OLC Identified 31 Missing Documents During Period Leading Up to Torture Tape Investigation

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As I reported on Monday, DOJ lost not only John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s emails from the period when they were writing the Bybee Memos. It also lost at least 10 documents on torture, a number of them that went into the development of the torture memos.

We first learned these documents had disappeared from a declaration that David Barron, Acting head of OLC, submitted in response to an ACLU FOIA last September. In it, he described the six month effort OLC made last year to recreate the original Vaughn document first created in 2005. With a lot of searching last year, OLC was able to identify 171 documents that might be the documents referenced in the original Vaughn Index.

But OLC appears to have first discovered the problem before last year. Barron’s declaration describes one OLC lawyer attempting–but failing–to identify all the documents in the Vaughn index during late December 2007 or early January 2008. At that time, the OLC lawyer was only able to identify 150 of the 181 documents listed in the Vaughn index.

On at least one occasion in late 2007 or early 2008, when the documents were recalled by OLC from OPR for purposes of another matter, an OLC attorney made significant efforts to recompile the 181 documents listed on the original Vaughn index based on the descriptions of the documents in that index. The attorney made tentative identifications of approximately 150 of the 181 documents and marked the original documents with pencil numbers corresponding to the Vaughn index in the lower left-hand corner of each of those 150 documents.

It’s likely, but not certain, that these documents were recalled as part of DOJ’s review of whether it should criminally investigate the torture tape destruction (news of the tape destruction broke December 6 and Mukasey announced the investigation on January 2). And whether or not that’s why they recalled these documents, the OLC lawyer who tried to recreate the Vaughn index had to have been aware that CIA had destroyed evidence of its torture program.

And yet, according to Barron’s declaration, no one made any attempt to look for the 31 documents that OLC lawyer had not been able to find for more than another year.

That’s a remarkably lax attitude regarding documents potentially disappearing from a SCIF.

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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Ibn Sheikh al-Libi’s and Abu Zubaydah’s Coffins

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At Mary’s instigation, I went back to look at Ibn Sheikh al-Libi’s description of how he was shoved into a coffin-like box in Egypt. (Thanks to burnt for the searchable copy.)

According to al-Libi, the foreign government service [redacted] “stated that the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq. … This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.” Al-Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then “placed him in a small box approximately 50cm x 50cm.” He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, alLibi claims that he was given a last opportunity to “tell the truth.” When al-Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al-Libi claimed that “he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back.” Al-Libi told CIA debriefers that he then “was punched for 15 minutes.”216

(U) Al-Libi told debriefers that “after the beating,” he was again asked about the connection with Iraq and this time he came up with a story that three al-Qa’ida members went to Iraq to learn about nuclear weapons. Al-Libi said that he used the names of real individuals associated with al-Qa’ida so that he could remember the details of his fabricated story and make it more believable to the foreign intelligence service. Al-Libi noted that “this pleased his [foreign] interrogators, who directed that al-Libi be taken back to a big room, vice the 50 square centimeter box and given food.”217

That mock burial–and al-Libi’s subsequent lies about Iraqi ties with al Qaeda–happened sometime before February 22, 2002, when a DIA cable challenged the report.

This is the first report from Ibn al-Shaykh [al-Libi] in which he claims Iraq assisted al-Qa’ida’s CBRN efforts. However, he lacks specific details on the Iraqi’s involvement, the CBRN materials associated with the assistance, and the location where the training occurred. It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest. Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control

Al-Libi was, you’ll recall, the onsite manager of the Khalden training camp, a camp that trained a range of Muslims, a policy that  put it at odds with Osama bin Laden, who wanted training to be limited to al Qaeda operatives.

Just over a month after al-Libi claimed, having been shoved in a coffin for almost a day, there were ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, the US captured al-Libi’s associate, Abu Zubaydah, who handled logistics for Khalden. Rather than send Abu Zubaydah off to the Egyptians, as the US had done with al-Libi, they instead sent Abu Zubaydah to a CIA run black site in Thailand.

And there, less than three months after the Egyptians shoved Ibn Sheikh al-Libi in a coffin overnight, James Mitchell threatened to do the same with Abu Zubaydah. Ali Soufan objected and told Mitchell doing so was torture. Soufan left the black site and alerted DOJ of what Mitchell had intended to do.

And then, some time later (Abu Zubaydah says it was about 3 months after his surgery, so perhaps mid-July) they did shove Abu Zubaydah in that coffin-like box. Read more →

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.

Did DOJ “Lose” the Smoking Gun Torture Document?

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You know what I find surprisingly absent from the OPR Report?

Any discussion of how–just days after potentially receiving a document making clear that SERE techniques were torture and that torture was not effective–John Yoo still authorized the use of torture in US interrogations.

Here are the last two paragraphs of that document:

(U) Another important aspect of the debate over the use of torture is the consideration of its potential impact on the safety of U.S. personnel captured by current and future adversaries. The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel. While this would have little impact on those regimes or organizations that already employ torture as a standard means of operating, it could serve as the critical impetus for those that are currently weighing the potential gains and risks associated with the torture of U.S. persons to accept torture as an acceptable option.

(U) CONCLUSION: The application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably, the potential to result in unreliable information. This is not to say that the manipulation of the subject’s environment in an effort to dislocate their expectations and induce emotional responses is not effective. On the contrary, systematic manipulation ofthe subject’s environment is likely to result in a subject that can be exploited for intelligence information and other national strategic concerns. [my emphasis]

This document was written by JPRA–the people that administer the SERE program from which our torture program was purportedly reverse-engineered. It provides clear evidence that, on July 25, 2002, JPRA was aware of an ongoing debate over whether or not to use torture with prisoners in US custody. The document clearly states that torture leads to unreliable information. And the document calls these techniques “torture.”

You’d think, if there were proof Yoo had read it, that OPR would include some discussion of how JPRA’s expert opinion that this was torture should have affected Yoo’s own definition of torture (heck–JPRA’s language here would be more on point than the “organ failure” language that Yoo and Jennifer Koester used to define torture). You’d think, given the experts’ opinion that torture produced unreliable information, OPR would have challenged Yoo’s acceptance of the CIA’s claims that torture was the only way to get Abu Zubaydah to reveal the intelligence they claimed he had. You’d think OPR would ask Yoo why–given his reliance on the same JPRA experts to claim that waterboarding didn’t cause psychological harm–he chose to ignore this document from JPRA.

This document, in other words, ought to be a cornerstone of OPR’s analysis of Yoo’s failure to provide independent analysis and include all relevant information about what constituted torture. It ought to be used as proof that Yoo knew he was authorizing what the experts deemed to be torture.

If OPR had proof Yoo read this document, it would be the “smoking gun” that when he wrote the torture memo he knew he was deliberately authorizing torture.

But it’s not clear whether Yoo did read it. And it’s not clear that if he did, proof to that fact would still have been in OLC’s collection of torture documents by the time OPR got around to reviewing those documents.

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Conyers Asks for the White House Side of Yoo and Philbin’s Emails

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The letter the National Archives wrote to DOJ last week inquiring about John Yoo’s missing emails focused on DOJ’s violation–as a Federal Agency–of the Federal Records Act.

Now, John Conyers is taking the reverse approach–asking for email exchanges to which the White House was a party–which would be preserved pursuant to the Presidential Records Act.

Any of the missing emails that included White House personnel should have been preserved as Presidential Records and be maintained in your archives. Therefore, I request that you search the relevant records (including both classified and unclassified materials) and provide the Committee with:

  • Any emails including John Yoo sent or received between March 1, 2002, and May 31, 2003.
  • Any emails including Patrick Philbin sent or received between July 1, 2002, and August 5, 2002.

Please make every effort to expedite this request. At a minimum, please provide at [sic] preliminary report on the results of your records search as soon as possibly, and in any event no later than March 15, 2010.

NARA is bound to find one of two things: that the abundant discussions between David Addington and John Yoo in this period (and more limited conversations with John Bellinger) have, like John Yoo’s DOJ emails, simply disappeared. Alternately, maybe they’ll find the White House’s side of emails with John Yoo, about this, and other things (such as the warrantless wiretapping program).

Any bets it’ll be the former?

At the very least, it’ll be a nice test to see how far along NARA’s project of restoring all the destroyed White House emails is coming along.

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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The Mock Burial in the OPR Report

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CIA’s torturers asked DOJ to let them use mock burials. But DOJ said no.

PDF page 42 of the OPR Report (searchable copy here) includes a list of the torture techniques that Mitchell and Jessen recommended be used with Abu Zubaydah. Whereas the Bybee Two Techniques memo approves ten techniques, Mitchell and Jessen recommended twelve. In other words, Mitchell and Jessen asked for two techniques to be approved that did not get specific approval.

One of these (technique 10) is diapering. We know they used diapers anyway as it was a critical element of their sleep deprivation and stress position techniques.

Technique 12 remains redacted in this report. But as I pointed out last week, PDF page 178 of the First Draft includes an unredacted reference to the technique.

Goldsmith viewed the Yoo Memo itself as a “blank check” that could be used to justify additional EITs without further DOJ review. 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. [my emphasis]

The twelfth technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.

There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the Bybee Two memo, because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page 60 in the Final Report) includes a page and a half of redactions following the discussion of leaving it out.

That redaction almost certainly includes a discussion of why mock burial was so important to include in the memo: Because we know that James Mitchell threatened to use it in May 2002. And after Mitchell did threaten to use it, Ali Soufan called it “borderline torture.” After he told FBI’s Counterterrorism Assistant Director Pasquale D’Amuro about the technique, D’Amuro instructed him to leave the black site.  As follow-up to this meeting, a bunch of DOJ bigwigs–including Michael Chertoff–had a meeting about Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation. At about the same time, Chertoff refused to give the CIA advance declination of prosecution for torture.

Curiously, the DOJ’s IG Report on torture says the CIA asked for 10 torture techniques to be included in its OLC memo, not 12.

Now, it’s not clear whether Mitchell and Jessen ever did use mock burial with Abu Zubaydah. Zubdaydah didn’t mention it in the narrative he gave to the ICRC of his treatment.

But there are two more reasons why Yoo’s refusal to approve mock burial is dangerous for the CIA. First, an FBI agent told CIA and DOJ that the technique was borderline torture. Nevertheless, the CIA asked to have the technique available to it.

Also, any legal discussion of why mock burial would be a problem would focus on how torture statutes prohibit the threat of imminent death. Yet after mock burial was specifically excluded as a torture technique, CIA torturers went on to threaten detainees with a power drill and a gun. In other words, someone at that CIA had already been told, specifically, that they could not use the threat of imminent death on detainees. But on at least two occasions, they did so anyway.

OPR Working Thread Part Three

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Happy Sunday.

Here are the HJC copies of all these documents:

And burnt has made available searchable copies to everything here.

My notes on the first draft are here.

My notes on the second draft, the Mukasey response, and the Yoo response are here.

I’m going to go through the first Bybee response in this thread. All page references will be to the PDF page, not the document page.

Mahoney’s Lies

I have read enough of Margolis’ response to have had the impression that Maureen Mahoney, Bybee’s lawyer, was much more attentive to her client’s needs than Bybee was when he was working in OLC.

But the first paragraph–which is replete with outright errors and propaganda–changes my mind on that front.

Six months after the September 11,2001 attacks, United States forces captured top al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah. Because Zubaydah had assumed the role of chief military planner for al Qaeda, he possessed critical imminent threat information. In particular, the Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) determined that Zubaydah had information about a “second wave” of devastating attacks targeting, among other things, the tallest building in Los Angeles. After Zubaydah resisted traditional interrogation methods, the CIA developed an enhanced strategy for Zubaydah and asked the attorneys at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for its opinion on the legality ofusing ten specific interrogation techniques to interrogate him. The request required OLC to interpret the federal criminal anti-torture statute found at 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A-a statute that had never before been interpreted by any court. The statute defines torture as an act “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain.”

It is true that they captured Abu Zubaydah (aka “Boo boo”) roughly six months after 9/11. But almost everything else in this paragraph is false–and was known to be false when Mahoney wrote it. We know that AZ was not a top AQ leader, was not the chief military planner for AG (ferchrissakes, KSM was!). It is true that CIA claimed AZ had information about a second wave of attacks. But he didn’t. We also know that AZ responded to traditional interrogation methods. And OLC was not asked to opine on the legality of ten techniques. They were asked to opine on twelve (the ten that got approved, plus diapering and mock burial). And it wasn’t until days before the opinion was released that CIA asked for approval of those specific techniques.

In short, Mahoney’s response is premised on known lies.

Maybe we should report her to her bar council…

As it turns out, this is not just empty lies–she returns to this false portrayal of what happened later in the document to support her argument that this was a limited opinion.

On March 28, 2002, American and Pakistani intelligence agents captured Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda leader. After the death of Mohammed Atef during the American invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001, Zubaydah had assumed the role of chief military planner for al Qaeda, ranking in importance only behind Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. Shortly after Zubaydah’s capture, in early April 2002, the CIA’s Office of General Counsel began discussions with the Legal Advisor to the National Security Council (“NSC”) and OLC concerning the CIA’s proposed interrogation plan for Zubaydah. OPR gives no weight to and even fails to acknowledge that the Techniques Memo related only to Zubaydah, a known, hardened terrorist, trained in resistance whose mental and physical conditions were known to the CIA. The CIA asked OLC to evaluate the legality of ten specific interrogation methods proposed for use with Zubaydah.3

Of course, we know they were already subjecting Binyam Mohamed to sleep deprivation at this time.

Who reviewed the document

This is interseting. Maybe Mahoney wants to provide us more detail of the review process, because that doesn’t appear in the report.

Various drafts of the memos were reviewed by the Attorney General, the White House Counsel, the Deputy White House Counsel, the CIA General Counsel, the NSC General Counsel, the Attorney General’s legal advisor, the Head of DOJ’s Criminal Division, and the Vice President’s Legal Counsel.

Especially since almost all of these people were more involved in the memo with Bybee’s name on it than Bybee was.

But it’s also interesting because it puts Addington more strongly in the mix than he admits.

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Duke Cunningham Rails against Leadership Failures and Scandals

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Okay, it’s been a busy day. But I thought I’d throw out this little tidbit just to lighten your afternoon.

On page 86 of this FOIA packet, a CIA MFR from a May 6, 2004 briefing on the Abu Ghriab scandal records Duke Cunningham’s outrage that DOD had not informed the House Intelligence Committee of the looming Abu Ghraib story. He wailed about how scandals cause a stain on the United States.

Other scandals. The pages here in Congress. Enron. The Catholic Church. In all these cases, the focus isn’t on the good but on the bad. There is a stain on the US as a result of this and that is what has us so upset. Leadership is at the point of contact. Here, they seem to have lost all attention to detail. Bureaucracies tend to prevent immediate action. There are exceptions to the chain of command. When I was a wing commander in the military, I told my people to go to me directly and speedily in certain cases. They included sexual harrassment. Radical prejudice. Spouse and child abuse. Drug abuse. In other words, any issues that could prove critical to the reputation of the unit, the service or our country. Twice, I shut down my squadron to address such issues. We are upset by the failure here to notify.

To which Jane Harman responded,

Hear, hear!

Slightly over a year after Cunningham made this impassioned speech, news began to break that Cunningham was selling himself to Defense contractors for–among other goodies–a yacht named the Duke Stir.

But boy can he make a nice speech, in the privacy of a classified briefing.