Pre-Emptive Strike on OPR Report: NYT Misrepresents Comey Emails, Claims He Approved Torture

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Update: Read the Comey emails. The NYT has–IMO–grossly misrepresented the emails. Not only have they printed a story with their source’s spin completely untouched, but they have ignored the real news in these emails.

The NYT has been leaked a bunch of the emails that will show up in the Office of Public Responsibility report on John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury’s role in approving torture. (h/t Jason Leopold) Their story on the emails appears to be a pre-emptive (and somewhat misleading) strike on the OPR report due out shortly.

The most news-worthy of these appears to be Jim Comey, agreeing that the May 10, 2005 opinion authorizing waterboarding was “ready to go.”

Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.

That opinion, giving the green light for all 13 C.I.A. methods, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, “was ready to go out and I concurred,” Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times.

While signing off on the techniques, Mr. Comey in his e-mail provided a firsthand account of how he tried unsuccessfully to discourage use of the practices. He made a last-ditch effort to derail the interrogation program, urging Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to argue at a White House meeting in May 2005 that it was “wrong.”

“In stark terms I explained to him what this would look like some day and what it would mean for the president and the government,” Mr. Comey wrote in a May 31, 2005, e-mail message to his chief of staff, Chuck Rosenberg. He feared that a case could be made “that some of this stuff was simply awful.”

Now, I say this is a misleading attempt to pre-empt the OPR report.

I say it’s misleading not because I’m trying defend Comey for “going along with” this memo. But because the story buries the fact that Comey still did oppose the May 30, 2005 May 10 techniques memo (which raises the question of why these approvals came in three different memos).

His objections focused on a second legal opinion that authorized combinations of the methods. He expressed “grave reservations” and asked for a week to revise the memorandum, warning Mr. Gonzales that “it would come back to haunt him and the department,” Mr. Comey said in a 2005 e-mail to Mr. Rosenberg.

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The Hill’s Campfire Games on Intelligence Briefings

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The Hill has a childish article out–one that encourages our Congress to function like a child’s playroom, and one that manufactures "news" at the whim of its sources. The "story," as told by the Hill, is that Republicans attended a closed briefing (the article doesn’t really explain that "closed" means "classified"), and then came out and made claims about what they heard in the briefing.

Republicans ignited a firestorm of controversy on Thursday by revealing some of what they had been told at a closed-door Intelligence Committee hearing on the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Democrats immediately blasted the GOP lawmakers for publicly discussing classified information, while Republicans said Democrats are trying to hide the truth that enhanced interrogation of detainees is effective.

GOP members on the Intelligence Committee on Thursday told The Hill in on-the-record interviews that they were informed that the controversial methods have led to information that prevented terrorist attacks.

When told of the GOP claims, Democrats strongly criticized the members who revealed information that was provided at the closed House Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing. Democrats on the panel said they could not respond substantively, pointing out that the hearing was closed.

Now, reading those first few paragraphs, you’d think you’d find a series of quotes from Republicans in the article that supported the claim that torture "had led to information that prevented terrorist attacks," right? The Hill promised "on the record interviews."

As it turns out, the Hill gives us just one on-the-record quote from a Republican who attended the briefing, and it doesn’t quite live up to billing:

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), a member of the subcommittee who attended the hearing, concurred with Hoekstra [who was not at the briefing, that they told him interrogation worked].
 
“The hearing did address the enhanced interrogation techniques that have been much in the news lately,” Kline said, noting that he was intentionally choosing his words carefully in observance of the committee rules and the nature of the information presented.
 
“Based on what I heard and the documents I have seen, I came away with a very clear impression that we did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots,” Kline said.

Kline makes two claims:

  1. The hearing did "address" techniques that have been in the news lately
  2.  We did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots

And from this, the apparently English-challenged Hill writer, Jared Allen, claims that GOP members–plural Read more →

12 to 16 Bottles, Not 5

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A number of you were discussing the report–from Lawrence Wilkerson and Robert Windrem–that we used water bottles when waterboarding.

In administering the Bush White House’s most infamous “enhanced interrogation” procedure, waterboarding, CIA questioners employed a civilized tool for a brutal task—bottled water, sometimes straight from the fridge.

[snip]

A leading Bush administration official, retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff  to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says that the numbers associated with CIA waterboarding sessions—such as 183 times for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 83 times for al Qaeda training camp commander Abu Zubaydah—may even reflect the number of water bottles expended.

Windrem did a bit of fast math to figure out how many water bottles would have been used.

A one-pint water bottle takes about seven seconds to empty, so four or five bottles would take empty in 30 or 40 seconds, the time prescribed by the Justice Department memo approving the process. (Larger two-liter bottles might have been more efficient. Each takes a full 30 seconds to empty.)

At the risk being pedantic, I wanted to suggest this might not be the correct math. Windrem’s using the description of waterboarding included in the Bybee Two memo. But we know from the May 30, 2005 memo that waterboarding, in practice, used more water than described in the Bybee Two memo.

"[T]he waterboard technique  … was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator …  applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real–and is more poignant and convincing.") [my emphasis] 

And a document submitted by JPRA in support of the Bybee Two memo (and described in the SASC report) gave a description of waterboarding that more closely resembled waterboarding as it was eventually practiced than it did the SERE technique it purportedly described (or the description that got into the Bybee Memo). Read more →

Why Did CIA Hide Dick Cheney’s Role in Briefing?

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Thanks to the WaPo for confirming something I guessed last month. Back then, I wrote,

I’m going to make a wildarsed guess and suggest that when the CIA lists "not available" in a series of 2005 torture briefings to Republicans in Congress, they really mean "Dick Cheney attended, but we don’t want to tell you that."

Today, the WaPo reports,

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees.

[snip]

The CIA made no mention of his role in documents delivered to Capitol Hill last month that listed every lawmaker who had been briefed on "enhanced interrogation techniques" since 2002. For meetings that were overseen by Cheney, the agency told the intelligence committees that information about who oversaw those briefings was "not available."

[snip]

The CIA declined to comment on why Cheney’s presence in some meetings was left out of the records.

[snip]

Several members of Congress who took part in the Cheney meetings declined to comment on them, citing secrecy concerns.

In one of my most unsurprisingly correct wildarsed guesses ever, Cheney was working with the CIA to keep his little torture program, and neither the CIA nor the Republicans he was arm-twisting want to talk about it.

But that ought to be worth some closer attention. WTF did the CIA hide Cheney’s role in these briefings (not to mention the date of their briefing with McCain)? It reveals not only a desire to hide the degree to which these "briefings" under Porter Goss became active lobbying in support of torture, but also the degree to which the CIA is working actively, with a former Administration official (Cheney) to hide their collaboration.

The article does provide two more important details that add to the damning story.

Cheney’s briefings on interrogations began in the winter of 2005 as the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees,  Sen. John D. Rockefeller III (W.Va.) and  Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), publicly advocated a full-scale investigation of the tactics used against top al-Qaeda suspects.

On March 8, 2005 — two days after a detailed report in the New York Times about interrogations — Cheney gathered Rockefeller, Harman and the chairmen of the intelligence panels,  Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and  Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), Read more →

Nadler and State Secrets

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Yesterday, Jerrold Nadler announced he will hold a hearing on state secrets on Thursday.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler (NY-08), Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, will chair a legislative hearing on H. R. 984, the State Secret Protection Act of 2009, his bill to reform the state secret privilege. This hearing will examine the standard of review for what qualifies as a state secret and how best this privilege should be reformed. The hearing will take place on Thursday, June 4th at 2:00pm in Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2141, Washington, D.C.

The state secret privilege allows the government to withhold evidence in litigation if its disclosure would harm national security. The purpose of the privilege is to protect legitimate state secrets; but if not properly policed, it can be abused to conceal embarrassing or unlawful conduct whose disclosure poses no genuine threat to national security. Nadler’s bipartisan bill, the State Secret Protection Act of 2009, co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas Petri (WI-6), would ensure meaningful judicial review of the privilege and prevent premature dismissal of claims. The bill aims to curb abuse of the privilege while protecting valid state secrets.

As it happens, at the same time they announced this, Nadler was speaking on a panel with me about accountability for torture (I’m looking for video–but it may take a while to find it). And he focused closely on state secrets.

Interestingly, he was speaking of state secrets as a means of accountability for not just torture but (obviously) illegal wiretapping. 

Mind you, Nadler is also pushing for an independent prosecutor on torture, so he’s not proposing lawsuits as the sole means for accountability. But he’s thinking of it as a means for accountability.

It seems there are a few problems with that. First, timing. Yes, if state secrets were changed, Binyam Mohamad’s suits could move forward. But for others, a lawsuit would just begin to wend its ways through the courts, but take years and years to resolve.

Furthermore, it’s not just state secrets that protects the wrong-doers. It’s also protections of federal employees from suit. While a lawsuit might expose the wrong-doing of the Bush Administration, it’s not going to land Dick Cheney in jail.

And, ultimately, it’s a concession of Congress’ own failures. When Chris Anders, ACLU’s legislative counsel, argued that indefinite detention would not pass Congress, Nadler pointed to the FISA Read more →

Cheney ‘Fesses Up that Rapport, Not Torture, Got Intelligence

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Greg Sargent catches Cheney parsing carefully about whether the two CIA documents he’s trying to get released will prove that torture works.

The key moment came when his interviewer said: “You want some documents declassified having to do with waterboarding.” Cheney replied:

“Yes, but the way I would describe them is they have to do with the detainee program, the interrogation program. It’s not just waterboarding. It’s the interrogation program that we used for high-value detainees. There were two reports done that summarize what we learned from that program, and I think they provide a balanced view.”

Greg speculates:

My bet is Cheney is planning to cite the valuable intel in the docs and say that the program — of which torture was only a part — was responsible for producing it. He’ll fudge the question of whether the torture itself was actually responsible for generating that information. Cheney is as experienced as any Washington hand at using precise language to obfsucate, and this is the game plan. You heard it here first.

Greg’s right–Cheney’s making a key retreat off his claims. That’s because we know the CIA got a ton of intelligence from some of the detainees, particularly KSM. But I’ve shown repeatedly, with my half-completed review of the KSM intelligence used in the 9/11 Report, that the bulk of this information came long after KSM was waterboarded in March 2003. The first big chunks of intelligence came from him in July 2003, and there were big chunks in the months that followed. This is important because the CIA started using rapport as well as abuse. Though we don’t know when they did so, it is likely that much of the intelligence they got from KSM came at least partly because of this rapport based interrogation. 

So I’m not surprised that the program–including rapport–got intelligence. I’m just curious why Cheney is backtracking on his big claims now.

CIA: Congress Shouldn’t Get Records of Our Crimes

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Mark Hosenball reports on some anonymous current and former CIA officers complaining that Congress wants to do oversight. In particular, they’re bitching that Leon Panetta seems willing to give Congress the operational cables–such as the ones listed in this log–describing the methods used during detainee interrogations and the people who used those methods.

"Operational traffic" refers to cables from the field to CIA headquarters, and they go well beyond the intelligence reports routinely provided to Congress, chronicling in exacting, minute-by-minute detail who did what to whom, and how detainees responded to particular questions and techniques.

[snip]

Panetta’s instinct was to give Congress what it wanted. But undercover officers warned him that this would break with standard practice, and veteran spies worried that it would chill brainstorming between field agents and their controllers. Aiming to compromise, Panetta signaled to Congress that the CIA would turn over only redacted documents—and that it would take a long time to vet as many as 10 million pages of cable traffic.

Congressional investigators aren’t backing down, however, insisting on all of the material without deletions, including names of personnel who participated in harsh questioning, and holding subpoenas in reserve. 

The real purpose of the story, presumably, is for anonymous CIA officers to repeat the old worried threat–that they’ll "lose their sense of mission" if the details of their actions become known to those exercising oversight over them. And, most amusing, the threat that CIA will end oversight if any of these details leak.

"If they blow this, if stuff leaks or it all gets turned into a political circus, you can close the book on the current system of intelligence oversight," one intel official warned. "Nobody will trust it."

Hahahahahahaha!!! After eight years of almost no oversight, after months of CIA claiming it briefed Congress when it didn’t and claiming it said things in briefings that it didn’t. Add in the trumped up intelligence, and there really is no trust in the other direction. And there is no "current system of intelligence oversight." There are the past years, and there’s this, an attempt to actually exercise oversight after the fact. Oversight, of course, that is mandated by law. Yet here you’ve got this guy, threatening to "close the book on the current system of oversight" if this "gets turned into a political circus."

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Bush’s Approved Torture … in 2003?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Carl Levin to Cheney: You’ve Got Nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[snip]

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

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

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

Liz Cheney: Calling My Daddy a Torturer Is Libelous

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

BabyDick says:

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

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