More Insane Rantings from the Crazy Man in the Attic

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Someone let Dick “PapaDick” Cheney out of his undisclosed location last night–they even gave him an award for being a “keeper of the flame.” In spite of the fact that the press is covering it as another serious attack from Cheney, I find it pretty laughable.

How else to treat a speech, for example, in which PapaDick boasts that Rummy got this “flame-keeper” award before him?

I’m told that among those you’ve recognized before me was my friend Don Rumsfeld. I don’t mind that a bit. It fits something of a pattern. In a career that includes being chief of staff, congressman, and secretary of defense, I haven’t had much that Don didn’t get first. But truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such a distinguished list.

From that auspicious start, Cheney launches into a screed against Obama for shutting down missile defense in Czech Republic and Poland–he complains that Obama did not stand by the agreements that Cheney and Bush made.

Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors. You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier. With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith.

It is certainly not a model of diplomacy when the leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic are informed of such a decision at the last minute in midnight phone calls. It took a long time and lot of political courage in those countries to arrange for our interceptor system in Poland and the radar system in the Czech Republic. Our Polish and Czech friends are entitled to wonder how strategic plans and promises years in the making could be dissolved, just like that – with apparently little, if any, consultation.

But he moves directly from that complaint to complaining that Obama is honoring the commitment Bush made to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

Next door in Iraq, it is vitally important that President Obama, in his rush to withdraw troops, not undermine the progress we’ve made in recent years. Read more →

Rage Against Musical Torture

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On Tuesday, I reported a new campaign to close Gitmo (the campaign website is now live). Today, a bunch of musicians are the joining the National Campaign against Torture to FOIA information on how music was used in the government’s torture program.

Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I hereby request the following:

All documents, including but not limited to intelligence reports, briefings, transcripts, talking points, meeting minutes, memoranda, cables, audio/visual recordings and emails produced by the Central Intelligence Agency concerning the use of loud music as a technique to interrogate detainees at U.S.-operated prison facilities at Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan during 2002-the present.

The documents we seek include but are not limited to records that contain explicit references to the following bands or songs, among any other bands or songs mentioned:

AC/DC

Aerosmith

Barney theme song (By Bob Singleton)

The Bee Gees

Britney Spears

Bruce Springsteen

Christina Aguilera

David Gray

Deicide

Don McClean

Dope

Dr. Dre

Drowning Pool

Eminem

Hed P.E.

James Taylor

Limp Bizkit

Marilyn Manson

Matchbox Twenty

Meatloaf

Meow mix jingle

Metallica

Neil Diamond

Nine Inch Nails

Pink

Prince

Queen

Rage against the Machine

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Redman

Saliva

Sesame street theme music (By Christopher Cerf)

Stanley Brothers

The Star Spangled Banner

Tupac Shakur

If you regard any of this material as potentially exempt from the FOIA’s disclosure requirements, I request that you nonetheless exercise your discretion to disclose them.  As you know, President Barack Obama has called upon all agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government.” As the FOIA requires, please release all reasonably segregable, nonexempt portions of documents.  To permit me to reach an intelligent and informed decision whether or not to file an administrative appeal of any denied material, please describe any withheld records (or portions thereof) and explain the basis for your exemption claims.

Among the musicians joining the campaign are Trent Reznor and Tom Morello whose music is among those used in the government’s torture program. As Morello says, “The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me – we need to end torture and close Guantanamo now.” And Jackson Browne–fresh off his victory against McCain and the Republican party for stealing his music–is also joining the campaign.

Me, I hope we can recruit Barney and Big Bird to join the campaign.

This part of the campaign is a great way to show how our nation’s practice of torture perverts our everyday culture.

Rahm’s Greg Craig Campaign

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How many stories–transparently sourced to Rahm Emanuel and predicting Greg Craig’s demise–have to appear before people start asking why Rahm is so persistently targeting Craig? Today’s NYT story follows on at least three other stories of the same genre (one, two, three). And it hides Rahm’s tracks even less than the earlier examples from the genre. There’s the on the record quote from Rahm.

“The president believes he has done a very good job and continues to do a very good job,” Mr. Emanuel said. “The notion that you’re going to blame him is ridiculous. He didn’t create Guantánamo. He is trying to work within the system to meet the president’s goal.”

There’s the blame on Rahm for trimming Craig’s portfolio on high profile issues.

At moments, it has looked as if Mr. Craig’s authority has been trimmed back. Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, assigned Pete Rouse, a senior adviser with deep ties to Capitol Hill, to oversee Guantánamo issues.

Similarly, after Mr. Craig started the search that produced the Supreme Court nomination of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Mr. Emanuel assigned the confirmation fight to Ronald A. Klain and Cynthia Hogan, aides to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with long experience handling judicial appointments.

In both instances, White House officials said that Mr. Craig remained involved but that it made sense to tap people with political backgrounds to manage political issues, particularly since Mr. Craig had so many other duties, like scrutinizing legislation, vetting appointees and selecting judges.

And there’s the description of Rahm’s juvenile taunts going back to the Lewinsky days.

He studied law at Yale with Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton and joined the Clinton White House in 1998 to fight impeachment. Longtime aides resented the newcomer. When the announcement of his appointment described Mr. Craig as the “quarterback” of the impeachment defense, some Clinton aides, including Mr. Emanuel, derisively referred to him as “QB.” (All these years later, Mr. Emanuel said he liked and respected Mr. Craig.)

Read more →

Durham’s Investigation and the Non-Exempt IG Files

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This is rather interesting.

Remember that the ACLU FOIA on the torture tapes covered several things: documents describing what the torture tapes originally depicted and documents discussing the torture tapes, both of which Judge Hellerstein recently said could be withheld to protect the CIA’s torture methods. (Well, okay, he said it protected sources and methods.)

Then there were the documents that discussed the actual destruction of the torture tapes. And the CIA has just determined that parts of 100 Inspector General documents are not exempt from FOIA–but cannot be released because doing so would hinder John Durham’s investigation into the torture tapes.

As required by this Court’s order of September 2, 2009, the CIA has conducted a line-by-line review of approximately 100 responsive OIG documents and processed these documents to identify any non-exempt information for release. The CIA has determined that certain of these 100 documents contain information that is not covered by any FOIA exemptions that may be asserted by the CIA. The CIA has been informed, however, that release of the information in question from the OIG documents would interfere with the ongoing criminal investigation of Special Prosecutor John Durham into the destruction of the videotapes.

This information must be fairly innocuous–if it described the actual content of the videotapes or could be claimed to be pre-decisional or attorney work product, the CIA would claim a FOIA exemption. But the information is either directly relevant to Durham’s investigation or the CIA is making shite up again.

I’m interested in this because of the OIG’s review of the Office of General Counsel’s review of the torture tapes–and because of Jay Rockefeller’s attempts to get more information on precisely that subject. After all, Jay Rock’s request for that information would be non-exempt, as would discussions within OIG of whether or not to respond to him. And those discussions would have taken place in 2005, just before the torture tapes were destroyed.

More Proposed Oversight from John Conyers

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John Conyers has been busy. In addition to drafting bills to improve FISA and PATRIOT (more on that later), he has introduced three more bills that would improve Congressional Oversight of the Executive.

The Department of Justice Inspector General Authority Improvement Act of 2009

This Act will authorize the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate attorney misconduct within the Department of Justice. Under current law, all allegations of wrongdoing by the Department of Justice attorneys are required to be investigated by the by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, rather than the Inspector General. In contrast with the statutorily independent Inspector General, the Office of Professional Responsibility is supervised by the Attorney General.

This limitation on authority does not exist for any other agency Inspector General. The Department of Justice Inspector General Authority Improvement Act of 2009 will make the authority of the Department of Justice Inspector General consistent with that of all other agencies and will prevent future abuses and politicization within the Department.

DOJ’s Inspector General, Glenn Fine, has been pushing for this authority for some time (and not just because it would give him more authority). It fixes two problems that exist right now–one, that lawyers in DOJ are not held legally responsible in the same way as others might be, because they escape IG oversight (and often benefit from quiet settlements on complaints handled by OPR). And, more importantly, the current situation (in which OPR–which reports to the Attorney General–conducts investigations of lawyers) makes it almost impossible to investigate the actions of the Attorney General or his close allies. Alberto Gonzales was able to put off investigations into the US Attorney scandal for some time this way.

The Inspector General Authority Improvement Act of 2009

This Act will provide the Inspectors General of the various agencies the authority to issue subpoenas for the testimony of former employees or contractors as part of certain investigations. Under current law, a critical witness can avoid being interviewed by an Inspector General, and thus seriously impede an investigation, by simply resigning from the agency.

The bill contains important limitations on an Inspector General’s subpoena power in order to prevent abuse or damage to ongoing investigations.  Most prominently, an Inspector General cannot issue a subpoena if the Department of Justice concludes in a particular case that the taking of a deposition would interfere with civil or criminal litigation.

Read more →

The Generals Recommit to Closing Gitmo

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I’ve been waiting for some time for the uniformed military to ratchet up the pressure to close Gitmo. After all, Gitmo remains a symbol of abuses committed against Muslims which puts service men and women at risk.

Today, VoteVets, former Congressman Tom Andrews, and a number of Generals have launched that campaign–with this TV ad and grassroots mobilization.

I’m particularly happy with the way this campaign is targeting those responsible for fear-mongering on Gitmo. Andrews must have said “fear-mongering” about 20 times on a conference call introducing this campaign. And he focused squarely on Dick “PapaDick” and Liz “BabyDick” Cheney for leading that fear-mongering–not to mention those Republicans fear-mongering in Congress. And, as General Johns pointed out, “The people who are [fearmongering] are the people who oppose the ban on torture.”

I’ll have more on this campaign going forward. But it’s good to see someone pushing back against the Cheneys and their friends on torture and Gitmo.

CNN Helps Mike Hayden Uncork A Fine Whine

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Michael Hayden is at it again. This time it is CNN that has donated the bandwidth to his continued petty whining about the release of the OLC Torture Memos. After acknowledging that the matter is over and now simply a matter of history, Hayden, in a “Special to CNN Comment” bearing today’s date, says:

I know that the story has moved on, that the outline of the journalistic narrative has been set, and that the “first draft” of history has been just about finalized. Before the ink dries though, I would like to offer at least a footnote.

And this footnote has to do with President Obama’s decision in April to release opinions drafted by the Department of Justice that detailed the CIA’s interrogation program for high-value al Qaeda detainees.
…
Make no mistake. The decision to release those memos in April was a political one, not a legal one — a question of choice rather than necessity.

This was a deliberate decision and, if it is to be defended, history (and journalism) should demand that it be defended on those grounds and not on some hapless “the judge was going to make me do it” argument.

As I said, this is all now a footnote, and Hellerstein’s September decision was barely remarked in the public discourse.

But the good people of CIA follow this more closely than most and, like the good operators and analysts that they are, they know what they see and they know what it means.

“Make no mistake”, just as the decision to release the torture Memos is old news, so is Hayden’s objection. He made it abundantly clear, on many records, before, during and after the Memos’ release. Why did CNN decide that giving Hayden a prime “special” opportunity to continue the same relentless petulance was a good idea? Where is the CNN “Special Comment” on the decision of the British High Court that heroically proclaimed:

It cannot be suggested that information as to how officials of the U.S. government admitted treating (Binyam Mohamed) during his interrogation is information that can in any democratic society governed by the rule of law be characterized as ’secret’ or as ‘intelligence’…

Where was the CNN “Special Comment” on US Federal Judge Jeffrey White who trumpeted the public’s “right to know” what their government has done in their name in a very similar FOIA case?

Why is it that CNN has special space available for Michael Hayden, a man centrally involved in the alleged Bush war criminal misconduct, to rehash his same old self serving petty whining from months ago, but not for the current news that actually supports the rule of law in a democracy?

Hear No Evil, See No Evil

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In case you haven’t figured out, I’ve been swamped this week (I drove to CO to help my mom pack up her house so I’ve been packing boxes for the last several days). Thanks to bmaz for minding the liquor cabinet (and more importantly, for keeping on top of the news).

In the meantime, there have been two unfortunate developments in torture accountability. First, the House approved Lieberman’s amendment withholding torture photos from FOIA. With the House’s approval, it becomes virtually assured that we will see neither the remaining Abu Ghraib abuse photos, nor some of the photos in CIA’s FOIA.

And so Congress becomes fully complicit in covering up Bush’s crimes.

In addition, Judge Royce Lamberth ruled against the ACLU’s efforts to force the government to release unredacted Combatant Status Review Tribunal transcripts. As you’ll recall, the government released slightly less redacted CSRTs earlier this year. We learned what we already knew–that KSM had lied under torture (though we learned one subject he lied about–Osama bin Laden’s location). In the guise of protecting sources and methods (methods that, most people acknowledge, include torture), the government is withholding unredacted CSRTs.

Between the two events, the government–with the Court’s and Congress’ help–continues to bury the evidence of Bush’s torture program.

Brit High Court Slaps Down US And British Torture Coverup

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In a stunning and refreshing decision, the British High Court has overruled the British government’s attempt to suppress torture evidence on the US and British treatment of Binyam Mohamed. From The Guardian:

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, acted in a way that was harmful to the rule of law by suppressing evidence about what the government knew of the illegal treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was held in a secret prison in Pakistan, the high court has ruled.

In a devastating judgment, two senior judges roundly dismissed the foreign secretary’s claims that disclosing the evidence would harm national security and threaten the UK’s vital intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US.

In what they described as an “unprecedented” and “exceptional” case, to which the Guardian is a party, they ordered the release of a seven-paragraph summary of what the CIA told British officials – and maybe ministers – about Ethiopian-born Mohamed before he was secretly interrogated by an MI5 officer in 2002.

“The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security is inimical to the rule of law,” Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones ruled. “Championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, is the cornerstone of democracy.” (emphasis added)

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how it is done. Make no mistake, this is as big of a slap at the United States government as it is the British and Milibrand. The pure fiction that the security relationship between the two countries rested in the lurch has never been anything short of a craven coverup of unconscionable and criminal conduct.

The Brit High Court was not done though:

“In our view, as a court in the United Kingdom, a vital public interest requires, for reasons of democratic accountability and the rule of law in the United Kingdom, that a summary of the most important evidence relating to the involvement of the British security services in wrongdoing be placed in the public domain in the United Kingdom.”

The judges sharply criticised the way Miliband and his lawyers tried to persuade the Obama administration to back the suppression of the CIA material. Lawyers acting for Mohamed, the Guardian and other media organisations pointed out that Obama had himself set up an inquiry into CIA practices and published details of their interrogation techniques.

In the end, Miliband had to rely for help on a CIA letter to MI6 claiming that disclosure of the document would harm the security of the US and UK.

The judges made it clear they did not believe the claim was credible. “The public interest in making the paragraphs public is overwhelming,” they said.

Production of the evidence will be stayed pending a right to seek appeal, but this is an outstanding decision and opinion. A nice and uplifting piece of news to round out the week.

UPDATE: Per MadDog, here is the AP Report on the High Court’s decision, and a tasty quote:

“It cannot be suggested that information as to how officials of the U.S. government admitted treating (Binyam Mohamed) during his interrogation is information that can in any democratic society governed by the rule of law be characterized as ’secret’ or as ‘intelligence’…”

From the Department of Ironic Reorganization

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It seems Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer wants to do a more effective job of hunting down human rights abusers.

Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer has proposed combining the Criminal Division’s Domestic Security Section and the Office of Special Investigation. If approved by the Office of Management and Budget, the merger would represent the first major structural change in the division since Breuer took office.

The mandates of the sections have grown closer in recent years. OSI, created in 1979, has reshaped its mission from ferreting out Nazis living on American soil to hunting human rights violators who fled all corners of the world, from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia.

DSS, established early in the Bush administration, targets human smuggling rings, immigration fraud, certain violent crimes and gun offenses, and international human rights violations. The section also has jurisdiction over crimes committed oversees by “individuals employed by or accompanying” the U.S. military.

The new entity would be called the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section. Meshing the resources of DSS and OSI could give the Criminal Division a competitive edge over U.S. Attorneys’ offices and other agencies vying to prosecute major human rights cases.

Rather than rearranging the deck chairs, maybe Breuer should just head to Alexandria and Mclean, VA to pick up Addington and Cheney.