I know most people are tired of the endless parsing of the transgressions of the Bush Administration. But I’m not tired of it. I doubt I ever will be. The short news cycle in contemporary politics is now standard fare, but that doesn’t mean that a history as important as our history from 2001-2009 should disappear. It hasn’t yet been adequately transcribed, and I have great respect for people like Marcy emptywheel Wheeler who keeps her nose to the grindstone looking for an approximation of the truth. In this post, she implies that the large amount of disappearing evidence about the Torture Programs is not due to chance, but instead to a pattern of active destruction that weaves throughout the history of the Bush Administration – a lesson probably learned from the White House Tapes during the Nixon Administration.
I just re-read Philippe Sands’ Torture Team and, given the news of disappearing emails and documents, this passage struck me anew:
[Mike Dunlavey, who was in charge of Gitmo as they put together the torture plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani] would have liked to have gone back to the daily diaries and schedules that were kept on the computer system, together with reports that were sent out on a daily basis, and details of the videoconferences that had taken place with the Pentagon. “I need to see that stuff,” he mused, “how am I going to get it?” It seemed doubtful that he would. “They were backed up at SOUTHCOM,” he explained, but “a couple of months after I left there was a SNAFU and all was lost.”Sands goes onto wonder whether there might be a connection to the destruction of the torture tapes. Dunlavey left Gitmo in November 2002, so those materials would have been lost in late 2002 or early 2003, when we now know people were panicking about what to do about the torture tapes. That was also between the time when–at the end of November 2002–a lawyer from CIA’s Office of General Counsel reviewed the tapes and claimed they matched the torture logs exactly, and the time when–in May 2003–CIA’s Inspector General discovered they weren’t an exact match. More importantly, CIA IG discovered there were 11 blank tapes, 2 broken ones, and 2 more mostly blank ones, suggesting that a first round of efforts to hide evidence on the torture tapes took place before CIA’s IG reviewed them. In other words, this “SNAFU” happened around the same time as the first round of destruction of the torture tapes took place.
Since there are so many incidences of destroyed or disappearing torture evidence, I thought it time to start cataloging them, to keep them all straight.
First, recall that the government has refused to turn over all of Abu Zubaydah’s diaries to him [update: here’s a more updated description of the diaries status from Jason Leopold]. The status of both the diaries and the legal argument over them remains largely sealed, so we can’t know for sure whether all the diaries remain intact. I believe they are just being withheld and haven’t been destroyed, but we don’t know for sure.
Also, remember that Alberto Gonzales was wandering around DC with a briefcase full of CYA documents just after he became Attorney General. Among those documents were draft and final versions of OLC opinions relating to torture, and possibly memos describing some operational aspects of the program.
The classified materials that are the subject of this investigation consist of notes that Gonzales drafted to memorialize a classified briefing of congressional leaders about the NSA surveillance program when Gonzales was the White House Counsel; draft and final Office of Legal Counsel opinions about both the NSA surveillance program and a detainee interrogation program; correspondence from congressional leaders to the Director of Central Intelligence; and other memoranda describing legal and operational aspects of the two classified programs.Since this briefcase appears to have been about CYA, it is unlikely Gonzales would have destroyed any of them. But we know only that they were not in secure custody for about two years. In other words, at least five pieces of evidence on torture has disappeared or been destroyed. But it could well be more than that. John Durham? For a guy investigating disappearing evidence, you’ve been awfully quiet…
With as much digging as has been done into the documentation of the Bush Administration, it is beyond imaginable how much of it is either missing or REDACTED from FOIA documents. It is so common that we’ve come to expect it. It dates from early in Bush’s tenure. On Nov. 1, 2001, Bush signed Executive Order 13233. Prior to the order, presidential records were sealed for 12 years, after which they were reviewed for release by the National Archives. Under the new order, both the former and incumbent president must review the records before they are released by the archives, and either could block disclosure indefinitely. Cheney went one further, joking that the way to avoid have a paper trail was to never write anything down, then refusing to have his records archived. But the disappearances, cataloged by Marcy for the Torture Program above, are so regular that they’ve become expected. Like, for example, the disappearance of the White House emails.
Such things don’t just happen. Somebody has to do the disappearing, and it has to be someone with a degree of technical savvy and an insider’s knowledge of what information needs to be destroyed. What that means to me is that there are knowledgeable middle-men out there who know what happened to all the records that evaporated and why.
I expect it was in the Bush corporate culture to be avoid writing down as much as possible, but the growing list of specific documents that can’t be located bespeaks a concerted effort. It seems to me that a specific investigation of how documents disappeared ought to ultimately flush out someone in the action team who might save their own soul by coming clean. As inept as those people were otherwise, I find it hard to believe that they could assemble a foolproof anything. And the place I would start would be with anyone remotely associated with Karl C. Rove. This sounds like his kind of fun…
I’m not tired with the search for truth for the Bush years. I want future presidents to know that no one will ever be allowed to lie us into a war again and get away with it. I want the future presidents and their appointed people workers in the executive branch to know that they work for us (Americans) not only the chief executive. Investigators should be able to stop the assault on our country and our laws with the computer searchs that are available to many. Serious crimes have been committed and we are already seeing the lies being told by Cheney, Rumsfied,Rove to revise history in their favor and to blame those who are less powerful. Thanks to people like Marcy of Empty wheel and people like boring old man they will not be successful in revising our history to protect themselves. They need to be held accountable. Doing nothing shouldn’t be allowed or it will happen again.