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Posted on Tuesday 26 May 2009


Dick Cheney’s Torture Kabuki
By: emptywheel
May 26, 2009

I wanted to pull three threads together in this post, which suggest how Cheney instituted torture in this country:

  • Alberto Gonzales may have been approving torture even while Condi Rice and others went through the show of getting an OLC opinion to authorize it;
  • CIA claimed to be briefing Congress when it wasn’t;
  • The Bush Administration then claimed Congress had bought off on torture to persuade those objecting to torture within the administration.

There are also certain parallels with the way Cheney implemented his illegal wiretap program…

Alberto Gonzales’ approvals

As Ari Shapiro reported last week, Alberto Gonzales was personally approving the techniques Mitchell’s torturers would use on a daily basis…
    The source says nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.
…this raises the possibility that the OLC approval process was all just show, basically endorsing torture that had gone on for some time already…

So that’s the first data point: that the CIA may have started torturing, and only got an OLC opinion to authorize it because Condi and Bellinger were inquiring into the legal basis for it.

CIA claimed to be briefing Congress when it wasn’t

As I noted in a post that’s supposed to go up at the Guardian today, the CIA claimed to have briefed Congress before all this happened–in those two briefings they claimed to have given Bob Graham. In addition, they repeatedly claimed to have briefed Democrats on the program, when they actually did not…

The Administration then claimed Congress had bought off on torture

And then, backed by this false record, the Administration tried to persuade those within the Administration who were fighting the torture…

The similarity with the illegal wiretap program

This last bit–the claiming Congress approved when it didn’t – is a tactic they used with the illegal wiretap program, as well. Recall what we know: On March 9 and 10, 2004, Jim Comey refused to reauthorize the illegal wiretap program. So Cheney pulled in the Gang of Eight (the first time the full Gang of Eight got briefed together), and gave them some representation of Comey’s concerns. According to Nancy Pelosi (her again), she objected to continuing the program. Nevertheless, Alberto Gonzales (him again) and Andy Card intended to use this purported support from Congress to continue the illegal program to persuade John Ashcroft – then in ICU and not legally acting as AG – to override Comey’s refusal to reauthorize the program.

Most interesting, though, is the record-keeping. After Comey and Mueller made it clear they might resign over the program’s reauthorization (under Gonzales’ signature), George Bush ordered Gonzales to create notes of the Congressional briefing – the one that had occurred a few days earlier. Even more interesting, Gonzales went back and added one more sentence some time after that fact. And it’s those records that Gonzales relied on when he claimed to Congress that the entire Gang of Eight had bought off on the program.

So: Alberto Gonzales approves a program he has no authority to approve. They create records after the fact – the content of which is contested – to claim they had Congressional approval for the authorization. And then use that purported Congressional approval (though apparently, more members of Congress approved of this than have of torture)to try to persuade those at DOJ who objected to the program.

At least they’re consistent.
Marcy is pointing to a methodology of deceit. It’s kind of like the strategy used by hedge fund investors. Play both sides of the fence. Use Congress’s purported agreement to convince the C.I.A. and the C.I.A.’s purported agreement to sell Congressmen. Truth? Neither fully briefed, neither really supporting the plan.

It reminds me of the methodology of September 8, 2002. The Administration leaked the ravings [all lies] of Curveball, the I.N.H. defector being interrogated by the Germans [who didn’t believe him], to Judith Miller of the New York Times. It was the fairy tale about Hussein’s impending atomic bombs.

THREATS AND RESPONSES:
THE IRAQIS; U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS
New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JUDITH MILLER
September 8, 2002

More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today….
Meanwhile, on the same day, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and Colin Powell are ton t.v. alking about Hussein’s dangerousness, referencing the New York Times article as evidence [the very paper they had leaked to]. It’s definitely a hedge-fund-esque method. They "leveraged" their story. Likewise, a few months later, Bush says, "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Since our C.I.A. had already debunked the Niger Forgeries, Bush referred to the British, who hadn’t yet come around and admitted that this was all baloney. What makes this piece particularly absurd is that the forged Niger documents said "bought," not "sought." The notion of "sought" was an earlier fabrication made up in the White House from, of all places, Joseph Wilson’s report. He mentioned that a Niger Official had said that an Iraqi had approached him at a conference, though that Iraqi never said anything about uranium [or much else].

These obvious hedging and leveraging methods alert us to how much this whole campaign for war [lasting from September 2002 to March 2003] was a sham. If you’ve got the goods on someone, you don’t have to go through all of these machinations and pertubations. So, carry on emptywheel, the Good-Guy Senators read your blog too. Load them up for bear until this truth can’t help but be plastered all over every t.v. set and front page in the country, "Invasion of Iraq was premeditated fraud, run by V.P."…

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