Sheldon Whitehouse revealed during today’s Department of Justice oversight hearing that the CIA is now reviewing the results of the Office of Professional Responsibility report on John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury’s role in authorizing torture.Whitehouse: CIA was given a opportunity for substantive comment and classification review. Is it now the CIA that is holding up the release of the report?Eric Holder claimed that the CIA’s review was not holding up the report. But when asked whether or not DOJ was ensuring that those at CIA reviewing the document had clean hands on torture, Holder twice did not answer, and ultimately said he wasn’t worried whether those involved in torture get to make substantive comment on the OPR report…In other words, no, Holder doesn’t find it problematic that someone like John Rizzo–who remains the Acting General Counsel at CIA and who made apparently false declarations to OLC in 2002 when it first approved torture–gets a chance to review the OPR report…
As troubling as this news that CIA is reviewing the OPR report is, it does say something about the OPR report’s conclusions. They implicate CIA enough that Eric Holder [not Mukasey] feels that CIA ought to get a chance to explain itself. I’ve been saying for months that the CIA may have knowingly submitted false information to OLC. It may be that John Yoo and Jay Bybee used that as their excuse for their crappy opinions. Maybe, if this report ever comes out, we’ll get to see whether that’s the case.
Oh, the tension. O.P.R. and C.I.A. I.G. Reports just sitting there waiting to be read, parsed, howled at, bemused. Poor Eric Holder and Leon Panetta are getting grilled as the with-holders when I’m sure either one of them would much prefer being on the other side. All of this seems gratuitous to me. Sooner or later, we’re going to see every single bit of it. The abuses of classifications have been so great that no one is going to put up with any of it anymore – at least if it has anything to do with the Bush Administration.
But I want to go back to this post [What happened in the DoJ after the Iraq Invasion?]. The whole DoJ superstructure except the AG [Ashcroft] left about the time Bybee and Yoo moved on. Why? What was their part in all of this? John Ashcroft, Larry Thompson, Viet Dihn, Michael Chertoff, Adam Ciongoli. It is simply inconceivable that the O.L.C. operated with complete independence. And what were the exact paths of communication between the White House and the DoJ? Who did Addington call? Who talked to Alberto Gonzales? Was Dick Cheney calling them in person? I hope one or another of these reports answers these questions.
Most of you are ahead of me. I just started reading Angler today. Up until now, I couldn’t pick it up. A couple of chapters in and I get it. He took charge from the get go, and still hasn’t let go. It’s not that Bush was a puppet. Bush was just another person being played by Mr. Cheney. All of those people is the last paragraph were played too. It seems like the Bush Administration should be called Cheney’s Symphony. It remains remarkable that he can say, "this is how it is," and people still listen. Last week he said of Richard Clarke, "He missed it." That is patently absurd, wrong in every dimension, yet no one threw tomatoes. But his hold is weakening, but it’s still there. I’m also hoping that these two reports will shed some light on the White House/DoJ/C.I.A. connections that will put a further dent in Cheney’s mojo.
A while back I said that when Cheney was looking for a VP for the Bush administration he sent applications for the possible candidates to fill out so that they could give everything but the kitchen sink to Cheney to rule out embarrassing problems. Later on Cheney used the information to try to control his playing field much like the late FBI Director J Edgar Hoover did. I guess you could call the info he had insurance. I think he had a lot of info on a lot of people and when he left the White House, he took his mansize safe with him. He is still appearing in interviews to remind people that he still has power and they better not forget it for their own good.
Wow, Joy. That’s a whole new source of evil power for the XVP that I had never thought about. Shades of J. Edgar . . .