone Records

/8 Comments/in , /by

Matt at TP follows up on Drudge’s report that John Solomon is moving to the Moonie Times as Executive Editor with a summary of Solomon’s greatest hits.

  • Solomon tried to link Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to the Jack Abramoff scandal by reporting on Reid contacts with Abramoff-tied lobbyist, but overlooked the fact that Reid voted against lobbyists’ favored bill.
  • Solomon took comments by Ambassador Joe Wilson out of context in effort to claim he “acknowledged his wife was no longer in an undercover job at the time Novak’s column first identified her.”
  • In a non-story, Solomon reported that Reid accepted of boxing tickets from a state government agency, despite and then did the opposite of what the agency wanted.
  • In 2006, Solomon claimed that Reid “collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale,” even though Reid actually only made a $700,000 profit on the sale.
  • Solomon wrote a story calling Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) a hypocrite on campaign finance reform, but buried quotes by critics of big money in government exonerating him for “all the things the article criticizes him for doing.”
  • In July, Solomon “devoted nearly 1,300 words to the ‘controversy’ surrounding” John Edwards’ haircut.
  • In a front page story, Solomon baselessly suggested that John Edwards had engaged in a shady land deal, but never provided proper context for the sale. His reporting was criticized by the Post’s ombudsman.

As Matt says, all these stories make Solomon perfectly suited to work for a spooked-up crazy Korean who also happens to head up a cult.

But there’s one incident that makes this move even more interesting. Back in the halcyon pre-9/11 days, Solomon got involved into a fight with DOJ over his phone records. Basically, Solomon discovered that then Senator Robert Toricelli had been picked up on a wiretap of known mobsters, talking about fund-raising. The transcripts of the wiretaps Solomon received were grand jury materials; when Solomon wrote his story on the taps, he alerted the mobsters that they were tapped and publicized Torricelli’s mob ties. So DOJ got his phone records to figure out who his source was and to prevent him from doing further work on the story.

Charles Lewis: There were news accounts that in August 2001 your home phone records were subpoenaed secretly by a federal grand jury. Can you give a little context?

John Solomon: Sure. I was working on a series of stories about what the government knew about Sen. Robert Torricelli’s ethics misdoings and the body of evidence that was available [going] back to the early 1990s. I found that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey had evidence that he had taken, basically, a loan guarantee from a donor (and long-time friend), bought some stocks and made a killing on it—a $144,000 profit. He repaid the loan, including less than $1,000 for the guarantee. Torricelli took this donor on a series of government-sponsored trade missions and hooked him up all across the world with the imprimatur of Congress. The U.S. attorney whose office declined prosecution was nominated by Torricelli to become a federal judge. She became a federal judge. The person he nominated to take her job then came into possession of new information. They intercepted Sen. Torricelli on a wiretap talking to some known mob folks just before the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago, when they were basically talking about fundraising. I obtained excerpts of the wiretap, which would be covered by Grand Jury secrecy, wrote that story, and again the U.S. attorney declined prosecution. Torricelli had recommended that U.S. attorney for his job as well. Read more →

Bush’s Empire: Making His Own Reality, NIE Edition

/35 Comments/in /by

I’m interested in Michael Hirsh’s report that Bush trashed the key judgments of the NIE while in Israel for two reasons. First, WTF was the SAO who leaked the story trying to accomplish?

That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can’t control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE’s] conclusions don’t reflect his own views" about Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity. [my emphasis]

The same article quotes Stephen Hadley, one of a limited number of Senior Administration Officials accompanying Bush on the trip, as saying that Bush said only that Iran remains a threat, regardless of what the NIE says.

Bush’s national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, told reporters in Jerusalem that Bush had only said to Olmert privately what he’s already said publicly, which is that he believes Iran remains "a threat" no matter what the NIE says.

Was Hadley’s on the record quote a continuation of the earlier anonymous comment to Hirsh or, more likely, a response to the earlier leak, an alternate view of what the anonymous SAO was spinning to Hirsh? That is, did some SAO spin Bush’s fairly innocuous comment (at least as Hadley interpreted it) as a repudiation of the NIE, contrary to the official stance of the Administration? And if so, to what end? To support Dick Cheney’s campaign for war (Stephen Hadley is often considered a Cheney operative, though he was stuck playing the interlocutor between Cheney and the CIA leading up to the Plame leak)?

But I’m also struck by the timing of this quote. If I were one of the analysts who worked on this NIE–or even, say, one of the senior intelligence officers who threatened to go public with the key judgments of the NIE–I’d be pretty peeved to know that Bush was bad-mouthing my handiwork to allies, particularly after the apparent confrontation to get it declassified in the first place. Read more →

CIA Inspector General: We Never Had Any Torture Tapes!

/111 Comments/in , /by

The CIA has responded to ACLU’s motion to hold the CIA in contempt for destroying the terror tapes. They argue they shouldn’t be held in contempt for destroying the torture tapes for three reasons:

The videotapes were held in operational files. The Court ruled that the CIA’s obligation to search for records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA requests did not extend to its operational files. Rather, the Court ordered the CIA to search investigative files of the CIA’s Office of Inspector General (“CIA OIG”) for operational records produced to or collected by CIA OIG during the course of CIA OIG’s investigation into allegations of impropriety in Iraq. The tapes were not produced to or collected by CIA OIG. Thus, the CIA’s destruction of the videotapes did not violate the Court’s orders.

Moreover, the videotapes were not responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA requests because the activities depicted on the videotapes were not the subject of a CIA OIG investigation of allegations of impropriety in Iraq, or any other investigation conducted by CIA OIG. Under the Central Intelligence Agency Information Act (“CIA Information Act”), the CIA’s operational records are exempt from search or review in response to FOIA requests unless an exception to the Act applies. One exception is where the records requested are the specific subject matter of an investigation by CIA OIG into allegations of impropriety or illegality in the conduct of an intelligence activity. 50 U.S.C. § 431(c)(3). Here, CIA OIG did not conduct an investigation into allegations of impropriety or illegality relating to the interrogations on the videotapes prior to their destruction. Therefore, the tapes were exempt from search and review in response to Plaintiffs’ FOIA requests up to the time of their destruction.

Further, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) has initiated a criminal investigation into the destruction of the tapes. That investigation is considering, inter alia, whether the destruction of the tapes was inconsistent with or violated any legal obligations, including those arising out of civil matters such as this Court’s orders. Accordingly, if the Court does not deny the contempt application outright, it should stay these proceedings pending completion of DOJ’s criminal investigation. [my emphasis]

In other words, their reasoning depends entirely on the technical status of the CIA IG investigation into detainee interrogation. The CIA submitted a declaration describing that investigation; here’s what they said. Read more →

They Really Don’t Want Us Learning About the Torture Tapes, Do They?

/60 Comments/in , /by

I noted several weeks ago that Bob Bennett sounded an awful lot like he was beginning to float excuses for his client, Jose Rodriguez, to ask for immunity before he testified before Congress.

The article also includes a clear signal from the masterful press manipulator, Bob Bennett, that he intends to advise his client John Jose Rodriguez to plead the Fifth.

Bennett told NEWSWEEK that his client had been "a dedicated and loy­al public servant for 31 years" and "has done nothing wrong." But he warned that Rodriguez may refuse to cooperate with investigators if he concludes that the probes are a "witch hunt." "I don’t want him to become a scapegoat."

In case you missed it, Bennett uses the same phrase Monica Goodling’s lawyer, John Dowd, used, "witch hunts," just before he snookered Congress into offering her immunity for a bunch of stuff that Congress already had evidence she was doing. As a reminder, Monica said almost nothing that incriminated Rove or Harriet and only sort of incriminated AGAG. But she managed to get herself immunity for "crossing the line" and politicizing DOJ’s hiring practices. Bennett’s use of precisely same language as Monica’s lawyer may be no accident.

Well, surprise, surprise! Bennett just told Congress he wants Rodriguez to receive immunity before he’ll testify before Congress (h/t maryo2).

Attorneys for Jose Rodriguez told Congress that the former CIA official won’t testify about the destruction of CIA videotapes without a promise of immunity, a person close to the tapes inquiry said Wednesday.

[snip]

Defense attorney Robert Bennett told lawmakers, however, that he would not let Rodriguez testify because of the criminal investigation into the case. Without a promise of immunity, anything Rodriguez said at the hearing could be used against him in court.

Of course, Bennett’s excuse has changed. Rather than use the tired excuse Monica Goodling used–she was the "victim" of a witchhunt–Bennett is using the even more tired Iran-Contra era excuse that, um, maybe Congress can get his client out of all criminal liability if Bennett pulls a fast one … ? But honest, Bennett’s not worried about any real criminal liability, nosiree.

Meanwhile, Judge Mark Kennedy has decided he trusts DOJ a lot more than Judge Mark Wolf does, and he doesn’t see the need to conduct an inquiry into why the CIA was destroying tapes that might have been relevant to cases before him. Read more →

Is Dick Finally Going to Go After OBL?

/67 Comments/in , , /by

The NYT has a disturbing story this morning, explaining that, with the US policy in tatters after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, they’re considering ratcheting up the pressure by allowing the CIA to partner with the Special Forces on operations in Pakistan.

President Bush’s senior national security advisers are debating whether to expand the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The debate is a response to intelligence reports that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying efforts there to destabilize the Pakistani government, several senior administration officials said.

[snip]

Several of the participants in the meeting argued that the threat to the government of President Pervez Musharraf was now so grave that both Mr. Musharraf and Pakistan’s new military leadership were likely to give the United States more latitude, officials said. But no decisions were made, said the officials, who declined to speak for attribution because of the highly delicate nature of the discussions.

Many of the specific options under discussion are unclear and highly classified. Officials said that the options would probably involve the C.I.A. working with the military’s Special Operations forces.

Two pseudonymous counter-insurgency analysts cross-posting at Danger Zone have a good response to this: Read more →

Helgerson’s Reports Will Remain Unchanged

/37 Comments/in /by

Since I’ve been talking so much about Helgerson, and since we now have proof that Helgerson’s investigation was always central to discussions of the torture tape destruction, I would be remiss in ignoring this bit from the LAT (h/t Laura).

The CIA has completed a controversial in-house probe of its inspector general and plans to make a series of changes in the way the agency conducts internal investigations, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson has consented to more than a dozen procedural changes designed to address complaints that investigations carried out by his office were unfair to agency employees, the officials said.

But the agency will not force Helgerson to revise previously issued reports or acknowledge flaws in the reports, including one report that was sharply critical of top CIA officials for intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Read more →

Harman’s Letter

/99 Comments/in , /by

TPMM has a copy of Jane Harman’s letter to then CIA General Counsel Scott Muller and his reply (h/t BayStateLiberal). As Paul Kiel notes, Muller blows off Harman’s warning not to dispose of the Zubaydah tape.

You discussed the fact that there is videotape of Abu Zubaydah following his capture that will be destroyed after the Inspector General finishes his inquiry. I would urge the Agency to reconsider that plan. Even if the videotape does not constitute an official record that must be preserved under the law, the videotape would be the best proof that the written record is accurate, if such record is called into question in the future. The fact of destruction would reflect badly on the Agency.

Muller simply doesn’t acknowledge her advice in his return letter.

But even without a response, Harman’s advice is instructive. It reveals that–at least in February 2003–CIA premised the destruction of the torture tapes on the completion of Helgerson’s IG inquiry into interrogation methods. That confirms my earlier suspicions that the torture tapes were intimately connected with the IG inquiry–and makes the May 2004 White House discussion of whether or not to destroy the tapes all the more damning. After all, they can’t very well deny that the IG reported that the tapes showed methods that may have been illegal if they claimed the torture tape destruction tied to the inquiry itself? So once the report came out, they would be bound to keep the tapes since they would have verified or refuted the IG report.

Also note, Harman mentions only Zubaydah, not al-Nashiri. Did Muller just neglect to mention the latter AQ detainee? Or are we getting a somewhat fickle depiction of what tapes were kept?

Just as interesting is the partial blow-off that Muller gives Harman on the issue of the policy wisdom of torturing detainees, as distinct from the legal implications. She asks, Read more →

Durham’s Previous Run-In with Tribalism

/13 Comments/in , , /by

There are two more themes emerging on the coverage of John Durham, the guy Mukasey picked to investigate the torture tape destruction. First, there’s this piece from the WaPo that describes how Durham managed to take down the governor of CT.

Pickerstein said Durham relied on a "good versus evil" vision of the world while overseeing the probe of former governor John G. Rowland.

Rowland was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison and four months of home confinement for accepting $107,000 in gifts from people doing business with the state and for not paying taxes on them. "It wasn’t an easy case, but John was single-minded in his pursuit of the truth," Pickerstein said.

Gotta say I appreciate the emphasis on his willingness to go after Republicans. But folks? Let’s stop with the "Second coming of Fitz" claims, particularly ones that suggest Fitz doesn’t have a sense of humor.

He’s Fitzgerald with a sense of humor Read more →