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Our Torture Regime Based on Same Kinds of Lies and Bad Intell as the Iraq War

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The third sentence of the Bybee Two Memo asserts Abu Zubaydah is “one of the highest ranking members of the al Qaeda terrorist organization.”

You have asked for this Office’s views on whether certain proposed conduct would violate the prohibition against torture found at Section 2340A of title 18 of the United States Code. You have asked for this advice in the course of conducting imenogations of Abu Zubaydah. As we understand it, Zubaydah is one of the highest ranking members of the al Qaeda terrorist organization, with which the United States is currently engaged in an intemational armed conflict following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

The next paragraph warns that if any of the facts in the memo provided by CIA “change,” the memo’s advice would not necessarily apply.

Our advice is based upon the following facts, which you have provided to us. We also understand that you do not have any facts in your possession contrary to the facts outlined here, and this opinion is limited to these facts. If these facts were to change, this advice would not necessarily apply.

The memo continues to make claims about Abu Zubaydah’s central role in al Qaeda.

According to this assessment, Zubaydah, though only 31, rose quickly from very low level mujahedin to third or fourth man in al Qaeda. He has served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant.

[snip]

He also acted as al Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications. Additionally, he has acted as al Qaeda’s Counterintelligence officer and has been trusted to find spies within the organization. Zubaydah has been involved in every major terrorist operation carried out by al Qaeda. He was a planner for the Millenium plot to attack U.S. and Israeli targets during the Millennium celebrations in Jordan. Two of the central figures in this plot who were arrested have identified Zubaydah as the supporter of their cell and the plot. He also served as a planner for the Paris Embassy plot in 2001. Moreover; he was one of the planners of the September 11 attacks. Prior to his capture, he was engaged in planning future terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.

We’ve long known these assertions to be false. We’ve long known the CIA later admitted these assertions were wrong–as Abu Zubaydah himself revealed when he described his captors apologizing for claiming he was al Qaeda’s Number Three.

They told me sorry we discover that you are not number three, not a partner even not a fighter.

But as Jason Leopold reports, DOJ has now admitted in court documents that the claims it made in the Bybee Two Memo–the claims it used as a foundation for their entire torture program–were false.

The Justice Department has quietly recanted nearly every major claim the Bush administration had made about “high-value” detainee Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo prisoner who at one time was said to have planned the 9/11 attacks and was the No. 2 and 3 person in al-Qaeda.

[snip]

For the first time, the government now officially admits that Zubaydah did not have “any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” and was neither a “member” of al-Qaeda nor “formally” identified with the terrorist organization.

All the torture that came after (even the DOD program, given details on DOD’s use of the Bybee Memos to craft their own torture program that appear in the OPR Report) ultimately relied on the analysis DOJ made in the Bybee Memos.

And that analysis was based on information that DOJ now admits to be false.

First we had the Curveball fabrications and the Niger forgeries, and now we have this foundational claim to a false al Qaeda Number Three. Our entire torture regime is based on the same kind of lies and bad intelligence as was the Iraq War.

The Context of the July 13 Fax

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As I pointed out in an earlier post, when Counterterrorism Center lawyer Jonathan Fredman sent the torturers in Thailand a green light for torture in August 2002, he relied on language about intent from a July 13, 2002 fax from John Yoo to John Rizzo rather than the finalized August 1 Bybee Memo. In a second post on this, I also showed that both of Yoo’s nominal supervisors–Jay Bybee and John Ashcroft–claim they knew nothing about that fax. In this post, I’m going to show how that fax appears to arise out of DOJ discomfort with CIA’s torture program.

As the timeline below shows, Yoo dated (but did not send) the fax the same day that the numerous parties involved in reviewing the Bybee Memo had an apparently contentious meeting at which they discussed the draft memo as well as the CIA’s torture plan (I’m doing a big update on the Torture Timeline, so some of this is not reflected in the timeline yet).

July 10, 2002: John Yoo tells Jennifer Koester that they will present the Bybee memo to NSC at 10:45 on July 12 (and names the Bybee Memo the “bad things opinion”!).

July 11, 2002: John Yoo and Jennifer Koester have briefing session with Michael Chertoff on Bybee Memo.

July 11, 2002: An OLC paralegal cite-checks the draft, and someone schedules a July 12 meeting with Alberto Gonzales and a July 13 meeting with (effectively) NSC.

July 12, 2002: First draft of Bybee Memo distributed outside of OLC.

July 12, 2002: John Yoo meets with Alberto Gonzales (and either David Addington or Tim Flanigan) on Bybee Memo.

July 13, 2002: John Yoo and Jennifer Koester present July 12 draft to John Rizzo, John Bellinger, Michael Chertoff, Daniel Levin, and Alberto Gonzales. Rizzo provides overview of interrogation plan. Chertoff refuses to give CIA advance declination of prosecution. Levin states that FBI would not participate in any interrogation using torture techniques, nor would it participate in discussions on the subject.

July 13, 2002: Rizzo asks Yoo for letter “setting forth the elements of the torture statute.”

July 15, 2002: John Yoo faxes John Rizzo July 13 letter on the torture statute.

July 15, 2002: John Yoo sends Jennifer Koester an email telling her to include a footnote in the opinion stating that they had not been asked about affirmative defenses like necessity, self-defense, or commander-in-chief powers.

July 16, 2002: John Yoo and Jennifer Koester meet with Alberto Gonzales and (probably) David Addington and Tim Flanigan. Yoo shared the July 13 fax with them. At the meeting, it is decided that Yoo will include Commander-in-Chief and other affirmative defenses in Bybee Memo.

July 16, 2002: In response to earlier request from Michael Chertoff (perhaps as early as July 13), John Yoo has Jennifer Koester draft, but not send, a letter to CIA refusing a letter of declination of prosecution.

July 17, 2002: George Tenet meets with Condi Rice, who advised CIA could proceed with torture, subject to a determination of legality by OLC.

Of course, two things are going on in the background. First, when Ali Soufan left the black site in May because James Mitchell threatened Abu Zubaydah with mock burial, DOJ got official notice that one of its top terrorism agents believed that the CIA was using torture with Zubaydah. Yet, two months later, the torturers were almost certainly already using the most aggressive torture with Abu Zubaydah.

What seems to have happened is the following. Yoo and Koester were all set for an NSC meeting on July 12, perhaps until they had a July 11 briefing with Chertoff. In any case, something made them reschedule that NSC meeting to arrange an Alberto Gonzales (and presumably, Addington) meeting first. After which they appear to have had an incredibly contentious meeting with Bellinger, Chertoff, Levin and others. Perhaps the fact that John Rizzo presented the latest interrogation plan (which, we suspect, was already in process anyway) made things worse. We do know, for example, that mock burial remained in the plan, even after Soufan had balked when Mitchell tried to use it two months earlier. Whether because of Rizzo’s presentation or Yoo’s draft memo, at the meeting Chertoff definitively refused an advance declination and Levin announced that FBI would have nothing more to do with CIA’s torture program.

And so Rizzo, perhaps noting that the head of DOJ’s Criminal Division and the FBI Chief of Staff were reacting rather unfavorably to CIA’s torture plan, asked Yoo for some kind of cover. In response, Yoo wrote a memo raising the bar for prosecution of inflicting severe mental suffering incredibly high.

What I find particularly interesting is the 2-day delay before Yoo sent the fax, dated July 13, to Rizzo on July 15. That likely coincided with another delay; we know Chertoff asked Yoo to send Rizzo a letter refusing advance declination sometime between July 13 and July 16, but Yoo didn’t act on that request until he had sent Rizzo his July 13 fax already.

Did Yoo get both the request for the letter refusing advance declination and the request for the letter laying out the torture statute at the same contentious meeting?

And then there’s one more unexplainable coincidence. On the same day Yoo sent the July 13 memo (on July 15), Yoo instructed Koester they not only wouldn’t include any affirmative defenses in the memo, but they would claim they weren’t asked for such things. Yet that happened just a day before heading into a meeting with Gonzales and (almost certainly) Addington, at which they did decide to include such things. And incidentally–a fact I hadn’t noted before–Yoo gave Gonzales and (almost certainly) Addington a copy of his July 13 fax at the same meeting where it was decided to add affirmative defenses to the Bybee Memo.

I can’t prove it. But it appears that Yoo wrote the July 13 fax in response to serious reservations from Chertoff and Levin. And in response to that, Addington directed him to add a bunch more defenses (literal and figurative) into the Bybee Memo.

One last point. As I said, one key difference between the July 13 fax and the Bybee Memo is that Yoo rebutted an obvious objection to his reading of how the Torture Statute treated intent with severe mental suffering.

It could be argued that a defendant needs to have specific intent only to commit the predicate acts that give rise to prolonged mental harm. Under that view, so long as the defendant specifically intended to, for example, threaten a victim with imminent death, he would have had sufficient mens rea for a conviction. According to this view, it would be further necessary for a conviction to show only that the victim factually suffered mental harm, rather than that the defendant intended to cause it. We believe that this approach is contrary to the text of the statute.

Any bets on whether Chertoff and/or Levin made precisely this argument at that July 13 meeting?

Abu Zubaydah’s Drawings

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Jason Leopold has a long article on Abu Zubaydah out that you should read in detail. It provides an update on AZ’s torture diaries (which his lawyer now has, though in untranslated form). And the tidbit that one reason officials are so worried about information on AZ coming out is that it’ll show the massive intelligence failure that resulted in the conclusion that he was a top al Qaeda officer.

These officials claim that while there is some concern within the Justice Department about the details of Zubaydah’s interrogations prior to August 2002 being revealed and leading to renewed calls for an investigation, there is greater unease with the fact that if the case moved forward it would expose the massive intelligence failure that took place in the last months of the Clinton administration and during George W. Bush’s first term that resulted in Zubaydah at one point being named the No. 3 official in al-Qaeda and one of the planners of the 9/11 attacks.

There’s also further confirmation that Mitchell and Jessen were conducting a human experiment on AZ, including testing how long a human could go without sleep.

For example, one current and three former CIA officials said some videotapes showed Zubaydah being sleep deprived for more than two weeks. Contractors hired by the CIA studied how he responded psychologically and physically to being kept awake for that amount of time. By looking at videotapes, they concluded that after the 11th consecutive day of being kept awake Zubaydah started to “severely break down.” So, the torture memo concluded that 11 days of sleep deprivation was legal and did not meet the definition of torture.

But I’m particularly interested in the degree to which AZ’s lawyer, Brent Mickum, seems to believe that John Durham is interested in AZ’s drawings of the torture done to him.

During a recent meeting with Durham, Mickum said he learned that the special prosecutor had obtained drawings during the course of his probe that Mickum believed were Zubaydah’s. In addition to the diaries, Mickum had previously sought from the Justice Department drawings Zubaydah made while in CIA custody. But the Justice Department told Mickum they could not locate the drawings.

“When I met with John Durham I discovered he had drawings, which, based on my review I believed were my client’s,” Mickum said. “The drawings were ultimately produced to us in late 2009.”

The Justice Department would not discuss the drawings, diaries, or other issues related to Zubaydah’s case.

Mickum said in lieu of the torture tapes, the drawings Zubaydah made contain the best description of the torture techniques CIA interrogators used against Zubaydah while he was being held at the agency’s black site prison facilities. Mickum said he could not disclose how many drawings Zubaydah made nor could he discuss the content.

“These are a good group of drawings and he is a pretty good artist,” Mickum said. “The depictions would be of interest. [Zubaydah] can draw and with great detail.”

This suggests two things. First, that until some time last year, DOJ claimed not to be able to locate drawings that had already been turned over to Durham for his investigation. And that those drawings may be detailed enough to clarify precisely what the torturers did to him when.

Yoo’s Supervisors Didn’t Know about the July 13, 2002 Fax

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As I pointed out in my last post, when Jonathan Fredman wrote the Abu Zubaydah torture team in Thailand to tell them they had gotten the green light to torture, he cited not the Bybee One memo which had just been signed, but a July 13, 2002 Yoo fax, for his discussion of intent.

This is significant not just because the language on intent in the fax lacks some of the caveats in the Bybee One Memo. But also because it appears Yoo was freelancing when he wrote the July 13 fax.

To be sure, the evidence that Yoo was freelancing when he wrote this fax is not as clear cut as it was for the Legal Principles/Bullet Point documents. Unlike the Legal Principles documents, this fax is on OLC stationary and signed by Yoo, making it appear, at least, like a formal OLC opinion.

But Yoo’s superiors at DOJ claim to have known nothing about it.

In response to July 2008 questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jay Bybee said in October 2008 that he did not recall any written guidance to CIA before the August 1 memo.

Judge Bybee said that he did not recall “any written advice provided to any governmental agency prior to August 1, 2002, on the meaning of the standards of conduct required for interrogation under the federal anti-torture statute or on specific interrogation methods,”

Similarly, when asked in July 2008 whether anyone from his department had authorized torture before August 1, 2002, John Ashcroft claimed he “didn’t know.”

Mr. NADLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Attorney General Ashcroft, in your testimony you mentioned Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in March 2002. The Inspector General report on the FBI’s role in interrogation makes clear that he was interrogated beginning in March of that year. The Yoo-Bybee legal memo was not issued until August 2002. So was the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah before August 2002 done without DOJ legal approval?

Mr. ASHCROFT. I don’t know.

Mr. NADLER. Well, did you offer legal approval of interrogation methods used at that time?

Mr. ASHCROFT. At what time, sir?

Mr. NADLER. Prior to August of 2002, March 2002.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I have no recollection of doing that at all.

Mr. NADLER. And you don’t know if anyone else from the Department of Justice did?

Mr. ASHCROFT. I don’t know.

[snip]

Mr. WEXLER. So from March to August, did you offer any legal approval of the interrogation methods used at that time?

Mr. ASHCROFT. I don’t have any recollection of doing so.

Mr. WEXLER. And did anyone else at the Department of Justice?

Mr. ASHCROFT. I don’t know. I don’t know.

And there is evidence that Jack Goldsmith didn’t learn about it until just before he left DOJ.

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Abu Zubaydah’s Torturers Relied on July 13 Yoo Fax, not Bybee Memo

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There’s an astounding passage in Bybee’s Second Response to the OPR Report that reveals that Abu Zubaydah’s torturers relied on a July 13, 2002 memo Yoo sent to John Rizzo, rather than the Bybee One Memo, for their general torture authorization.

In a passage attempting to refute OPR’s assertion that the Bybee Memo was written so vaguely it could easily be misinterpreted, Jay Bybee’s lawyer, Maureen Mahoney, examines a set of documents the CIA wrote about torture to show (she claims) that CIA never misinterpreted “OLC’s advice,” including the Bybee One Memo. It’s clear that the documents she refers to include at least CIA’s own Interrogation Guidelines, the Bullet Points written to summarize OLC’s advice, the declination memo the Counterterrorism Center wrote in the Salt Pit killing, and a memo Jonathan Fredman, CTC’s top lawyer, wrote to the Abu Zubaydah interrogation team.

Here’s how she describes the Fredman memo:

In addition, the documents OPR uses to reveal the CIA’s understanding of the standards in the Bybee Memo (e.g., Report at 65-66) do not suggest there was any misinterpretation going on. As shown in subsequent sections, these documents (which Bybee never wrote or saw) were actually correct statements of the law. [Redacted] memo to the Abu Zubaydah interrogation team, for instance, which quoted from Yoo’s July 13, 2002 fax to Rizzo, provided a correct summary of the specific intent element. Report at 66; infra Section N.A. It is correct, as Yoo wrote, that if an individual “undertook any of the predicate acts for severe mental pain or suffering, but did so in the good faith belief that those acts would not cause the prisoner prolonged mental harm, he would not have acted with the specific intent necessary to establish torture.” Report at 48; infra Section IV.A. [PDF 32; my emphasis]

We know this memo was from Jonathan Fredman, because Mahoney refers to it again on the next page, and in that reference, the name “Fredman” is not redacted.

As this passage makes clear, Fredman wrote a memo to the Abu Zubaydah torture team including an analysis of how intent plays into Torture Statute. Now, the passage of the OPR Report that discusses this memo (document pages 65-66; PDF pages 71-72) is entirely redacted. But it appears after discussion of the finalization of the Bybee Memo on August 1, 2002, suggesting Fredman’s memo was sent after that date. Indeed, the first passage after the long redacted section refers to “a cable [] sent out last week, following the issuance of the opinions,” which would seem to be a reference to Fredman’s memo. In other words, the memo appears to post-date the Bybee One memo.

Nevertheless, the memo doesn’t refer to the Bybee One Memo for its discussion of intent. Rather, it refers to the July 13, 2002 memo that John Yoo faxed John Rizzo. While we can’t prove it with the redactions, it appears that Fredman made a conscious decision not to refer to the finished, official OLC memo, but instead referred to the more informal fax Yoo had sent earlier in the month.

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Did Addington Oppose 9/11 Commission Questions to Avoid Independent Evaluation of Torture Program?

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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. Read more →

A Catalog of the Destroyed Torture Evidence

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I just re-read Philippe Sands’ Torture Team and, given the news of disappearing emails and documents, this passage struck me anew:

[Mike Dunlavey, who was in charge of Gitmo as they put together the torture plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani] would have liked to have gone back to the daily diaries and schedules that were kept on the computer system, together with reports that were sent out on a daily basis, and details of the videoconferences that had taken place with the Pentagon. “I need to see that stuff,” he mused, “how am I going to get it?” It seemed doubtful that he would. “They were backed up at SOUTHCOM,” he explained, but “a couple of months after I left there was a SNAFU and all was lost.”

Sands goes onto wonder whether there might be a connection to the destruction of the torture tapes. Dunlavey left Gitmo in November 2002, so those materials would have been lost in late 2002 or early 2003, when we now know people were panicking about what to do about the torture tapes. That was also between the time when–at the end of November 2002–a lawyer from CIA’s Office of General Counsel reviewed the tapes and claimed they matched the torture logs exactly, and the time when–in May 2003–CIA’s Inspector General discovered they weren’t an exact match. More importantly, CIA IG discovered there were 11 blank tapes, 2 broken ones, and 2 more mostly blank ones, suggesting that a first round of efforts to hide evidence on the torture tapes took place before CIA’s IG reviewed them.

In other words, this “SNAFU” happened around the same time as the first round of destruction of the torture tapes took place.

Since there are so many incidences of destroyed or disappearing torture evidence, I thought it time to start cataloging them, to keep them all straight.

  • Before May 2003: 15 of 92 torture tapes erased or damaged
  • Early 2003: Dunlavey’s paper trail “lost”
  • Before August 2004: John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s torture memo emails deleted
  • June 2005: most copies of Philip Zelikow’s dissent to the May 2005 CAT memo destroyed
  • November 8-9, 2005: 92 torture tapes destroyed
  • July 2007 (probably): 10 documents from OLC SCIF disappear
  • December 19, 2007: Fire breaks out in Cheney’s office

(I put in the Cheney fire because it happened right after DOJ started investigating the torture tape destruction.)

There are two more evidence-related issues pertaining to the torture program.

First, recall that the government has refused to turn over all of Abu Zubaydah’s diaries to him [update: here’s a more updated description of the diaries status from Jason Leopold]. The status of both the diaries and the legal argument over them remains largely sealed, so we can’t know for sure whether all the diaries remain intact. I believe they are just being withheld and haven’t been destroyed, but we don’t know for sure.

Also, remember that Alberto Gonzales was wandering around DC with a briefcase full of CYA documents just after he became Attorney General. Among those documents were draft and final versions of OLC opinions relating to torture, and possibly memos describing some operational aspects of the program.

The classified materials that are the subject of this investigation consist of notes that Gonzales drafted to memorialize a classified briefing of congressional leaders about the NSA surveillance program when Gonzales was the White House Counsel; draft and final Office of Legal Counsel opinions about both the NSA surveillance program and a detainee interrogation program; correspondence from congressional leaders to the Director of Central Intelligence; and other memoranda describing legal and operational aspects of the two classified programs.

Since this briefcase appears to have been about CYA, it is unlikely Gonzales would have destroyed any of them. But we know only that they were not in secure custody for about two years.

In other words, at least five pieces of evidence on torture has disappeared or been destroyed. But it could well be more than that.

John Durham? For a guy investigating disappearing evidence, you’ve been awfully quiet…

The Terrorist Sympathizers Grassley Doesn’t Mention: Chiquita

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Predictably, Politico piles onto the latest installment of the McCarthyist attacks on DOJ, largely repeating the attack as made by Dana Perino and Bill Burck. The one thing it does add is some discussion of what Eric Holder should have disclosed at his confirmation hearings last year.

Holder didn’t mention the brief during his confirmation hearings to be Attorney General, even though the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire required him to list all Supreme Court amicus briefs he was party to. His questionnaire lists briefs in only three cases: Miller-El v. Cockrell, Johnson v. Bush and D.C. and Fenty v. Heller.

A Justice Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said “the brief should have been disclosed,” but had been “ unfortunately and inadvertently” left out in the documents submitted to the committee.

“ In any event,” he said, “ the Attorney General has publicly discussed his positions on detention policy on many occasions, including at his confirmation hearings.

Justice Department officials also didn’t mention the briefs in the letter they sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) informing Congress that nine of the department’s political appointees either “represented detainees [or] … either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.”

Now, I agree that Holder should have disclosed all this.

But I’m also interested in the tizzy surrounding whether Holder should have disclosed himself in response the questions Chuck Grassley posed on terrorist sympathizers at DOJ. Granted, originally asked were definitely targeted toward creating this witchhunt–that is, to detainees at Gitmo, rather than to the representation of terrorists and their affiliates generally.

But if we’re going to discuss Holder’s “biases,” shouldn’t we start with Holder’s representation of Chiquita, and particularly his success at getting several white Republican men off of charges that they knowing supported right wing Colombian terrorists? Particularly given the way Bush’s DOJ facilitated that process?

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The Next Attack: Holder’s Amicus Curiae Brief Against Unlimited Presidential Power

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As Jake Tapper reports, the next attack the McCarthyites have planned is on Eric Holder, for once saying in an amicus curiae brief that it’s possible following the Constitution will make it harder to detain potential terrorists.

In 2004 Attorney General Eric Holder was one of four former Clinton administration officials offering an amicus brief questioning President Bush’s assertion that he had the inherent authority to indefinitely detain as “enemy combatants” American citizens captured in the US.

The brief, offered in the case Donald Rumsfeld v Jose Padilla, can be read HERE.  Holder’s co-authors include former Attorney General Janet Reno, former deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, and the former counsel for the CIA Jeffrey Smith.

A Republican official on the Senate Judiciary Committee tells ABC News that Holder did not disclose this amicus brief before his confirmation hearings.

The brief is actually refreshing in its simplicity. It recites all the means the executive branch has to combat terrorism, then says the President doesn’t also need the power to detain Americans without any judicial oversight. I can see why and how the Republicans will make a stink of it, but that doesn’t mean they are right.

But there’s a part of the brief that deserves particularly close attention–because it raises the implicit question of why the Bush Administration didn’t just charge Jose Padilla, if they could back up the claims they made about him.

When Padilla was arrested pursuant to the material witness warrant, his terrorist plans were thwarted. He was then available to be questioned to the same extent as any other citizen suspected of criminal activity. Moreover, the facts set forth in the President’s findings, and the facts presented to the District Court, are more than sufficient to support criminal charges against Padilla, including providing material support to designated terrorist organizations, 18 U.S.C. § 2339B; providing material support to terrorists, id. § 2339A; conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, 18 U.S.C. § 2332a; and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, id. § 2332a(a)(1).36 Read more →

The Waterboarding Smoking Gun, Again

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Since Mark Benjamin has decided to claim–some 300-plus days after I did the first of many posts focusing on the details of waterboarding (to say nothing of posts drational did looking at these descriptions medically)–that, “the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” haven’t been mined for waterboarding details until now,” I thought I’d make another point about the significance of those details.

As Mark points out and I’ve been pointing out for 11 months, the torturers did far more during waterboarding than what members of the military underwent in SERE training. They dumped large amounts of water onto detainees, and made sure detainees inhaled water. This is far worse than either the Bybee Two Memo or SERE training describes.

Which is why it is so important that, six days before Yoo finalized the Bybee Two memo describing a relatively controlled waterboarding process, Jim Haynes went out of his way to get JPRA to send CIA a description of waterboarding that also didn’t resemble waterboarding as it was done in SERE training (Haynes appears to have given orders eliciting that description in a face-to-face meeting).

As the SASC reported, DOD General Counsel Jim Haynes got JPRA, the entity that administers SERE training, to put together two packets of information on July 25 and 26, ostensibly about SERE training, though JPRA personnel realized he wanted to use it to reverse-engineer the techniques. As we now know, those were crucial days of the Bybee Memo drafting process, when Yoo was looking for more data before he could approve waterboarding, and at about the time when CIA decided it wanted written approval of the torture techniques. But the description JPRA sent Haynes (and CIA)–a description that the OPR Report makes clear OLC received–didn’t describe waterboarding as the Navy used it. Rather, it described waterboarding as it would ultimately be practiced by the CIA.

JPRA’s description of the waterboarding technique provided in that first attachment was inconsistent in key respects from the U.S. Navy SERE school’s description of waterboarding. According to the Navy SERE school’s operating instructions, for example, while administering the technique, the Navy limited the amount of water poured on a student’s face to two pints. However, the JPRA attachment said that “up to 1.5 gallons of water” may be poured onto a “subject’s face.” While the Navy’s operating instructions dictated that “[n]o effort will be made to direct the stream of water into the student’s nostrils or mouth,” the description provided by JPRA contained no such limitation for subjects ofthe technique. While the Navy limited the use ofthe cloth on a student’s face to twenty seconds, the JPRA’s description said only that the cloth should remain in place for a “short period of time.” And while the Navy restricted anyone from placing pressure on the chest or stomach during the administration of this technique, JPRA’s description included no such limitation for subjects of the technique.

Think about it. Why would Haynes make sure Yoo had this description, particularly if Yoo was going to use a more restrained description of the practice in his memo (just as he did with his description of sleep deprivation and small box confinement)? Why didn’t they just use a description of what the Navy actually did? And where would JPRA have gotten that description? How did it happen that OLC ended up getting a description of waterboarding as it would ultimately be practiced?

There are a  number of possibilities: maybe JPRA got a hold of Mitchell and Jessen’s description of waterboarding as proposed and used that instead. Maybe CIA knew they were going to exceed the limits Yoo described in the memo.

Or, maybe JPRA somehow described waterboarding as it had already been applied to Abu Zubaydah.

I can’t yet prove which of those things happened. But I’d suggest that, now that others have decided to look at descriptions I’ve been writing about for 11 months, they also might want to look at this particular description, which in theory, at least, preceded the waterboarding purportedly authorized by the Bybee Memo six days later.