Were other tapes destroyed?

Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been representing detainees held by the government at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, suggested that the disclosure by the CIA suggests the agency destroyed evidence in other cases. The center represents Majid Khan, a former ‘ghost’ detainee who was allegedly held in a secret prison in Eastern Europe before being transferred to Guantanamo. Warren said the center has asked for materials relating to interrogations of Khan. ‘I find it hard to believe the CIA would make videotapes of interrogations of only two people,’ Warren said.”

UPDATE: The ACLU is calling on Attorney General Mukasey to appoint an independent counsel to investigate, and if appropriate, prosecute any potential criminal activity.

UPDATE II: The Justice Department and CIA announced they will conduct a joint preliminary inquiry into the agency’s destruction of videotapes. The review will determine whether a full investigation is warranted.

Suskind: WH Efforts To Pin Full Blame On Rodriguez For Destruction Of Tapes ‘Hard To Believe’

Since the New York Times and other media outlets revealed Thursday evening that at least two CIA tapes documenting harsh interrogation of detainees were destroyed in 2005, Bush administration officials have been claiming complete ignorance.

White House counsel Harriet Miers knew of CIA’s plans but told them not to do it:

ABC News has learned that at least one White House official knew about the CIA’s planned destruction of videotapes in 2005 that documented the interrogation of two al Qaeda operatives: then-White House counsel Harriet Miers. Three officials told ABC News Miers urged the CIA not to destroy the tapes.

President Bush didn’t know:

[Bush] has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction before yesterday.

Vice President Cheney was in the dark as well:

The vice president learned about the tapes and their destruction at the same time [as Bush], another administration official told CNN.

CIA Director Porter Goss wasn’t informed:

Mr. Goss became C.I.A. director in 2004 and was serving in the post when the tapes were destroyed, but was not informed in advance about Mr. Rodriguez’s decision, the former officials said.

CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo also didn’t know:

The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said.

The full blame for the destruction of the tapes has fallen on Jose Rodriguez, then the CIA’s head of the clandestine division. Rodriguez reportedly undertook the destruction of the tapes in a unilateral manner, without receiving any instructions from his bosses or giving them advance notice of his actions.

Last night on CNN, Ron Suskind — author of the One Percent Doctrine — said the idea that Rodriquez didn’t get “some authorization from above” is “hard to believe.” “It simply doesn’t work that way,” Suskind said, noting that “at this point, lots was being authorized from the White House in terms of the CIA.” Watch it:



UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman wrote that in State of War, the NYT’s James Risen reported “an effort by senior officials ‘to insulate Bush and give him deniability‘ on torture.” Kevin Drum recounts a conversation between George Tenet and President Bush that was reported in the One Percent Doctrine. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied.

UPDATE II: Marcy Wheeler documents the responses from Congressional members as to what they knew and when they knew it. She notes the ostensible silence of former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), who is running for reelection next year.

Transcript:

SUSKIND: Right now, what people are calling for is an investigation as to who knew what when. Now, if this was handled within the CIA, as Mike Hayden has said, well, then there’s somebody in the CIA that acted unilaterally. If that was the case — and I think that would be a surprise — then that person certainly will be drawn in front of the hot lights.

BLITZER: Because they say that this was a decision made by the guy who was in charge of clandestine operations…

SUSKIND: Yes, Jose Rodriguez.

BLITZER: And he made it on his own. But let’s get some context now, because the tape was actually made back in 2002. It was destroyed in 2005. What was going on in 2005 that, for some, might raise some alarm bells?

SUSKIND: Well, it’s the end of the Tenet year. It’s the beginning of the Goss year. Remember, Porter Goss is brought in.

BLITZER: George Tenet was the CIA director. Porter Goss, a former member of Congress.

SUSKIND: That’s right.

BLITZER: Was brought in as the new CIA director.

SUSKIND: And the view, Wolf, was that he would bring the CIA into line, that they were a renegade agency. And mostly the vice president, and the president, said, we want these guys to march to lockstep. That was the period in which these tapes were destroyed.

Now, Goss, I think has said publicly he was outraged by this. But, ultimately, a director of operations at CIA is not going to do something like this — so dramatic — destroying evidence that, clearly, people want — including the 9/11 Commission — without some authorization from above. It simply doesn’t work that way.

BLITZER: So, based on what you know about Washington and these kind of situations, I assume there’s going to be a full scale investigation and people are going to want to drag some of these guys before Congress.

SUSKIND: Well, it’s interesting. You know, the administration, up to this point, might have subverted the intent of certain laws. But they tend to not have crossed the line in terms of an actionable investigation or prosecution. This may be the case in which that line that was crossed. And the question, again, everyone is asking is who authorized this, at what level?

Frankly, at this point, lots was being authorized from the White House in terms of the CIA. And it’s hard to believe that Jose Rodriguez, an upper middle level — I mean he’s a top guy — would have acted unilaterally to destroy evidence that clearly people wanted.

No WMDs, but plenty of MWDs at Gitmo in 2004

From March 2003 to 2004, US forces invaded Iraq, supposedly largely based on the justification that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of destruction. But they proved non-existent, as many experts had been saying all along – although the mainstream media largely failed to provide those experts with a voice.

However, there were plenty of MWDs existent through this period – and in use. MWDs – Military Working Dogs – were a regular feature of life in 2003 and 2004, not just in the US military prison camp Abu Grahib, Iraq, but also much closer to home, at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.

On December 3, 2007 Wikileaks released the secret 2004 manual for the base, together with a detailed list of changes over its 2003 predecessor.

Between The SOP Manual from 2003 includes a whole chapter on Military Working Dogs – chapter 26. MWD teams are to be deployed for “psychological deterrence”, walking the “Main Street” of Camp Delta during shift “to demonstrate physical presence to detainees”. That is, menacing dogs are required to be a constant presence.

Dogs are also used on “detainee transfer” missions. Upon request, dogs can be used to assist a special team called an “Immediate Reaction Force” to extract prisoners from their cells – though it appears more of an Overreaction Force. This team consists of 5 heavily armed guards. The “Number One Man” pins the detainee to the ground with a shield, and then the “Number Two” through “Number 5” Men are responsible for one limb of the detainee each.

The procedure is portrayed in the movie “The Road to Guantanamo” in a manner consistent with the SOP manual.

Dogs can assist this 5-man force in extracting one detainee, according to section 26-2-b-(2)(b) of the Camp Delta manual.

In the 2004 manual, chapter 26 is substantially unchanged, and the policy remains. MWDs were regularly used at Guantanamo, while WMDs remained undetected in Iraq.

In response to the Wikileaks release of the 2003 manual, a US military spokesman told Reuters that no dogs are used at Guantanamo today, but did not say when or when such a change was made.

C.I.A. Was Urged to Keep Interrogation Videotapes

WASHINGTON — White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.

The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said.

The disclosures provide new details about what Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, has said was a decision “made within C.I.A. itself” to destroy the videotapes. In interviews, members of Congress and former intelligence officials also questioned some aspects of the account General Hayden provided Thursday about when Congress was notified that the tapes had been destroyed.

Current and former intelligence officials say the videotapes showed severe interrogation techniques used on two Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were among the first three terror suspects to be detained and interrogated by the C.I.A. in secret prisons after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Top C.I.A. officials had decided in 2003 to preserve the tapes in response to warnings from White House lawyers and lawmakers that destroying the tapes would be unwise, in part because it could carry legal risks, the government officials said.

But the government officials said that Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations, had reversed that decision in November 2005, at a time when Congress and the courts were inquiring deeply into the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program. Mr. Rodriguez could not be reached Friday for comment.

As the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida, was among Congressional leaders who warned the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes, the former intelligence officials said. Mr. Goss became C.I.A. director in 2004 and was serving in the post when the tapes were destroyed, but was not informed in advance about Mr. Rodriguez’s decision, the former officials said.

It was not until at least a year after the destruction of the tapes that any members of Congress were informed about the action, the officials said. On Friday, Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2004 to 2006, said he had never been told that the tapes were destroyed.

“I think the intelligence committee needs to get all over this,” said Mr. Hoekstra, who has been a strong supporter of the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program. “This raises a red flag that needs to be looked at.”

The first notification to Congress by the C.I.A. about the videotapes was delivered to a small group of senior lawmakers in February 2003 by Scott W. Muller, then the agency’s general counsel. Government officials said that Mr. Muller had told the lawmakers that the C.I.A. intended to destroy the interrogation tapes, arguing that they were no longer of any intelligence value and that the interrogations they showed put agency operatives who appeared in the tapes at risk.

At the time of the briefing in February 2003, the lawmakers who advised Mr. Muller not to destroy the tapes included both Mr. Goss and Representative Jane Harman of California, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Ms. Harman described her role on Friday. Mr. Goss’s role was described by former intelligence officials.

According to two government officials, Mr. Muller then raised the idea of destroying the tapes during discussions in 2003 with Justice Department lawyers and with Harriet E. Miers, who was then a deputy White House chief of staff. Ms. Miers became White House counsel in early 2005.

The officials said that Ms. Miers and the Justice Department lawyers had advised against destroying the tapes, but that it was not clear what the basis for their advice had been.

A message left at Mr. Muller’s law office on Friday was not returned, and White House officials would not comment about Ms. Miers’s role.

It was also not clear when the White House or Justice Department were told that the tapes had been destroyed, or whether anyone at either place was notified in advance that Mr. Rodriguez had ordered that the step be taken. Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said Friday that President Bush had “no recollection” of being made aware of the tapes’ destruction before Thursday, when General Hayden briefed him on the matter.

In his message to C.I.A. employees on Thursday, General Hayden said that the leaders of the intelligence committee had been informed of the agency’s “intention to dispose of the material,” but he did not say when that notification took place.

Several former intelligence officials also said there was great concern that the tapes, which recorded hours of grueling interrogations, could have set off controversies about the legality of the interrogations and generate a backlash in the Middle East.

According to one former intelligence official, the C.I.A. then decided to keep the tapes at the C.I.A. stations in the countries where Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri were interrogated.

Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan, and it has been reported that he was taken to Thailand for part of his interrogation. It is unclear where Mr. Nashiri was interrogated by C.I.A. operatives.

Mr. Nashiri, a Qaeda operations chief in the Arabian Peninsula until his capture in 2002, is thought to have planned the October 2000 bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen.

The current and former intelligence officials said that when Mr. Rodriguez ultimately decided in late 2005 to destroy the tapes, he did so without advising Mr. Rizzo, Mr. Muller’s successor as the agency’s top general counsel. Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Goss were among the C.I.A. officials who were angry when told that the tapes had been destroyed, the officials said.

Mr. Rodriguez retired from the agency this year.

The Senate Intelligence Committee announced Friday that it was starting an investigation into the destruction of the videotapes.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said, “Whatever the intent, we must get to the bottom of it.”

Guantanamo Bay four freed to come to UK despite US fears of terror risk

Government pressure has secured the release of four Guantanamo Bay prisoners who had British residency rights at the time of their detention, despite Pentagon concerns that they still pose a terrorist risk, it emerged last night.

Three men are expected to be back in Britain before Christmas. Another detainee, Shaker Aamer — who the US Defence Department alleged recently had links to the “highest level” of al-Qaeda — will go home to Saudi Arabia.

But a fifth man who once lived in Kensington is expected to remain in detention at the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Binyam Mohammed could face trial under a military tribunal system, the legality of which has itself been challenged at the US Supreme Court. A US military indictment alleges that he received firearms and explosives training alongside the shoebomber Richard Reid, was lectured by Osama bin Laden and had been given a terrorist mission by one of the masterminds behind the September 11 attacks.

Mr Mohammed, 29, an Ethiopian who converted to Islam while living in London in the 1990s, denies the allegations and says that he was tortured at a CIA “ghost prison” in Morocco.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, has been working with David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to negotiate the release of the men from Guantanamo and their return home. Although all UK citizens held at Guantanamo have long since come home, this August the Prime Minister made a formal request for the return of those who had a right to live in Britain when they were captured.

Whitehall sources insisted last night that negotiations to secure the men’s release were still taking place with the US authorities. The Government has assured the United States that it will take whatever precautions are needed to ensure that the men do not represent a threat to US interests.

If the British security services and police have evidence that they are suspected of involvement in terrorist activity, the men face being charged or placed under a control order restricting their movement. In reality, a control order would be the most likely option.

Senior officials in Washington last night confirmed that “a deal had been done” and indicated that, as a condition of their release, the three men would be “subject to strict supervision or possibly control orders when they come home”.

MI5 is understood to have drawn up detailed contingency plans for the surveillance of Jamil El Banna, a Jordanian refugee whose family live in northwest London, Omar Deghayes, who lived in Brighton and was a refugee from Libya, and Algerian-born Abdennour Sameur, whose last British address was in Bournemouth.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office reviewed its approach because of the Government’s desire to see the closure of the Guantanamo prison camp and recent steps by the US Government to reduce the numbers of detainees being held there.

All the men, some of whom had lived and worked in Britain for decades, had been granted refugee status, indefinite leave or exceptional leave to remain before they were detained.

Reports of their imminent release, which has not yet been confirmed by the Pentagon, came as President Bush faced fresh embarrassment over the CIA’s decision to destroy tapes of interrogations that it made of two al-Qaeda suspects in 2002.

Mr Bush’s spokeswoman said that he had “no recollection” of the existence of the two videotapes — or any decision to wipe them. But human rights groups accuse the CIA of destroying evidence that it has tortured suspects with “enhanced interrogation” techniques. A US Senate committee yesterday promised a thorough investigation into the tapes, which the CIA claims were wiped clean to protect the identity of agents.

In 2005, four men who had been released from Guantanamo Bay were released without charge once they had returned to the UK.

Moazzam Begg, Martin Mubanga, Feroz Abbasi and Richard Belmar were arrested and questioned under the Terrorism Act 2000 on returning to the country, but were released just a few weeks later.

Mr Begg, 36, from Birmingham, Mr Abbasi, 25, from Croydon, South London, Mr Mubanga, 32, from Wembley, northwest London, and Mr Belmar, 25, from St John’s Wood, northwest London, had spent three years in American custody at the Cuban base, accused of links with al-Qaeda.

At the time, the Pentagon said that it still believed that the men continued to represent a threat and that British authorities had been asked for assurances “that the detainees will not pose a continuing security threat to the United States or its allies” before they flew back to Britain.



The allegations

Omar Deghayes Libyan. He is accused of committing terrorist acts against the United States, but his lawyers insist that it is a case of mistaken identity. He will return to the UK

Shaker Aamer
Saudi Arabian. He has lived in the UK since 1996 and went to Afghanistan in 2001 to carry out charity work. He had indefinite leave to stay in the UK when he was captured. He will return to Saudi Arabia

Jamil El Banna
Jordanian. He has been detained since 2003 and questioned about his links to Abu Qatada, the radical Muslim cleric. He will now return to the UK

Abdennour Sameur
Algerian. He came to the UK in 1999 and admitted having prior knowledge of the attacks on September 11, 2001, but has said that he made the confession because he feared that his leg would be amputated because US interrogators said that they would not treat the gun wound from his arrest. He will return to the UK

Binyam Mohammed
Ethopian. He sought asylum in the UK in 1994 and was given leave to remain. He allegedly had firearms and explosives training alongside Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. He claims to have been tortured in Cuba. US authorities allege he planned to blow up flats in an apartment block in the US. He will remain at Guantanamo Bay

CIA analysts willing to ‘go to jail’ to ensure NIE’s release.

From Think Progress

Retired Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, reveals that senior CIA analysts pushed for the NIE’s key judgments on Iran to be released, threatening to speak to the media if they weren’t:

The “jungle telegraph” in Washington is booming with news of the Iran NIE. I am told that the reason the conclusions of the NIE were released is that it was communicated to the White House that “intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary” if the document’s gist were not given to the public. Translation? Someone in that group would have gone to the media “on the record” to disclose its contents.

Sen. Whitehouse Reveals Secret DoJ Legal Memos: Bush Determines What Is Constitutional

This morning, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) delivered an impassioned floor speech to help frame the debate over FISA reform. Using his privilege as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Whitehouse said he has “spent hours poring over” secret opinions issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) — and he took notes.

Whitehouse is a lawyer, a former U.S. Attorney, a former legal counsel to Rhode Island’s Governor, and a former State Attorney General. He said he sought and received permission to have his notes declassified because he wanted to show the public “what the Bush administration does behind our backs when they think no one is looking.”

“To give you an example of what I read,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor, “I have gotten three legal propositions from these secret OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note-taking could reproduce them from the classified documents”:

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.


Once again i'm stunned at the power grabs by this president!

From Huffington Post

The Senate's No. 2 Democrat on Friday asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the CIA obstructed justice by destroying videotapes that documented the harsh 2002 interrogations of two alleged terrorists.

A day after CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden told agency employees the tapes were destroyed in 2005, members of Congress, human rights groups and lawyers for accused terrorists said the tapes may have been key evidence that the U.S. government had illegally authorized torture.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Friday that President Bush did not have any recollection about the tapes or about their destruction.

"I spoke to the president this morning about this. He has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction before yesterday" when he was briefed by Hayden, she said.

In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois asked for a probe of "whether CIA officials who destroyed these videotapes and withheld information about their existence from official proceedings violated the law."

In a speech on the Senate floor, Durbin dismissed the CIA's explanation that it was trying to protect the identities of the interrogators. "We know that it is possible and in fact easy to cover the faces" of those who appear on camera, Durbin said. "This is not an issue that can be ignored."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said his committee would conduct a full review of the matter. Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton, D- N.Y., also called for a full investigation.

"We've got to really clean house here and get to the bottom of what's been going on," she said Friday.

In his Thursday message to CIA employees, Hayden said that House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed about the tapes and the CIA's intention to destroy them in 2003. He also said the CIA's internal watchdog watched the tapes and verified that the interrogation practices were legal. The tapes were destroyed in late 2005.

The CIA taped the interrogation of the first two terror suspects the agency held, one of whom was Abu Zubaydah. Zubaydah, under harsh questioning, told CIA interrogators about alleged 9/11 accomplice Ramzi Binalshibh, President Bush said publicly in 2006.

Hayden told agency employees the interrogations were legal, and said the tapes were not relevant to "any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries."

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which coordinates the work of all attorneys representing U.S. prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, says the CIA may have destroyed crucial evidence a court said it was entitled to in 2004.

The group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2004 that has forced the Defense Department and other government agencies to release thousands of documents.

CCR said Friday it is now "deeply concerned" the CIA may have destroyed evidence relating to Majid Khan, a former CIA detainee now held at Guantanamo.

The tapes' revelation may affect several ongoing terrorism trials.

Convicted terrorism conspirator Jose Padilla's lawyers claimed in a Florida federal court that Zubaydah was tortured into saying Padilla was an al-Qaida associate. In a Nov. 16 response, the Justice Department dismissed Padilla's allegations as "meritless," saying Padilla's legal team could not prove that Zubaydah had been tortured.

Padilla's lawyers asked to interview Zubaydah to determine the circumstances of his interrogations but the judge denied the request. Padilla and his two co-defendants will be sentenced next month. They face life in prison on three terror-related convictions.

In a separate case, attorneys for al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui in 2003 began seeking videotapes of interrogations they believed might help them show their client wasn't a part of the 9/11 attacks. These requests heated up in 2005 as the defense slowly learned the identities of more detainees in U.S. custody.

On Nov. 3, 2005, a U.S. District judge ordered the government to disclose whether it had video or audio tapes of specific interrogations. Eleven days later, the government denied it had tapes relevant to the request.

Rep. Jane Harman of California, who was the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, said she told the CIA in a classified letter not to destroy the tapes. She was not informed in 2005 when the CIA went ahead with its plan to destroy them.

The Senate Intelligence Committee did not learn of the tapes' destruction until November 2006.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from August 2004 until the end of 2006, said through a spokesman that he doesn't remember being informed of the videotaping program.

"He believes the committee should have been fully briefed and consulted on how this was handled," said Jamal Ware, senior adviser to the committee.

The tapes were destroyed at a time when there was increasing pressure from defense attorneys to obtain videotapes of detainee interrogations. The 2004 scandal over the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had focused public attention on interrogation techniques. The tapes also were not provided to the 9/11 Commission, which relied heavily on intelligence reports about Zubaydah and Binalshibh's 2002 interrogations.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency did not subvert the 9/11 commission's work.

"The agency went to great lengths to meet the requests of the 9/11 Commission. In fact, because it was thought the commission could ask about tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active," he said.

Hayden: Destruction Of Tapes Was ‘In Line With The Law’ Because Torture Advocate Rizzo Said So

Yesterday, the New York Times revealed that, in 2002, the CIA videotaped its own officials administering harsh interrogation tactics against two al Qaeda operatives, but three years later, destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the incidents. One of the videotapes may have contained evidence of an al Qaeda operative being waterboarded.

The Times reports the destruction of the tapes occurred in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal and “CIA officers became concerned about a possible leak of the videos and photos.” In his agency’s defense, CIA Director Michael Hayden said, “What matters here is that it was done in line with the law.” As proof, he cited internal CIA legal decisions:

The decision to destroy the tapes was made within CIA itself. […]

As part of the rigorous review that has defined the detention program, the Office of General Counsel examined the tapes and determined that they showed lawful methods of questioning.

The man in charge of this “rigorous review”? John Rizzo — the Acting General Counsel of the CIA. Recall, Rizzo was nominated by President Bush last year to become CIA General Counsel. At his confirmation hearings, Rizzo unapologetically stood behind his approval of the “Bybee memo,” which defined torture as “serious physical injury, such as organ failure.” When asked whether he still agreed with that decision, Rizzo answered, “I honestly — I can’t say I should have objected at the time.”

After a coalition of human rights and advocacy groups and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee voiced strong objections to his nomination, the White House backed down and withdrew his nomination.

Rizzo effectively signed off on the destruction of evidence that may have proven that his original legal opinion was in violation of U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. And now, Hayden is citing Rizzo’s signature as proof that the video destruction “was done in line with the law.”

Mayweather vs Hatton

HATTON WINS

Bin Laden driver wins right to argue he's a POW

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Osama bin Laden's driver lost a bid to call alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed as a defense witness Wednesday, but won the right to argue he is a prisoner of war, not a war criminal.

A military judge issued the preliminary rulings in the latest government effort to formally charge Salim Hamdan, 36, at a military commission — hours after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on an overarching Guantanamo detainee question.

But the hearing, slated to continue Thursday toward an arraignment, revealed his U.S. defense lawyers' strategy to get their client's war-crimes charges dismissed for a third time in five-plus years of confinement at this offshore detention center.

They asked Navy Capt. Keith Allred, the judge, to hold a battlefield-style Geneva Conventions hearing on whether Hamdan is in fact a POW, not an unlawful enemy combatant.

POWs, lawyers for both sides argued, can only be tried by U.S. military court-martial, so a favorable ruling would mean he could not face justice under the terror court President Bush set up and Congress enacted for al-Qaida members and other alleged terrorists.

"You're not an alien unlawful enemy combatant if you are a driver or just a farmer working on one of Mr. bin Laden's farms," argued Navy Lt. Brian Mizer, on the defense team.

The Pentagon claims that Hamdan is an unlawful enemy combatant — a prerequisite for trial by military commissions — because he served as bin Laden's driver, and allegedly also was a bodyguard, attended a training camp and ferried weapons for the al-Qaida organization.

His lawyers claim he is an ordinary prisoner of war by Article V of the Geneva Conventions, which, unlike Congress' law that created terror offenses that can be tried at commissions, covers civilian support units of armed forces and inhabitants of nonoccupied territory who spontaneously take up arms.

Allred, a veteran Navy judge who earlier dismissed charges against Hamdan on a technicality, said he had yet to thoroughly consider whether the Article V argument could be considered. "It will take a great deal of work," he said.

In a sense, the issue dovetailed with the topic the justices debated at the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of 37 other Guantanamo captives, not yet charged by commission: whether panels of U.S. military officers — not judges — adequately screened the 300 or so detainees now here to determine whether they were properly held in indefinite detention as "enemy combatants."

Meantime, Allred said he would accept evidence on the question as it applies to Hamdan on Thursday — possibly to include testimony by telephone from the man's wife and brothers-in-law back home in Yemen and from two other Guantanamo captives not charged with any crimes and not classified as high-value detainees.

Defense attorneys were granted extraordinary dark-of-night access to the prison camps Wednesday to interview a captive who arrived in September 2004, a Jordanian. Also, an attorney for a Moroccan captive was seeking immunity from prosecution from the Pentagon's supervisor of the war court before agreeing to testify as a witness for Hamdan.

The father of two with a fourth-grade education — who claims he took to driving on the one-time Saudi millionaire's Afghanistan farm for the money — was sporting a white head-dress partially fashioned like a turban and traditional Yemeni garb.

Hamdan, who took on the White House in an earlier war court challenge, and won, looked fit and was sporting a goatee and followed the proceedings with grim seriousness. He exchanged some grins with the judge — a veteran Navy judge, and his second on a commissions case.

Allred rejected a request to call three so-called high-value detainees to the court from behind the razor wire at Camp Delta, saying the defense had not asked for them in timely fashion and the security hurdles for obtaining their testimony this week would be too daunting.

The defense argued the men sent here in 2006 for future trial after years in CIA custody might say Hamdan didn't join al-Qaida's inner circle that carried out secret terror operations.

Chief case prosecutor, Army Lt. Col. William Britt, had objected, saying defense lawyers did not have special secret clearances to see the men — and at this stage neither did Britt, who is the deputy chief prosecutor.

Defense lawyer Charles Swift, a former Navy officer, argued the inner circle of senior al-Qaeda leaders at the prison camps, including Mohammed, could lay out the al-Qaida structure.

John Murphy, a Justice Department prosecutor assigned to the case, accused the team defending Hamdan of going on a fishing expedition for favorable evidence.

"If you are to go down that road, you could use it to interview every detainee in the camp," Murphy protested.

The hearing is a prelude to a probable arraignment by Hamdan, only the third man to go before President Bush's latest formula for military commissions.

Australian David Hicks, 36, pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaida foot soldier and is imprisoned at home ahead of a New Year's Eve release. Canadian Omar Khadr, who was captured in Afghanistan at age 15, is charged with a terror murder charge for the July 2002 grenade killing of a U.S. Army medic.

State Dept. retains manager of troubled embassy project

WASHINGTON — A State Department project manager banished from Iraq by the U.S. ambassador and under scrutiny by the Justice Department continues to oversee the construction of the much-delayed new American embassy in Baghdad from nearby Kuwait, State Department officials disclosed Thursday.

James L. Golden, a contract employee, is still managing the $740 million project, said Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, the department's top management official.

"Mr. Golden is still . . . our project manager, and still is working with the contractor, at their base in Kuwait," Kennedy said.

One State Department official with detailed knowledge of the unopened embassy expressed outrage that his superiors haven't replaced Golden.

"I find it absolutely amazing that State senior management doesn't seem to think it a trifle odd that two people under investigation . . . are still making all the management decisions under this same contract," the official said in an e-mail. The official asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation by his superiors.

Golden and the Baghdad-based embassy construction coordinator, Mary French, have been implicated in a Justice Department criminal investigation into how embassy construction subcontracts were issued, according to current and former U.S. officials and congressional testimony.

Neither Golden nor French has been charged with any wrongdoing.

Construction and safety problems have plagued the Baghdad embassy, originally scheduled to open in September. Kennedy and other top department officials have declined to provide a firm date for when it will be ready to house nearly 1,000 U.S. diplomats and staff.

Kuwaiti-based First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co. is constructing the embassy, which will be the largest American embassy in the world once it's completed.

Department officials defended the decision to leave Golden in place, saying it was necessary to provide continuity on the project. The department is working to overcome construction flaws that range from questions about the strength of blast walls to a fire-suppression system that failed inspection.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker banished Golden from Iraq after an incident last May in which a mortar round damaged a wall at the new embassy that was supposed to be blast resistant. Golden, along with First Kuwaiti, attempted to repair the damage before an investigation could be conducted, U.S. officials said.

Attempts to reach Golden for comment for this article were unsuccessful.

McClatchy first reported the criminal investigation into the embassy's construction in mid-October.

New details were made public a month later during a congressional hearing, in which it became known that the State Department's inspector general, Howard Krongard, had met personally with Golden and French despite warnings from his staff that such a personal meeting would "taint the investigation," according to a congressional report.

The two embassy project managers weren't mentioned by name in the report by majority Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Golden was referred to as a "person of interest" in the Justice investigation, and French as a "subject of investigation."

But Krongard divulged their names publicly. "I would like to tell you what exactly I was doing, both with Mr. Golden and Ms. French," he told the committee.

According to the committee's report, Golden hasn't returned to the United States or made himself available for a follow-up interview since the August meeting with Krongard. Krongard has since recused himself, at Justice's request, from the embassy investigation.

Many details of the probe remain under wraps.

CIA destroyed tapes of ‘harsh interrogations.’

In 2005, while “in the midst of congressional and legal scrutiny” over its secret detention program, the CIA “destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody,” the agency admitted today. The videotapes, which contained footage of “severe interrogation techniques,” were “destroyed in part” out of concern that they could “could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy.” The decision to destroy the tapes was made “within the C.I.A. itself.”

UPDATE: The AP reports that “House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA’s intention to destroy them.”

Joe Klein Calls Bush’s Response To NIE ‘An Amazing Moment Of Candor By The United States’

This week Joe Klein authors Time’s front cover story on Iran, titled, “Iran’s Nukes: Now They Tell Us,” in reference to the recent intelligence revelations that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Klein cheered President Bush’s response to the NIE, stating that it was “an amazing moment of candor by the United States”:

The Bush reaction to this — he didn’t try to block it. He didn’t try to postpone it. He didn’t spend weeks, he didn’t ask the intelligence community ‘give me a couple of weeks, let’s see if we can figure out some kind of negotiating initiative or some way to respond to this.’ He didn’t try to spin it to our advantage. This is an amazing moment of candor by the United States.

Contrary to Klein’s assertion that the White House “didn’t try to block it,” the NIE was completed a year ago but stalled by the White House in an effort to “make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran.”

Moreover, the White House confirmed that Bush lied to the public, as he was told in August that Iran’s nuclear weapons program “may be suspended.” (Bush previously said he was never told what information the intelligence community possessed.) A skeptical Joe Scarborough responded to Klein’s cheerleading for the administration, stating, “Well that’s one way to look at it,” then explained that Bush continued to warn of World War III with Iran despite knowing better. Klein chuckled, “There is that…”

In Joe Klein’s world, once White House deception and deceit is revealed to the public, it becomes “amazing candor.”

Supreme Court showdown on detainees

The US Supreme Court is holding a hearing on Wednesday in two cases that are being seen as a legal showdown over the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.

The cases challenge the removal by an act of Congress of the prisoners' right of habeas corpus to take their cases to US civilian courts.

If the court rules in favour of the prisoners, indefinite detention under military control at Guantanamo Bay could be declared unlawful.

The prisoners whose names have gone forward in these test cases are Lakhdar Boumediene and Fawzi al-Odah.

The first is an Algerian turned Bosnian who went to Bosnia during the civil war and stayed on. He was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the US embassy there but was released and then, according to his lawyers, grabbed by US agents and secretly flown to Guantanamo Bay.

The second is a teacher from Kuwait who was picked up in Pakistan.

A 17th Century example

However another, more ghostly, figure will also feature in the case.

This is Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who was one of Charles II's henchmen after the restoration of the monarchy in England in the 17th Century. Briefs for both sides in the Supreme Court hearing mention his activities.

Clarendon set up his own Guantanamo Bay, believed to have been in Jersey, in the hope that his prisoners could be kept away from the courts and in particular from the right of habeas corpus.

This is an ancient procedure in which a court can order someone holding a prisoner to bring him or her to court to justify the detention.

In the end, he failed and was himself impeached before fleeing abroad.

The administration had hoped, too, that, by choosing a remote location in Cuba, it would avoid the scrutiny of American courts.

However, in an important case called Rasul v Bush in 2004, the Supreme Court held that prisoners, even though foreign and even though in a far away place, could petition US courts under habeas corpus.

So to try to get around this, in 2006 the administration proposed, and Congress passed, the Military Commissions Act (MCA).

This removed the habeas corpus right. And it is this Act which is being challenged in the Supreme Court.

Arguments for the prisoners

Lawyers for the petitioners (that is the prisoners) argue in their brief: "The Founders of our nation created a Constitution dedicated to the protection of liberty, not one that turns a blind eye to indefinite detention without a meaningful opportunity to be heard."

They say that habeas corpus does extend to Guantanamo Bay because, even though the territory is not under formal US sovereignty, it is under US control.

"The MCA's purported repeal of habeas is unconstitutional," they argue.

Arguments for the government

US government lawyers under the solicitor general, who argues government cases in the court, have responded by saying in their brief that the US does not own Guantanamo Bay and therefore the writ of habeas corpus does not run there.

As aliens held outside the sovereign territory of the United States, petitioners do not enjoy any rights [under the habeas corpus clause of the US constitution]," they state.

The government further argues: "The Military Commissions Act of 2006 validly divested the District Court of jurisdiction over petitioners' habeas corpus petitions."

Dazzling display

The arguments will be heard in a one-hour session during which the justices of the Supreme Court pepper and interrupt the lawyers with questions designed to test them and trip them up.

It is often a dazzlingly learned hearing and the lawyers for both sides have to be wary of making mistakes and of being found ignorant and wanting.

The court then issues its ruling some months later.

In this case, the stakes are higher than usual - the future of Guantanamo Bay.

The Earl of Clarendon would be fascinated.

pssst...DO SOMETHING!

Please visit Homeland security for sale after you watch this video:

Changes in Guantanamo Bay SOP manual (2003-2004)

Wikileaks and The Center for Constitutional Rights cracks open the torture manual or the closest thing to it. To think the Bush admin. does this in our name(sic).

Chris Shays CT-04 can't resist

Fox News refuses to run pro-Constitution ad

Fox News has refused to air an ad produced by the Center for Constitutional Rights that criticizes the Bush administration for "destroying the Constitution" by the use of renditions, torture, and other tactics. The ad, "Rescue the Constitution," which is narrated by actor Danny Glover.

In an email provided to Media Matters for America by the Center, Fox News account executive Erin Kelly told Owen Henkel, the Center's e-communications manager, that Fox would not run the ad:

Hi Owen --

We cannot approve the spot with it being Danny Glover's opinion that the Bush Administration is destroying the Constitution. If you have documentation that it is indeed being destroyed, we can look at that.

Sorry about that,

Erin

In 2005, Fox refused to run an ad critical of then-Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito Jr., who had been nominated by President Bush to succeed retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Gay rumours eclipse Condi’s glory moment

IT SHOULD have been Condoleezza Rice’s finest hour as US secretary of state: at last President George W Bush was hosting a Middle East peace conference that she had been struggling to organise for months.

Yet when Rice’s photograph appeared on the front page of America’s bestselling weekly newspaper last week, it had nothing to do with her peacemaking efforts. She had been dragged into a National Enquirer article headlined “Who’s Gay and Who’s Not”.

The article revived long-standing Washington gossip about Rice’s sexuality and sparked off the usual flurry of internet chatter about her high-profile role in a Republican administration widely regarded as hostile to gays.

It also underlined the increasing friction in American politics between a high-minded media establishment disdainful of bedroom gossip and the no-holds-barred, consumer-driven world of instant internet scandal. A Google search of the words “Condoleezza” and “lesbian” last week yielded 146,000 hits.

Condoleezza Rice returns home empty-handed
Rice was not alone in falling victim to what the US media elite invariably decries as corrupted journalistic standards but what the rest of America seems to regard as the real story in Washington: who is sleeping with whom?

While most leading US newspapers were preoccupied with serious policy issues such as Iraq and illegal immigration, New York tabloids were feasting on startling new details about Rudolph Giuliani, the city’s former mayor, who is alleged to have concealed the cost of the security protection he needed while on secret trysts with his then mistress.

Giuliani dismissed the allegations as a “political hit job” and “dirty trick” that just happened to pop up hours before a key televised debate between Republican presidential candidates. Although it appeared that Giuliani had done nothing illegal, the fuss refocused attention on his colourful private life and may damage his appeal to conservative voters.

Political insiders also noted that the detailed allegations, including documented evidence of the accounts used to hide Giuliani’s potentially embarrassing expenses, were published not by a newspaper but by Politico.com, an increasingly influential website.

The mainstream US media also managed to ignore one of the most read political stories on the internet last week, an account in The Times about a dirty-tricks campaign in South Carolina, including anonymous allegations that Senator Hillary Clinton is having an affair with Huma Abedin, a female member of her campaign staff. Democrat officials dismissed the allegations as an obvious attempt to smear the frontrunning presidential candidate.

The former senator John Edwards, Clinton’s Democratic rival, felt the tabloid lash when the Enquirer claimed he too was having an affair with a campaign aide while his cancer-stricken wife campaigned on his behalf elsewhere. Edwards denounced the story as “false, completely untrue, ridiculous” and said the Enquirer had failed to produce evidence “because it’s made up”.

The steady flow of salacious and often thinly sourced sex-related stories is causing headaches for US newspaper editors, who have been bludgeoned by shrinking circulations and internet competition yet are still clinging to values described by one blogger last week as “snoozy, prissy and haughty”.

The drift towards internet-fuelled sensationalism was deemed to be so serious earlier this year that the Columbia Journalism Review, a bastion of US media elitism, convened a panel of top editors to consider whether the government should step in to subsidise serious newspapers as a valuable public service, along the lines of the BBC.

The Enquirer described its article as “the ultimate guessing game among Hollywood fans - trying to figure out which big-name stars are gay”. The report went on: “According to the buzz among political insiders, it’s an open secret that . . . Rice is gay.”

The piece quoted an unnamed “in-the-know” blogger as saying that during her years as provost of Stanford University in California, Rice was “completely out as a lesbian and it was not a scandal, just a reality”. The paper referred to reports that in 1998 Rice bought a house with a “special friend”, another unmarried woman, a film-maker named Randy Bean.

It was far from the first time that she had been linked to lesbian rumours. In a recent biography of Rice, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent, noted that Bean, described as a “liberal progressive”, was her “closest female friend”. It was Kessler who discovered from a search of property records that Rice and Bean owned a house together.

Rice does not comment on her private life, and she is not an elected official, so her sexuality has never been a campaign issue. But the gay community has long been troubled by her association with conservative Republicans opposed to gay marriage, and with evangelical Christians who regard homosexuality as a sin.

At one point last year Rice was regarded as a possible Republican candidate in the 2008 White House race. Yet most commentators agreed that she was reluctant to run, and a Washington Post columnist concluded that she was “the longest of long shots”, as it indeed turned out.

The columnist Chris Cillizza made no mention of Rice’s sexuality, and it took an internet reader named Anne Roifes to remind the Post that high journalistic standards sometimes miss the point.

“It is widely believed in gay circles that Condi is a lesbian,” Roifes commented. “That could be one reason she will not run.”

Help put this ad on Fox News.

While President Bush might not read our Supreme Court legal brief or listen to the arguments in next week's case, he'll probably watch the coverage on Fox News. So we've prepared a hard-hitting commercial to show during the O'Reilly Factor. Film star and activist Danny Glover narrates a 30-second video that depicts the shredding of our Constitution

We need your help to put it on the air in Washington, D.C. - in Bush's backyard and in his bedroom.

Can you help? Please make a contribution of $20 (or more if you can) to get the ad aired on the O'Reilly Factor so we can get our message across without being interrupted! If we raise more than we need, we'll take it to other shows like The Countdown with Keith Olbermann, too.