1 Boring Old Man

Why the CIA Would Want to Hide May 2002 from Judge Hellerstein [and the ACLU]
By: emptywheel
June 11, 2009

I’ve had a couple of really weedy posts examining the CIA’s response to the torture FOIA. And I wanted to pull back a bit, and explain what I think they might mean.

We’re getting all these documents because the CIA is trying to avoid being held in contempt for not revealing the now-destroyed torture tapes in a response to this FOIA in 2004. At that time, the CIA had to reveal the torture related documents held by its Inspector General or Office of General Counsel. When ACLU learned of the torture tape destruction, it argued that the tapes should have been included in that FOIA compliance and certainly should not have been destroyed. The CIA argued, though, that since the Inspector General had never physically had the tapes, they were not responsive to the original FOIA…

The CIA was hoping – it appears – that its narrative that the torture tapes portrayed waterboarding, and that’s the big reason they were sensitive, would distract Hellerstein and the ACLU and therefore allow them to hide a slew of other information: the success of the FBI before Abu Zubaydah’s torture started, the torture that started before the OLC opinions were written [and the White House’s intimate involvement in approving the earlier torture], the role of contractors in the torture, the quality of intelligence they got using persuasive interrogation as compared to the quality of intelligence they got using torture, whatever happened in al-Nashiri’s waterboarding that led them to stop and even admit it didn’t work with him, whatever happened to Abu Zubaydah around October 11, 2002 that led them to take a picture of him, and the Inspector General’s reconstruction of the Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation [which should have been turned over in the first FOIA]…

[big snip]

And so we get the Vaughn Index released the other day. Panetta’s declaration makes a couple of big new admissions: Contractors were present at the interrogations, and someone at NSC, rather than George Tenet, made this program a special access program. But the new materials continue to hide the following evidence that might support a contempt citation:

• Details about the interrogations from May [May overall was undersampled, particularly from May 14 through 23]
• Deliberative discussions that took place before August [which might include the approval of torture before the OLC memos]
• The degree to which torture, as practiced, exceeded the torture as authorized 
• Mistakes the CIA made about Abu Zubaydah’s identity
• The extent to which FBI interrogators got more and better intelligence than the CIA contractors
• Someone’s – perhaps the Inspector General’s – reconstruction of the timeline concerning the torture
• Interview records from both the Inspector General’s investigation or the early CIA response to revealing the torture tapes had been destroyed

Perhaps most telling, the CIA undersampled in May and did not turn over any of four timelines and six notes/outlines [which I suspect were part of the IG investigation], but included in Vaughn B two totally decontextualized descriptions of waterboarding [and mark my words–I bet the CIA will soon agree to hand those over to prove its cooperation].

SHINY OBJECT!! WATERBOARDING!!!!

The CIA still wants to pretend this is all about waterboarding. But it is increasingly clear that it is about the things CIA did in May and June, the high level authorizations for it, the success of the FBI, and the completely false claims they used to later authorize their torture. The torture tapes were destroyed not because they showed OLC-authorized waterboarding. They were destroyed [among other reasons] because they proved that the foundation of our torture program was a lie. And the CIA is still trying to hide that fact from Judge Hellerstein.

During that year to year and a half, we’ve learned that our own government misbehaved in almost any dimension you might pick. Rather than rely on our existing agencies – the C.I.A., the D.o.D., the D.o.J. – the Executive Branch took them over and directed their activities – micromanaging each from the White House – specifically, the Office of the Vice President. It was a new meaning for the term, Commander in Chief. In their defense, it was certainly a tumultuous time and I’m sure the pressures were great. But as we learn more and more about their behavior, we would’ve been better off if they’d just taken the year off and gone to their ranches for a period of spiritual renewal.

Each new revelation seems to lead to a new deceit. Over the ensuing six years of the Iraq War, we’ve learned that the intelligence that warned of the al Qaeda attack was ignored. We’ve found out that the cause for the Iraq War was a lie. We’ve learned that we jettisoned the Geneva Conventions. Now, we’re learning that the illegal torture was part of the attempt to justify the illegal war. Above all, we’ve learned that the Executive perogative of classifying information was used extensively to evade the oversight that lies at the heart of the American Constitution. Rather than keeping secrets from our enemies, the Executive Branch kept secrets from Congress and the American people. The Department of Justice became their political arm, and the C.I.A. began to resemble the K.G.B. in Russia, a direct agent of the rulers rather than the intelligence gathering agency of the government. If that weren’t enough, the domestic functions of government – things like disaster relief, responsible fiscal policy, attention to our economy and our markets – fell to the wayside and our descent into an economic black hole went unattended until it was too late to do anything about it.

A Suspect’s Long History of Hate, and Signs of Strain

James W. von Brunn was growing despondent. John de Nugent, an acquaintance who describes himself as a white separatist, noticed the change when they last spoke two weeks ago… "The responsible white separatist community condemns this," he said. "It makes us look bad."

James W. Brunn does make the white separatist community look kind of bad. And Scott Roeder didn’t do much for the anti-abortion picketers either. Now that I think about it, Adolph Hitler had a real negative impact on the reputation of the German peple.

The topic isn’t the the paranoid person’s choice of objects, though that’s what makes it to the news. It’s the mechanisms operative in the mind of the paranoid person. It’s always the same. "They" are out to destroy "me" "us." In Brunn’s book title, he’s found a line in the Torah -"Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog" – apparently a line of interpretation about the escape from Egypt under Moses. It is said to mean something like, "… when in battle, do not try to spare the lives of those opposing soldiers who are fine, upstanding people. Kill any enemy soldier, regardless of their character." But who cares what it means? James Brunn could’ve found a jillion lines that might explain his feeling that the Jews are out to get him us. In the mind of the paranoid person, "they" are always the same – some group [called in the literature the pseudocommunity] that is specifically motivated to wipe "me" "us" out. Why pseudocommunity? Jews are a real community. Well, Brunn was an equal opportunity paranoid person, he included blacks as well – "the browning of America will alter everything…" And it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that the "they" are unassociated "other-than-me" groups.

I guess we’re in for it for a while. The paranoid people are out there, like they’ve always been, but their hatred is being fed by the republican/religious/right [RRR] at a level we’ve not seen since the heat of the Civil Rights Movement. But I’ll have to admit, even in our tolerant society, I’m awed that someone would say, "‘The responsible white separatist community condemns this,’ he said. ‘It makes us look bad.’" with no apparent awareness of how absurd that sounds.

Moving from the individual paranoid person to society at large, terrorists are frightened people – that’s just that. Sometimes, they are crazy frightened people like this old man, James Brunn, and sometimes, they’re not. Scott Roeder and James Brunn are likely flagrantly mentally ill people, but I suspect John de Nugent, the guy who talks about "the responsible white separatist community" is someone who is more in the range of frightened than deranged.

Sheldon Whitehouse: “No Further Actionable Intelligence Was Obtained”

from Abu Zubaydah by Waterboarding
By: emptywheel
June 10, 2009

Sheldon Whitehouse gave a barnburner of a speech last night, in which he described how egregious Dick Cheney’s lies about torture have been. The speech goes further than President Obama’s and Russ Feingold’s and Carl Levin’s calls on Cheney’s lies in two ways. First, those other calls focused on whether the documents Cheney wants declassified actually say what he claims they say; Whitehouse focused on whether Cheney’s more basic claims about torture are true. And second, Whitehouse here focuses not on whether we needed waterboarding to get intelligence [Obama, for example, said, "the public reports and the public justifications for these techniques – which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques – doesn’t answer the core question, which is:  Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?], but whether we actually got any useful intelligence from the methods at all. 

Whitehouse says that no further actionable intelligence was gained through the torture used on Abu Zubaydah after he was turned over to the CIA contractors for good…

I want my colleagues and the American public to know that, measured against the information I’ve been able to gain access to, the story-line that we have been led to believe, the story-line about waterboarding that we have been sold, is false in every one of its dimensions, and I ask that my colleagues be patient and be prepared to listen to the evidence when all is said and done before they wrap themselves in that storyline.

Goals Shift For Reform Of Financial Regulation
Anticipating Resistance, Obama Changes Tack
By David Cho, Binyamin Appelbaum and Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post
June 10, 2009

The Obama administration is pulling back from some of its most ambitious ideas for overhauling the financial system, after determining that the consolidation of power under fewer federal agencies would face grave opposition by lawmakers and regulators, sources familiar with the discussions said.

Although the unveiling of the plan is a week away, several central elements have already been pummeled in public by lawmakers, wary of the concentration of authority in few hands, and in private by some economists and financial executives consulted by senior officials.

The administration had originally sought to eliminate turf wars among agencies and gaps in their oversight, for instance by centralizing the power to oversee banks in one body and combining the two agencies that police financial markets.

Those proposals have fallen by the wayside, the sources said. Instead the administration increasingly is focused on adding new layers of regulation on top of old. Officials are planning to empower the Federal Reserve with new powers to manage risk across the financial markets, but are considering setting up a council of regulators to keep the central bank in check.

The plan’s evolution reflects the administration’s revised judgment that some changes, while desirable, do not get at the causes of the financial crisis, while other elements, such as the elimination of entire agencies, would be rejected on Capitol Hill. What remains, however, would still be the most sweeping overhaul of financial regulation since the Great Depression.

The administration’s proposal reflects its wide range of consultations, which may improve the chances that significant reforms will pass Congress. But as a result, the plan increasingly diverges in key respects from what senior administration officials say is the ideal approach to improving financial regulation…

In the coming plan, there are only two important issues from where I sit [knowing as little as I do about all of this]. First, the S.E.C. and the C.F.T.C. have to start doing their jobs again – a bold concept after the torpor of the Bush era. Second, the gigantic hole ["the Wendy and Phil Gramm hole"] of unregulated commodities and derivatives needs to be plugged with full regulatory oversight. It almost doesn’t matter what structures are tasked with resolving these problems – what matters is that they are full staffed, fully funded, and have great big "teeth."

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman is wandering around Europe worrying that we haven’t done enough Stimulus to bring drama to the recovery. In my way of thinking, Krugman is a Keynesian who sees the economy as an organism, kind of like a plant in a greenhouse – needing to be carefully pruned. The opposite view comes from the Conservative free-market Capitalists who see it more like a glorious weed – growing like Kudzu on a Georgia country roadside. I’m coming to believe that Capitalism works best when the main forces at work are the traditional supply/demand dynamics of classical economic theory. The main purpose of "regulation" is to keep the economy operating on that axis rather than being determined by the wheelings and dealings of professional investors or the whims of government. So, I guess I’m a pro-supply/demand capitalist. What that means is that I see Krugman’s gloomy forecasts as the post-deregulation reality that we must live through in order to restore a rational and honest economy. Like that great economist Mikhail Gorbachev said:

 [Gorbachev] said that it was now clear to him "that the new Western model was an illusion that benefited chiefly the very rich. The model that emerged during the final decades of the 20th century has turned out to be unsustainable," Gorbachev wrote in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post. "It was based on a drive for super-profits and hyper-consumption for a few, on unrestrained exploitation of resources, and on social and environmental irresponsibility."

Treasury Plays It Smart and Gets It Right
Washington Post
By Allan Sloan
June 9, 2009

Sometimes the best investment is the one you didn’t make. That’s the case with one of the biggest investment pools in the country: the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program, which Congress authorized last October to help combat the financial meltdown. The smartest thing the Treasury has done is to not buy troubled assets with the money. Instead, it has used most of it to buy preferred stock in banks to shore up their capital. There was lots of yowling when the Treasury wisely changed its mind in November – critics yelled "bait and switch" because the pre-Obama Congress would never have approved a plan for the government to buy ownership stakes in banks. But forgoing asset purchases has turned out to be the right decision.

TARP certainly hasn’t been run perfectly. Among other things, the Treasury has lavished subsidies on nonbanks like General Motors and American International Group, and used its authority under TARP to tell banks how to run their business and pay their staff. But this is trivial stuff compared with the problems we’d have had if the Treasury had tried to buy troubled assets from banks and insurance companies at a price both fair to taxpayers and high enough not to bankrupt the sellers.

How do I know this about a program that was never launched? By looking at the problems the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Federal Reserve and Treasury have run into in the course of trying to set up a public-private investment program to buy troubled assets…

The program has bogged down over questions such as whether to let banks that have gotten bailouts play this game [talk about double-dipping!], whether pay and perks of private investors would be capped, and whether it’s right to let Wall Street, which made fortunes while creating this mess, make additional fortunes cleaning it up…

For many of us, the best investment we ever made was the one we never made, such as not bottom fishing for GM or Lehman common stock. For Uncle Sam, the best investment was not buying troubled assets on his own. And that’s the bottom line…

UPDATE 1-CMBS TALF subscriptions due on June 16 -NY Fed
Jun 9, 2009

Investors can request loans for commercial mortgage-backed securities on June 16 under an emergency program to unlock credit markets, the New York Federal Reserve said on Tuesday.

Commercial mortgage-backed securities are the latest asset class to be included in the Fed’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, which aims to lower borrowing costs for households and businesses. Lowering lending costs in commercial real estate could help ease refinancings by borrowers, who are increasingly defaulting on loans for a lack of credit.

The June 16 subscription period — which will take place between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. EDT — includes only commercial mortgage-backed securities issued in 2009.

The program may take until July or August to get off the ground, however, given the typical three- to six-month period it usually takes to create, package and sell commercial mortgage bonds, Paul Vanderslice, a managing director in mortgage trading at Citigroup Global Markets Inc, told Reuters after a panel hosted by the Commercial Mortgage Securities Association in New York…

While the big guys like the A.C.L.U. and C.R.E.W. certainly deserve credit for finally prying the information out of the government, anyone obsessed with these things knows that the next Pulitzer should go to emptywheel, the person who has tirelessly kept up with the documentation, parsed it into digestable bytes, and given it to us in a form we can almost understand. Here comes some more…

Lawsuits Force Disclosures by C.I.A.
New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
June 9, 2009

Mr. Obama’s decision in April to release legal opinions from the Bush administration on interrogation, which were sought in a lawsuit, has opened the door to the disclosure of other documents…

In new responses to lawsuits, the C.I.A. has agreed to release information from two previously secret sources: statements by high-level members of Al Qaeda who say they have been mistreated, and a 2004 report by the agency’s inspector general questioning both the legality and the effectiveness of coercive interrogations.

The Qaeda prisoners’ statements, made at tribunals at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were previously excised from transcripts of the proceedings, but they will be at least partly disclosed by this Friday, according to a court filing. The report by the inspector general, whose secret findings in April 2004 led to a suspension of the C.I.A. interrogation program, will be released by June 19, the Justice Department said in a letter to a federal judge in New York…

The releases expected this month will not begin to exhaust the anticipated disclosures on interrogation. The Justice Department’s long-awaited ethics report on the lawyers who wrote the interrogation memorandums is set for release this summer. A criminal investigation of the destruction of interrogation videotapes by John H. Durham, a federal prosecutor, is still under way.

The A.C.L.U., one of a dozen advocacy groups fighting in court for details of the Bush administration security programs, plans to file another lawsuit on Thursday, this one seeking additional White House and Justice Department documents on interrogation. The same day, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of clergy members, will meet with Obama administration officials to argue for a national commission, said a spokesman, Steve Fox.

The Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House judiciary committees, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Representative John Conyers of Michigan, continue to press for such a commission, though their efforts so far show no sign of winning majority support. A spokesman for Mr. Leahy, David Carle, said the senator saw the commission proposal as “an uphill battle,” but he added, “He has kept the option alive.”

CIA IG Report: To Be Released on June 19
By emptywheel
June 9, 2009

The detail that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a month and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got into the OLC memo via the CIA IG Report released May 2004. So, too, did the reports that CIA interrogators exceeded the guidelines laid out in the Bybee Two memo. And the conclusion that the torture couldn’t be said to have stopped any attacks? That was in the CIA IG Report, too.

Which is why the IG Report’s reported release – on June 19 – might be big news. Or, it might be 400 pages of mostly redacted content.

In new responses to lawsuits, the C.I.A. has agreed to release information from two previously secret sources: statements by high-level members of Al Qaeda who say they have been mistreated, and a 2004 report by the agency’s inspector general questioning both the legality and the effectiveness of coercive interrogations.

The Qaeda prisoners’ statements, made at tribunals at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were previously excised from transcripts of the proceedings, but they will be at least partly disclosed by this Friday, according to a court filing. The report by the inspector general, whose secret findings in April 2004 led to a suspension of the C.I.A. interrogation program, will be released by June 19, the Justice Department said in a letter to a federal judge in New York.

Precisely how much the agency will disclose, however, remains to be determined, as the administration is clearly struggling to decide where to draw the line. In both cases, which involve separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the documents are likely to be redacted to withhold information the C.I.A. still considers especially delicate.

Me? I’ll be pleasantly surprised [though not satisfied] if they release pages 85 though 91, which talk about the [in]efficacy of the program. It was in response to these six pages that at least some of Dick Cheney’s CYA documents were written. And the detainee statements from their CSRTs? Maybe we’ll finally learn why Rahim al-Nashiri was only waterboarded two times.

• Steven Bradbury 05/10/2005
• Steven Bradbury 05/10/2005
• Steven Bradbury 05/30/2005
• Steven Bradbury 10/06/2008

Lieberman-Graham torture photo ban will be added to

‘every piece of legislation that comes down the pike’
Think Progress
06/09/2009
by Ryan Powers

Yesterday, Jane Hamsher reported that the detainee photo amendment sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was stripped from the war supplemental in committee. The amendment would have allowed the Obama administration to suppress any “photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained” after 9/11 by U.S. forces. This afternoon, Graham and Lieberman held a press conference to register their objections to dropping the measure and announce that they had “added our original legislation as an amendment to the FDA regulation of tobacco bill that’s on the floor right now”:

LIEBERMAN: We’re going to vote against cloture on the bill, and I’m going to do everything I can to see if I can convince other Democrats to do that. We’re just not going to roll over because some folks in the House don’t like this amendment. [W]e’re going to do everything we can to hold up the supplemental appropriations bill until we’re sure that this amendment prohibiting the release of these dangerous photographs is on that bill. And then we’ll continue to do everything we can to attach it to other legislation, to slow up the process.

Graham said the amendment was needed because “These photos, if they’re released, will be used by the enemy to incite violence as they walk down these streets.” A “senior Democratic aide” told the Weekly Standard that the two senators would “attach [the amendment] to every piece of legislation that comes down the pike.”

Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a "recruitment tool" for the enemy. On this theory, by the tough questioning of killers, we have supposedly fallen short of our own values. This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the President himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the Left, "We brought it on ourselves."

It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so. Nor are terrorists or those who see them as victims exactly the best judges of America’s moral standards, one way or the other.

Critics of our policies are given to lecturing on the theme of being consistent with American values. But no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.

As a practical matter, too, terrorists may lack much, but they have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in freedom of speech and religion … our belief in equal rights for women … our support for Israel … our cultural and political influence in the world – these are the true sources of resentment, all mixed in with the lies and conspiracy theories of the radical clerics. These recruitment tools were in vigorous use throughout the 1990s, and they were sufficient to motivate the 19 recruits who boarded those planes on September 11th, 2001…

Dick Cheney, American Enterprise Institute, May 21, 2009

And, as long as we’re talking about speaking with forked tongues – what happened to all that malarkey about Congress not messing with Executive Powers that we had to listen to for the last eight years? I guess it’s selective, the precious Unitary Executive Theory. Congress shouldn’t limit the President if, and only if, the President is a Republican. These people are without conscience.

Gorbachev calls for Perestroika in West
AFP
June 7, 2009

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called for a perestroika, or top-to-bottom reform, in the West, arguing that its current economic model was "unsustainable" and needed replacement. Commenting on the current global economic crisis, the ex-Soviet president who presided over the collapse of his country, said that it was now clear to him "that the new Western model was an illusion that benefited chiefly the very rich."

"The model that emerged during the final decades of the 20th century has turned out to be unsustainable," Gorbachev wrote in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post. "It was based on a drive for super-profits and hyper-consumption for a few, on unrestrained exploitation of resources and on social and environmental irresponsibility."

Gorbachev predicted "perhaps even greater upheaval down the road" and insisted that the current economic and social model existing in the West needed replacing. "I have no ready-made prescriptions," Gorbachev said. "But I am convinced that a new model will emerge, one that will emphasize public needs and public goods, such as a cleaner environment, well-functioning infrastructure and public transportation, sound education and health systems and affordable housing."

From the mid-1980s, Gorbachev was the initiator of a series of fundamental reforms in the Soviet Union.

Notice the graphic Rush Limbaugh’s staff put together. Very odd. We get the part about he thinks Obama is a Communist. But what’s the deal with Lincoln? Was Lincoln a bad guy for ending slavery, ergo freeing African Americans, ergo leading to a black President, ergo leading to Communism? It’s even more confusing because the graphic his staff was playing off of had Gorbachev standing with Lenin. Lenin was a hard-liner who probably turned over in his grave when Gorbochev came along.

Rush’s staffers have it all mucked up. I guess when your on a tight schedule of hate-mongering for the masses, you’re not particularly careful with your metaphors. And, by the way, what Gorbochev did in Russia and said in this article  are some pretty good things. And, by the way, perestroika [or top-to-bottom reform] is exactly what we need in the west. "… that the new Western model was an illusion that benefited chiefly the very rich. The model that emerged during the final decades of the 20th century has turned out to be unsustainable. It was based on a drive for super-profits and hyper-consumption for a few, on unrestrained exploitation of resources and on social and environmental irresponsibility." Good call Mikhail.