1 Boring Old Man

Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’
Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda Suspects

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News. The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques – using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time – on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects – whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding. The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were "hundreds of [Principals] meetings" on a wide variety of topics and that he was "not at liberty to discuss private meetings"…

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said. According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly"…

A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo – the Golden Shield – that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns – shared by Powell – that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it"…

Ashcroft asks a reasonable question, "Why was this going on in the White House?" A sympatheic interpretation would be that they felt obligated to know what was going on. But when one finds out what they knew, and what they approved, the sympathy fades quickly into incredulity. And we cannot forget that when they were basking in the delusion that this kind of stuff was "legal" [via John Yoo and others at the OLC], that "legality" hinged on the sovereignty of the President. It was only "legal" because it was ordered by the President.

But one answer to Ashcroft’s question, "Why was this going on in the White House?" is that it’s where the President lives, a President who had secretly assumed war-time sovereignty based on secret legal memos to do secret things, and the White House was a place that protected that secrecy. The legality of his assumption of power, and the legality of the ways in which he and these "Principals" exerted this power, rested on the opinion of a few men who the American people had never met, from an office most American people had never heard of in the Department of Justice, and involved things that were against many of our own Laws, our Constitution, and International Law. Not only that. The President and the "Principals" have repeatedly denied that these things we are reading about ever happened, things that fall under the heading "war crimes".