Who Would Jesus Torture?

From Harold Meyerson

As Christians across the world prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, it's a fitting moment to contemplate the mountain of moral, and mortal, hypocrisy that is our Christianized Republican Party.

There's nothing new, of course, about the Christianization of the GOP. Seven years ago, when debating Al Gore, then-candidate George W. Bush was asked to identify his favorite philosopher and answered "Jesus." This year, however, the Christianization of the party reached new heights with Mitt Romney's declaration that he believed in Jesus as his savior, in an effort to stanch the flow of "values voters" to Mike Huckabee.

My concern isn't the rift that has opened between Republican political practice and the vision of the nation's Founders, who made very clear in the Constitution that there would be no religious test for officeholders in their enlightened new republic. Rather, it's the gap between the teachings of the Gospels and the preachings of the Gospel's Own Party that has widened past the point of absurdity, even as the ostensible Christianization of the party proceeds apace.

The policies of the president, for instance, can be defended in greater or (more frequently) lesser degree within a framework of worldly standards. But if Bush can conform his advocacy of preemptive war with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount admonition to turn the other cheek, he's a more creative theologian than we have given him credit for. Likewise his support of torture, which he highlighted again this month when he threatened to veto House-passed legislation that would explicitly ban waterboarding.

It's not just Bush whose catechism is a merry mix of torture and piety. Virtually the entire Republican House delegation opposed the ban on waterboarding. Among the Republican presidential candidates, only Huckabee and the not-very-religious John McCain have come out against torture, while only libertarian Ron Paul has questioned the doctrine of preemptive war.

But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans -- candidates and voters alike -- really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus's birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn't big on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him," Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn't simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.

So Romney attacks Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee defends himself by parading the endorsement of the Minuteman Project's Jim Gilchrist, whose group harasses day laborers far from the border. The demand for a more regulated immigration policy comes from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the push to persecute the immigrants already among us comes distinctly, though by no means entirely, from the same Republican right that protests its Christian faith at every turn.

We've seen this kind of Christianity before in America. It's more tribal than religious, and it surges at those times when our country is growing more diverse and economic opportunity is not abounding. At its height in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was chiefly the political expression of nativist Protestants upset by the growing ranks of Catholics in their midst.

It's difficult today to imagine KKKers thinking of their mission as Christian, but millions of them did.

Today's Republican values voters don't really conflate their rage with their faith. Lou Dobbs is a purely secular figure. But nativist bigotry is strongest in the Old Time Religion precincts of the Republican Party, and woe betide the Republican candidate who doesn't embrace it, as John McCain, to his credit and his political misfortune, can attest.

The most depressing thing about the Republican presidential race is that the party's rank and file require their candidates to grow meaner with each passing week. And now, inconveniently, inconsiderately, comes Christmas, a holiday that couldn't be better calibrated to expose the Republicans' rank, fetid hypocrisy.

Bush Lawyers Discussed Fate of C.I.A.Tapes

From NYT:

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal.

The destruction of the tapes is being investigated by the Justice Department, and the officials would not agree to be quoted by name while that inquiry is under way.

Spokesmen for the White House, the vice president’s office and the C.I.A. declined to comment for this article, also citing the inquiry.

The new information came to light as a federal judge on Tuesday ordered a hearing into whether the tapes’ destruction violated an order to preserve evidence in a lawsuit brought on behalf of 16 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The tapes documented harsh interrogation methods used in 2002 on Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects in C.I.A. custody.

The current and former officials also provided new details about the role played in November 2005 by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine branch, who ultimately ordered the destruction of the tapes.

The officials said that before he issued a secret cable directing that the tapes be destroyed, Mr. Rodriguez received legal guidance from two C.I.A. lawyers, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger. The officials said that those lawyers gave written guidance to Mr. Rodriguez that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that the destruction would violate no laws.

The agency did not make either Mr. Hermes or Mr. Eatinger available for comment.

Current and former officials said the two lawyers informed the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, about the legal advice they had provided. But officials said Mr. Rodriguez did not inform either Mr. Rizzo or Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, before he sent the cable to destroy the tapes.

“There was an expectation on the part of those providing legal guidance that additional bases would be touched,” said one government official with knowledge of the matter. “That didn’t happen.”

Robert S. Bennett, a lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez, insisted that his client had done nothing wrong and suggested that Mr. Rodriguez had been authorized to order the destruction of the tapes. “He had a green light to destroy them,” Mr. Bennett said.

Until their destruction, the tapes were stored in a safe in the C.I.A. station in the country where the interrogations took place, current and former officials said. According to one former senior intelligence official, the tapes were never sent back to C.I.A. headquarters, despite what the official described as concern about keeping such highly classified material overseas.

Top officials of the C.I.A’s clandestine service had pressed repeatedly beginning in 2003 for the tapes’ destruction, out of concern that they could leak and put operatives in both legal and physical jeopardy.

The only White House official previously reported to have taken part in the discussions was Ms. Miers, who served as a deputy chief of staff to President Bush until early 2005, when she took over as White House counsel. While one official had said previously that Ms. Miers’s involvement began in 2003, other current and former officials said they did not believe she joined the discussions until 2005.

Besides the Justice Department inquiry, the Congressional intelligence committees have begun investigations into the destruction of the tapes, and are looking into the role that officials at the White House and Justice Department might have played in discussions about them. The C.I.A. never provided the tapes to federal prosecutors or to the Sept. 11 commission, and some lawmakers have suggested that their destruction may have amounted to obstruction of justice.

Newsweek reported this week that John D. Negroponte, who was director of national intelligence at the time the tapes were destroyed, sent a memorandum in the summer of 2005 to Mr. Goss, the C.I.A. director, advising him against destroying the tapes. Mr. Negroponte left the job this year to become deputy secretary of state, and a spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment on the Newsweek article.

The court hearing in the Guantánamo case, set for Friday in Washington by District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. over the government’s objections, will be the first public forum in which officials submit to questioning about the tapes’ destruction.

There is no publicly known connection between the 16 plaintiffs — 14 Yemenis, an Algerian and a Pakistani — and the C.I.A. videotapes. But lawyers in several Guantánamo cases contend that the government may have used information from the C.I.A. interrogations to identify their clients as “unlawful combatants” and hold them at Guantánamo for as long as six years.

“We hope to establish a procedure to review the government’s handling of evidence in our case,” said David H. Remes, a lawyer representing the 16 detainees.

Jonathan Hafetz, who represents a Qatari prisoner at Guantánamo and filed a motion on Tuesday seeking a separate hearing, said the videotapes could well be relevant.

“If the government is relying on the statement of a witness under harsh interrogation, a videotape of the interrogation would be very relevant,” said Mr. Hafetz, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school.

In addition to the Guantánamo court filings, the American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal judge to hold the C.I.A. in contempt of court for destroying the tapes. The A.C.L.U. says the destruction violated orders in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by several advocacy groups seeking materials related to detention and interrogation.

FBI withdrew from interrogation due to CIA’s ‘harsh tactics.’

From Think Progress:

In 2002, as the CIA used “harsh tactics” to interrogate al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaida, FBI agents involved in his detention increasingly “protested the aggressive methods that were used.” Reportedly, “one agent was so offended he threatened to arrest the CIA interrogators.” The Washington Post reports today that the tensions between the two agencies became so bad that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III “eventually ordered the FBI team to withdraw from the interrogation” because of the tactics being used:

Tensions came to a head after FBI agents witnessed the use of some harsh tactics on Abu Zubaida, including keeping him naked in his cell, subjecting him to extreme cold and bombarding him with loud rock music. […]

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III eventually ordered the FBI team to withdraw from the interrogation, largely because bureau procedures prohibit agents from being involved in such techniques, according to several officials familiar with the

Judge orders hearing on CIA torture tapes

A federal judge has ordered a hearing on whether the Bush administration violated a court order by destroying CIA interrogation videos of suspected terrorists.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy rejected calls from the Justice Department to stay out of the matter. He ordered lawyers to appear before him Friday morning.

In June 2005, Kennedy ordered the administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”

FBI: Torturing Gave Us Nothing But "Crap"

From TPM
Abu Zubaydah was:

A) A high-ranking Al Qaeda operative who largely confounded U.S. interrogators with his literary and tactical genius until they submitted him to waterboarding and other forms of torture. After that, he provided key information that likely preempted future attacks.

B) A low-ranking and mentally ill Al Qaeda operative who provided valuable information under gentle questioning, but whose confessions made under torture were useless. Much of the threat information he provided was "crap."

A is the CIA's version (and the President's). B is the FBI's. And in today's Washington Post, Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus walk through the competing profiles. Zubaydah, remember, was one of the two detainees whose interrogations appeared on the destroyed CIA tapes.

It's clear off the bat that the version of events provided by John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent who launched something like a PR blitz last week, is not quite right. In his telling, Zubaydah held out until waterboarded; after only 35 seconds of that, he gave in and "from that day on, he answered every question."

By contrast, both CIA and FBI agents tell the Post that he provided valuable information before he was waterboarded. And there wasn't just one session: "Instead, [other former and current officials] said, harsh tactics used on him at a secret detention facility in Thailand went on for weeks or, depending on the account, even months."

And then you get to the real discrepancies.

A CIA agent says that Zubaydah was a "wily adversary" under questioning who seemed "very selective in what he protected and what he gave up."

Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, "who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case," responded that Zubaydah was talking before he was waterboarded, but the CIA agents couldn't believe that he knew so little.

Coleman, in fact, emerges as an effective foil to Kiriakou (who, incidentally, participated in the capture of Zubaydah but wasn't present during the torture) in the piece. Coleman says that Zubaydah was a "safehouse keeper" for Al Qaeda who had suffered a serious head injury years earlier.

Zubaydah's mental instability was manifest in his diary, Coleman says, which was "written in three distinct personalities -- one younger, one older and one the same age as Abu Zubaida. The book was full of flowery and philosophical meanderings, and made little mention of terrorism or al-Qaeda."

Former CIA Director George Tenet, by contrast, writes in his book that Zubaydah used a "sophisticated literary device to express himself" in the diary.

And you get the impression that Tenet's reading is typical of the way the CIA agents tended to see Zubaydah:

Coleman said reports of Abu Zubaida's statements during his early, traditional interrogation were "consistent with who he was and what he would possibly know." He and other officials said that materials seized from Abu Zubaida's house and other locations, including names, telephone numbers and computer laptops, provided crucial information about al-Qaeda and its network.
But, Coleman and other law enforcement officials said, CIA officials concluded to the contrary that Abu Zubaida was a major player, and they saw any lack of information as evidence that he was resisting interrogation. Much of the threat information provided by Abu Zubaida, Coleman said, "was crap."

"There's an agency mind-set that there was always some sort of golden apple out there, but there just isn't, especially with guys like him," Coleman said.

"It smells like the coverup of the coverup."

From TPM:

That's Rep. Jane Harman's (D-CA) take. And Rep. Pete Hoekstra's (R-MI) wasn't any different.

In case you were already out the door late Friday afternoon when the news broke, the Justice Department, along with the CIA's inspector general, informed the House intelligence committee that they'd told the CIA not to cooperate with the committee's investigation into the CIA's torture tapes. Congress would just have to wait until the joint Justice Department-CIA probe was done (when? who knows) before they got any answers. The reason given was that it would "jeopardize" the Justice Department's investigation if the CIA gave the committee all the information it wanted while at the same time cooperating with the DoJ inquiry.

Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) and Hoekstra pronounced themselves "stunned." There's "no basis" for the DoJ to do that, they said. Harman, the former ranking member on the committee, said the same yesterday.

The ground is being laid for an ol' fashioned separation-of-powers showdown. Hoekstra went further, saying "I think we will issue subpoenas." With Republican backup, it should prove pretty easy for Reyes to pull the trigger. Hoekstra even singled out CIA Director Mike Hayden, promising to hold him "accountable."

And remember, Hoekstra and Reyes weren't the only lawmakers Michael Mukasey's Justice Department upset on Friday. Mukasey sent a friendly none-of-your-business letter in response to the Senate Judiciary Committee's questions about the CIA tapes. Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was "disappointed" and promised to make that clear when Mukasey appeared before his committee in the new year.

At this point, it's worth observing that Michael Mukasey has been on the job as attorney general barely a month and has already united both parties in Congress against him. That's some quick work.

But wait! The Department also argued Friday that a federal judge should not hold a hearing on the tapes, saying that a hearing would be "both unnecessary and potentially disruptive.” Lawyers representing 12 detainees at Guantanamo had asked for one. Is a three branches free-for-all in the works?

Fact-checking the FISA debate.

Sen. Russ Feingold’s office has put out a fact sheet on the Dodd-Feingold amendment to strike retroactive immunity. One common myth:

Myth: The bill’s provision is necessary to extend immunity to telephone companies that responded in good faith to a government request.

Reality: Existing law already immunizes telephone companies that respond in good faith to a government request, as long as that request meets certain clearly spelled-out statutory requirements. This carefully designed provision protects the companies and Americans’ privacy by encouraging the companies to comply with legitimate requests but not to comply with requests that don’t meet the requirements laid out in the law.

Interrogation crimes worse than the cover-up

Who done it?

Sometime late in 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes showing hundreds of hours of interrogations of two top al Qaeda suspects -- while continuing to imply to the 9/11 commission and the courts that no such interrogation tapes ever existed.

What was on those tapes that made CIA officials so eager to destroy them, instead of just selling them to the producers of 24 and retiring in comfort? And who authorized (or knew of) their destruction?

Not our national Decider, who insists, via White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, that he didn't decide anything whatsoever, because he has ''no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction.'' That's in contrast to former White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers, who apparently knew all about the tapes but didn't bother to share the news with her boss.

Unidentified administration sources assure us, though, that Miers recommended that the CIA preserve the tapes. (It's not hard to imagine her words: ``Gee, if these interrogation tapes just happened to be lost or destroyed, it would sure make it tough for anyone to bring future war crimes or torture prosecutions against anyone in this administration, so I hope the CIA will take really good care of those tapes.'')

Over at the CIA, another unidentified ''former official'' said no one at the White House ever ordered the CIA not to destroy the tapes -- at least not in so many words: 'They never told us, `Hell, no,' '' that official told The New York Times. And current and former officials said that the CIA's acting general counsel, John Rizzo, was in on the whole discussion about the tapes. Still another anonymous ''official'' asserted that Rizzo was out of the loop and ''angry'' at the tapes' destruction.

When it was his turn to pass the buck, current CIA Director Michael V. Hayden helpfully reminded Congress that he wasn't even at the CIA in 2005 and therefore had no idea who ordered that the tapes be destroyed, although he naturally intends to look into it.

As the president told ABC News, ''It will be interesting to know what the true facts are.'' Uh-huh. But in many ways, the question of who ordered that the tapes be destroyed completely misses the point. It probably won't be all that difficult to answer that question -- congressional inquiries are fairly good at that sort of thing. We may even see some prosecutions come out of this. Those who want heads to roll for this probably will get their way.

But so what? In this case, as blogger and Georgetown professor Marty Lederman reminds us: ''The cover-up is not worse than the crime, and they knew it. Those tapes must have depicted pretty gruesome evidence of serious criminal conduct.'' Waterboarding? For sure, according both to news accounts and to former CIA operative John Kiriakou. Other ''enhanced'' forms of interrogation that, to the unenhanced eye, would look indistinguishable from plain torture? It's a pretty good bet. If I had to guess, the tapes were destroyed because obstruction-of-justice charges are no big deal compared with war-crimes charges.

After we find out who authorized the destruction of the tapes, the true who-done-it will remain: Who gave the CIA the green light to use interrogation methods that the agency surely suspected were criminal? Who decided to let the United States adopt the interrogation methods of a hundred tin-pot dictators?

Answering that one will be far more uncomfortable. It would be nice to find a scapegoat (Aha! It was Dick Cheney!), but the unpleasant truth is that the blame is pretty widespread.

So . . . who really done it?

Cheney, presumably, and the sinister little gnomes on his staff, and the checked-out Decider, who either knew and didn't care, or didn't care to know. And the CIA leadership and a whole cadre of operatives, who were willing to try a long list of discredited shortcuts they could borrow from our enemies. And blame the conservative punditocracy, which eagerly defended enhanced interrogation methods. And let's not forget the GOP leadership in Congress, which gave the administration a whole book of blank checks.

But save some blame for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who apparently uttered not a word of dismay when briefed in 2002 on enhanced interrogation methods that included waterboarding, and for quite a few other congressional Democrats as well, who thought that ignoring and overlooking administration criminality was a legitimate form of congressional oversight. And we can blame ourselves, too, collectively. After all, we're the nation that made 24 a hit show.

How does a democracy come to adopt a policy of torturing detainees? To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a village.