John Rizzo Buries the Mock Burial

/3 Comments/in /by

The DC elite media continues to help John Rizzo promote his misleading memoir, this time with a Politico excerpt of his claim of how the torture techniques got chosen.

Here and elsewhere, Rizzo alludes to the one torture technique John Yoo rejected, though he says “DOJ” rejected it because it was “so gruesome.” (Note the context in which this appears, though, as an afterthought to the sentence describing simulated drowning.)

Waterboarding: The interrogator would strap Zubaydah to an inclined bench, with his feet slightly elevated. A cloth would be placed over his forehead and eyes, and water would be applied to the cloth in a controlled manner—for 20 to 40 seconds from a height of 12 to 24 inches. The intention would be simulate the sensation of drowning. There was also another technique that I’m barred from describing that was so gruesome that the Justice Department later stopped short of approving it. [my emphasis]

As I reported almost 4 years ago, this technique actually should be unclassified, as DOJ released it in unredacted form in a draft of the Office of Professional Responsibility report.

The technique is mock burial.

They planned to use simulated drowning and simulated burial.

And Yoo didn’t reject it outright: he told Rizzo he would “need more time” if he wanted that technique to be approved.

Although Yoo told us that he had concluded that the mock burial technique would violate the torture statute, he nevertheless told the client, according to Fredman and Rizzo, that he would “need more time” if they wanted it approved.

Moreover, Yoo likely rejected it not because he found it gruesome (remember, Yoo has said he would seriously consider authorizing torturers crushing a child’s testicles to make his father talk). He almost certainly rejected it because Ali Soufan called the torturers’ plan to stick Abu Zubaydah (whose gunshot wounds were still not entirely healed) into a coffin, “borderline torture,” and then left the torture site and complained to his superiors. So (again, this is supported but not confirmed by the public record) when Michael Chertoff — then head of the Criminal Division and trying to ensure he wouldn’t have to charge the torturers with torture because the FBI witnessed and then complained about it — reviewed the techniques, this one presented a problem.

That DOJ approved, instead, both small and large box confinement shows they had no squeamishness with putting someone inside a box to simulate death. And we have reports that small or large box confinement got used as mock burial later in the torture program.

Plus, Rizzo does provide one other detail that helps explain one detail of how they planned to simulate burial.

For the small box, the interrogator would have the option to place a harmless insect inside.

That is, the insect they approved for use with Zubaydah was tied to the small — not the large — box. Stick him in a box, make him think he was buried alive, only to find an insect crawling around in there, as if he were 6 feet under.

Perhaps that’s why they never used the insect? Because they could never conduct unfettered live burial like they wanted, because Ali Soufan objected to it.

In any case, Rizzo will no doubt get a lot of mileage claiming that DOJ got squeamish about a single torture technique. But the truth is DOJ got cornered by the legal dilemma presented by a complaint about a coffin.

John Rizzo Declares Entire Torture Program Illegal

/5 Comments/in /by

As I have noted in the past, John Rizzo has gone on the record to admit that the torture program was authorized by a Presidential Memorandum of Notification.

A few days after the attacks, President Bush signed a top-secret directive to CIA authorizing an unprecedented array of covert actions against Al Qaeda and its leadership. Like almost every such authorization issued by presidents over the previous quarter-century, this one was provided to the intelligence committees of the House and Senate as well as the defense subcommittees of the House and Senate appropriations committees. However, the White House directed that details about the most ambitious, sensitive and potentially explosive new program authorized by the President—the capture, incommunicado detention and aggressive interrogation of senior Al Qaeda operatives—could only be shared with the leaders of the House and Senate, plus the chair and ranking member of the two intelligence committees.

As always, CIA dutifully followed White House orders, [my emphasis]

Two years ago, at least, when he was trying to diss Congress using demonstrably false claims about the degree to which they had been briefed, John Rizzo claimed that the authority for the torture program all came directly from George Bush (Michael Hayden has said the same).

Not so today, apparently.

Steve Coll reports that Rizzo’s memoir claims Bush knew nothing about the details of torture his authorization provided the legal cover for.

Rizzo’s most remarkable account concerns President Bush. Essentially, Rizzo concludes that Bush has lately invented a memory of himself as a someone who was well informed and decisively in favor of waterboarding certain Al Qaeda prisoners, when, as far as Rizzo can tell, Bush seems not to have known at the time what the C.I.A. was doing.

In “Decision Points,” his 2010 memoir, Bush recalled that George Tenet provided a list of brutal interrogation techniques the C.I.A. proposed to use, and that Bush overruled “two that I felt went too far.” Later, when Tenet asked the President directly if he could employ waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Bush wrote that he answered, “Damn right.”

Yet, according to Rizzo, “The one senior U.S. Government national security official during this time—from August 2002 through 2003—who I did not believe was knowledgeable about the E.I.T.s was President Bush himself. He was not present at any of the Principals Committee meetings … and none of the principals at any of the E.I.T. sessions during this period ever alluded to the President knowing anything about them.”

Some of the chronology of events related to the C.I.A. interrogations that Bush provides in “Decision Points” doesn’t compute, according to Rizzo. Also, Rizzo would certainly have known if Bush had banned two techniques, but Rizzo has “no idea” what Bush might have been referring to in his memoir. Throughout this period, Rizzo, as he remembers it, was in daily contact with George Tenet, who said “nothing about any conversations he had with the president about E.I.T.s, much less any instructions or approvals coming from Bush.”

Rizzo writes, “It simply didn’t seem conceivable that George [Tenet] wouldn’t have passed something like that on to those of us who were running the program.” Rizzo got in touch with Tenet while preparing “Company Man” and Tenet confirmed “that he did not recall ever briefing Bush” on specific interrogation techniques being used at C.I.A. prisons. “I have to conclude that the account in Bush’s memoir simply is wrong,” Rizzo concludes. [my emphasis]

There are, as there always are with John Rizzo’s claims, obvious gimmicks. He apparently discusses the period from August 2002 — the date when DOJ’s OLC authorized torture for Abu Zubaydah, at which point much, if not all of the techniques approved, had already been used on him — through 2003, the year before Bush issued a second authorization for the torture program in Tenet’s last days. The key authorizations from the White House came before August 2002, as the torture was happening (and Coll should review these details if he wants to review Rizzo’s memoir competently). And we know Tenet did record Bush’s authorization for the program — he did it in a document Rizzo handled.

Moreover, there are other public claims that refute Rizzo’s claim, as when Glenn Carle described being told CIA had a letter from the President authorizing it to go beyond SERE with detainees.

“We don’t do that sort of thing,” [Glenn Carle responded to a CIA Counterterrorism Center Deputy about “going beyond SERE” with a detainee].

“We do now,” Wilmington’s voice was flat. The conversation remained quiet.

“What about EO12333? We’ve never done that sort of thing. The Agency’d never do that. We’d need a finding, at least.”

[snip]

“We have it.” Wilmington’s manner brightened a little. “We have a letter from the president. We can do whatever we need to do. We’re covered.” [my emphasis]

In other words, Rizzo’s claims don’t mean much (except that, goddamnit I’m going to have to read his stinking memoir).

But hey, let’s take him at his word. Because if Bush really was ignorant about the torture program, then it means the entire thing was illegal.

If CIA’s former top lawyer wants to claim the torture program was illegal, who are we to doubt him?

Leon Panetta Torture Review Agrees with Senate Torture Report

/2 Comments/in /by

I’m watching the confirmation hearing for Caroline Krass to be General Counsel of the CIA.

When his turn, Mark Udall just started by saying that after the review process between CIA and Senate Intelligence Committee, “I’m more confident than ever of the factual accuracy of the Committee’s 6300 page study.” He then repeated it again.

He went on to reveal that CIA is still withholding certain cables the Committee needs to finish the report.

Finally, he revealed that Leon Panetta did a review of the torture program. And that review came to the same conclusion as the Senate Intelligence Report.

Which raised two questions, for Udall. First, given that Panetta, as CIA DIrector, came to largely similar results as the Senate did, why has the CIA spent a year fighting the release of the Torture Report?

More importantly, why has — as Udall revealed — refused to turn over the Panetta review to the Committee?

Very good questions.

Yup, John Brennan Rolled DiFi on the Torture Report

/6 Comments/in /by

Brennan with TortureThe 15th paragraph of this story on CIA’s continuing efforts to water down the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report reads,

The CIA’s current director, John Brennan, was a senior agency official when the harshest CIA tactics were in use. Officials said that in closed-door meetings with Congress, he complained the Senate report contained major inaccuracies.

It is utterly predictable that Brennan, who refused to read the report before he got confirmed, would, after he was confirmed, decide it was inaccurate. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for just some of the bread crumbs this would happen.

Since I was right about John Brennan being completely untrustworthy about bringing an open mind to the evidence presented in the Torture Report, let me make another prediction based on this detail.

Committee aides said the panel hoped to finish work on an updated version of the report, taking note of CIA comments, by the end of the year. The committee could then vote to request declassification, which would allow the public to see the report, or at least parts of it.

What’s going to happen is the SSCI will water down the report, ignoring the clear implications of the evidence, in hopes of getting support for declassification. The Republicans on the committee, at least, still won’t vote to declassify it. Some section of the watered-down report will be released. And the historical record on torture will not reflect the clear evidence in the documentary record.

Dianne Feinstein could, of course, move to declassify the report in its current state.

But she won’t do that, and John Brennan knows it. You see, he knows DiFi wants to be loved by the spooks she oversees, and they could care less what she thinks of them, so long as they continue to hide the true nature of their organizations. And her desire to be loved by those she oversees makes her an easy mark.

 

Exploitation: “In my ears and in my eyes”

/7 Comments/in , /by

Goldman and Apuzzo, perhaps as a swan song before the former heads off to WaPo, break the story of Penny Lane — the story of the Gitmo camp where recruited double agents stayed until they were sent off to spy for the CIA.

They focus primarily on the series of perks detainees got both while at Gitmo and once they had agreed to spy.

By early 2003, Penny Lane was open for business.

Candidates were ushered from the confines of prison to Penny Lane’s relative hominess, officials said. The cottages had private kitchens, showers and televisions. Each had a small patio.

Some prisoners asked for and received pornography. One official said the biggest luxury in each cottage was the bed — not a military-issued cot but a real bed with a mattress.

The cottages were designed to feel more like hotel rooms than prison cells, and some CIA officials jokingly referred to them collectively as the Marriott.

Current and former officials said dozens of prisoners were evaluated but only a handful, from a variety of countries, were turned into spies who signed agreements to work for the CIA.

[snip]

Prisoners agreed to cooperate for a variety of reasons, officials said. Some received assurances that the U.S. would resettle their families. Another thought al-Qaida had perverted Islam and believed it was his duty as a Muslim to help the CIA destroy it. One detainee agreed to cooperate after the CIA insinuated it would harm his children, a former official said, similar to the threats interrogators had made to admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

All were promised money. Exactly how much each was paid remains unclear. But altogether, the government paid millions of dollars for their services, officials said. The money came from a secret CIA account, codenamed Pledge, that’s used to pay informants, officials said.

But there are a few details they either barely hint at or profess ignorance to.

First, that mention of threatening a detainee with harming his children? Obviously, that’s coercion, not persuasion. Jason Leopold and Jeff Kaye have long focused on how our torture program aims to exploit prisoners, including “recruiting” them to be double agents, in part, by torturing them. (And this was one key purposes of torture at Abu Ghraib, too.)

The process by which we recruited detainees to turn informant was by no means solely about real mattresses.

Goldman and Apuzzo profess ignorance about whether these double agents showed up in lists of “Gitmo recidivists.” They did. Remember: several Gitmo “recidivists” then “flipped back” to Saudi control and provided key information on AQAP structure and plots. Though it appears to have even taken several years before they explained to Congress that some of these recidivists were actually not — or at least were not supposed to be. So not only did these detainees serve as double agents against al Qaeda, but the existence of them as “recidivists” fed the fears about closing Gitmo.

And there are at least textual hints of whom they did flip (or think they had flipped), though I won’t lay out the several places where I’ve seen those hints in case these men are still out there.

Finally, Goldman and Apuzzo note this program ended in 2006, as the number of new detainees dropped (and, I might add, as the government tried to get out of the torture business).

But make no mistake. The government still aims to exploit the people it captures for counterterrorism purposes, whether in some forgotten cell in Afghanistan or on a ship. If we were only in the interrogation business, it could all take place in a traditional jail with legal representation.

Senate Intelligence Swiss Cheese on OLC Memos

/5 Comments/in , , /by

Great news!

After a member of the President’s party had to hold up that President’s nominee to head the CIA just to get Office of Legal Counsel memos authorizing the killing of an American citizen with no due process, the Senate Intelligence Committee has moved to force the Administration to turn over OLC memos in the future.

Terrible news!

The language is full of ginormous loopholes that would allow the Executive Branch to avoid sharing all the memos they’re already withholding.

Here’s what it says.

(1) REQUIREMENT TO PROVIDE LIST OF OPINIONS TO CONGRESS.—Except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act and annually thereafter, the Attorney General, in coordination  with the Director of National Intelligence, shall provide to the congressional intelligence committees a  listing of every opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice that has been provided to an element of the intelligence community.

(2) CONTENT.—Each listing submitted under paragraph (1) shall include—

(A) as much detail as possible about the subject of each opinion;

(B) the date the opinion was issued;

(C) a listing of each recipient agency;

(D) whether the opinion has been made available to Congress or a specific committee of  Congress, including the identity of each such committee; and

(E) for any opinion that has not been made available to Congress or a specific committee of Congress, the basis for such withholding.

(b) EXCEPTION FOR COVERT ACTION.—If the President determines that it is essential to limit access to a covert action finding under section 503(c)(2) of the National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. 3093(c)(2)), the

President may limit access to information concerning such finding that is subject to disclosure under subsection (a) to those members of Congress who have been granted access to the relevant finding under such section 503(c)(2).

(c) EXCEPTION FOR INFORMATION SUBJECT TO EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE.—If the President determines that a particular listing subject to disclosure under subsection (a) is subject to an executive privilege that protects against such disclosure, the Attorney General shall not be required to disclose such opinion or listing if the Attorney General notifies the congressional intelligence committees, in writing, of the legal justification for such assertion of executive privilege prior to the date by which the opinion or listing is required to be disclosed.

Basically, this language requires the Attorney General to give the Intelligence Committees — not the public, not all of Congress, not even the Judiciary Committees — an annotated list — not the actual opinions! — of all the OLC memos written for an element of the Intelligence Community (which would presumably exclude the White House) in a given year.

There are two exceptions to this rule.

DOJ doesn’t have to include memos on covert operations — like torture, illegal domestic wiretapping, or drone killing — that have only been briefed to a subset of the committee, such as the Gang of Four. This would allow the White House to continue to hide all the OLC memos about which there have been contentious fights in the past, including the roughly seven OLC memos on targeted killing they’re still (as far as we know) sitting on.

And DOJ doesn’t have to include memos “subject to” executive privilege (it’s not clear he has to formally invoke executive privilege, mind you). If the limitation on this language wouldn’t already have done so, this would allow the White House to hide memos like the torture memos addressed to the White House rather than CIA or DOD.

Seriously, the annotated list mandated for the Intelligence Committees ought to be the standard mandated for the public, with provision to hide secret stuff. Which is close to the standard earlier Presidents had abided by.

So what this basically does is enshrine the status quo, in which the President doesn’t have to tell the American people what his lawyers say the law is.

Aikins in Rolling Stone: Zakaria Kandahari Was in Facebook Contact With Special Forces After Escaping Arrest

/21 Comments/in , /by
This photo of Zakaria Kandahari appears in Aikens' Rolling Stone article.

This photo of Zakaria Kandahari appears in Aikins’ Rolling Stone article.

By now, you undoubtedly have heard about Matthieu Aikins’ blockbuster story published yesterday by Rolling Stone, in which he provides a full description of war crimes carried out by Special Operations forces in the Nerkh District of Maidan Wardan province, Afghanistan. [If not, go read it in full, now!] I began following this story closely back in February when Hamid Karzai demanded the removal of all Special Operations forces from Maidan Wardak because of the crimes committed by this group. As more details of the crimes slowly emerged after that time, it became more and more clear that although several members of the US Special Operations A-Team participated in the crimes, a translator working for them, going by the name of Zakaria Kandahari, was central to the worst of the events. It eventually emerged that Karzai had demanded in January that the US hand Kandahari over for questioning, but the US eventually claimed that Kandahari had escaped. I had viewed that claim with extreme skepticism. Details provided by Aikins at the very end of his article provide justification for that skepticism, as it turns out that while Kandahari was “missing”, he appears to have used Facebook to stay in contact with the Special Operations team of which he had been a part.

Back in May, the New York Times carried an article detailing some of the charges against Kandahari and providing a description of his disappearance. Note especially the military’s multiple claims that they had nothing to do with the disappearance and did not know where he was:

Afghan officials investigated the events in the Nerkh district, and when they concluded that the accusations of misconduct by the team were true, the head of the Afghan military, Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, personally asked the American commander at the time, Gen. John R. Allen, to hand Mr. Kandahari over to the Afghan authorities.

According to a senior Afghan official, General Allen personally promised General Karimi that the American military would do so within 24 hours, but the promise was not kept, nor was a second promise a day later to hand him over the following morning. “The next morning they said he had escaped from them and they did not know where he was,” the official said.

The American official said the military was not trying to shield Mr. Kandahari. “The S.F. guys tried to pick him up, but he got wind of it and went on the lam, and we lost contact with him,” the official said. “We would have no reason to try to harbor this individual.”

And a spokesman for the American military, David E. Nevers, said General Allen “never had a conversation with General Karimi about this issue.”

That “we lost contact with him” is just one of the many lies put out by the military about this entire series of events. Look at what Aikins uncovered, just by finding Facebook traffic from the A-Team involved (but note that this moves Kandahari’s disappearance back to December from the previous accounts that put it in January): Read more →

Intelligence Committees: Not Informed about Torture, Not Informed about Drone Casualties, Not Informed about US Person Spying

/8 Comments/in , , /by

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released reports on US drone killings today. For the moment, I’m going to outsource reading the reports to Sarah Knuckey’s excellent post.

Both reports (per Knuckey) point to individual drone strikes on civilians that may or probably violate international law.

Specific US strikes killed civilians in violation of the law and US policy.  These are the first major reports by each organization detailing field investigations into specific strikes.  HRW reviewed six strikes in Yemen (occurring between December 2009 and April 2013). HRW concluded that two of the strikes violated international law (pp. 54, 67), four may have (pp. 30, 39, 43, 60), and none of the six appeared to have complied with Obama’s May 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance (p. 89).  AI reviewed all 45 reported Pakistan strikes between January 2012-August 2013, and investigated nine in detail.  AI’s legal findings include that “evidence indicates” that an October 2012 strike unlawfully killed a grandmother and injured eight children (p. 23), and AI had “serious concerns” that a July 2012 strike that killed 18 and injured 22 (p. 24) may have been a war crime or extrajudicial execution (p. 27).  AI also investigated a number of strikes on apparent rescuers (those who came to the scene of a first strike to help the wounded), which it concluded may have been illegal (pp. 28-30).  Neither report seeks to assess the total number or rate of civilian casualties for all strikes.

[snip]

Investigations and accountability obligations. AI states that the US has legal obligations to investigate any cases where there are “reasonable grounds to indicate that unlawful killings have occurred,” and to prosecute, and remedy where appropriate (pp. 35-37).  HRW similarly states that the US has a duty to investigate violations of the laws of war, and that government secrecy effectively denies victims’ right to redress (p. 87).  Both reports also state the US should provide compensation or condolence payments for any civilian harm, but that neither organization is aware of the US having done this (AI, p. 39; HRW, p. 88).

This documentation of civilian casualties, of course, provides further evidence Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers’ claims about civilian casualties are false.

But we knew that.

Which means, in addition to the fact that we’re violating international law with some of our drone killings, we also are seeing a recurrent trend.

Even the CIA’s own lawyer agreed that CIA didn’t properly inform Congress, including the Intelligence Committees, about torture.

We’re learning that vast parts of the NSA’s spying — including spying that collects US person data — remains largely hidden from the Intelligence Committees.

And we have yet more proof they have been misinformed about drone killings.

Is there some dubiously legal program the Intelligence Community has fully informed Congress on?

CIA and the President: The Warm Embrace of Mutual Incrimination

/10 Comments/in , /by

Brennan with TortureAndrew Sullivan is newly convinced — but surprised and confused — that President Obama is permitting John Brennan to hold up the release of the Senate Torture Report.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that one major power-broker in Washington is resisting the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s allegedly devastating report on the torture program run by the Bush-Cheney CIA. That major power-broker is the Obama administration.

You might be surprised by this, given the president’s opposition to torture and abolition of it. But the evidence is at this point irrefutable

[snip]

Brennan answers to the president, who has urged the release of the report.

So why the hold-up? That is the question.

Why is Obama allowing Brennan to undermine Obama’s own position? Why is the president allowing the CIA to prevent the very transparency he once pledged to uphold? I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is now Obama who is the main obstacle to releasing the Senate Report on Torture.

Mind you, the evidence was pretty irrefutable back in May, too, and became more so in July. Moreover, I’m not sure Obama has “urged the release of the report” — though Joe Biden has.

The explanation for Obama’s silence on this report seems pretty obvious if you read both Stephen Preston’s answers to Mark Udall’s questions and Obama’s past actions on torture. In short:

  • Torture was authorized by a Presidential Finding — a fact Obama has already gone to extraordinary lengths to hide
  • CIA has implied that its actions got sanction from that Finding, not the shoddy OLC memos or even the limits placed in those memos, and so the only measure of legality is President Bush’s (and the Presidency generally) continued approval of them
  • CIA helped the (Obama) White House withhold documents implicating the White House from the Senate (Sully does not note this fact, but Katherine Hawkins, whom Sully cited, did)

With specific reference to documents potentially subject to a claim of executive privilege, as noted in the question, a small percentage of the total number of documents produced was set aside for further review. The Agency has deferred to the White House and has not been substantively involved in subsequent discussions about the disposition of those documents.

Indeed, I wonder whether the evidence in the Senate report showing CIA lied to the White House is not, in fact, cover for things some in the White House ordered CIA to do.

This is, I imagine, how Presidential Findings are supposed to work: by implicating both parties in outright crimes, it builds mutual complicity. And Obama’s claimed opposition to torture doesn’t offer him an out, because within days of his inauguration, CIA was killing civilians in Presidentially authorized drone strikes that clearly violate international law.

Again, I think this is the way Presidential Findings are supposed to work: to implicate the President deeply enough to ensure he’ll protect the CIA for the crimes he asks it to commit.

But it’s not the way a democracy is supposed to work.

Barb Mikulski and Stephen Preston Seem to Disagree Over Whether David Petraeus “Jerked Around” Congress

/1 Comment/in , , /by

A big part of Stephen Preston’s response to Mark Udall’s questions about whether he supports adequate disclosure to Congress consists of insisting the CIA Directors he worked with — Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, presumably Mike Morell as Acting Director, and John Brennan — have supported full disclosure to Congress.

Doing a better job of congressional notification and ensuring the proper provision of information concerning covert action and other intelligence activities to the Intelligence Committees has been a top priority of the Directors under which I have served, starting with Director Panetta, and one that I have fully supported.

[snip]

What we regard as proper practice today is driven by faithful application of the National Security Act of 1947. It is also informed by the very high priority the Directors under which I have served have placed on doing a better job of congressional notification and ensuring the proper provision of information concerning covert action and other intelligence activities to the Intelligence Committees. To repeat, I have fully supported these efforts and, if confirmed, will be fully committed to such efforts with respect to the Armed Services Committees.

While it may or may not be true that the Directors under whom Preston has served have not engaged in the kind of manipulative briefings that characterized the torture program, every time I read these assurances from Preston I remembered what Barb Mikulski said at John Brennan’s confirmation hearing.

Now, I want to get to the job of the CIA director. I’m going to be blunt — and this would be no surprise to you, sir.

But I’ve been on this committee for more than 10 years. And with the exception of Mr. Panetta, I feel I’ve been jerked around by every CIA director.

I’ve either been misled, misrepresented, had to pull information out, often at the most minimal kind of way, from Tenet, with his little aluminum rods to tell us that we had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to Porter Goss, not worth coming.

You know the problems we’ve had with torture. The chair has spoken eloquently about it all the way.

And, quite frankly, during those questions, they were evaded, they were distorted, et cetera.

While she didn’t name him as she did Tenet and Goss, neither did she except David Petraeus, like she did Leon Panetta.

This would seem to suggest that Mikulski has a very different understanding of Petraeus’ commitment to briefing Congress than Preston claims to have.