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Richard Clarke Reminds Cheney and Condi of Their Incompetence

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When I saw Condi saying, "unless you were there, in a position of responsibility, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas we faced in trying to protect Americans," to Stanford students, my instinct was to remind everyone that she was forced to admit, "I believe the title was ‘Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States.’"

Richard Clarke, after listening to Cheney and Condi make similar statements for a month, has a similar instinct (and of course, he’s in a position to make the argument more strongly than I). Today, he’s got an op-ed reminding readers of how Cheney and Condi refused to take terrorism seriously until it was too late. And once they did, they overreacted.

He describes the panic with which Cheney responded on 9/11.

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president’s national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president’s office and remember glimpsing horror on his face.

And then he catalogs how the excessiveness of Cheney’s and Condi’s response led to more failures (click through for his discussion of the Iraq debacle).

On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda’s anti-American propaganda was right.

Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures — such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times — would be the most effective.

Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. Read more →

Bush’s Approved Torture … in 2003?

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A number of people have pointed to a comment Bush made in MI on Thursday about his role in approving torture. Here’s how CNN described it:

Bush spoke in broad strokes about how he proceeded after the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in March 2003.

"The first thing you do is ask, what’s legal?" he said. "What do the lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get information so I can say to myself, ‘I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people.’ I can tell you that the information we got saved lives."

Here’s how Eartha Jane Meltzer from MI Messenger described it:

But the former president spoke indirectly of his administration’s authorization of the use of torture against detainees captured during the War on Terror, avoiding the words “torture” and “abuse.”

“You have to make tough decisions,” Bush said. “They’ve captured a guy who murdered 3,000 citizens … that affected me … They come in and say he may have more information …and we had an anthrax attack … and they say he may have more information. What do you do?“

Bush was firm and defended his record as president: “I will tell you that the information gained saved lives.”

And here’s how the Detroit Free Press described it:

Former President George W. Bush defended on Thursday his decision to allow harsh interrogation of the terrorist who ordered the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, saying it was cleared by his lawyers to prevent what his advisers believed was another, imminent attack.

"I made a decision within the law to get information so I can say, I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people," he said. "I can tell you, the information gained saved lives."

Here’s how SW MI’s Herald-Palladium described it:

He defended his decision to authorize waterboarding on the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. 

Now, I’m trying to get clarification on this point, particularly since Bush used to claim frequently that Abu Zubaydah ordered up 9/11, but between CNN and H-P, they seem to be clear that Bush was referring specifically to KSM, not AZ. [See updated below.]

If his reference to KSM was explicit, I find that very odd. 

Why would Bush talk about the seminal moments in his tenure as President, and refer to approving the torture of the third guy we waterboarded, and not number one or number two? Wouldn’t the first approval of waterboarding be the most important?

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Carl Levin to Cheney: You’ve Got Nothing

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Carl Levin better watch out for Liz "BabyDick" Cheney and her cries of "libel!" Because he just called her Daddy a liar, using words like "false statements" and "colossal misrepresentation."

Now, Levin is actually the second person who has seen those documents who says they don’t say what PapaDick says they do.  A couple of weeks ago, Russ Feingold accused PapaDick of lying using somewhat more gentle language.

Nothing I have seen – including the two documents to which former Vice President Cheney has repeatedly referred – indicates that the torture techniques authorized by the last administration were necessary, or that they were the best way to get information out of detainees. The former vice president is misleading the American people when he says otherwise.

But I’m specifically interested in Levin’s statements for the very specific way he rebuts PapaDick’s claims (note, I’ve got nothing on my senior Senator in my appreciation for weeds). 

But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques.

I’m interested in those specific details for the way they flesh out the details from the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo which appears to have details from two documents related to those Cheney is seeking. As I suggested in April, it appears Cheney may be seeking one of the documents, and a version of another, that Bradbury used to rebut the CIA IG report’s conclusion that the torture was not all that useful. 

Here’s what the three documents cited by Bradbury for his "efficacy" argument say. I’ve left off all reference to the IG Report; my discussion of Bradbury’s use of that is in this post and this post. And I’ve noted which claims–really, the most critical ones–he offers no citation for. I bring it back to Levin below.

CIA Directorate of Intelligence, Khalid Shaykh Muhammed: Preeminent Source on Al-Qa’ida (July 13, 2004) ["Preeminent Source"]

After the September 11 attacks, KSM assumed "the role of operations chief for al-Qa’ida around the world." [citation omitted] KSM also planned additional attacks within the United States both before and after September 11.

[snip]

And, indeed, we understand that since the use of enhanced techniques, "KSM and Abu Zubaydah have been pivotal sources because of their ability and willingness to provide their analysis and speculation about the capabilities, methodologies, and mindsets of terrorists."

Memorandum for Steven G. Bradbury, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, from [redacted], DCI Counterterrorist Center, Re: Effectiveness of the CIA Counterintelligence Interrogation Techniques (March 2, 2005) ["Effectiveness Memo"]

Your office has informed us that the CIA believes that "the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al-Qa’ida has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001." [citation omitted] Read more →

Liz Cheney: Calling My Daddy a Torturer Is Libelous

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I just got home and am wiped out (bmaz kept me out partying in NYC), so I thought I’d throw put this up for discussion [JimWhite is probably right I don’t want to say "throw"]. 

BabyDick says:

  • She hasn’t seen the memos she’s convinced show torture was effective (no mention of whether she saw the IG report which says torture isn’t effective)
  • She still ignores the part of Admiral Blair’s statement that shows we only got general info from torture–like the 10 pieces of intelligence we got after waterboarding Abu Zubaydah 83 times
  • She says respect for the law is a "policy difference"
  • She invokes libel if we call her Daddy or those incompetent contractors who waterboarded KSM 183 times torturers

You want to argue that last point in court, BabyDick? Because I sure do think that PapaDick and Mitchell’s contractors are torturers.

Dick Cheney’s Torture Kabuki

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I wanted to pull three threads together in this post, which suggest how Cheney instituted torture in this country:

  • Alberto Gonzales may have been approving torture even while Condi Rice and others went through the show of getting an OLC opinion to authorize it;
  • CIA claimed to be briefing Congress when it wasn’t;
  • The Bush Administration then claimed Congress had bought off on torture to persuade those objecting to torture within the administration.

There are also certain parallels with the way Cheney implemented his illegal wiretap program.

Alberto Gonzales’ approvals

As Ari Shapiro reported last week, Alberto Gonzales was personally approving the techniques Mitchell’s torturers would use on a daily basis.

The source says nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

We know there’s cable traffic from the field back to CIA HQ every day. And we know there’s a May 28, 2002, 4-page cable from HQ back to the Field that roughly corresponds to when Ali Soufan has said the torturers brought out the small box in which they eventually confined Abu Zubaydah. This may mean there’s a seven-week gap between the time the harshest techniques were first okayed, and the time Condi purportedly gave the torture program its first okay on July 17, 2002. As I noted the other day, this raises the possibility that the OLC approval process was all just show, basically endorsing torture that had gone on for some time already.

Is it possible that when Bellinger and Condi asked for an OLC opinion, the CIA’s torturers were already hard at work, and it’s only because Bellinger asked for an opinion that they even bothered? If Gonzales was relaying daily approvals for torture directly to the torturers in the field, then why would it appear that Condi was the one who "approved" the program in mid-July? Why not Gonzales?

It’s a possibility that one of Shapiro’s sources is contemplating.

"I can’t believe the CIA would have settled for a piece of paper from the counsel to the president," says one former government official familiar with those discussions.

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Gallup Polls Public Approval on Innocent Bystanders, But Not Torturers

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gallup-torture.thumbnail.gif

You guys are all really smart people. So here’s a quiz. What’s wrong with this picture?

I know. Too easy: Gallup apparently decided to poll who was winning the battle of torture public opinion.

And forgot to poll public approval on the actual torturers!

I don’t have the crosstabs or actual questions, but by all appearances, Gallup asked, 

Do you approve or disapprove of how each of the following has handled the matter of interrogation techniques used against terrorism suspects?

  • Barack Obama
  • The CIA
  • Democrats in Congress
  • Republicans in Congress
  • Nancy Pelosi

I’m sorry to be crude, but was it Crazy Pete Hoekstra or Dick Cheney himself who sucked your dick, Gallup, to persuade you to do this poll?  Because there’s really no other legitimate excuse for this poll. You didn’t poll on approval on the "handling of interrogation techniques used against terrorism suspects" for:

  • Dick Cheney, the architect and main apologist of the torture program
  • James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the contractors who had no experience in interrogation, but nevertheless made big money off of torturing prisoners
  • John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury, who wrote crazy legal opinions to pre-authorize torture
  • The torturer who said he used more water than legally permitted because that made the whole process "more poignant and convincing"  
  • Alberto Gonzales, who was giving daily, meticulous approvals for torture even before it had been declared "legal"

Instead, Gallup polled on a bunch of people who weren’t involved in the actual torture. Hell, even the CIA’s significantly off the hook, given that contractors did the torture, and people like George Tenet and Jose Rodriguez who oversaw it are retired.

What’s your opinion of the handling of the members of Congress who were illegally not briefed before the torture started? What’s your opinion of those chump Democrats who tried to make the Army Field Manual (for all its faults) the standard for interrogation? What’s your opinion of a bunch of dead-ender Republicans who are clinging to some political scandal to stay relevant?

But not, "What’s your opinion of Dick Cheney, who tried to get an Iraqi tortured so he could claim there were ties between Iraq and al Qaeda that had long since been discredited?"

Dick Asks Obama to Wave His Magic Wand

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During the week that Dick Cheney ordered Libby to out Valerie Plame, Mary Matalin told Libby that "Bush" should order everything on the Wilsons declassified (it’s not clear whether Matalin meant this to include Plame’s identity or not). She said "the President should wave his magic wand" to declassify the oppo on the Wilsons. (She said this in the same conversation, IIRC, in which she called Joe Wilson a snake.)

I thought of that today when I read Cheney’s latest attempt to pressure Obama to declassify his propaganda on torture. (h/t Bob Fertik)

I saw that information as vice president, and I reviewed some of it again at the National Archives last month. I’ve formally asked that it be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained, the things we learned, and the consequences for national security. And as you may have heard, last week that request was formally rejected.

It’s worth recalling that ultimate power of declassification belongs to the President himself. President Obama has used his declassification power to reveal what happened in the interrogation of terrorists. Now let him use that same power to show Americans what did not happen, thanks to the good work of our intelligence officials.

C’mon, Obama, wave that magic wand, Dick appears to be begging. A wonder, huh, that he’s resorting to selective declassification again to try to win a political argument.

Selective declassification, that is, and a selective memory. Central to Cheney’s narrative, you see, is that Obama "used his declassification power to reveal what happened in the interrogation of terrorists." Now, to be fair, Obama did participate in discussions of whether or not to release those documents. But ACLU didn’t get the documents from Obama or the White House. It got them from DOJ, the originator of the memos.Those memos got handed over in the same way any routine successful FOIA request would  (even if this did end up being a non-routine FOIA request). 

I guess in Dick Cheney’s little mind, it always has to be about the executive waving his magic wand.

Update: Ah jeebus. As if working from a script, Fox’s Major Garrett rushed off to the press conference and started waving Dick’s magic wand for him.

Q A follow-up on Mark’s question, does the President agree or disagree with the Vice President’s contention that he has the authority to declassify the CIA memos? Does he agree with that?

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Liz Cheney’s Non-Denial #2: Daddy Suggested–But CIA Refused to Execute–Waterboarding

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A few weeks ago, Liz "BabyDick" Cheney took the the airwaves to defend her Daddy’s torture regime. But she very pointedly and repeatedly refused to deny a charge Norah O’Donnell challenged her to deny: that PapaDick was the "prime mover" of torture.

Check: According to his daughter, PapaDick Cheney was the prime mover on the torture policy.

Yesterday, BabyDick was refusing to deny allegations again. This time, that PapaDick had ordered up torture of an Iraqi so he would "reveal" ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.

STEPHANOPOLOUS: There were some reports this week that the Vice President’s Office, back in 2003, in April 2003, I believe, sent some sort of word, to Iraq, that a detainee in custody should be waterboarded in order to get information, to establish whether there’s a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda or more information on weapons of mass destruction.

[snip]

You’ve explained one part of it, I just want to ask you to explain another part of it. The report though that the vice president’s office did ask specifically to have information about Iraq-al Qaeda connections presented to this detainee, do you deny that?

LIZ CHENEY: I think that it’s important for us to have all the facts out. And and, the first and most important fact is that the vice president has been absolutely clear that he supported this program, this was an important program, it saved American lives. Now, the way this policy worked internally was once the policy was determined and decided, the CIA, you know, made the judgments about how each individual detainee would be treated. And the Vice President would not substitute his own judgment for the professional judgment of the CIA. [my emphasis]

More generally, BabyDick’s non-denial makes four points:

  • Two CIA officials said waterboarding was not used (with Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but BabyDick doesn’t note that) to establish such a link
  • The people claimed to be waterboarded are not any of the three on whom waterboarding was used
  • Lawrence Wilkerson’s story should not be trusted because he has made a cottage industry of attacking Cheney
  • CIA made the final decision on torture

But see what she doesn’t deny? That Cheney suggested–but CIA refused–to waterboard Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi. Look at precisely what the Daily Beast reported.

In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” Read more →

A Dick Cheney Torture Trifecta!

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First we have Judy "re-connected at the roots" Miller claiming Nancy Pelosi’s in trouble because Dick Cheney tortured.

Then we got Stephen "Hagiographer" Hayes, claiming Nancy Pelosi’s in trouble because Dick Cheney tortured.

And now we’ve got Victoria Toensing, claiming we shouldn’t prosecute John Yoo and Jay Bybee because they told Dick Cheney he could torture. This article is notably bad, even for Toensing. She invokes her Reagan-era legal experience as her basis of authority–but ignores the Reagan-era case which declared waterboarding to be torture.

In the mid-1980s, when I supervised the legality of apprehending terrorists to stand trial, I relied on a decades-old Supreme Court standard:

She claims the lawyers (she conveniently mentions just Yoo and Bybee, for obvious reasons) only had to determine whether waterboarding constitued a specific intent to torture, and not whether it shocked the conscience.

Our capture and treatment could not "shock the conscience" of the court. The OLC lawyers, however, were not asked what treatment was legal to preserve a prosecution. They were asked what treatment was legal for a detainee who they were told had knowledge of future attacks on Americans.

The 1994 law was passed pursuant to an international treaty, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. The law’s definition of torture is circular. Torture under that law means "severe physical or mental pain or suffering," which in turn means "prolonged mental harm," which must be caused by one of four prohibited acts. The only relevant one to the CIA inquiry was threatening or inflicting "severe physical pain or suffering." What is "prolonged mental suffering"? The term appears nowhere else in the U.S. Code.

Congress required, in order for there to be a violation of the law, that an interrogator specifically intend that the detainee suffer prolonged physical or mental suffering as a result of the prohibited conduct. Just knowing a person could be injured from the interrogation method is not a violation under Supreme Court rulings interpreting "specific intent" in other criminal statutes.

Bradbury, of course, spent a good part of his May 30, 2005 memo addressing the "shock the consicence" standard, because the program had been deemed illegal by the CIA’s own IG under that standard.

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Dick Cheney, Torture, Iraq, and Valerie Plame

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I’ve been reluctant to embrace suggestions that torture, Iraq, and Valerie Plame were all going to coalesce into one linked story. After all, it would be too easy for me, of all people, to argue these stories were linked. But I increasingly suspect they are.

First, let me pull together some data points.

Nancy Pelosi and Bob Graham are linking the non-briefings on torture with the Iraq NIE

Now that they are explicitly stating that CIA lied in its September briefings on torture, Nancy Pelosi and Bob Graham are also both linking those lies with the lies they were telling–at precisely the same time–in the Iraq NIE. Here’s Pelosi:

Of all the briefings that I have received at this same time, earlier, they were misinforming the American people there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and it was an imminent threat to the United States. I, to the limit of what I could say to my caucus, told them, the intelligence does not support the imminent threat that this Administration is contending. Whether it’s on the subject of what’s happening in Iraq, whether it’s on the subject of techniques used by the intelligence community on those they are interrogating, every step of the way, the Administration was misleading the Congress.

And that is the issue. And that is why we need a truth commission.

And here’s Graham:

Yes, they’re obligated to tell the full Intelligence Committee, not just the leadership. This was the same time within the same week, in fact, that the CIA was submitting its National Intelligence Estimate on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which proves so erroneous that we went to war, have had thousands of persons killed and injured as a result of misinformation.

Now, it’s quite possible Graham and Pelosi are tying these two lies together just to remind reporters how unreliable the CIA is. Perhaps they’re doing it to remind reporters of how they got burned leading into the Iraq War, trusting the spin of the Administration.

But perhaps they’re trying to say there’s a direct connection, an explicit one, between the NIE and torture. We know Ibn Sheikh al-Libi’s claims appeared in there. Did anything that came out of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation? Or Ramzi bin al-Shibh? 

Did CIA not reveal they were torturing detainees to dodge any question about the accuracy of claims about Iraq intelligence?

The proposal to waterboard Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi

Then there’s not just the revelation, by Charles Duelfer, but the timing he describes of OVP proposals to waterboard Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, a Mukhabarat officer. Read more →