Surely They’ll Resort to Pixie Dust on This

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MadDog linked to this while I was away at the dentist, but since I’m a big fan of both Secrecy News and of Bill Leonard, I wanted to highlight it in a post of its own.

Bill Leonard, who until Cheney chased him away last December, was the person overseeing the Information Security Oversight Office (making him one of the top people in the government overseeing the use of classification and declassification). He confirms what we’ve been saying: the classification surrounding the Torture Memo was improper.

“The disappointment I feel with respect to the abuse of the classification system in this instance is profound,” said Mr. Leonard, who recently retired as director of the Information Security Oversight Office, which reports to the President on classification and declassification policy.

“The document in question (pdf) is purely a legal analysis,” he said, and it contains “nothing which would justify classification.”

Beyond that crucial fact, the binding technical requirements of classification were ignored.

Thus, he explained: There were no portion markings, identifying which paragraphs were classified at what level. The original classifier was not identified on the cover page by name or position. The duration of classification was not given. A concise basis for classification was not specified. Yet all of these are explicitly required by the President’s executive order on classification.

“It is not even apparent that [John] Yoo [who authored the memo] had original classification authority,” Mr. Leonard said.

“All too often, government officials simply assert classification. To enjoy the legal safeguards of the classification system, you need to do more than that. Those basic, elemental steps were not followed in this instance.”

“Also, for the Department of Defense to declassify a Department of Justice document,” as in this case, “is highly irregular,” Mr. Leonard said.

(The DoD declassifier mistakenly cited “Executive Order 1958″ on the cover page of the declassified memorandum. The correct citation is “Executive Order 12958, as amended.”)

Violations of classification policy pale in comparison to the policy deviations authorized by the Justice Department memo, which was ultimately rescinded. Nevertheless, such classification violations are significant because they enabled the Administration to pursue its interrogation policies without independent scrutiny or accountability.

“To learn that such a document is classified has the same effect for me as waking up one morning and learning that after all these years there is a ’secret’ Article IV to the Constitution that the American people did not even know about,” said Mr. Leonard. [my emphasis]

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Embarrassment-Free Show Trials

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The Miami Herald (which is doing good work on the Gitmo show trials) has a description of some of the ways the military is ensuring that the Gitmo show trials don’t lead to the release of any embarrassing information.

A defense lawyer lets slip at the war court convening here that a battlefield commander changed an Afghanistan firefight report in a way that seemed to help a U.S. government murder case. Reporters hear the field commander’s name but are forbidden to report it.

In another case, a judge approves the release of a captive’s interrogation video showing the blurred face of an American agent. But a federal prosecutor on loan to the Pentagon withholds it “out of an abundance of caution.”

Even as the U.S. government edges toward full-blown, war-crimes trials by military commission here, with more hearings next week, all sides are grappling with what information can be made public and what must be kept secret.

Consider: A new courtroom here sequesters Pentagon-approved spectators behind a soundproofed window. If a terror suspect tries to shout about his treatment in U.S. custody, a military censor can mute the audio feed that observers hear.

Under rules that protect interrogation techniques, the Pentagon’s war court won’t let the reputed 9/11 architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, say he was waterboarded — something the CIA director, Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, confirmed on Feb. 5.

This will, I suspect, make for a very interesting First Amendment case before the show trials are done (and yes, the ACLU is already working on just that thing). Until those cases work their way through the courts, though, I hope we see more articles like this. They expose the degree to which these are show trials. And the degree to which the military is worried about not just sensitive security information, but also embarrassing information such as the name of the Colonel who allegedly framed Omar Khadr for murder, will be released.

And if there were any doubt about the speciousness of the claim, compare what Gordon England says when he has a pragmatic reason to want to avoid showing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed publicly:

Gordon England, deputy secretary of defense, issued a memo banning the release of Guantánamo detainee photos. The Pentagon is bound by the Geneva Conventions not to humiliate detainees, it said, and “We respect the dignity of all persons.”

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Chertoff Keeps Waiving Laws

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I’m kind of glad that I put off posting on the Administration’s waiver of environmental laws so it can put up its pathetic little wall on the border with Mexico.

In a sweeping use of its authority, the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that it would bypass environmental reviews to speed construction of fencing along the Mexican border.

Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, issued two waivers covering 470 miles of the border from California to Texas well as a separate 22-mile stretch in Hidalgo County, Tex., where the department plans to build fencing up to 18 feet high into a flood-control levee in a wildlife refuge.

“Criminal activity at the border does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation,” Mr. Chertoff said in a statement.

The announcement angered environmental groups, which have raised concerns through lawsuits and public hearings about the damage that fencing could cause to wildlife. Property owners, particularly along the Rio Grande, have also objected to what they considered federal intrusion on their land and access to the river.

That’s because Marty Lederman, in the first of a series on the Torture Memo, noticed something no one has yet noticed in the memo.

From all that appears, John was not acting entirely on his own with respect to the March 14th Opinion. Section II of the memo is where much of the most astounding legal analysis appears. In that section, John concludes that the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming, and stalking (i.e., threats) simply do not apply to the military in the conduct of war, by virtue of four "canons of construction": (i) that criminal statutes should not be construed to apply to the military during war; (ii) that they should not be construed to apply to the sovereign more broadly; (iii) that they are superseded as to the military by the Uniform Code of Military Justice; and (iv) of course, that if Congress did mean for them to apply in this context, it would be a violation of the Commander in Chief’s prerogatives.

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The “John Yoo, Let’s Pretend We’re Lawyers” Game

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Here’s a fun little game you bloggers can try at home. It’s called the "John Yoo, Let’s Pretend We’re Lawyers" game.

  1. Take an 81-page opinion dealing with the degree to which the President’s power is bound (or not) by existing laws during war time
  2. Open both parts of that opinion in your PDF reader (Part One, Part Two)
  3. Using the search function on your PDF reader, search for the word "Youngstown"
  4. Guess how many citations to Youngstown you find–go on, guess!

Peterr helpfully suggests via email, "Maybe it was redacted for national security reasons."

And in case you were worried that Yoo simply doesn’t know about Youngstown, see this link (also courtesy of Peterr), that demonstrates that Professor Yoo believes it is the first text to consider in any discussion of separation of powers.

Acting Counsels and Torture

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Marty Lederman links to the finally declassified March 2003 memo authorizing torture in the military (Part One, Part Two). He reminds us the significance of the memo:

As I’ve discussed previously — see for instance here and here, and as Jane Mayer has reported in great detail, the March 14th Yoo memorandum, and the April 2, 2003 DOD Working Group Report that incorporated its outrageous arguments about justifications for ignoring statutory limits on interrogation, was secretly briefed to Geoffrey Miller before he was assigned to Iraq, and became the source of all the abuse that occurred there in 2003 and early 2004. (In late 2004, new OLC head Jack Goldsmith reviewed the March 2003 memo, was stunned by what he later called the "unusual lack of care and sobriety in [its] legal analysis" — it "seemed more an exercise of sheer power than reasoned analysis" — and immediately called the Pentagon to implore them not to rely upon it. Later, the next head of OLC, Dan Levin, wrote the Pentagon to confirm that they rescind any policies that had been based on the Yoo memo. See the whole story here.)

But I’m even more interested in this part of Marty’s post:

On Friday, March 13, 2003, Jay Bybee left his office as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. The very next day — a Saturday — John Yoo, merely a Deputy AAG in the Office, issued his notorious memo to the Pentagon, on behalf of OLC, which effectively gave the Pentagon the green light to disregard statutory limits on torture, cruelty and maltreatment in the treatment of detainees.

It describes how, as soon as the established top lawyer for one part of the executive branch left, his replacement took responsibility for a significant legal act. I find it ironic, particularly given the stamp that appears on the first page of the first part of the memo:

Declassify under authority of Executive Order 1958
By Acting General Counsel, Department of Defense,
By Daniel J. Dell’Orto
31 March 2008

Dell’Orto, you’ll remember, replaced William Haynes at some point last month. I’m not precisely sure when Haynes’ last day was–but within weeks of taking over as Acting General Counsel at DOD, Dell’Orto declassified an opinion we’ve been trying to declassify for years. Read more →

Not Even John Yoo Approved of the Illegal Wiretap Program

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I do hope that Eric Lichtblau’s book gets enough coverage this week to further stall Jello Jay’s attempts to ram through telecom immunity. The excerpt in the NYT today reveals that when the illegal wiretap program started in 2001, it had no specific legal authorization–not even from the compliant John Yoo!

Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, assured nervous officials that the program had been approved by President Bush, several officials said. But the presidential approval, one former intelligence official disclosed, came without a formal legal opinion endorsing the program by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.

At the outset of the program in October 2001, John Ashcroft, the attorney general, signed off on the surveillance program at the direction of the White House with little in the way of a formal legal review, the official said. Mr. Ashcroft complained to associates at the time that the White House, in getting his signature for the surveillance program, “just shoved it in front of me and told me to sign it.”

Aides to Mr. Ashcroft were worried, however, that in approving a surveillance program that appeared to test the limits of presidential authority, Mr. Ashcroft was left legally exposed without a formal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, which acts as the legal adviser for the entire executive branch.

At that time, the office had already issued a broad, classified opinion declaring the president’s surveillance powers in the abstract in wartime, but it had not weighed in on the legality or the specifics of the N.S.A. operation, officials said.

The nervousness among Justice Department officials led the administration to secure a formal opinion from John Yoo, a deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel, declaring that the president’s wartime powers allowed him to order the N.S.A. to intercept international communication of terror suspects without a standard court warrant.

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Feith Based Initiative At The Pentgon

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Grover Norquist can pretty much pull the drain plug now; the job of eviscerating the United States Government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" is about complete. The latest breaking news out of the Pentagon is that the US mistakenly shipped ICBM warhead nuclear triggering mechanisms to Taiwan.

The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that it mistakenly shipped non-nuclear components for an intercontinental ballistic missile to Taiwan from a U.S. Air Force base in Wyoming.
…
At a Pentagon news conference, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said the misshipped items were four nose cone assemblies for ICBMs. He also said they were delivered to Taiwan in March 2005 and had been sent instead of helicopter batteries that had been ordered by Taiwan.
…
”It is a component for the fuse in the nosecone for a nuclear system,” Wynne said. ”We are very concerned about it.”

Well, that’s understandable. Because thermonuclear warhead triggers probably look just like helicopter batteries, right? Oy and ugh.

Apparently, the Cheney/Bush Administration planting of "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the planet" at the Pentagon is paying dividends even after Doug Feith is long gone, because there seems to be some real competence issues over there, and, critically, with regard to our military’s handling of it’s nuclear weapons. As you might recall, it was not long ago that there were some empty quivers and bent spears out of another upper mid-west Air Force Base. In late August, 2007, six live nuclear cruise missiles went missing.

The nuclear weapons were “lost” for 36 hours after taking off on August 29 on a cross-country journey from the remote Minot air force base in North Dakota to Barksdale in Louisiana. Major-General Richard Newton, air force deputy chief of staff, said there was an “unprecedented” series of procedural errors, which revealed “an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards”.

There is bound to be a lot of speculation and discussion on the latest incident that is just now being revealed in spite of the fact that it occurred all the way back in 2005. Hopefully, it will also renew the discussion of the Minot/Barksdale incident, which kind of faded from the national conscience (if you want a decent rundown on some of the various theories and weird facts on the Minot/Barksdale event, see here). So how will the Six Sigma management geniuses of the Bush Administration respond to these disturbing examples Read more →

A Failure of Legal Scholarship

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The smart legal types in the blogosphere have weighed in on whether or not OPR’s investigation of two OLC opinions (the rationale for warrantless wiretapping and the rationale for torture) can accomplish anything. Marty Lederman writes,

I have previously questioned whether such an ethics-based investigation makes any sense. My colleague David Luban has argued, alternatively, that it does. Whatever the merits of that particular argument might be, there is something else a bit odd about the OPR investigation: The new Attorney General has effectively adopted and ratified the post-Yoo OLC opinions as reflecting current, official DOJ views. How could OPR, which is subordinate to the AG, promulgate the conclusion that the legal advice the AG has embraced is not "consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys"? As Emily Bazelon points out in an excellent recent column, OPR does not appear to have the independent authority to overrule the AG in that respect.

[snip]

Myself, I remain a bit skeptical of what could come from such an investigation, by either OPR or the IG. If either of them "found" that OLC’s advice was wrong, or even egregiously wrong, it would remain the case that OLC, the AG and the President disagree.

In an op-ed in the National Law Journal, Sheldon Whitehouse (who pushed OPR to conduct the torture-related of these two investigations) elucidates what he thinks the OPR is likely to to find.

This substantial body of precedent [finding waterboarding illegal] has been documented by Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Trans- national Law. Most notably, Wallach details incidents of waterboarding prosecuted by DOJ itself: the 1983 federal prosecution of a Texas county sheriff who waterboarded prisoners. The indictment asserted that the defendants conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating ‘water torture’ ordeal in order to coerce confessions." The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted. The 5th U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed. U.S. v. Lee, 744 F.2d 1124 (1983). At sentencing, U.S. District Judge James DeAnda admonished the former sheriff, "The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country."

How is it that the OLC, the elite legal conscience of DOJ, completely missed a U.S. Court of Appeals case on point, a case in which DOJ itself had brought the charges, and a case whose prosecuting assistant U.S. attorney is still in the department? Is this a failure of legal analysis, or something much, much worse?

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“Dude, that’s what they want.”

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Babak Pasdar’s affidavit on Verizon’s Quantico Circuit reveals something about the government’s back-door access to all of Verizon’s data, one which might be familiar to you from the missing White House emails saga.

When the Steven McDevitt tried to reconstruct all OVP the emails from the period when Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney were coordinating their cover story, he discovered no logs from the emails of that period existed; thus, there’s no way to be sure that the 250 pages of email turned over to Patrick Fitzgerald constitute all the missing emails.

Golly. What a surprise, then, that the government didn’t want any logs taken of its back-door access to (presumably) Verizon’s data.

Pasder notes that (presumably) Verizon’s log collection system was very primitive.

I specifically remembered being shocked at the primitiveness and inadequacy of their log collection system. After all, this was a major carrier. After a cursory overview I was able to point out to C1 and C2 that their log collection system might not have been collecting all logs. This surprised C1 and C2. A subsequent test showed that the client’s log collection system was missing as many as 75% of the logs being generated, essentially rendering the whole system useless.

Mind you, that covered the whole system, not just the Quantico Circuit the government was using to access the system. But when Pasdar describes learning about the Circuit itself, he explains that there was no logging system for the Circuit. None.

This is a little narrative he tells about learning of the Circuit when testing the firewalls of the new system he was putting in.

At one point I overheard C1 and C2 talking about skipping a location. Not wanting to do a shoddy job I stopped and said "we should migrate all sites."

C1 told me this site is different.

I asked, "Who is it? Carrier owned or affiliate?"

C1 said, "This is the ‘Quantico Circuit.’"

Pasdar goes on to learn that this is a 45 mega bit per second circuit that supports data and voice communication. The consultants he was working with made it clear they weren’t supposed to put any access controls on it.

C1 said that this circuit should not have any access control. He actually said it should not be firewallled.

I suggested to migrate it and implement an "Any-Any" rule. ("Any-Any" is a nickname for a completely open policy that does not enforce any restrictions.) That meant we could log any activity making a record of the source, destination and type of communication. It would have also allowed easy implementation of access controls at a future date. "Everything at least SHOULD be logged," I emphasized.

C1 said, "I don’t think that is what they want."

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My Version of Pelosi’s Statement on Exclusivity

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TPMM wrote up a summary of a response Speaker Pelosi gave to a question I asked at a blogger conference call today that has caused a stir. While I don’t disagree with McJoan’s take–if the Speaker had really said immunity was the issue, it would reflect a short-sighted view of FISA (though I’d say the same about other topics, such as segregation; after all, once the government can legally use information that has been improperly collected, that’s toothpaste out of a tube, too)–I’d like to give my version of the conversation, because I don’t think that’s what Pelosi said or meant.

The call was originally supposed to be focused on contempt. So after the Speaker finished telling about the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity bill, someone (Mike Stark, I think) asked for reassurances that the Democrats would continue to pursue contempt after we win the White House and larger margins in both houses next year. Pelosi spoke at length about how important this contempt fight is because of the separation of powers issue–and stated that this is a better case than when GAO tried to get Cheney’s records on his Energy Task Force. Finally, in response to a follow-up, Pelosi stated that Democrats would continue to pursue the contempt issue after November.

Then, I piped in. I basically asked the idea laid out in this post.

Email providers argue that immunity will contribute to uncertainty. They speak of receiving "vague promises," they demand "clear rules" and "bright lines."

Given that complaints about uncertainty and unclear demands have led these email providers to strongly oppose retroactive immunity, it suggests the requests the email providers got were really murky–murky enough that the requests caused the email providers a good deal of trouble.

If the government was making such murky requests, don’t you think Congress ought to know what those requests were in more detail?

That is, since email providers just made a very strong statement against immunity, shouldn’t we be asking them why they’re opposed to it?

Pelosi, having just spoken at length about about separation of powers, then said that immunity wasn’t the only issue, exclusivity was important as well.

Note, I’m not sure I can dispute Paul Kiel’s description, though I don’t remember Pelosi emphasizing exclusivity in the way his post suggests at all. I certainly didn’t hear her say immunity is the issue, but then I was listening for my answer. Read more →