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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?

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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Dusty Foggo’s Girlfriend, John Rizzo, and the Salt Pit

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The AP story on the Salt Pit death makes it clear that–at a time when Dusty Foggo was Executive Director of CIA–he was involved in an internal review of the death.

The current U.S. official insisted that the case was adequately scrutinized. The official also said a CIA accountability review board was held in connection with the death.

The CIA declined to discuss whether the two agency officers cited in the inspector general’s report were punished.

But when the case was put before Kyle D. Foggo, the CIA’s third-ranking officer at the time, no formal administrative action was taken against the two men, said two former intelligence officials with knowledge of the case.

This review must have happened some time after fall 2004, when Foggo started in the ExDir position (it seems to have been a follow-on to the CIA IG Report). That means that Foggo’s decision not to act against any of the people in the Salt Pit killing came at around the same time that his girlfriend was hired at CIA’s Office of General Counsel over the objections of staffers within OGC. That’s significant because among the people in the chain of authorization between the Bybee Memo and the torture was then OGC head John Rizzo, who intervened to make sure Foggo’s girlfriend got and stayed hired.

Details of how Foggo got his girlfriend hired appeared in the sentencing documents for his conviction in the Brent Wilkes/Duke Cunningham case (they were included not just to show Foggo’s corruption, but also because, over the course of the case, Foggo had repeatedly claimed to be happily and faithfully married).

As William Mitchell of the CIA Inspector General’s office described, Foggo’s girlfriend, ER, was at first rejected by OGC because she had previously been investigated for having an affair with her boss (elsewhere the sentencing materials include Foggo’s claim that “she didn’t fuck him”), and then destroyed evidence to cover up the affair. But after OGC rejected her application, Foggo harassed the Managing Associate General Counsel of CIA, who then passed on Foggo’s concern to then Acting General Counsel John Rizzo.

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The Salt Pit and the Bybee Memos

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The AP has a long article out providing details behind the Salt Pit death of a detainee named Gul Rahman–a former militant associated with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who was captured on October 29, 2002 at the home of Hekmatyar’s son-in-law, Dr. Ghairat Baheer, along with the Baheer and three others. A week later, Rahman was separated from the others. He was subjected to stress positions and water dousing and–on November 20–left in 36 degree cold, only to die a few hours later.

Aside from finally providing details on a story that has long been known, the story is interesting for the way it shows the how the CIA’s torture system fit with DOJ’s approvals in the Bybee Memos. The Rahman death shows that CIA’s managers (probably in the Counterterrorism Center) were involved in direct guidance on a technique that got someone killed. That technique was specifically not approved in the Bybee Two memo. But when CTC worked to exonerate the guy in the field–the manager of the Salt Pit–they pointed to the intent language of the Bybee One memo, and claimed that anything short of intending severe pain could not qualify as torture. Ultimately, CIA’s managers used the Get Out of Jail Free Card that John Yoo had written them to prevent accountability for themselves when they gave approval for a technique that got someone killed.

Gul Rahman died from water dousing

The AP describes how, in response to Rahman’s resistance to US guards (he threw a latrine bucket), he was subjected to stress positions and dousing.

At one point, the detainee threw a latrine bucket at his guards. He also threatened to kill them. His stubborn responses provoked harsher treatment. His hands were shackled over his head, he was roughed up and doused with water, according to several former CIA officials.

The exact circumstances of Rahman’s death are not clear, but the Afghan was left in the cold cell on the morning of Nov. 20, when the temperature dipped just below 36 degrees. He was naked from the waist down, said two former U.S. officials familiar with the case. Within hours, he was dead.

Though the AP doesn’t say it, the language used here makes it clear CIA thought of this as water dousing–a technique that would not be approved by DOJ for use until August 26, 2004. After Rahman died, the CIA tried to invent the Legal Principles document as a way to authorize murder and other crimes, but Jack Goldsmith would go on to not only refuse to consider that document OLC authorization, but to refuse to approve water dousing specifically in March 2004.

In other words, three years and our third review of this case later, and DOJ still hasn’t decided whether wetting someone down in close to freezing temperatures is a crime, even though this was a torture technique that DOJ had not approved at the time.

The Salt Pit manager relied on the advice of his superiors

Now, the guy who wet down Rahman apparently wasn’t working off a list of approved techniques. Rather, he was asking for guidance from his superiors.

The [Inspector General’s] report found that the Salt Pit officer displayed poor judgment in leaving the detainee in the cold. But it also indicated the officer made repeated requests to superiors for guidance that were largely ignored, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.

That raised concerns about both the responsibility of the station chief and the CIA’s management in Langley. Similar concerns about CIA management were later aired in the inspector general’s review of the CIA’s secret interrogation program.

In fact, John Yoo, appears to blame the people interpreting the Bybee Memos for any untoward results from torture. For example, he refers to a written document (probably cables to the field) that appear to be derivative of the Bybee Memo, suggesting those didn’t properly account for pain that might amount to death.

The Memo says that the pain must rise to the level that “would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions.” Bybee Memo at 6. There is no way to interpret this sentence other than that if the pain is equivalent to the pain that accompanies those conditions, the infliction qualifies as torture, whether or not it actually does result in those conditions. It certainly would not be so misinterpreted by the sophisticated legal audience at which the Bybee Memo was directed–especially given the analysis in the Classified Bybee Memo, which carefully examined the level of physical pain caused by the individual interrogation techniques even though none of those techniques cause death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions. See Classified Bybee Memo at 9-10 (“With respect to physical pain, we previously concluded that ’severe pain’ within the meaning of Section 2340 is pain that is difficult for the individual to endure and is of an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury.”)40

40 [long redaction] But, of course neither Professor Yoo nor Judge Bybee have anything to do with writing or reviewing [redacted] and they could reasonably assume their own work product would be read in good faith and consistently with its terms by a sophisticated audience even if a particular reader did not read it carefully or willfully disregarded its terms. [emphasis original]

That is, Yoo seems to blame whoever both read the Bybee Memo and–having interpreted the memo in a “sophisticated” manner–passed on authorization for techniques that did result into death.

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The Request for Reaffirmation of Torture

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This is going to be another weedy post…

I wanted to put two totally bureaucratic pages (PDF 23-24) from the recent FOIA dump into the context of the other known documents in the chronology. The first page is an “Executive Correspondence Routing Sheet,” sent from CIA General Counsel Scott Muller around top CIA management for approval. It reads:

This memo follows General Counsel discussion with the DCI and agreement on the need to seek reaffirmation from the NSC.

And the memo in question (the following page) appears to be a very short memo with the subject, “Review of CIA Interrogation Program,” from John Rizzo circulated to the lawyers involved with the torture program and the top CIA executives on the Executive Correspondence Routing Sheet. The Rizzo memo is dated May 24, 2004; the last signature–that of George Tenet–is dated June 4, 2004.

The routing sheet is interesting not just because Tenet signed it the day after he resigned.

It also shows a glimpse of the bridge by which CIA responded to the CIA IG Report but also (probably) Jack Goldsmith’s unwillingness to reaffirm opinions that OLC had never made by asking the White House for some kind of written re-endorsement of the torture program.

As I’ve shown here and here, when the CIA Inspector General began its review of the torture program in response to the Salt Pit death and abuses of al-Nashiri, CIA and Jennifer Koester and John Yoo (though he denies involvement) worked back channel to develop a set of “Legal Principles” (elsewhere called “Bullet Points”) that would expand the legal authorization DOJ had given CIA’s torture program in such a way as to legally excuse the crimes the IG was inspecting. Significantly, the Legal Principles document expanded the already farcical analysis of Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture that Yoo had done in the Bybee One memo.

CIA twice tried to present these Legal Principles to OLC as a fait accompli, first in June 2003, when Patrick Philbin took over many of John Yoo’s duties, and then again in March 2004, in conjunction with the finalization of the IG Report and at a time when Goldsmith headed the OLC. Both Philbin and Goldsmith refused to accept the Legal Principles as OLC sanctioned documents.

Now, significantly, the March 2, 2004 set of Legal Principles was itself a request for “reaffirmation” of the torture program’s legality. Scott Muller emphasized CIA needed that reauthorization, among other reasons, because they had incorporated new torture techniques based on the OLC “guidance.”

For example, using the applicable law and relying on OLC’s guidance, we concluded that the abdominal slap previously discussed with OLC (and mentioned in the June 2003 summary points) is a permissible interrogation technique.

Of note, Goldsmith appears to have taken special note of the description of water PFT, which (Muller’s note said explicitly) was “intended to … humiliate” detainees. Given that the IG Report concluded that the torture program probably violated Article 16, this language seemed to flout the prohibitions against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Between March 2 and May 24 (when Rizzo wrote his memo), Goldsmith did not reauthorize the Legal Principles. Nevertheless, CIA incorporated the Legal Principles into the final draft of the IG Report. Goldsmith got a copy of that document some time before May 25 and presumably spoke to Muller about the inclusion of the Legal Principles in it, because on that day, he wrote CIA’s IG noting that he had received it and asking for time to review the depiction of OLC’s legal advice in the IG Report before it got sent to Congress.

In other words, Goldsmith’s continued objection to the inclusion of the Legal Principles in the IG Report is probably what prompted John Rizzo to send out a memo referencing the IG Report (which the CIA called the “Review of the CIA Interrogation Program,” the subject of his memo) that appears to have recommended asking NSC for reaffirmation of the torture program.

So faced with Goldsmith’s refusal to reaffirm something OLC had never affirmed in the first place, CIA decided to go to the White House and get them to approve of the program in writing. Read more →

Boxes and Burials in the CIA’s Torture Plans

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In this post, I’m going to test a hypothesis that OLC may not have included “cramped confinement” in its torture plans until it removed “mock burial.” If I’m right, it means after having been told OLC would not approve mock burial, OLC and CIA instead just renamed what they were doing as “cramped confinement” so as to get it past those in DOJ who were opposed to allowing the US to use mock burial in its torture program.

This is a weedy post even by my standards. But the key points are:

  • Many of the discussions about which techniques OLC was approving appear to have taken place orally, not in written form
  • The one written document we know exists–a JPRA Physical Pressures document–was an attempt made during the key three days of the Bybee Memo process to pretend that JPRA sanctioned waterboarding (at least) as it either already had been used or would be used on Abu Zubaydah, rather than as the Navy used it in training
  • The section on small box confinement also seems to have been created in response to this process, meaning it is possible that JPRA adjusted both the name and the description of the technique to provide JPRA sanction for mock burial as it had been done on AZ

The OPR Report’s list of torture techniques is neither the original nor the final list of planned torture techniques

The OPR Report includes a list of torture techniques Mitchell and Jessen proposed to use with Abu Zubaydah that includes both cramped confinement and mock burial, which seems to suggest that the CIA tried to get both approved at once. But the OPR Report provides absolutely no explanation for the source or the date of its list (on PDF 41) of the torture techniques. It says simply:

The CIA psychologists eventually proposed the following twelve EITs to be used in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah:

In addition to the use of the word “eventually” in this description, there’s further evidence this list is not the first incarnation of the torture techniques requested. That’s because this description of sleep deprivation…

Sleep deprivation: The subject is prevented from sleeping, not to exceed 11 days at a time;

Includes this footnote:

As initially proposed, sleep deprivation was to be induced by shackling the subject in a standing position, with his feet chained to a ring in the floor and his arms attached to a bar at head level, with very little room for movement.

Compare that with the description of sleep deprivation as it appears in the Bybee Two memo.

Sleep deprivation may be used. You have indicated that your purpose in using this technique is to reduce the individual’s ability to think on his feet and, through the discomfort associated with lack of sleep, to motivate him to cooperate. The effect of sleep deprivation will generally remit after one or two nights of uninterrupted sleep. You have informed us that your research has revealed that, in rare instances, some individuals who are already predisposed to psychological problems may experience abnormal reactions to sleep deprivation. Even in those cases, however, reactions abate after the individual is permitted to sleep. Moreover, personnel with medical training are available to and will intervene in the unlikely event of an abnormal reaction. You have orally informed us that you would not deprive Zubaydah of sleep for more than eleven days at a time and that you have previously kept him awake for 72 hours, from which no mental or physical harm resulted. [my emphasis]

The description in the OPR Report for this torture technique, at least, matches what appears in the Bybee Two memo.

Also note the admission (which I had never noticed before) that CIA had already subjected AZ to sleep deprivation but don’t worry, AZ was A-Okay as a result.

you have previously kept him awake for 72 hours

Though their admission to 72 hour sessions of sleep deprivation doesn’t accord with AZ’s memory of his first several weeks in the black site, which describe being kept awake for weeks at a time (perhaps 11 days?), using the shackling technique that OLC would go on to eliminate from their description of sleep deprivation:

I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks.

[snip]

I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water on my face.

From all this we can make several educated assumptions about the list included in the OPR Report. First, it includes the torture techniques as ultimately incorporated in the torture memos; this is not the list that CIA first brought to OLC. Moreover, we know that the description of sleep deprivation, at least, was watered down to hide the most appalling aspects of the technique that, even though they weren’t described, had already taken place.

Oh, and they were probably lying about the one detail they admitted to, how long they had subjected AZ to sleep deprivation.

But we already knew that.

That said, we know the OPR Report’s list isn’t the final list, either. The OPR Report list still shows, in unredacted form, diapering as a technique. We have no idea when or why that we eliminated from the list. And we know the redacted 12th technique is mock burial, which was eliminated some time after July 24, 2002, though we don’t know when, specifically, that happened. Note that the description of that 12th technique–mock burial–continues onto PDF page 43, so the description of it may include more detail on how it was eliminated from the list.

In other words, at best, this is an interim list. The list may simply reflect the final form that each torture technique request had before it was either incorporated into the Bybee Two memo or eliminated from the list.

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A Momentous Day to Lose Your Documentation

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As I explained in this post, at least ten documents that OPR should have had to conduct its investigation into the writing of the torture memos disappeared sometime over the course of the investigation (significantly, CIA had an opportunity to come and take all the documents away for a while just after OPR first got access to them).

In this post, I showed how that prevents us–at least using just the unclassified report–from confirming whether or not John Yoo ever read the document making the following points:

  • The techniques the US was considering using on detainees amounted to torture
  • Torture produces unreliable information
  • America’s use of torture would increase the chances that Americans, if captured, would be tortured themselves

But there’s one more reason losing a large document, sent on July 25, 2002 from CIA and OLC (it probably originally came from DOD), is a problem: Because that document was exchanged on one of the most momentous days of the entire development of the torture memos.

Here’s a quick review of the most significant dates in the development of the torture memos:

April 11, 2002: John Yoo and Jennifer Koester officially begin working on the torture memo, though Yoo had already done research for it

July 13, 2002: Michael Chertoff tells CIA, Yoo, and others that DOJ will not issue an “advance declination” (a Get Out of Jail Free card) covering the torture program

July 16, 2002: David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, and Tim Flanigan order Yoo to reverse course and include the Commander-in-Chief and defenses section in the Bybee One memo to make up for not offering an advance declination

July 24, 2002: Yoo gives John Rizzo oral approval to use six torture techniques (attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, and wall standing) but says DOJ needs more data before approving waterboarding and other more controversial techniques, possibly including mock burial

“Some point thereafter”: Yoo tells Rizzo it will “take longer” to approve remaining torture methods if mock burial is included

July 25, 2002: CIA sends 46 to 60 pages of documents–possibly DOD documents–to OLC; those documents have since been lost

July 26, 2002: CIA sends 3 (or 4?) more DOD documents to OLC, including a list of torture techniques used in SERE; though the OPR Report doesn’t say it in the unclassified section, OLC verbally approves remaining torture techniques (except mock burial); CIA requests, for the first time, written approval for specific techniques

August 1: Bybee One and Two memos signed, as well as letter to Gonzales on CAT

There are three main plot lines, from what we can see, in the development of the Bybee Memos: first, the refusal of an advance declination and the replacement with it of other ways to allow torturers to Get Out of Jail Free. Then, the decision not to approve mock burial in an effort to get the memo quickly. And, finally, CIA’s last minute request to get the torture techniques approved in a written document.

Two of those three events happened sometime between July 24 and July 26. I’d suggest they might even be related. And 60 pages of documentation (or maybe 46, we don’t know)–documents that might explain how mock burial got dropped and/or a written list got added–have disappeared.

My gut feel is that the disappearing documents–assuming their disappearance from a SCIF was not just a remarkable accident–have more to do with the JPRA document than with the change in approach that day. But there’s the distinct possibility that those documents also would have explained more about the dropped mock burials and the written list of torture techniques.

It’s Not Just the Emails DOJ Lost, It’s the Backup Documentation

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We’ve been talking quite a bit about John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s emails on the torture memos that OLC deleted: with a rebuttal of John Yoo’s claims there were no email, a report on the National Archives’ attempts to learn what happened, and a catalog of damning facts we learned from the few emails left over.

But it’s not just the emails that are missing. It’s also some of the backup documentation. Some of the documents that went into the production of the torture memos–and should have been reviewed by OPR over the course of its investigation–disappeared some time in the last 5 years.

As I reported last September, after some delay in a FOIA response, Acting head of OLC, David Barron confessed that OLC could not find all of the documents that it had first listed on a 2006 FOIA response.

The problem, as Barron explained in his declaration, seems to stem from three things: CIA, not OLC, did the original FOIA search in 2005 and at that time did not make a copy of the documents responsive to FOIA; for long periods OPR had the documents, lumped in with a bunch of other torture documents, so it could work on is investigation; the documents got shuttled around for other purposes, as well, including other investigations and one trip to the CIA for a 2007 update to the FOIA Vaughn Index. [Here’s the 2007 Vaughn Index and here’s the Vaughn Index that accompanied Barron’s declaration last September.]

And, somewhere along the way, at least 10 documents originally identified in 2005 as responsive to the FOIA got lost.

Poof!

The 10 Missing Documents

Here’s a list of the short descriptions of what disappeared:

  • Document 6, 07/25/2002, 46 [or 60 or 59] page Top Secret [or Secret] memo providing legal advice
  • Document 20, 09/12/2003, 1 page Top Secret memo requesting legal advice
  • Document 47, 07/07/2004, 1 page Top Secret memo providing legal advice
  • Document 77, 08/16/2004, 2 page Top Secret memo providing legal advice
  • Document 142, undated 2 page Top Secret memo requesting legal advice
  • Document 155, undated 3 page Top Secret draft memo with attached handwritten notes requesting legal advice
  • Document 172, undated 5 page Top Secret memo requesting legal advice
  • Document 175, undated 6 page Top Secret draft memo providing legal advice
  • Document 177, undated 10 page Top Secret draft memo providing legal advice
  • Document 181, undated 127 page Top Secret draft memo providing legal advice

Why did CIA do the FOIA responses?

Now, before I get into why this is troubling in terms of the OPR Report, let me just challenge a claim Barron made in his declaration. He explained that CIA, rather than OLC, had done the first and second FOIA searches this way:

CIA attorneys were initially given access to the OLC Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (“SCIF”) in 2005 to search for documents responsive to the FOIA request at issue in this litigation. CIA attorneys conducted the search because no OLC attorneys assigned at the time to the processing of FOIA requests had the clearances needed to access and review the documents.

It’s not entirely clear when CIA would have been rifling through OLC’s SCIF drawers in 2005 (and Barron apparently doesn’t feel like telling us). But it would have come after Judge Alvin Hellerstein ordered the CIA to respond to the FOIA on February 2, 2005 (they had been refusing to respond to his order to do so from the previous fall). And they would have done it over the next year and a half. In any case, it would have happened after Daniel Levin wrote his unclassified torture memo, about which the OPR Report explains,

Virtually all of OLC’s attorneys and deputies were included in the review process,

And it would have happened during or after the drafting of the Bradbury memos, about which the OPR Report explains,

Bradbury circulated drafts of his memoranda widely within the Department.

Granted, the OPR Report doesn’t say the Bradbury Memos were circulated widely within OLC, but when they had an incentive to make the claim, DOJ later claimed that the torture memos, which would have been the same compartment as all the FOIA documents, were widely circulated. It seems unlikely that Levin’s memo was reviewed by “virtually all of OLC’s attorneys,” but that the following year they couldn’t find a single OLC lawyer to put together a FOIA response.

And what seems even more curious is that rather than invite CIA to OLC’s SCIF to do the updated FOIA response in 2007–at a time when the documents were under investigation–DOJ would instead send all the documents over to CIA for them to do it.

In 2007, the documents were recalled from OPR by OLC so that they could be sent to the CIA for processing and for purposes of updated the unclassified Vaughn Index submitted in this matter.

It’s sort of funny that DOJ took fewer cautions with these documents after they were actively under investigation than they did beforehand. Here, DOJ seems to have said to the CIA, see if you can’t make some of these documents accidentally blow into the Potomac on your way back to DOJ…

Three Troubling Documents

Now, it’s hard to tell what disappeared, since we don’t actually get to see either the documents that disappeared or those the DOJ thinks might be close matches. But three of the documents, in particular, trouble me.

Document 6, 07/25/2002, 46 [or 60 or 59] page Top Secret [or Secret] memo providing legal advice

Here’s the longer description of this document submitted in the 2007 FOIA response:

Document No. 6 is a 60-page document dated 25 July 2002 that consists of a 3-page memorandum and six attachments of 2 pages, 7 pages, 10 pages, 13 pages, 13 pages, and 12 pages, respectively. It is classified SECRET.

The memorandum and attachments contain confidential client communications from the CIA on a matter in which it requested legal advice from OLC.

Aside from the fact that DOJ has said, at different times, this packet of information was 46, 60, and 59-pages long (and that the same FOIA claims it is classified both Top Secret and Secret), the questions about this document alarm me because I’m fairly certain this is the packet of JPRA information sent OLC in the last days of drafting of the first torture documents. It’s going to take me a full post to explain the many reasons questions about this document’s provenance is problematic–tune in next post for the next installment of disappearing evidence!

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Torture Tapes and CIA Retirements

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The NYT originally broke the news of the torture tape destruction on December 6, 2007. And on October 25, 2007, the government informed Leonie Brinkema that they had found three unrelated tapes of interrogations that should have been disclosed during the Moussaoui trial. Those two events were the first we had confirmation of the scandal surrounding the CIA’s taping–and subsequent destruction–of torture tapes.

Those events followed–distantly–the retirement of Jose Rodriguez, who we know was in charge of CTC when the torture tapes were made and was later in charge of Clandestine Services when the torture tapes were destroyed. Rodriguez’s replacement was reported publicly on September 14 and he left on September 30.

The torture tape revelations also followed–distantly–the September 25 withdrawal of the nomination of John Rizzo to be CIA General Counsel, a function had he filled on an interim basis for some years. We know Rizzo was involved in the authorization of torture, though he claimed to be mysteriously out of the loop of 2005 discussions about whether or not to destroy the torture tapes.

Given the lapse of time between the Rodriguez retirement and the Rizzo withdrawal, it was unclear whether there was a connection.

And while it’s still unclear whether there’s a connection, it turns out the timing of CIA internal discussions about the torture tape destruction and Rodriguez’ retirement and Rizzo’s withdrawal is much closer than we knew.

The torture tapes FOIA reveals that the CIA was discussing the torture tape destruction on September 25 and October 5, 2007. It describes a Top Secret September 25, 2007 email “discussing the review and disposition of the tapes” and must have attached these earlier discussions (that’s why they were included in this Vaughn Index). And it describes a Secret October 5, 2007 email which appears to link to the earlier email approving of the destruction of the tapes. John Durham has claimed a law enforcement exemption over the latter of these two emails, suggesting that release of that email would interfere with whatever investigation of the torture tape destruction he is doing.

Again, not that there’s a connection, but CIA was linking to discussions that Rodriquez was involved in and Rizzo may have been involved in at precisely the time they effectively ended their CIA careers.

Is John Rizzo Stalling?

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Boy, the press conference with Eric Holder today was jam-packed. In addition to using the Zazi arrest to push to renew the PATRIOT Act, Holder apparently updated reporters on the long-awaited OPR report.

The release of a long-awaited ethics report on the conduct of former Justice Department lawyers who authorized the use of harsh interrogation appears to be a ways off.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday the department is waiting for additional comments from “some of the lawyers who were involved.” The former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers under scrutiny already missed a May deadline for submitting their responses.

Speaking with reporters at Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, Holder said he expected the report to be cleared for release relatively soon. In June, he said the report, now more than four years in the making, would be ready in a “matter of weeks.”

The report explores whether legal advice in the interrogation memos, which have since been rescinded, met professional standards required of Justice Department lawyers. The Office of Professional Responsibility’s initial findings are said to be harshly critical of Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and John Yoo, a former deputy.

In spite of this report’s focus on Yoo and Bybee, I wonder whether they’re really the cause of the delay. After all, last we heard, the report was delayed not just because Yoo and Bradbury got a chance to review the document and work the ref, but because CIA got to review the document, even while John Rizzo, a key participant in the report, remained as Acting General Counsel at CIA.

In other words, "some of the lawyers who were involved" may not be limited to the OLC lawyers. John Rizzo was "involved" over a longer time and in as central a role as any of the OLC lawyers. He may have as much incentive as they do to delay the report.