1 Boring Old Man

There is a wealth of investigative material on the development of our aggressive torture program in the period after 9/11, including the recent ACLU FOIA Document Dump last week about the destruction of the tapes of Abu Zubaydah’s torture. But it’s not exactly in the public domain, because it’s not widely read. The gist of things is that the US was going to take off the gloves in responding to that egregious attack – the use Vice President Cheney’s term – move to the Dark Side. The torture program was just one example of that sentiment – one opposed by our own laws and international treaties. There were a couple of things the US didn’t officially condone: torturing prisoners and waging unprovoked war [though both sets of principles had been unofficially breached in Viet Nam].

In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Towers, our government quickly embarked on a path to get around both of these prohibitions. One strategy was to redefine torture through the legal system using the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. Another strategy was to engage the intelligence communities in creating a case for war. While they were at it, they rode over another prohibition – our right to privacy – using these same legal and intelligence agencies to engage in unwarranted domestic surveillance. In each case, part of their rationale was to use the war powers of the presidency to basically shift the balance of powers towards the executive branch of our government. All of these efforts were rapidly mobilized immediately after 9/11.

I spent this weekend in a bunker hiding from our record pollen counts, occupying myself reading the many reports of what went on in 2002 about the torture program. The information is surprisingly detailed and available.  It’s clear that all kind of people knew that what they were doing was on very unsteady ground. The solution was secrecy. The widespread domestic surveillance was a secret. The construction of a Casus Belli for Iraq operated in secret. The torture program was a secret. Here’s a piece from the minutes of a GITMO Counter Resistance Strategy meeting on October 2, 2002 – talking about how to deal with the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] that monitors prisoner treatment:

Read by an outsider a few weeks later, the central flaw was immediately apparent:

In the ACLU FOIA Dump from Friday, there are plenty of examples of conscious covering up the tracks, culminating in the destruction of the evidence – the videotapes of Abu Zubaydah’s torture. This is a report of what the CIA Officer, Jose Rodriguez, who ordered them destroyed had to say the next day:

White House Counsel, Harriet Miers, may have been uncharacteristically livid [but she didn’t do anything with her livid] and Jose Rodriguez continued in this same job for several years. Within a few months, Miers was hard at work shepherding another plan to corrupt the DoJ – the firing of the US Attorneys [the ones who wouldn’t push the politically motivated "voter fraud" cases]. All of this corruption of the government agencies flowed down from the White House, mediated primarily through a team of lawyers from each of the agencies skillfully coordinated by the the Vice President, Dick Cheney, and his Legal Counsel/Chief of Staff, David Addington.

When the Libby Trial finally made it into court, I wanted it to be bigger. I wanted Fitzgerald to indict Karl Rove and Dick Cheney – and maybe even George Bush. I wanted 24/7 News coverage. But, I’ll have to admit that the trial that happened actually changed things for the better, even though it wasn’t the firework display I’d envisioned. So I’d settle for a less explosive case with the torture tape destruction than the one of my fantasies, but it’s looking to me like while the it was widely wished for in the Administration, it was the work of Jose Rodriguez taking matters into his own hands. And at the time it happened, there wasn’t any ongoing case in the justice system, so it’s hard for me to see what justice might have been obstructed. The tapes were destroyed before we really knew what was going on.  And I don’t know anything about the laws about the pre-emptive destruction of incriminating government records in general, but I worry that this tape destruction thing might not be the longed for torture program smoking gun.