CIA to Release Videotape Docs to Senate Committee

Originally posted at Daily Kos

In a turnabout, the CIA said "it would begin handing over documents to Congress about the destruction of videotapings showing the harsh interrogation of two terror suspects after the House Intelligence Committee threatened to subpoena two agency officials," according to a breaking story from Associated Press.

This comes after the bombshell revelations earlier yesterday that at least four administration officials, including David Addington, Harriet Myers and Alberto Gonzales, were involved in discussions about what to do with these incriminating videotapes. dday had an excellent diary on this earlier.

The turnabout also comes after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said he was going to subpoena former and current CIA officials and attorneys if they didn't agree to appear before the committee. The agreement by CIA apparently also includes agreement on the testimony of CIA general counsel John Rizzo, the official who is said to have ordered the destruction of the tapes, though CIA won't commit him to a specific date.

According to the AP story:

The committee's announcement is another sign of increasing tensions between Congress, the judiciary and the White House over the interrogation tapes. Congressional overseers are angry they were not fully informed of the tapes and their destruction, and want to know what else they have not been told. A federal judge has summoned Justice Department lawyers to his courtroom Friday to determine whether the destruction of the tapes violated a court order to preserve evidence about detainees.

Reyes also wants the CIA to make available CIA attorneys Steve Hermes, Robert Eatinger, Elizabeth Vogt and John McPherson to testify before the committee. Former CIA directors Porter Goss and George Tenet, former deputy director of operations James. L Pavitt, and former general counsel Scott Muller are also on his list.

Reyes also denounced the Justice Department for trying to interfere with Congressional investigation into the matter, when the CIA inspector general sent a letter to his committee last Friday, telling Congress to suspend its investigation, arguing (speciously) that such an investigation would interfere with the joint Justice Department/CIA internal (bullshit) investigation into the matter.

It would be folly to believe that victory here is total. It's not clear Reyes will get all the participants the Committee wants to agree to testify. Also, it would be hard to believe that the CIA will not turn over highly redacted "documents", much less all the relevant documents.

Still, the speed of this about-face speaks to the intense heat flaring around this scandal, with its tentacles so obviously extended up into the Oval Office itself. Today's story comes on the heels of the announcement by U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy that he would order a hearing into whether the Bush administration violated a court order, breaking a great many laws thereby, by destroying in November 2005 the interrogation videos of suspected Al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Judge Kennedy, too, had to confront Justice Department warnings to back off. Vyan had a good diary on this aspect of the scandal yesterday.

The AP story ends with an amusing (to us) bit about Dana Perino's pique on the New York Times article that pointed to the White House.

White House press secretary Dana Perino called the Times story "pernicious and troubling." In a tense back-and-forth with reporters, Perino was adamant her opposition to one of the headlines on the story that said: "White House role was wider than it said"....

She said the headline made it appear that the White House had been misleading the public.

"The White House has not commented on anybody's involvement or knowledge, save for me telling everybody that the president had no recollection of being briefed on the existence or the destruction of the tapes before he was briefed by (CIA Director Michael) Hayden," Perino said. "After that, I did not comment on anybody's knowledge or involvement. So if somebody has information that contradicts the one thing that I've said, then this would be true — but it's not. And that is why I asked for a correction and The New York Times is going to correct it."

Update: Scott Shane at the New York Times has an article up now covering this new aspect of the tapes story (Tapes-gate?). He emphasizes that the appearance of "Jose A. Rodriguez, who as chief of the agency’s clandestine service ordered the tapes destroyed in 2005" is not a done deal. There might have to be "complex negotiations over legal immunity", due to that dubious DoJ/CIA internal review. Reading between the lines, it seems Bush/CIA are hoping this will cool things between the Administration and Congress, i.e., keep this out of the headlines.

The agreement marked at least a partial resolution of a standoff between the Bush administration and Congress....

In a conciliatory statement Wednesday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department has “no desire to block any Congressional investigation” and has not advised the C.I.A. against cooperating with the committee.....

A C.I.A. spokesman, Mark Mansfield, said the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, was eager to accommodate the committee as it performed its oversight role.....

An intelligence official, offering more details on condition of anonymity, said the top-secret documents would be made available either on Capitol Hill or at the agency, as soon as the logistics could be worked out, as early as Thursday afternoon.

In a final show of just how incapable, though, the administration is of talking straight on both torture, and now this latest cover-up of its crimes, Judge Mark Filip, Bush's nominee for deputy attorney general, apparently told his Congressional interviewers yesterday that "he might have counseled the C.I.A. not to destroy the tapes."

“It might be the better practice to keep those in any event, given the interest in the subject matter that was on the tapes,” Mr. Filip told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Nothing like principle to make one give a strong statement of right and wrong.

How the Justice Department Made the World Safe for CIA Torture

Scott Shane, David Johnston, and James Risen of the New York Times have written a stinging article on U.S. Justice Department decisions that have -- and still do -- provide supposed legal justification for harsh interrogation techniques amounting to torture.

In the article, "Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations", the Shane et al. describe the role of former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales in quashing an internal revolt at the Justice Department over the unprecedented spate of legal alibis for barbaric levels of torture. Some of the department's "opinions" remain secret to this day.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Using the odd formulation that Gonzales "seldom resisted pressure" from Bush's Machivellian vice president, Cheney, and Cheney's sinister consiglieri David Addington, the article singles out "Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department", as the signatory of the secret Justice Department directives. Elsewhere in the article, Bradbury is described as the "linchpin" in the defense of Bush's torture policies.

Meanwhile, Comey was not the only administration official to be revolted by Bush, Cheney and the CIA's plans to unleash inhuman and widely condemned forms of barbaric interrogation.

In late 2003... the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing [John Yoo's] work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general’s hospital bedside.

Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith left the Justice Department soon afterward. He first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

In the world of Beltway politics, it's rare that an administration official will go on the record, as Goldsmith has done, as a source for a major news article that is criticizes the government he served. But then, the inhumanity, the evil, that emanates from Bush's torture chambers is so foul that even conservative politicians blanch in recoil.

The Times piece confirms that Gonzales, either with or at the bidding of Addington, locked down opposition to the draconian "war on terror" policies, isolated Comey, presided over Goldsmith's resignation, and put Bradbury on probation under the watchful eye of Bush counsel Harriet Miers.

They need not have worried:

Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right....

Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsel’s assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury’s role in interrogation policy.

Steven Bradbury is another of President Bush's true believers, his army of God, no doubt. One can only wish to whatever god, spirit, or fate that rules this world, if in fact anything rules this world but naked might, that this rotten, disgusting crew is ousted as soon as possible. (I can't resist two other Bradbury factoids: he was law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and was a partner at Kirkland and Ellis, LLP, in Washington, DC. What? Did you forget so soon Ken Starr's old firm?)

The revolt of the bureaucrats has come too little, too late. While it's gratifying to read about some of Comey's statements, and how Goldsmith and others were outraged, it's little beer to those of us who have been opposing this government's policies for years. And it's an obscenity to those who have lost their sanity, or even their lives, in Bush's torture chambers.

Inside Secret CIA Interrogation Program

Also posted at Daily Kos

The August 8 interview Amy Goodman of Demcracy Now! conducts with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer and Jameel Jaffner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Program, makes for more impeachment fodder. Mayer reveals that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) labelled the CIA's detention and interrogation methods "tantamount to torture". The ICRC warned that "U.S. officials responsible for the abusive treatment may have committed 'grave breaches' of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act". Mayer reported on much of this in her recent New Yorker article on the "black sites".

Even more disturbing, if that's possible, the ICRC, which keeps its reports to the government confidential, the better to maintain access to prisoners, reported on all this to the Bush Administration last year, but access to the report was limited to only a trusted few. Following Jaffner's analysis quoted below, I'll bet Gonzales was one of them.

Jaffner is involved in a Freedom of Information Act request for records regarding oncerning treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. He is also author of an upcoming book about torture: Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. He began his comments with an indictment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his role in the Bush Administration's use of torture.

Well, it's actually, I think, a little frustrating that senior officials, including Alberto Gonzales, have not been held accountable for the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but also elsewhere. We now know that prisoners were abused in US custody all over the world -- Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. We know that they were abused because of policies that were adopted at the highest levels. Alberto Gonzales is one of the people who participated in constructing the policies that led to the abuse and, in many cases, the torture of prisoners, and yet neither Mr. Gonzales nor any of the other senior officials who were involved in creating those policies have been held to account. I think that, you know, actually, most of the senior officials who should have been held to account have been rewarded instead.

Jaffner also spoke about the linkage between CIA and the military on interrogations:

But one of the things that struck me in reading the article is the numerous similarities between what happened in CIA custody and what happened in military custody. And if you look at how the military developed its techniques, its techniques that led to the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo, for example, they were developed in exactly the same way: by reverse-engineering, these SERE methods, the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. These are methods that the military used ultimately against prisoners in its custody, and they are apparently the same methods that the CIA used against prisoners in its custody....

Later in the joint interview, Jane Mayer discusses "the use of psychologists in interrogations as "a way by the CIA to skirt the Convention Against Torture, among other international treaties":

Well, if you take a look at the so-called torture memos, the forty pages or so of memos that were written by Jay Bybee and John Yoo way back right after 9/11, and you take a look at how they -- they're busy looking at the Convention Against Torture, basically, it seems, trying to figure a way around it. One of the things they argued, these lawyers from the Justice Department, is that if you don't intend to torture someone, if your intention is not just to inflict terrible pain on them but to get information, then you really can't be necessarily convicted of torture.

So how do you prove that your intent is pure? Well, one of the things they suggest is if you consult with experts who will say that what you're doing is just interrogation, then that might also be a good legal defense. And so, one of the roles that these SERE psychologists played was a legal role. They were the experts who were consulted in order to argue that the program was not a program of torture. They are to say, “We've got PhDs, and this is standard psychology, and this is a legitimate way to question people.”

And now the government is trying to continue their campaign, taking it right into the convention of the American Psychological Association, where military psychologists stand ready to introduce a "substitute" resolution on psychologist participation in interrogations, the aim of which is to torpedo an earlier resolution calling for a moratorium on psychologists operating at foreign detention prisons! Jane Mayer hit the nail on the head, asked about the fate of the protest within APA on psychologists invovled in military/CIA interrogations:

And some of the psychologists who were key players in this actually are officials at the APA who have set the policy here. So there's a bit of a sort of a sense of the foxes guarding the chicken house.

So we await the next stage of the fight against the government and its insistence on maintaining the instruments of coercion, of abuse, of torture.

Did Gonzales Skip Out on SERE/Torture Training?

Also posted at NION

Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is known to have served in the U.S. Air Force. Multiple sources describe his transfer to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where he spent two years, 1975-1977. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Academy, in those days SERE training was mandatory for all cadets between their 3rd and 4th years. But Gonzales never made it to his third year, per Wikipedia's anonymous author(s):

Prior to beginning his third year at the academy, which would have caused him to incur a further service obligation, he transferred to Rice University (Houston, Texas), where he was a member of Lovett College and earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1979. He then earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1982. [Emphasis mine]

Now the further service obligation was probably another sign up, as he had already been in the Air Force four years, spending the first two years in Alaska as an enlisted man. But could the "further obligation" have been attending SERE training, known to be horribly onerous?

For those not familiar with SERE, the acronymn stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. A program that started with the Air Force, and had its roots in resistance to capture programs in the Cold War, it spread to the other services over the years.

One area of concentration in SERE's curriculum is resistance to interrogation, and is said to include teaching of and experience of the following:

extreme temperatures

waterboarding - being tied to a board with the feet higher than the head and having water poured into the nose

noise stress - playing very loud and dissonant music and sound effects. Recordings have been reported to include babies wailing inconsolably, cats meowing, and irritating music (including a record by Yoko Ono)

sexual embarrassment

religious dilemma - being given the choice of either seeing a religious book desecrated or revealing secrets to interrogators.

flag desecration

prolonged cramped or restrictive confinement

sleep deprivation

starvation

mock execution

overcoming food aversion (finding nutrition from alternate sources which might include insects, roadkill, dumpsters)

height/water/enclosed spaces

physical beating

"stress inoculation"

According to a document discovered by Mark Benjamin of Salon in a ACLU cache of released government documents:

A March 22, 2005, sworn statement by the former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo said instructors from SERE also taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba.

"When I arrived at GTMO," reads the statement, "my predecessor arranged for SERE instructors to teach their techniques to the interrogators at GTMO ... The instructors did give some briefings to the Joint Interrogation Group interrogators."

This is directly relevant to those in the American Psychological Association who are fighting to gain a moratorium on psychologist participation on interrogations, such as those at Guantánamo, and who maintain the leadership of the APA is pro-government and pro-torture, despite all their protestations and pretty, if legalistic, resolutions.

Why? Because the the Chief Psychologist of SERE at the time was Colonel Morgan Banks. Banks was also, and importantly, handpicked by then APA President Gerald Koocher to serve with five other members of the military (out of 10 members total) on the PENS committee of the APA, which in 2005-06 investigated the question of psychologist involvement in coercive interrogations and torture in Bush's "war on terror". It issued a report that formally condemned torture, and psychologist participation in same, but supported ongoing psychologist participation in national security interrogations.

For his part,Banks denied to the Washington Monthly introducing SERE techniques to Guantánamo interrogators, but then he may not have been "chief of the Interrogation Control Element". Nevertheless, he is

responsible for the training and oversight of all Army SERE Psychologists, who include those involved in SERE training and in the repatriation of former detainees and prisoners of war. He provides technical support and consultation to all Army psychologists providing interrogation support, and his office currently provides the only Army training for psychologists in repatriation planning and execution, interrogation support, and behavioral profiling.

By the way, thanks to the Kiley report (of then Army Surgeon General, the now-disgraced Kevin Kiley), we know that all Behavioral Science Consultation Team or BSCT members at Guantánamo must undergo SERE training. And, New York Times writers M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks had a source tell them that Banks was intimately involved in constructing interrogation policy at Guantánamo, just as he had been when stationed at Baghram Air Force Base in Afghanistan in 2002-2003:

We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of that guidance).

And this is the man who was to dispassionately investigate and counsel on the role of psychologists in interrogations for the oh-so-liberal APA?

Which takes me back to Alberto Gonzales. He, of course, is infamous for counseling Bush for rejecting Geneva Convention protections to prisoners captured in the military actions against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here's a link to his memo of January 25, 2002.

Would Gonzales have as easily made his recommendation to allow torture if he himself had suffered, as many Air Force cadets of his age did, the torments of SERE training? Or if he had taken the training, and I cannot be sure he didn't undertake it, could that experience have hardened him, made him ready to revenge his sufferings on nameless men, women, and children he had never seen, who would undergo coercive interrogations because they were deemed "enemy combatants" in a new kind of war that Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales felt existed above national and international law?

We can't answer that question. But one thing for sure, the torture continues. The perpetrators escape accountability. And the nation sleeps in restless slumber, dreaming of American Idol fame, of Jack Bauer rescue and failure, and of invisible American and Iraqi corpses, hidden from the T.V. screens.

Gonzales's likely skipping of SERE training is like Bush's playing hooky from National Guard service. Both are symbols of American adolescent irresponsibility and hauteur: let the others do the dirty work, and screw everybody else.