Subject: CIA Investigation Demands Calm Approach Sun Dec 30, 2007 4:16 am
(The editors of NRO are apologist scumbags!)
National Review Online: Interrogation Tape Inquiry Must Ignore Left's Hysterics
This column was written by the editors of National Review Online.
When news broke that the CIA had destroyed tape recordings from interrogations of War on Terror detainees, it was entirely predictable that the ACLU Left would see a scandal. But a scandal this is not - at least not yet. We don’t know everything about the tapes’ destruction, but what we do know gives us no reason to suspect a government cover-up of anything. As the Justice Department’s investigation moves forward - and as the rhetoric from the left heats up - here is a bit of context to keep in mind.
Shortly after 9/11, the CIA began a special interrogation program for high-value detainees captured in the War on Terror. This program made use of aggressive tactics, including waterboarding. As the Washington Post has recently reported, the program had the support of top congressional leaders - Republicans and Democrats, including one Nancy Pelosi - who were briefed on it some 30 times beginning in 2002.
Mystifyingly, the CIA decided to tape-record some early interrogation sessions involving two notorious terrorists: “Abu Zubaydah” (real name: Zein al-Abideen Mohamed Hussein), a close associate of Osama bin Laden; and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the mastermind of the 2000 bombing that killed 17 Navy personnel aboard the U.S.S. Cole. The CIA was under no legal obligation to make the recordings. It has explained that the tapes’ purpose was to ensure compliance with “established legal and policy guidelines,” but there are many ways of doing that without making tapes. Indeed, it is standard practice at the FBI and other federal agencies not to electronically record interrogations.
Predictably, the existence of the recordings became a severe problem for the CIA. If the tapes were leaked, they would give the enemy valuable information about our interrogation methods (al-Qaeda trains its operatives to resist known tactics) and the state of our intelligence on terrorist operations. They would expose and potentially endanger CIA officers who carried out interrogations under orders from their superiors, relying on legal guidance from the Justice Department. Worst of all, they might become a powerful propaganda tool in the hands of Islamists.
For all these reasons, the CIA destroyed the tapes in 2005. The destruction was ordered by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the director of the agency’s clandestine service. (He has since retired.) Rodriguez acted on written advice from at least two mid-level CIA lawyers, but apparently without the approval of either the CIA’s general counsel, John Rizzo, or its then-director, Porter Goss. According to press reports, both Goss and his predecessor, George Tenet (who was CIA director when the interrogation program began), had previously denied requests to destroy the tapes. There had been other admonitions. Goss says that in his former role as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he warned against destroying any tapes. So did Rep. Jane Harman, at the time the ranking Democrat on the committee. There are also indications that lawyers at the Justice Department and the White House counseled against spoliation.
That is what we now know, or at least think we know. What’s needed now is a thorough investigation to determine exactly what happened and whether any laws were broken. Such an investigation is already underway, led by the Justice Department in conjunction with the CIA’s inspector-general. Attorney general Michael Mukasey should ensure that this investigation moves swiftly. But his department should be given a reasonable amount of time to get to the bottom of things without undue interference from Congress and the courts.
The destruction by government officials of information pertinent to a disputed issue is obviously cause for concern. It raises the specter of obstruction of justice. Let’s be clear, though, about what is at stake. There is no indication that the substance of any detainee interrogation was lost. Notes or transcriptions of the debriefings were surely preserved, and the detainees are still available. Moreover, the tapes would not add anything significant to our knowledge of the CIA’s interrogation methods. It has long been known that the detainee program made use of tough tactics such as waterboarding (which, for all the controversy, was apparently used on only three detainees, most recently four years ago). High-ranking members of Congress from both parties knew about these tactics from the very beginning - and their principal concern, according to press accounts, was whether the CIA was being tough enough.
Not surprisingly, the administration’s detractors have been quick to speculate that the tapes’ destruction may have obstructed the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. They also allege that it may have influenced the outcome of Zacarias Moussaoui’s trial. Clearly the Justice Department must determine whether those tribunals heard deliberate misrepresentations about what information the government possessed. But we should remember that neither the investigation nor the trial was a probe of interrogation tactics. The 9/11 Commission was looking into intelligence lapses - and long after the use of waterboarding had prompted allegations of torture, it was content to review mere summaries of detainee interviews. As for Moussaoui, al Qaeda detainees were potentially relevant to his defense only because they might have had exculpatory information about his role in the 9/11 plot. Again, interrogation tactics were not at issue, and there is no reason to believe that the detainees who appeared in the destroyed tapes knew anything that would have helped Moussaoui. (After all, he pled guilty.)
Congress was debating interrogation tactics when the tapes were destroyed in 2005, and the result was the McCain Amendment. But it is far from clear that debate would have benefited from tapes of something Congress and the public already knew was happening.
At the time of the tapes’ destruction, there was also a case before a federal court in Washington that concerned alleged prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay. The government had been ordered to preserve any evidence of abuse there, but none of the destroyed tapes involved Gitmo detainees. Could they nonetheless have been relevant to the Gitmo case? That is something the Justice Department should evaluate - and without interference from the case’s presiding judge, who has ordered a hearing about the tapes for later this week.
Congress, the courts, and the public will benefit most from a competent and independent investigation of the tapes’ destruction. Members of Congress who called for independent leadership at the Justice Department following Alberto Gonzales’s resignation should be willing to give Attorney General Mukasey the breathing room he needs to show such leadership now. In the interim, let’s suspend judgment, and bear in mind that the criminal-justice system must coexist with the demands of national security. Link
RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
Subject: Re: CIA Investigation Demands Calm Approach Sun Dec 30, 2007 5:00 am
CovOps wrote:
We don’t know everything about the tapes’ destruction, but what we do know gives us no reason to suspect a government cover-up of anything. As the Justice Department’s investigation moves forward - and as the rhetoric from the left heats up - here is a bit of context to keep in mind.
Well here's a bit of context: We know that Government's have always been a pack of lying scumbags. Thus we may quite rightly suspect a government cover-up. Guilty until proven innocent is an accurate rule of thumb when considering these sort of dubious activities.
Subject: Re: CIA Investigation Demands Calm Approach Sun Dec 30, 2007 5:08 am
CIA Tapes: Will New AG Do The Right Thing? Cohen: Michael Mukasey's Independence Will Be Tested By His Handling Of CIA Tapes Case
(CBS) Attorney Andrew Cohen analyzes legal issues for CBS News and CBSNews.com.
The Justice Department’s controversial court filing on late Friday night -shhh, while everyone is sleeping! - isn’t worthy of all the media attention it got over the rest of the weekend.
Neither was Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey’s “nuts to you” response to legislators when they asked for updated information about the Department’s investigation into Tapegate, the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of terror interrogation videotapes.
The post-happy-hour filing came in the case of two detainees. The federal judge in this case had ordered the government back in 2005 to protect from destruction “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay."
The Justice Department told U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy that he should now inquire no further into Tapegate and that, even if tapes were destroyed by the CIA, they were not at the time subject to his court order because the men in question were not being held at Gitmo.
A few hours earlier, in the light of day, the attorney general politely and rather succinctly informed several key legislators that the Justice Department would not be willing to share in real-time the details of its nascent Tapegate investigation. To do otherwise, Mukasey wrote, would be to undermine his pledge of nonpartisanship which he made repeatedly to some of the very same members of Congress during his confirmation hearing a few months ago.
In the first case, the executive branch was telling the judiciary to steer clear of the controversy altogether. In the second case, the executive branch was telling the legislators to wait like the rest of us for the results of an internal investigation (at both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department) into the CIA’s breach of protocol (if not of federal law). Surely this scenario - one branch telling another to get lost - is not breaking news.
What else did you expect Mukasey and Company to do? Before they know more, before the CIA coughs up any more spies to talk, officials in Justice’s National Security Division cannot permit judge-authorized discovery of the matter in criminal or civil cases. And no prosecutor is going to be eager to share with a bunch of politicians the ongoing results of a pending investigation. You can imagine how secret the details of such an investigation soon would become.
So it’s on all the executive branch now. At least for now. By pushing back last week, the White House and CIA and Justice Department have gained a little more time, if not a little more room, to sort out for themselves what went so wrong; how material and relevant legal and historical evidence could be so willingly destroyed. The executive branch may not have the last word on where the facts lead us here. But it has by fiat declared that it will have the first.
This means Mukasey, 66, still wet behind the ears in his new job, has to get it right the first time. He has to conduct himself like the blend of judge and lawyer that he is. The lawyer in him must aggressively-even zealously-seek the truth about how and why the tapes were destroyed. The judge in him must just as ruthlessly ensure a dignified, independent investigation which the American people can trust and respect when it is completed.
Can he do this, even if he wants to? I’m not sure. Given the history of the past seven years with these folks, there is every reason to think that deep within the recesses of the CIA (and the White House) bright, powerful people are even now plotting to block investigators (even CIA investigators) from ever really knowing for sure (or saying for sure) precisely what happened. Maybe “plotting” is too strong a word. Maybe a better word is “ensuring.”
And if the pending executive branch investigations fail? If the Justice Department comes back and says it could not complete a comprehensive factual narrative because of CIA intransigence? If the CIA comes back and points a finger at one guy-hi there, Jose Rodriguez, former CIA operations director-and then whitewashes the rest? Then it will be incumbent upon the Congress, and the courts, to ensure that the other branch is held accountable.
What then? Subpoenas? Court orders? Secret deposition sessions? The “executive privilege” showdown we’ve all been ready and waiting for between the President and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont? How long will that take? Surely long enough to run out the clock on this administration. That’s why this first true test for Mukasey almost certainly will be his hardest.
At his confirmation hearing, Mukasey told Senate Judiciary Committee members over and over again that he would exercise independent judgment and not simply defer to the wishes of the White House. That White House now wants this all to go away, quietly, without any court cases or the concomitant public display of even more sensitive intelligence information. Most of the rest of us want a simple and unvarnished explanation about what went wrong. We’ll soon see which side Mukasey really is on what he meant at his hearing when he used the word “independent.” Link
Subject: Re: CIA Investigation Demands Calm Approach Sun Dec 30, 2007 5:09 am
Nemo wrote:
CovOps wrote:
We don’t know everything about the tapes’ destruction, but what we do know gives us no reason to suspect a government cover-up of anything. As the Justice Department’s investigation moves forward - and as the rhetoric from the left heats up - here is a bit of context to keep in mind.
Well here's a bit of context: We know that Government's have always been a pack of lying scumbags. Thus we may quite rightly suspect a government cover-up. Guilty until proven innocent is an accurate rule of thumb when considering these sort of dubious activities.
Hear, hear!
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Subject: Re: CIA Investigation Demands Calm Approach
Subject: CIA Investigation Demands Calm Approach 
Sun Dec 30, 2007 4:16 am
