More that has yet to be Revealed on Torture

Scott Horton has a great post in which he discusses seven of his observations surrounding the recent release of the 2004 Inspector General report. His whole post is worth a full read and you can find it here, but in the meantime, here are a few of his observations:

1. The worst is yet to come. Yesterday the CIA released a fresh copy of the report with roughly half of the “case study” discussion now unmasked. But context and placement suggest that the material that remains concealed contains some of the worst discussion of abuse in the report. The heavy redactions start around page 25, and the redactions cover discussion of the origins of the program and the approval process, as well as the discussion of specific prisoners, notably Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. Although cases in which the guidelines provided by the Justice Department were exceeded have been discussed, it’s likely the case that the still blacked-out passages cover instances where Justice gave a green light but the conduct was so gruesome that CIA wants to keep it under wraps. That means we haven’t heard the last of the Helgerson report, and further disclosures are likely.

2. Opposition from within. For years the CIA has said that CIA personnel would be demoralized and the reputation of the agency would be damaged by disclosure of the contents of the report. But the report documents just the opposite. The Inspector General’s review was launched by complaints coming from valued senior employees who felt that the Bush Program (as John Yoo has dubbed it) was wrong. One of them actually expresses his worry that those involved will be hauled before the World Court at some point because of [and that’s redacted!] This makes clear that good employees of the agency opposed the Bush Program, were vocal in their opposition, and focused concern on the program’s illegality. The OLC memos were intended to silence these complaints, but they only accentuated the agency’s morale problems by enmeshing it in obviously illegal and immoral conduct. By contrast, the number of CIA personnel involved in pushing it through and supporting it is tiny—probably not many more than two dozen—though their voices are heard very loudly. It’s interesting that in a stream of appearances by CIA personnel on TV yesterday—Tyler Drumheller, Jack Rice, Bob Baer and others—all said that a criminal investigation was a good idea. The official spokesman of the CIA torture team remains, as for the last seven years, David Ignatius.

[...]

4. All trails lead to the Vice President’s office. At several points, redactions begin just when the discussion is headed toward the supervision or direction of the program and context suggests that some figure far up the Washington food chain is intervening. Moreover, as Jane Mayer recounts in Dark Side, Helgerson’s report was shut down when he was summoned, twice, to meet with Dick Cheney, who insisted that the report be stopped. Cheney had good reason to be concerned. This report shows that the vice president intervened directly in the process and ensured that the program was implemented. The OPR report likewise shows Cheney’s office commissioning the torture memos and carefully supervising the process. It is increasingly clear that torture was Dick Cheney’s special project and that he was personally and deeply involved in it. And the CIA report has some amazing nuggets that show Cheney’s hand. In 2003, after Jay Bybee departed OLC, Cheney struggled to have John Yoo installed as his successor, but ultimately John Ashcroft’s candidate, Jack Goldsmith, prevailed. Goldsmith quickly backtracked on the torture authorizations that Yoo and Bybee gave. The result? The CIA stopped taking its cue from OLC and instead turned to the White House for guidance. It is remarkably vague on the particulars, and blackouts emerge just as passages seem to be getting interesting. But there’s little doubt that Dick Cheney and his staff were pushing the process from behind the scenes.

Inspector General's Report Released - Detainees Threatened with Death and Rape

Yesterday the Justice Department released the long-awaited 2004 Inspector Generals Report on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. This is the largest single release of information that gives insight into the implementation of policies that were crafted by the Bush Administration and carried out by the CIA.

Some of the new revelations that have come to light in the release of this report are the following tactics:

- Threats of execution using guns and threats of the use of a power drill
- Threats to kill a detainees children
- Pressure points that were used to restrict blood flow via the carotid artery until the detainee faints, then shaking the detainee awake and repeating.
- Threats to rape the female members of the detainees family in front of the detainee.
- Striking a detainee in the chest with the butt of a rifle and kneeing a detainee in the chest.
- Blowing smoke into a detainees face for five minutes.
- Using waterboarding techniques with large quantities of water

Some conclusions that were issued in the IG Report:

250. The Agency's detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world. The eTC Detention and Interrogation Program has resulted in the
issuance of thousands of individual intelligence reports and analytic
products supporting the counterterrorism efforts of U.S. policymakers and military commanders. The effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured,
however.

[...]

253.~The Dol legal opinion upon which the Agency relies is based upon technical definitions of t1severell treatment and the "intent" of the interrogators, and consists of finely detailed analysis to buttress the conclusion that Agency officers properly carrying out Errs would not violate the Torture Convention's
prohibition of torture, nor would they be subject to criminal prosecution under the u.s. torture statute. The opinion does not address the separate question of whether the application of standard or enhanced techniques by Agency officers is consistent with the undertaking, accepted conditionally by the United States regarcling
Article 16 of the Torture Convention, to prevent "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

Another interesting note:

232. ~'One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some '~wanted list to appear before the World Court for war crimes stemming from activities [redacted] Another said, "Ten years from now we're going to be 'sorry
we're doing this ... [but] it has to be done." He expressed concern that the eTC Program will be exposed in the news media and cited particular concern about the possibility of being named in a leak.

The IG apparently had some recommendations, but they were all redacted in the report that was released.

Glenn Greenwald:

To those blithely dismissing all of this as things that don't seem particularly bothersome, I'd say two things:

(1) The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle -- all things that we have always condemend as "torture" and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies ("torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .") -- reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.

(2) As I wrote rather clearly, numerous detainees died in U.S. custody, often as a direct result of our "interrogation methods." Those who doubt that can read the details here and here. Those claiming there was no physical harm are simply lying -- death qualifies as "physical harm" -- and those who oppose prosecutions are advocating that the people responsible literally be allowed to get away with murder.

It simply can not become any clearer than this. If the United States expects to be a moral leader and a just leader in the global community there is simply no excuse for not investigating and prosecuting all those involved in the previous administration. A narrow investigation that focuses on the lower-level personnel who carried out these brutal acts of torture is meaningless unless there are also investigations that go straight to the top. As I have stated time and time again, if the United States wishes to never go down this road again, then the only deterrent is to hold those who are responsible for implementing these techniques to account. Anything less is criminal.

Jeremy Scahill on "Real Time" and the Release of the Inspector General's Report

Real Time with Bill Maher had an interesting panel this past Friday night on HBO. Included in this panel were comedian Jay Leno, NBC political correspondent Chuck Todd, and investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill.

They get to talking about Blackwater, torture, and holding elected officials to account when Scahill calls out Chuck Todd for the media's role (and Todd's role) in framing this debate. Here is the video:



You may remember a recent interview that transpired between Chuck Todd and Glenn Greenwald where Greenwald made Todd's arguments against investigations look ridiculous. Here is an exchange:

GG: ...But let me ask you this question - and I just have a couple more questions, and I appreciate this time. You just referenced earlier that you think that this has become cable catnip because it's an entrenched partisan debate between the left and the right. And about a month ago you created a little controversy because you said about the question about whether there should be investigations, about the release of the OLC memos, you said, quote, "Frankly, this feels like a political food fight right now: the hard left, the hard right fighting over this in the blogosphere."

Some of the people who have called for investigations and prosecutions of Bush-era torture crimes include people like Jesse Ventura, the former independent governor of Minnesota; Philip Zelikow, the former aide to Condoleezza Rice; four-star general Barry McCaffrey, who said, on MSNBC, actually, that numerous detainees were, quote, "murdered" in custody, and that there's no way that we can not have criminal investigations. General Antonio Tabuga, who investigated the Abu Ghraib crimes, said: quote, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes; the only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account." Same with Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief-of-staff to Colin Powell; Thomas Pickering and Williams Sessions, former Reagan administration officials, on and on, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post calling for investigations.

The idea that this is something that, the idea that the rule of law, that holding our high government officials to accountability when they commit crimes, is a "hard left versus a hard right" or a partisan debate - isn't that really just an invention of cable news, for exactly the reason that you said, which is that's how cable news typically understands things, even when that's not really what the debate is?

CT: Well, look - and that is my frustration on this very issue, that I don't think - and this is why, when I said, how should this be handled, and how should this be investigated - if you could guarantee me that we could keep this debate off of television, and keep it off of being an ideological - because, this was an ideological, when you read those OLC memos, I was struck by this fact, and that is that the Bush White House was looking for a legal way to do this. They were trying to legally justify what they were doing, and what their policy was. Which then, if that is the case, then, things are going to have an ideological split, and frankly, you, you and I both know you're going find judges that end up falling on both sides of this issue.

Now, does that mean that there shouldn't be investigations as to how these detainees died in custody? Of course there should be investigations. That's what makes the American form of justice held to a higher standard.

GG: And what should be done about investigations that reveal that there were crimes that were committed?

CT: Well, look, that's up to the Justice Department. I know you have strong feelings about this. I am trying, honestly, very hard, not to put my personal feelings on this specific issue into it. I am trying to deal in the analysis of why, for instance, the Obama White House doesn't want this. They don't want to have this debate even if they passionately feel, as many do, about what might have happened.

Scahill's moment with Todd is the second instance where Todd has been forced to defend his views that prosecutions of the Bush Administration are not appropriate and should therefore not happen. Todd is not alone in his views, in fact, the Obama Administration has also adopted this "look forward not to the past" mantra when discussing the possibility of prosecuting Bush Administration officials.

The relevancy of this is also to be noted as the Justice Department is expected to release the internal investigation into torture by John L. Helgerson, or the Inspector General's report. The release of this investigation has been delayed on numerous occasions and should give us additional insight and provide for more disturbing details into the types of actions that were authorized under the Bush Administration. Scott Horton has more thoughts:

If the passages of the report describing in detail the practices used and comparing them to the OLC guidance are released, that would be significant. It would effectively set the stage for the appointment of a special prosecutor—and indeed, it looks to me that the Justice Department is now trying to build support for such a decision.

But in addition to the CIA inspector general’s report, another major document has been on hold for some time: the report of the department’s ethics office, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). Now, its disclosure is another major issue. The New York Times reports this morning that OPR is advising Holder to “reopen nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases” based on its internal review of the torture memoranda and the process that led to their issuance.

This formulation suggests that these cases were investigated and dealt with by the Justice Department under Bush–but that plainly is not correct. The cases were funneled into the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which served as a sort of “dead letter office” for politically sensitive cases on which the Bush team expected nothing to happen. And nothing did happen. The OPR report would set the stage for appointment of a special prosecutor to look at these cases. As a result of the passage of time and the failure to undertake an investigation while evidence is fresh, it will now be much more difficult to build a case for charges, but an effort will be made. Still, the real issue is whether the OPR report itself will be made public.

[...]

Release of the entire OPR report is critical. If it is not released, or released with key passages blacked out, that will suggest that the Attorney General wants to protect Justice Department figures from scrutiny. The public would be correct to cry foul about this and any other efforts to deflect attention from the Justice Department’s own role in the wrongdoing, which was enormous.

The disclosures made at the beginning of the week will provide a solid indication of how we can expect Eric Holder to act. Most likely he will be exercising discretion to disclose facts and information that reveal whatever conduct he has decided to investigate. That’s sensible enough. But we shouldn’t allow this to distract us from what he’s chosen to keep secret. That will be even more revealing.

UPDATE: Jeremy Scahill sent an email to Glenn Greenwald after his appearence on Real Time that said the following:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me "that was a cheap shot." I said "what are you talking about?" and he said "you know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "that's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

So reporting the truth and pointing out the lack of independence in the media isn't the issue, it is about not hurting the feelings of Chuck Todd. This speaks volumes about real journalism in today's society.