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.
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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…
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff advised the CIA between 2002 and 2003 that its agents had the legal authority to use techniques that included waterboarding on one of the agency’s so-called "high level detainees," according to a little-known report published in January 2005.That interrogation was videotaped and the tape later was destroyed. Chertoff was head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division when CIA officials inquired whether its agents could be charged with violating the federal anti-torture statute for employing interrogation methods such as waterboarding. The tactic is intended to make detainees feel as if they are drowning.
"The CIA was seeking to determine the legal limits of interrogation practices for use in cases like that of Abu Zubaydah, the Qaeda lieutenant who was captured in March 2002," says a January 29, 2005, New York Times story. That story quoted unnamed sources who told the newspaper that "Chertoff was directly involved in these discussions, in effect evaluating the legality of techniques proposed by the CIA by advising the agency whether its employees could go ahead with proposed interrogation methods without fear of prosecution."
During his Senate confirmation hearing in February 2005, Chertoff maintained that he provided the CIA broad guidance in response to its questions about interrogation methods and never specifically addressed the legality regarding waterboarding or other techniques.
However, Chertoff, according to intelligence sources who spoke to Truthout, told former CIA General Counsel Scott Muller and his deputy, John Rizzo, that an August 1, 2002, memo widely referred to as the "Torture Memo" put the CIA on solid legal ground and that its agents could waterboard a prisoner without fear of prosecution. The memo was written by former Justice Department attorney John Yoo. Yoo’s memo said that Congress "may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."
The videotaped interrogations were destroyed in November 2005, after The Washington Post published a story that first exposed the CIA’s use of so-called "black site" prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects, using techniques that were not legal on US soil. The Post’s story discussed Abu Zubaydah and the harsh methods the CIA used when questioning detainees. However, it’s unknown whether the Post’s story directly led to the destruction of the videotapes.
An intelligence official told Truthout that the CIA’s Muller and Rizzo feared that the Justice Department’s issuance of a new legal opinion defining torture in broader terms than Yoo’s August 2002 memo would expose its agents – specifically those who interrogated Abu Zubaydah – to prosecution and so Rizzo had approved the destruction of the videotapes. That reported approval followed publication of The Washington Post story exposing the CIA’s secret prisons, and the new legal opinion defining torture…
- "How to Break the Law Without Being Culpable"
- "Living In The Loopholes: How To Find Them"
- "How To Rationalize That The Law Doesn’t Apply"
- "Executive Privilege: What Doesn’t It Cover?"
- etc.
The Freudian view of morality was some of Freud’s best thinking. How does a person develop a moral compass, something he calls the Superego. At first it’s personified. The little kid sees some forbidden object and looks around to see if Mom’s around, watching him. Later it gets inside. The kid might looks at the forbidden object, and say, "no, no" – speaking for the Mom. Later it just becomes his or her own thought, "no, no." In these early years, it’s fear of reprisal that drives things. It’s only later that the reasons for the "no, no" become associated – "it will burn my fingers." And even later when the empathy of the "Golden Rule" get tacked on – "It would hurt me or others if someone else did it."
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