Filling In The Blanks

ABC has some news on what was inside those blocks of redacted text in the CIA Inspector General report:

The CIA and the Obama Administration continue to keep secret some of the most shocking allegations involving the spy agency's interrogation program: three deaths and several other detainees whose whereabouts could not be determined, according to a former senior intelligence official who has read the full, unredacted version.

Of the 109 pages in the 2004 report, 36 were completely blacked out in the version made public Monday, and another 30 were substantially redacted for "national security" reasons.

The blacked-out portions hide the Inspector General's findings on the circumstances that led to the deaths of at least three of the detainees in the CIA's program, the official said. Two of the men reportedly died in CIA in Iraq and the third died in Afghanistan.

The Inspector General's findings about a fourth death involving a prisoner in Afghanistan were made public in the report. A CIA contract employee was convicted of assault in that case and is now in prison.

The still-secret portions of the Inspector General's report also describe fears that the waterboarding of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed came close to killing him. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 separate times, according to the report.

The unredacted version of the report makes a reference to the "unsafe" nature of waterboarding but makes no mention of its actual effects on Mohammed or the two others who were subjected to the technique.

Again, much of this is not new information. We know quite a bit about deaths in American custody. They made an Academy Award-winning movie about one of these deaths. We've known for several months that the Bush regime suddenly changed their policies on waterboarding to require a medical doctor and a tracheotomy kit, suggesting that they were well aware of the dangers of the technique. The Bradbury memo from 2005 describes what appears to be a near-death experience on the waterboard:

In our limited experience, extensive use of the waterboard can introduce new risks. Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness. An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately and the interrogator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water. If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required. Any subject who has reached this degree of compromise is not [censored hereafter].

Abu Zubaydah has admitted that he lost consciousness on at least one occasion during waterboarding.

Later on in the report, ABC describes how the CIA flat-out lost detainees in its maze of black sites:

Also hidden from public scrutiny, according to the official, was the discovery by the CIA Inspector General that the CIA could not adequately account for several of the 100 al Qaeda suspects who were part of the detainee program that the CIA maintained had been well administered.

The official said "a few just got lost and the CIA does to know what happened to them."

Other detainees, said the official, were transferred to other countries and their whereabouts are still unknown. In other cases, "incomplete records" were to blame for the failure to account for the detainees' status after leaving the program.

As the report says later, Hassan Ghul is one such "missing" detainee, and his name inadvertently showed up in an OLC memo released earlier this year, the first acknowledgement that the CIA even had him in custody. He either got transferred to a third party or simply got lost in the shuffle.

These were the serious adults in charge of your safety.

Maybe it's fine that these revelations have to get uncovered over and over and over again. But it would be nice if the Administration simply came clean and acknowledged what everyone already knows, that American interrogators murdered detainees in their custody. He's being opportunistic, but Pete frickin' Hoekstra agrees with all this:

The ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), said he thinks more of the CIA's blacked out information should be made public. "If the sections of the report don't talk about sources and methods, at this point in time, my bias would be toward transparency and toward releasing more information." Hoekstra, who has read the unredacted version of the CIA report, said he could not comment on its contents.

Since most of this material is already out, the repeated discovery of it just leads to further outrage around the world and at home. This is a cover-up where everyone already knows the crime.

To Be Fair, The Gun May Have Not Been Loaded

Remember, as long as interrogators didn't cause organ failure or death everything's fine.

CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to frighten a captured al-Qaeda commander into giving up information, according to a long-concealed agency report due to be made public next week, former and current U.S. officials who have read the document said Friday.

The tactics -- which one official described Friday as a threatened execution -- were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the CIA's inspector general's report on the agency's interrogation program. Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 and held for four years in one of the CIA's "black site" prisons, ultimately became one of three al-Qaeda chieftains subjected to a form of simulated drowning known as waterboarding.

The report also says that a mock execution was staged in a room next to one terrorism suspect, according to Newsweek magazine, citing two sources for its information. The magazine was the first to publish details from the report, which it did on its Web site late Friday.

A federal judge in New York has ordered a redacted version of the classified IG report to be publicly released Monday, in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. Since June, lawyers for the Justice Department and the CIA have been scrutinizing the document to determine how much of it can be made public. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been weighing the report's findings as part of a broader probe into the CIA's use of harsh interrogation methods.

Got the Newsweek story right here. The interrogators of al-Nashiri clearly wanted him to think he would be shot, and in the other case, penetrated with a power drill, if he didn't give up the information they sought. The report also describes mock executions, in other words, gunshots going off in the rooms next door, making the prisoners believe they were killing others and they may be next. And look at this, "A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with imminent death."

Well, since when have federal laws amounted to anything in this crazy world? Especially if you can get some bureaucrat to sign off on it:

Three months before Nashiri's capture, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel -- Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge -- advised the CIA in an August 2002 memo that threats of "imminent death" were not illegal unless they deliberately produced prolonged mental harm. Independent legal experts have called that interpretation too hedged and thus too lax.

The CIA's excuse, of course, is that they didn't engage in any behavior that "went beyond formal guidance." Which isn't true, according to those familiar with the IG document - there's apparently an entire section listing violations by CIA interrogators. But the formal guidance, from hollowed-out souls like Bybee, was itself illegal. And we have documentary evidence of that beyond this IG report. Al-Nashiri was one of the suspects waterboarded by the CIA, as well as one of those who had his interrogation sessions taped. The CIA destroyed the torture tapes, but at a Netroots Nation panel an ACLU lawyer stated that there are written transcripts of these sessions which have been hidden from the public.

Not only will we get a chance to read all the gory details of this next week, but the "Cheney documents" will be on display as well:

At the same time the administration releases the inspector general's report, it is also expected to release other CIA documents that assert the agency collected valuable intelligence through the interrogation program. For months, former vice president Dick Cheney has called for these documents to be released. However, a person familiar with the contents of the documents says that they contain material that both opponents and supporters of Bush administration tactics can use to bolster their case. The Senate Committee on Intelligence is now conducting what is supposed to be a thorough investigation of the CIA's detention-and-interrogation program. The probe is intended not only to document everything that happened but also to assess whether on balance the program produced major breakthroughs or a deluge of false leads.

So we'll get a back and forth about whether torture saves lives, which each side cherry-picking their own set of facts (incidentally, the IG report concludes that the interrogations were "not effective"). But none of this strikes to the heart of the matter - we tortured. Torture is illegal. The ends don't justify the means in any legal sense. And those who authorized, directed and engaged in torture should be prosecuted. In fact, the current Administration violates the law with each day they fail to do so.

New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told the Huffington Post that he believed that President Obama would be breaking the law if he decided to oppose launching investigation into the authorization of torture.

"If they follow the law they have no choice," Nadler said in an interview this past weekend.

The logic, for Nadler, is straightforward. As a signatory of the convention against torture, and as a result of the anti-torture act of 1996, the United States government is obligated to investigate accusations of torture when they occur in its jurisdiction.

The alternative, Nadler said, "would be violating the law. They would be not upholding the law; they would be violating it."

This will flare up every few weeks until justice is done. And with each passing day, trust in the President slips.

Why A Special Prosecutor? Let Me Count The Ways

We have so many reasons from the last Administration that highlight the importance of a special prosecutor to deal with the wreck of the previous eight years, it's a serious task to count them all. Aside from torture, warrantless spying, black sites, indefinite detention, the suspension of habeas corpus, outing a covert CIA operative, lying the country to war in Iraq? You mean we need more reasons?

More broadly, one can highlight the problem of an accountability-free zone in Washington, regardless of the issue. If there is literally no issue where top officials can ever be held to account, this does nothing but give government, in particular the executive branch that deals with security and secrecy, a license to run wild. Consider just the past 48 hours:

• We finally got a report on the scope of the Administration's spying programs, the consensus of five Inspectors General, and while we learned a fair bit of interesting details about the nature of the internal debate over the program, the fact that John Yoo was one of the only human beings in America to know about it because the Cheney/Addington crowd knew he would produce favorable rulings legitimizing it, and the fact that the secrecy ultimately undermined whatever the program was designed to produce in terms of intelligence, all we really learned is that some surveillance program operated completely outside the boundaries of the law, without oversight by Congress, and we to this day have no idea about the extent or nature of the spying. As Glennzilla says, this does not comprise an investigation:

Nonetheless, because the Obama administration is actively blocking any real investigation -- Obama opposes all Congressional investigations into Bush-era crimes and, worse, is engaged in extraordinary efforts to block courts from adjudicating the legality of Bush's surveillance activities by claiming that even long-obsolete and clearly criminal programs are "state secrets" -- it is quite likely, despite how blatant is the lawbreaking, that there will be no consequences for any of it. In a Look-to-the-Future-Not-the-Past political culture, it's irrelevant how severe is the lawbreaking by high government officials. They know they will face no consequences even when, as here, they deliberately commit felonies -- which is precisely why criminality is so rampant in our political class [...]

The IG Report is more notable for what it fails to address than for what it discloses, but that's the nature of IG Reports. Most of the key players who authorized the illegal domestic spying -- David Addington, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, John Ashcroft, George Tenet -- simply refused to talk to the IGs or, in many cases, didn't even bother responding to their request. The IG's have no power at all to compel them to do so; it's entirely optional. That -- aside from the fact that they work within the Executive Branch and for the very agencies they are supposed to investigate -- is what makes IGs such an inadequate substitute for real oversight: no matter how much integrity and independence they might have, they are extremely limited in what they can achieve.

As any litigator will tell you, the lack of power to compel key witnesses to answer questions and produce documents severely hampers any ability to conduct a real investigation. Yet, when they passed the FISA Amendments Act -- which legalized Bush's spying programs and immunized lawbreaking telecoms -- Democratic leaders kept pointing to the requirement of an IG Report to placate those complaining that they were whitewashing and legalizing Bush abuses. But IGs are simply incapable, given their very limited powers and their institutional allegiances, of any real investigation of this sort. What they were unable to disclose in this Report underscores how limited are their investigative abilities [...]

Over the past couple of years, there have been isolated leaks suggesting abuses of these eavesdropping powers, but there has been no real investigation into the ends to which these surveillance powers were used. As a legal question, it matters little: eavesdropping without warrants is a felony no matter the purpose for which it was done. But since FISA's warrant requirement arose from the recognition that widespread surveillance abuses were virtually inevitable if eavesdropping was conducted without judicial oversight, the lack of any investigation into this question reveals the extent to which both parties have been eager to help cover-up the crimes that were committed during the Bush years. The IG Report sheds some light onto what happened, but most of it, as intended, remains in the dark, and real accountability is still as far away as it was before this Report was issued.

Russ Feingold said in a statement that "This report leaves no doubt that the warrantless wiretapping program was blatantly illegal and an unconstitutional assertion of executive power."

• The United States government, under two Presidents, blocked any investigation into the mass slaughter of perhaps thousands of Afghans by a warlord.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.

“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

These are the prisoners stuffed into metal containers without food and water, and left helpless as guards shot into the containers. And we never investigated it, despite having a military presence in the country for seven years. Agence France Press has more.

• And then there's this:

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Remember that we have no idea what this program is, although there are some indications that this may be the infamous executive assassination ring. So because of the lack of accountability, the Vice President can order the CIA to keep a sensitive counter-terrorism program completely secret and therefore beyond oversight.

I would offer that all of these programs and secret plans and extra-Constitutional deployment of powers, well summarized here by Tom Watson, are a direct result of the complete lack of accountability for the actions taken by officials in the executive branch. The processes of oversight through the Congress and the Inspector General reports offer little opportunity for sanction. The expansion of executive power over the years gives many opportunities to short-circuit accountability through invocations of state secrets or national security. So without an independent prosecutor with subpoena power allowed to follow out the dictates of equal justice under the law, we will see an increase of air into the balloon, more and more, until it consumes us all. We have to pop the unaccountability bubble.

Nobody Could Have Predicted

The warrantless wiretapping program collected information through far more than warrantless wiretapping.

A new internal government report says President George W. Bush authorized secret intelligence activities shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that went beyond wiretapping without court orders.

Details of those activities remain classified, but are referred to in the newly released report as the President's Surveillance Program.

Practically everyone in the Bush Administration associated with this program, including John Ashcroft, George Tenet, Andrew Card, David Addington and John Yoo, all declined to be interviewed by the Inspectors General for this report. One of the only on-the-record sources for this report is cheerleader Michael Hayden, who as NSA Director when this program was enacted thinks it stopped multiple terrorist attacks (how reliable a narrator is he, really?). As a result we get a pretty murky picture of what exactly happened, with the additional intelligence gathering still classified, and each Inspector General working on the report hitting a wall of difficulty at assessing the effectiveness or even scope of the program. NSA talks it up, CIA wasn't read into the system (although, as Spencer Ackerman reports, they had a deeper role than at first thought), DoJ couldn't really asses it, the Director of National Intelligence has less of a clear idea as well.

There is this, from the report:

The DOJ OIG review concluded that several considerations favored initiating the process of transitioning the PSP (President's Surveillance Program) to FISA authority earlier than had been done, especially as the program became less a temporary response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and more a permanent surveillance tool (emphasis mine). These considerations included the PSP's effect on privacy interests of US persons, the instability of the legal reasoning on which the program rested for several years, and the substantial restrictions placed on FBI agents' access to and use of program-derived information due to the highly classified status of the PSP.

If I had to guess, I'd say all this mystery was intentional. Nobody really knew what was going on with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the NSA, by design. The only ones who knew directed the policy, and they aren't talking. After the fact they desperately tried to keep the scope of the program a secret. The bottom line is that we still do not know the nature of the program, even after this IG report. Incidentally one Senator who voted for the FISA Amendments Act, which indemnified the telecoms and expanded the intelligence-gathering capabilities under FISA, said that as a consolation to civil libertarians, at least we would get a full accounting of the Bush-era program through this investigation.

His name was Barack Obama.

...Spencer:

The Bush administration called its warrantless surveillance efforts “very, very important to protect the national security of this country,” in the words of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2005. Today’s Inspectors General report on the President’s Surveillance Program doesn’t really substantiate that assessment. “[M]ost PSP leads were determined not to have any connection to terrorism,” according to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Former Bush administration officials gave the generic statement that the PSP was “of value,” to quote FBI Director Robert Mueller’s rather conspicuously understated judgment. But there’s no evidence given in the report about valuable contributions that the PSP uniquely provided to the counterterrorism fight, even when conceding that most of that stuff is classified.

The CIA Roadblock

About a week ago, Leon Panetta was quoted in The New Yorker saying that Dick Cheney seems like he wishes for the country to get attacked again. Panetta walked it back within 24 hours, or at least his spokesman did.

This quick shift is indicative of how the career officers are running the show inside the CIA, not Panetta, although I imagine he wasn't very hard to convince. The CIA has now gone back to its traditional role of covering up its ugliest activities, in contravention of judicial rulings and the will of the people. Take the 2004 Inspector general's report, for example, which has been described in major media and released in redacted form. The report was scheduled for release Friday, but amid insistent attempts at suppression, that release has been postponed. McJoan writes:

Greg Sargent speculates that this effort to suppress information is to try to "keep chunks that would undermine Cheney under wraps." This 2004 report from the CIA, according to various reports from officials who have seen it, will show that the CIA knew then that there was no proof that torture uncovered terror plots. One chapter of the report, which was released in heavily redacted form in response to an ACLU suit, is on "effectiveness." That chapter had been entirely redacted from the previous release.

That could be part of the resistance, but it appears that the larger part of it is that the CIA knew then, as it knows now, what it was doing was illegal. From the WaPo story:

The report further questioned the legality of using different combinations of techniques -- for example, sleep deprivation combined with forced nudity and painful stress positions, according to sources familiar with the document. While Justice Department lawyers had determined in August 2002 that the individual techniques did not constitute torture, the report warned that using several techniques at once could have a far greater psychological impact, according to officials familiar with the document.

"The argument was that combining the techniques amounted to torture," said a former agency official who read the report. "In essence, [Helgerson] was arguing in 2004 that there were clear violations of international laws and domestic laws."

This is ongoing CYA from the CIA. They know that torture was illegal, they're fighting tooth and nail to avoid disclosure and potential prosecutions.

Now, the CIA is currently reviewing the report from the Office of Professional Responsibility looking at the legal rationales given for torture by the likes of John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury. Eric Holder denied that the CIA will hold up the report, and that the report will be released within weeks, but of course, that's what was said about the 2004 CIA IG report. Marcy Wheeler writes:

In other words, no, Holder doesn't find it problematic that someone like John Rizzo--who remains the Acting General Counsel at CIA and who made apparently false declarations to OLC in 2002 when it first approved torture--gets a chance to review the OPR report.

Hell. Maybe if we're lucky, he'll tell DOJ that David Addington or Dick Cheney ordered him to submit that apparently false information so OLC would sign off on torture (though I doubt Rizzo--whose big career break was, like Cheney and Addington, cleaning up after Iran-Contra--will break the omerta).

As troubling as this news that CIA is reviewing the OPR report is, it does say something about the OPR report's conclusions. They implicate CIA enough that Eric Holder (not Mukasey) feels that CIA ought to get a chance to explain itself.

I've been saying for months that the CIA may have knowingly submitted false information to OLC. It may be that John Yoo and Jay Bybee used that as their excuse for their crappy opinions. Maybe, if this report ever comes out, we'll get to see whether that's the case.

The biggest roadblock to accountability and justice for torture is not the President or Nancy Pelosi or even Dick Cheney. It's so clearly the CIA. They knew what they were doing was illegal - hell, they apparently told Abu Zubaydah that they misjudged his rank despite torturing him for months. By the way, the CIA heavily redacted this transcript as well, to save their own asses. They knew as early as April 2003 that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was lying to them when he "admitted" to certain terrorist actions or plots, a fact KSM has admitted himself.

I present this not as proof that KSM was lying about who al Qaeda had stationed in the US. Rather, it is a document written contemporaneously with the torture. And it shows what role torture-induced knowledge played for the CIA. Where KSM didn't confirm CIA's preconceptions, they assumed he was lying. Where he gave them stories of scary attacks, they wasted resources tracking them down. But, partly because they were torturing him, they had no easy way to sort through the crap to find any real intelligence.

The work of the CIA in this period really confirms the inability for torture to extract useful information. And they knew that at the time. But they continued to torture, probably because they sought information without needing it to be true - see the al Qaeda/Iraq link. And now they are desperately trying to cover up the evidence, with the full support of the weak-kneed director. And I'm sure the President understands the danger of crossing the CIA.

It's a real problem.

The Evidence Demands Prosecution

Adam Serwer compared the Bybee memo to the ICRC report and finds that the CIA interrogators most certainly overstepped the legal limits placed on them by the Bush Administration.

The Bybee memo also describes a procedure known as "walling." The detainee wears a thick collar, which the interrogator uses to throw him against a "flexible wall." This "false wall" is meant to be constructed in such a way that impact creates a loud sound. Bybee wrote, "The idea is to create a sound that will make the impact seem far worse than it is and will be far worse than any injury inflicted on an individual." In Bybee's description, the detainee's shoulder blades are meant to hit the wall, implying that the detainee's back is to the wall.

In practice though, the ICRC report indicates that Zubayda was slammed "directly against a hard concrete wall." Another detainee, Walid Bin Attash, said that he was not only slammed against the walls of his interrogation room but that he was led along the corridor by his collar and slammed against the wall as he went. Another detainee said his head was slammed against a pillar repeatedly. One of the other memos released yesterday, written in May 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, who was then head of the OLC, indicates that "walling" could be used "20 or thirty times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question."

In fact, one of the Bradbury memos acknowledges the illegal use of waterboarding with more frequency than spelled out in the Bybee memo's guidelines.

The memos include what in effect are lengthy excerpts from the agency’s interrogation manual, laying out with precision how each method was to be used. Waterboarding, for example, involved strapping a prisoner to a gurney inclined at an angle of “10 to 15 degrees” and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth “from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches” for no more than 40 seconds at a time.

But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” and with “large volumes of water” rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general.

That IG report will eventually come out, among other documents, like those from between the time Abu Zubaydah was captured and the Bybee memo signed off on the 10 harsh interrogation tactics. Zubaydah himself said "the real torturing" started only three months after his capture, which would be around June 2002 (the Bybee memo allowing such techniques wasn't written until August), and it would be good to see that clarified.

But we already have enough evidence, provided by the government and the Red Cross, to indict those interrogators who did not act according to OLC dictates:

Senior administration officials have made it clear to me: neither President Obama's statement nor Attorney General Holder's words were meant to foreclose the possibility of prosecuting CIA officers who did NOT act in good faith, or who did not act according to the guidelines spelled out by the OLC.

As for acting in bad faith, how about those who demanded more information from Abu Zubaydah, when he had no more to tell and was clearly under mental strain?

The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum.

The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show.

Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.

Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect." [...]

Quoting a 2004 report on the interrogation program by the C.I.A. inspector general, the footnote says that “although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within C.I.A. headquarters still believed he was withholding information.”

The debate over the significance of Abu Zubaydah’s role in Al Qaeda and of what he told interrogators dates back almost to his capture, and has been described by Ron Suskind in his 2006 book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” a 2006 article in The New York Times and a March 29 article in The Washington Post asserting that his disclosures foiled no plots. (His real name is Zein al-Abideen Mohamed Hussein.)

This is to say nothing of the architects and superiors who designed, directed and authorized torture. But Attorney General Holder needs to be as good as his word here. The evidence exists to bring interrogators to trial. And the evidence certainly exists to bring to trial the top CIA personnel who demanded to wring Zubaydah out like an old sponge, ignoring the advice on the ground and acting in bad faith. I'd extend to these 4 ex-CIA chiefs who tried to illegally squash this information from ever being made public, George Tenet specifically, because this happened on his watch.

I'm sure someone at the Justice Department could convince a grand jury using only these documents. Prosecute.

Seeking Justice, Part II

T. Christian Miller wrote a definitive work a couple years ago called Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq. Late last week, Miller, who used to work for the LA Times and now writes for the online investigative unit Pro Publica got his eye on an unpublished document detailing the history of the failed reconstruction project in Iraq, and the only thing surprising about it is that the Pentagon allowed the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, to write it up at all. The blinding incompetence and ignorance, the sustained money funnel into the hands of contractors, and the ideological warfare that led to over $100 billion in waste and fraud, all to simply replicate what we spent even more billions destroying without improving the basic lives of Iraqis, is just astounding. You can pull out anecdote after anecdote that will absolutely floor you.

It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! 'We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.'" [...]

When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority's abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. "To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President," wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. "His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt." With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.

In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency's reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the agency's plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the American effort.

Money for many of the local construction projects still under way is divided up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs. "Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms of controlling resources," said an American Embassy official working in a dangerous Baghdad neighborhood. " 'You will use my contractor or the work will not get done.'"

The New York Times, who published this article in conjunction with Pro Publica, has actually put the entire report on its website, with keyword searchable functions. It's a major achievement that will ensure this history will not be buried, as important as the Pentagon Papers in many respects. The stories contained within tell a sad chapter in American history, where people with no interest and in fact total contempt for government were given the task of remaking a country, to predictable results. It's not just that they didn't know what they were doing - they didn't want to know. Domestic politics trumped competence, appearance trumped reality, and ideology trumped knowledge.

Some of this history has been told elsewhere, but this is a coherent, comprehensive narrative that will keep you awake at night. Hilzoy uncovered maybe the most notorious example:

"Ambassador George Ward, head of ORHA's humanitarian pillar, asked, "How am I going to protect humanitarian convoys, humanitarian staging areas, humanitarian distribution points?" A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM said, "Hire war lords." "Wait a minute," Ward thought, "folks don't understand this. There are warlords in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. There were no warlords to rent." "At that point," Ward says, "I thought this was going to fail because no one is paying serious attention to civilian security.""

It was more important to put "the adults" in charge, who simply knew that we would be greeted as liberators and that the oil money would pay for the reconstruction and that Sunnis and Shiites have no history of ethnic strife, than to find anyone with the slightest understanding of the country we were blowing to bits. It's absolutely astounding. And let me take a moment, in the midst of all this cheerleading that we "won the war" in Iraq, to second Matt Yglesias:

The harsh reality is that this was not a noble undertaking done for good reasons. It was a criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards. And it’s seen as such by virtually everyone all around the world — including but by no means limited to the Arab world. But it’s impolitic to point this out in the United States, and it’s clear that even a president-elect who had the wisdom not to be suckered in by the War Fever of 2002 has no intention of really acting to marginalize the bad actors. Which, I think, makes sense for his political objectives. But if Americans want to play a constructive role in world affairs, it’s vitally important for us to get in touch with the reality of what the past eight years of US foreign policy have been and how they’re seen and understood by people who aren’t stirred by the shibboleths of American patriotism.

This report might go a long way to such an understanding. But it just makes me sick.

The Simmering US Attorneys Scandal

This is something else I mentioned in passing last week, but Murray Waas is doing some excellent reporting on the US Attorneys investigation coming out of the Justice Department, and he's alleging that it's starting to reach the inner circle:

The Justice Department investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys has been extended to encompass allegations that senior White House officials played a role in providing false and misleading information to Congress, according to numerous sources involved in the inquiry.

The widened scope raises the possibility that investigators will pursue criminal charges against some administration officials, and recommend appointment of a special prosecutor if there is evidence of criminal misconduct.

The investigators have been specifically probing the role of White House officials in the drafting and approval of a Feb. 23, 2007 letter sent to Congress by the Justice Department denying that Karl Rove (President Bush's chief political adviser at the time) had anything to do with the firing of Bud Cummins, a U.S. Attorney from Arkansas. Cummins was fired in Dec. 2006 to make room for Tim Griffin, a protégé and former top aide of Rove's.

The February 23 letter stated, "The department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin," and that the Justice Department was "not aware of anyone lobbying, either inside or outside of the administration, for Mr. Griffin's appointment."

Federal investigators have obtained documents showing that Kyle Sampson, then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and Chris Oprison, then an associate White House counsel, drafted and approved the letter even though they had first-hand knowledge that the assertions were not true. The Justice Department later had to repudiate the Sampson-Oprison letter and sent a new one informing Congress that it could no longer stand by the earlier assertions.

That's a thin strand on which to hang an entire probe of politicization from the White House to the Justice Department. And that IG report as well as the report from the Office of Professional Responsibility cannot remand anyone to a grand jury, nor can they punish anyone outside of DoJ officials. So a special prosecutor is absolutely needed to determine wrongdoing, though they can recommend a criminal investigation.

But if the report is strong enough about the cover-up as it is about the underlying crimes, that could create a lot of pressure within the next Administration.

This takes us to Congress' investigation of the same matters, and the Bush Administration's continued invocation of executive privilege despite being smacked down in the contempt court case by a conservative judge and told that Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten must testify (and Karl Rove, in a separate complaint, as well). Waas, in a separate post at Crooks and Liars, argues that it would be in the Republican Party's best interest for Rove and Miers and Bolten to testify before the fall elections:

At some point long before the election, the Justice Department will release its long-awaited investigative report on the firings of the U.S. attorneys. And as I reported tonight at Huffington Post, a good portion of that report is going to be about the role of senior White House officials in shaping misleading testimony and correspondence about the firings to Congress.

Besides the report on the U.S. attorney firings, the Justice Department’s Inspector General is also readying a release for public release sometime probably long before election day about the politicization of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under the Bush administration.

Not only is that report virtually certain to be scathing, but relations between investigators and former Bush appointees in the Civil Rights Division have become so contentious that prosecutors have had to resort to using a grand jury to compel testimony, because many of the former Justice Department attorneys have refused to voluntarily be interviewed by the Inspector General.

Also what might not be a good omen for what might be in that report is that a federal grand jury is reportedly considering criminal charges against one former senior Bush administration appointee in the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman [...]

So at a minimum, the Justice Department is likely to release two devastating reports on the Bush administration this fall or even earlier. Worse, we might also learn that Justice’s Inspector General has sought either a criminal probe of some officials or even a special prosecutor. (The Inspector General does not have prosecutorial powers [...]

The continuous claims of executive privilege– whatever the motive for them being invoked– are going to appear more and more to the public part and parcel of a cover up. That is inevitable as the U.S. attorney report becomes public, and the report on the politicization of the Civil Rights Division is made public, as well as whatever else the public learns about these issues through leaks from the federal grand jury, the House Judiciary Committee’s ongoing probe, and sleuthing by folks like Josh Marshall.

I really don't think this holds. I don't recall the President being particularly concerned with the fate of the Republican Party - if he was then he could have done about a thousand things differently throughout the second term. And while the US Attorneys scandal has captured the imagination of the blogosphere I haven't seen it become very widespread beyond that. Indeed, the Monica Goodling report on illegal hiring practices barely registered a blip. What Waas is reporting is more damaging - senior DoJ officials lying to Congress because they were misled by Rove himself - but it's still complex and labyrinthine and there's a certain Presidential election sucking up a lot of oxygen. I think this investigation is still crucially important - particularly for the future, as a President Obama should be encouraged to appoint a special prosecutor - but I don't really see it being an electoral issue except in a few key districts. Marcy Wheeler seems to agree.

That said, there's some very juicy stuff here.

And the probe by the Justice Department's IG and OPR and firings of nine U.S. attorneys is only one of three internal DOJ investigations that have the potential of morphing into criminal probes of the Bush administration--and even the appointment of a special prosecutor. DOJ's IG is probing whether former Attorney General Gonzales testified truthfully to Congress about the administration's warrantless electronic eavesdropping program. A probe by OPR is investigating whether government attorneys acted within the law in authorizing and overseeing the eavesdropping program [...]

Apparently, advances in the investigations have been spurred by key emails that the Bush administration has withheld from Congress--claiming executive privilege--and that have now been obtained by DOJ investigators.

Among other things those documents show that Oprison, the associate White House counsel, knew that Rove was involved in the US Attorney firing when he reviewed drafts of the letter and approved final language claiming Rove was not involved [...]

Sampson also played a central role in the drafting of a January 31, 2007 letter from acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Hertling to Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) implying that the White House had never contemplated using an obscure provision in the USA PATRIOT Act to install Griffin as a U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation.

Gonzales and Sampson later changed course completely--when confronted with evidence to the contrary--and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Bush administration did indeed consider using the PATRIOT Act to install Griffin as a federal prosecutor.

These are real crimes and the senior staff is right to be nervous. When Bush leaves office, his leverage in keeping a lid on these investigations immediately begins to dissipate. This is why they're all so interested in pre-emptive pardons.