1 Boring Old Man

’03 U.S. Memo Approved Harsh Interrogations

The Justice Department in 2003 gave military interrogators broad authority to use extreme methods in questioning detainees and argued that wartime powers largely exempted interrogators from laws banning harsh treatment, according to a memorandum publicly disclosed on Tuesday. In a sweeping legal brief written in March 2003, when the Pentagon was struggling to determine the appropriate limits for its interrogators, the Justice Department gave the Pentagon much of the same authority it had provided to the Central Intelligence Agency in a memorandum months earlier. Both memorandums were later rescinded by the Justice Department.

The disclosure of the 2003 document, a detailed 81-page opinion written by John C. Yoo, who at the time was the second-ranking official at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, is likely to fuel the already intense debate about legal boundaries in the face of a continuing terrorist threat. Mr. Yoo’s memorandum is the latest document to illuminate the legal foundation that Bush administration lawyers used after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to give the White House broad powers to capture, detain and interrogate suspects around the globe.

The thrust of Mr. Yoo’s brief has long been known, but its specific contents were revealed on Tuesday after government lawyers turned it over to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sought hundreds of documents from the Bush administration under the Freedom of Information Act. Some legal scholars said Tuesday that they were amazed at the scope of the memorandum…

The Vice President appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert
Camp David, Maryland
September 16, 2001

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I’m going to be careful here, Tim, because I – clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world’s finest military. They’ve got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

MR. RUSSERT: There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering, reluctance to use unsavory characters, those who violated human rights, to assist in intelligence gathering. Will we lift some of those restrictions?

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Oh, I think so. I think the–one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we’ll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There’s–if you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I’m convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission…

But we didn’t know about that back then. And we didn’t know about the Bush/Cheney Plan to unseat Saddam Hussein and gain access to his oil. We hadn’t read the letter to President Clinton quoted here so often from the Project for the New American Century that explained their wish for "Regime Change" in Iraq. But mostly, we still had faith that our government was acting in our own best interests.

In retrospect, this interview is something of a cover-your-ass interview. It supposes that it was the intelligence community that let us down, not the new executive branch that had not listened to the intelligence we already had. And also it sounds like that intelligence community had been making excuses. "Our hands are tied! How can we get this kind of intelligence with all the checks and balances on our methods?" they might have said. So Vice President Cheney started immediately working on getting the tools to take the gloves off from his legal communmity – his lawyer David Addington, Bush’s lawyer Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. Recall, these were the days of "Dead or Alive" and "Bring it on!" I felt thing like that back then too. I expect most of us did – Rambo feelings, I call them.

There’s a "But…" in all of this coming, of course. It’s a reasonable "But…" Why not play it straight? If he’s going to say it in an interview on Meet the Press, why not say it in Congress? Why not follow our system? Why go around the F.I.S.A.? Why was everything in secret? I expect he would say something like, "We’re dealing with a formibable foe. Why should we let him know our plans?" That sounds reasonable, but it leaves out the ingredient that sews all of this together – Power.

From the very start, and for every minute both before and after 9/11, Dick Cheney is a Power Freak. Everything in his career is about Power, amassing Power. They’ve buried this psychological motive in their "Unitary Executive" Theory. I’ll guarantee you that if President Clinton came up with such a theory, Cheney would oppose it. This theory only applies to him. So, the Power grab was in the works within days of 9/11, and probably from before [see my last post, the quotes at the end from Chaffee’s new book]. He grabbed Power. He exerted Power. But he blew it, big time. He claimed he was ammassing Power to get good intelligence. But what he did was take us on a wild goose chase to Iraq based on the shakiest of cherry-picked intelligence, stuff they gathered to support his pre-existing conclusions and design.