1 Boring Old Man

McCain opposes probe of interrogation practices
Google News [AP]
07/12/2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. John McCain says he’s against opening a criminal investigation into whether CIA officers tortured detainees during the Bush administration. The Arizona Republican and former presidential candidate suggested that the fallout from embarking on a criminal investigation would provide a recruiting tool to terrorists.

McCain echoed the words of President Barack Obama, saying that it is time to move forward. The senator’s comments on NBC’s "Meet the Press" come as Attorney General Eric Holder considers whether to push forward with such a probe.

McCain questions what purpose would be served by airing out practices that are already known to have taken place and which McCain fought strongly against.

"what purpose would be served by airing out practices that are already known to have taken place and which McCain fought strongly against": While it is true that McCain did fight against some of those practices, he stopped before he completed the job. In my mind, he got talked out of following his principles for political reasons. Now he’s using the same logic on us that derailed him. Had he stuck to his guns [and picked a rational VP Candidate], he might even be President now. I’m glad he’s not, because he often bails out before the job is completed. Of all Republicans, he’s the one who knows why what happened needs to be pursued.

The purpose of airing out practices that are already known to have taken place  is obvious. The Bush Administration made a mockery of our entire system by exploiting loopholes and manipulating government to do it their way, not our way. We don’t elect people to play by their rules, we’ve got rules of our own. They broke our Laws, betrayed our trust, told us lies. They took control and abused their power and it was a disaster. They claimed they were the Law. They weren’t, and we need to tell them, their supporters, and future leaders that we are a government "of the people," "by the people," and "for the people." Our reason for airing out practices that are already known to have taken place is the same reason we charge criminals. If the criminals claims mitigating circumstances, we evaluate those considerations in sentencing.

Officials: CIA program targeted al-Qaida leaders
AP
By PAMELA HESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — A secret intelligence program canceled by CIA Director Leon Panetta in June was meant to find and then capture or kill al-Qaida leaders at close range rather than target them with air strikes that risked civilian casualties, government officials with knowledge of the operation said Monday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program, said the spy agency’s program never got off the ground.

Panetta canceled the effort on June 23 after learning of its existence, its failure to yield results, and the fact that Congress had been unaware of the program since its inception in 2001, according to one official with direct knowledge of the plan.

That official said former President George W. Bush authorized killing al-Qaida leaders shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and that Congress was made aware of that. However, the official said, Panetta also told members of Congress that according to notes that he had been given on the early months of the program, then-Vice President Dick Cheney directed the CIA not to inform Congress of the specifics of the secret program.

Panetta told the committees there was no indication that there was anything illegal or inappropriate about the effort itself, the official said…

^{Notice who’s not hanging on every word –
David Addington [behind Mary Matalin]…}

Now Can We Investigate?
Monday 13 July 2009
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist

President Obama is in the process of losing what may be the most important argument of his young administration. The argument is not about health care, bank bailouts, the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, the environment or the auto industry, though arguments on these issues are indeed ongoing and hanging in the balance.

No, the Obama administration is losing the argument about the past being less important than the future. They would like his government, Congress and the American people to look forward, and to leave behind as much of the past as possible. The past, in this case, is the battery of crimes, cover-ups and tyrannies unleashed by their predecessors in the Bush administration.

The Obama administration’s argument in favor of leaving the myriad abuses of the Bush administration to the dustbin of history is understandable, though hardly valid at this point. Obama and his team have a thousand and one problems to deal with in the here and now, and according to them, any attempt to quest into the past will derail all the work they have to do. They are also justifiably concerned that Republicans in Congress will try to burn down the Capitol building if Democrats even twitch in the direction of digging up the past.

Understandable? Sure. Valid? Not by a long chalk…

Siobhan Gorman reports that the secret program that Leon Panetta just revealed to Congress is an assassination squad.

^{A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter. The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.}

^{According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.}

^{In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn’t clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.}

Two comments about this. First, there must be something more. Aside from the near ubiquitous drone strikes, which seem to be fully acknowledged and non-controversial, there have been enough personal strikes against al Qaeda figures that appear likely to have been assassinations, that for all intents and purposes, it appears we are assassinating al Qaeda figures.

It may be, for example, that the conflict reported by Sy Hersh is the problem – that Special Ops has the mandate to kill but CIA is being dragged into those assassinations.

^{Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. [In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.]}

^{The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.}

^{“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”}

^{“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me.}

But even that can’t be it. While the conflict Hersh reported pertained to Iran, not al Qaeda, Congress clearly knows about this conflict – they’ve even drafted legislation to curb it. Nevertheless, you’d think that if Congress saw this going on with regards to Iran, it’d worry them more than the same practice going on with al Qaeda. Second, just to pre-empt the inevitable discussion of "law" every time this comes up. Yes, EO 12333 still appears to ban

assassinations.

^{No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.}

But EO 12333 is precisely the Executive Order that Sheldon Whitehouse invoked in 2007 when he revealed that Bush got an OLC opinion stating he could change EOs without changing the EO–what I call pixie dust.

^{"But what does this administration say about executive orders?"}

^{An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.}

^{"Whenever (the President) wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order," he may do so because "an executive order cannot limit a President." And he doesn’t have to change the executive order, or give notice that he’s violating it, because by "depart(ing) from the executive order," the President "has instead modified or waived it."}

So for those who will, inevitably, immediately invoke EO 12333 in arguing that assassination is "illegal," please do your homework. EO 12333 apparently prohibits assassinations, but there’s no way we can guarantee that Bush didn’t pixie dust the EO back in 2001 when he set up his little assassination squad. Furthermore, an EO is just that, an EO, one that a President can change at will without even publicly informing Congress or the American people. While it counts as law for the Executive Branch, it is not the same as a law passed by Congress, and treating it as if it is is simple foolishness at this point. I assume we’ll learn more about this in coming days. But thus far, I’m not convinced this is the whole of the story yet.

That’s my thought too. Panetta wouldn’t have been stirred so deeply by any of this. Congress wouldn’t have been so bent out of shape by it either. What I think we know at this point is that the C.I.A. had a hit squad program, that isn’t fully operational that went around any number of Laws. Either it had to do with Iran, not Iraq, or it is a C.I.A. Operation that should be under the Military’s control, or it was something else. My guess is that its some fancy techn-gizmo for assassinating people. Maybe they’re finding ways for bombs/drones to locate and hone in on cell phones.

Update: Okay, the WaPo explains that it’s not the assassinations themselves, it’s technical capability to make assassinations easier…

Also, consider this recent reporting from Wired…

It’s easy to criticize things in the past that didn’t work. Knowing that something failed validates the criticism in advance. And people who are failing, or who have failed, fall into a trap themselves. They continue to justify their plan, even when it’s clear it didn’t work out. They often keep pushing a failing enterprise, trying to pull it out of the fire eg "the Surge." Worse, they try to say "it worked" when it’s obvious it didn’t. So, we have self righteous critics, "I told you it wouldn’t work." And we have rationalizing defenders, "It did work. See, there have been no further attacks." And sometimes, they claim that what looks like failure is really a new problem, "How could we have predicted the insurgency?"

So, when we look back at the Bush Administration, we have to be careful not to punish failure. That’s the part that would be dangerous for our future. Our leadersa have the same right to fail as the rest of us. In fact, the right to fail is a bedrock American Principle. It’s called bankruptcy. We don’t throw you in debtor’s prison here. They tried that in England, and ended up colonizing the New World with their debtors. We just take you out of the game until you prove you’ve learned how to play.

When we review what our last Administration did, we have to evaluate each piece of it with this question, "What if it had worked?" For example, if in the course of torturing Abu Zubaydah. he had said, "Osama bin Laden lives at 3254 Maple Street in Islamabad, Pakistan", and we’d sent a kidnapping squad there that picked bin Laden up and flown him to Thailand where he was tortured and told us where all the al Qaeda cells were in the world – would we then be so down on torture? Or what if we’d data-mined all the phone calls in Georgia for the phrase "Savannah River Plant," and figured out there was an al Qaeda plan to attack it and steal plutonium, and we stopped the plot, would we be so down on data-mining? Or if Rumsfeld had listened to the military and sent 400,000 troops to Iraq, secured its borders early, and they had formed a Democratic Government that sold us oil cheap, would we be so down on the Iraq War?

I’ve been impressed that the Obama Administration as a whole appears to be sensitive to these points. They seem to feel that they need to start where we are and move ahead. A lot of us feel otherwise. But are we simply punishing failure? or being partisan? In some instances, the answer is a clear "Yes." But that’s not the whole story. It seems to me that there is one thing that we have every right to focus on – one thing that needs to be fixed. And it lead to a second thing that was even worse.

The one thing was the Bush Administration’s contempt for oversight. They made their plans in secret, put them into action in secret, and only told us things that moved us towards their conclusions. They evaded judicial oversight, congressional oversight, and oversight by the people at large. I believe that I would criticize that even if they had succeeded. In fact, I’m sure of it. The second thing came from this evasion of oversight – they didn’t change course based on the field conditions. They kept going with plans even when it was clear they were failing, or it became apparent that they were bad ideas. They fought to continue plans made in the desperate days of 9/11, unobserved, for now almost eight years.

It was perfectly reasonable to suspect Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. But as they pushed that hypothesis, it became patently obvious that wasn’t true – but they kept on. They interrogated Abu Zubaydah successfully, but when they didn’t learn all they wanted to learn, they tortured him unmercifully [with no results]. Either what they wanted him to say wasn’t true ,or what they wanted to know wasn’t something he knew. Oversight is important in the planning phase of things, but it’s also important when things are put into action. They avoided oversight "period." Our Constitutional Democracy was built on oversight. In many ways, it’s a brilliant system. The Founders seemed to know how human nature and power can interact and go amiss. So they built in Checks and Balances to head off the kind of things that can happen – in this case, did happen.

Oversight, Checks and Balances, things like that can be a huge pain in the ass. I personally hate committees, boards, task forces, situations where decisions are made by many. I prefer being given a job, thinking it through, and doing it. I don’t want advice unless I get stuck and ask for it [So I wouldn’t vote for me for President]. Group decisions are a lot harder. That’s why we have an "Executive" – someone who can get things accomplished ["execute" things]. We even recognize that in emergencies, we need to suspend the group-think because we need action. So we have war-time exceptions to get the job done.

When and To What Degree Was John Ashcroft Read Into the Illegal Surveillance Program?
By emptywheel
July 12, 2009

Ashcroft Claims He Wasn’t Fully Briefed on Data Mining Aspects of Program

That all addresses when Ashcroft was read into the program–but not what he learned. At least according to Ashcroft, he was never fully briefed on what are presumably the vacuuming and data-mining aspects of the program [we know this because of all the leaks that make it clear that data mining was the primary issue behind the March 10 confrontation] until after Philbin and Goldsmith replaced Yoo. The IG Report explains:

In a May 20, 2004 memorandum, Ashcroft wrote that it was not until Philbin and later Goldsmith explained to him that aspects of the NSA’s Other Intelligence Activities were not accurately described in the prior Authorizations that he realized that he had been certifying the Authorizations prior to March 2004 based on a misimpression of those activities.

The IG Report reinforces Ashcroft’s point here. It says that Yoo’s memos left out details on the Other Intelligence Activities that were part of the program.

Yoo also discussed in his memoranda the legal rationale for Other Intelligence Activities authorized as part of the PSP. To the extent that particular statutes might appear to preclude these activities, Yoo concluded that "we do not believe that Congress may restrict the President’s inherent constitutional powers, which allow him to gather intelligence necessary to defend the nation from direct attack." However, as detailed in Chapter Three of the DOJ OIG report, Yoo’s discussion of some of the Other Intelligence Activities did not accurately describe the scope of these activities. Yoo’s factual description of these activities was later identified by his successors in the Office of Legal Counsel and ODAG in late 2003 as insufficient and presenting a serious impediment to recertification as to form and legality.

Given that these "Other Intelligence Activities" are almost certainly the data mining and vacuuming parts of the program, it’s not just FISA that Yoo was blowing off here; it was also the Electronic Communication Protection Act and the Wiretap Act. And, by the time Philbin and Goldsmith discovered the discrepancy between what Yoo had described and what was actually being done, it also violated Congress’ explicit prohibition in the 2004 Defense Appropriations Law against DOD conducting such activity. All of which seems to explain the issues behind Ashcroft’s bring read in on the program. He wasn’t involved in the initial discussions about the program [John Yoo may or may not have been]. And from that point going forward, he took his understanding of the program from Yoo’s description of it–which left out key details about the data mining and vacuum side of things.

"Other Intelligence Activities" apparently means data-mining. As I understand it, data-mining means something like profiling. Look for all calls that have these words in them. I suppose that it’s like Googling, except the database is "all calls." The point is that our laws require "probable cause" for wiretaps or warrants. The results of a data-mining operation are so general that they fall way outside the definitions of "probable cause." So, why all the secrecy and subterfuge? Simple answer – it’s because what they’re doing is illegal under our Constitution’s Bill of Rights:

Article the sixth… The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I had a few moments in college when I considered going into Law. My roommate at the time was in Law School. One night, we were talking and he said, "You think being a lawyer is about right and wrong?" He went on to describe the alternative – due process, the right to having the best defense, etc. I didn’t listen too carefully to his explanation. His question had been enough. I’d already decided to move on to something else, because he was on target – I did think it was about right and wrong. If it was about something else, I wasn’t interested. But, over the course of time, I’ve seen or been involved with the legal process more than I would’ve liked, and I’ve been surprised. As confusing and as slow as the judicial system can be, it usually does the right thing [or the right enough thing], even in situations where it didn’t come out like I wanted it to.

The C.I.A. Leak case only resulted in a commuted sentence for a lackey – Scooter Libby – but it exposed a lot of the story to people who don’t keep up with such things. It took the vague preoccupations of bloggers into front page newspaper articles and political speeches where it belonged. We finally began to hear people saying things like "… lied to take us to war." And the trial itself gave us the first taste of the now ubiquitous "live blogging" of such events – catapulting the bloggers into the "real" media. The Law didn’t give us everything we wanted because the Law required proof that the parties under suspicion knew that Valerie Plame was a covert agent [it may be true that they didn’t]. But the trial made it clear who did what and why. Patrick Fitzgerald said "there’s a cloud over the Vice Presidency" – and that cloud has never lifted. It’s hard to realize that the Libby Trial ended only a little over two years ago, and look at where we are now.

What now? The Bush people are out of office, though their Party remains a problem. And the shadow of their Administration hangs heavily over the land. America is no longer a victim [September 11, 2001], we are the perpetrators [unjust invader of a sovereign state, torturers, a rogue nation]. We have a corrupted Constitution and a deeply divided people. Some want us to put the past behind us to "look forward" and "heal" [President Obama]. Others want us to examine the past and right the wrongs [me and probably you]. So we come again to the Law. The abuses of power during the Bush Administration were masterminded by lawyers [David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Miers, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, etc.]. They were obsessed with negotiating their way through the Law, all the while claiming they were the Law. With a few exceptions [Jim Comey, Jack Goldsmith, Patrick Fitzgerald], they "owned" the Department of Justice.

Comes now Eric Holder, our new Attorney General – the focus of a lot of media attention this weekend. Today, he is the Law. Will he appoint a Special Prosecutor or not? Here’s the media’s take:

The President has said he won’t interfere with the D.O.J., but he’s also been negative about prosecuting his predecessors. There’s plenty going on with two wars and the economy [or its absence]. So what’s Holder going to do? I don’t think that a rational Attorney General looking at this last eight years can avoid doing anything. There’s too much – the prewar intelligence distortions, the N.S.A. Spying, disavowing the Geneva Conventions, Torture, Rendition, failing to notify Congress. He has to pick something that fits criminal statutes [you can’t just say "you’ve been very bad boys"], yet something that doesn’t effect National Security or weaken our future leaders and our Government Agencies.

It’s easy to sit out here and say "get them!" It’s much harder to frame "get who?" for "doing what?" because it’s against "which law?" As little as I know about the Law itself, I do have an opinion. I would want Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor with very broad powers, like Fitzgerald had. The Bush White House twisted and bent so much, and I’ll bet we don’t know the half of it. I don’t care about punishing the involved parties, but I do care about not exonerating them. So I would like to see any trials be like the Libby Trial, focused on people who definitely broke the law in ways that can be proved. But I would also like to see broad enough charges to expose the breadth of their deceit. It’s a tall order for Eric Holder because success depends on his initial appointment. We owe Jim Comey a debt of eternal gratitude for appointing Patrick Fitzgerald and giving him the tools for a complete investigation. Let us just hope that Eric Holder can follow Comey’s lead…

Independent’s Day
NEWSWEEK
By Daniel Klaidman
July 11, 2009

… These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda," he says. "But that can’t be a part of my decision"…

But in late June Holder asked an aide for a copy of the CIA inspector general’s thick classified report on interrogation abuses. He cleared his schedule and, over two days, holed up alone in his Justice Depart ment office, immersed himself in what Dick Cheney once referred to as "the dark side." He read the report twice, the first time as a lawyer, looking for evidence and instances of transgressions that might call for prosecution. The second time, he started to absorb what he was reading at a more emotional level. He was "shocked and saddened," he told a friend, by what government servants were alleged to have done in America’s name. When he was done he stood at his window for a long time, staring at Constitution Avenue.

The Bush Administration actually set up the situation themselves. In the outing of Valerie Plame, they denied everything about it until the couldn’t deny it any more. Then they openly said "if you can’t charge us with a crime, leave us alone." And the crime, outing a covert agent and knowing it, couldn’t be proved. With the torture program, they did a lot of very shady things. They controlled their own legal advice. They instituted the program before they got it authorized. They suspended habeas corpus, right to trial, and human decency. Did they break the Law? That’s for a Special Prosecutor, a Grand Jury, a Judge, and a Jury to decide.

Intel official: Cheney, Tenet kept CIA program secret
Washington Times
By Eli Lake
July 12, 2009

^{Top Bush administration officials, including former CIA director George Tenet and former Vice President Richard Cheney, opted not to brief Congress on a secret program disclosed last month by CIA director Leon Panetta, according to an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the program. This official, who asked not to be named because of the classified nature of the program, said that the decision to keep the details of the secret program from Congress was made in part because the program remained "in the capability stage."}

^{"These activities lasted, if you will, for years," this official said. "There were other conversations about whether this should be taken to Congress. Tthe same decision was made again by senior officials at the time." This official went on to say that Mr. Cheney "was one official out of a select few who was aware of the program." The exact nature of the program is still a mystery in Washington. This official hinted that the secret program involved assassinations overseas, but declined to provide further details.}

^{Another intelligence official said the classified program was known as a SAP, or special access program. SAPs are intelligence activities that are so secret that even officers with the highest intelligence clearances do not know about them and their access is reserved for only the most senior officials and officers directly working on it. The New York Times reported on its Web site Saturday that the program was concealed from Congress at the direction of Mr. Cheney…}

^{Mr. Panetta, upon learning of the program’s existence, ordered it ended and briefed intelligence committees about it on June 24.}

Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project
New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
July 11, 2009

^{The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday. The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy. Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day…}

^{The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.” But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters”…}

^{The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort…}

^{Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program, whose details remained secret and which even some Democrats have said was properly classified. Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that should have been disclosed to the intelligence committees. Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.}

^{In the tense months after 9/11, when Bush administration officials believed new Qaeda attacks could occur at any moment, intelligence officials brainstormed about radical countermeasures. It was in that atmosphere that the unidentified program was devised and deliberately concealed from Congress, officials said. Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool…}

Things are getting confusing. There are the "Other Intelligence Activities" of the NSA-PSP-OIG Report. And there’s the whatever-secret-thing-the-CIA-was-doing that C.I.A. Chief Panetta raced to brief Congress about. Then there’s the "hit-squad reporting to Cheney" that Seymour Hersh alluded to in his talk several months ago in Minnesota. And Dick Cheney’s name [with sidekick David Addington] seems linked to all of them. Oh yeah, there was Torture too – and recall, we are still waiting for the release of the 2004 C.I.A. OIG Report. While these all may be separate things involving multiple agencies, it is more likely that they all go under the heading of "The Dark Side" of our War on Terror [slash War of Terror]. And it looks as though we’re about to get another jolt with Mr. former VP riding the chariot once again.

Dick Cheney and David Addington could have played it straight. They could’ve trusted our intelligence agencies to do their jobs. They could’ve followed the F.I.S.A. Guidelines, the Geneva Conventions, the Courts. At the least, they let Osama bin Laden drive them crazy on 9/11. More likely, they were crazy to start with, and 9/11 just gave them a reason to play it all out. It’s as if the People, the Laws and the Congress were their enemies rather than al Qaeda. It was a perfect storm – crazy Arab Jihadist, crazy American Vice President, weak American President, and way too much power to go around. What a tragedy…. 

In the lead-up to the night visitors attempt to get Ashcroft to sign off on the renewal of the program, Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith were called to the White House to a meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney. The obvious purpose of the meeting was to convince them to sign off on the program. We have become so accustomed to our leaders’ ethereal relationship with the truth that it’s easy to overlook what happened, it was such a regular occurrence:

"critically important" "thousands of lives" Where did that statement come from? Later in the report, each of the Intelligence Agencies has a section where they discuss the efficacy of the PSP [President’s Surveillance Program]. None of them found convincing evidence that the program was effective. But more than that, none of them reported on any survey of the effectiveness of program that came before the meeting under discussion here. There was no information about efficacy when Dick Cheney was speaking to Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith.

There are so many things wrong with this whole story. The Vice President and the President’s Counsel are meeting with the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Legal Counsel – people in charge of certifying the legality of the program. That isn’t how things are supposed to work. What happened to ‘justice is blind?’ Why are they directly lobbying the DoJ? What kind of legal argument is Cheney’s assertion that "thousands of lives" were at risk? And where did Cheney’s assertion come from? It came from his mind. It’s either something he thought, or something he made up to get his way, but it was for damned sure not based on any data:

In the IG Report, they couldn’t even cite examples where this program helped. They mention several cases where it may have helped. So, in this meeting [which shouldn’t have occurred], Cheney argued that the DoJ decide to ignore their duty to uphold the Law because the program in question was vital to National Defense [’cause Cheney said so]. And we’re still unclear "why?" Why was this ineffective program such a big deal?