{"id":4033,"date":"2010-04-23T15:13:29","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T19:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4033"},"modified":"2010-04-23T16:55:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-23T20:55:00","slug":"chaos-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/04\/23\/chaos-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"chaos theory&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div align=\"justify\">    <\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/emptywheel.firedoglake.com\/2010\/04\/22\/why-were-the-torture-tapes-destroyed\/\">Why Were the Torture Tapes Destroyed?<\/a><br \/>    \t\t \t \t \t\t          \t          By: <font color=\"#006666\">emptywheel<\/font><\/strong><br \/>   April 22, 2010<\/div>\n<p>   <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">&#8230; I am, however, interested in the question he ends his piece with: <strong><font color=\"#200020\">why  was CIA&ndash;and not DOD&ndash;tasked with these interrogations?<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">But what&rsquo;s really too bad is that Durham  hasn&rsquo;t been tasked with  explaining the broader mystery of why, in the  first place, the CIA is  even interrogating prisoners of war. The 1947  National Security Act  established the CIA as a civilian spy agency, not  as some Pentagon  backroom where you get to do things you don&rsquo;t want  the American people  to find out about. But more to the point, the  military is much better  equipped to interrogate prisoners. It has its  own interrogation school  at Fort Huachuca, not to mention hundreds of  language-qualified and  experienced interrogators. It also has the  Uniform Code of Military  Justice to deal with interrogations that have  gone bad&#8230; Unlike the CIA, military  interrogators have immediate  access to legal counsel. It&rsquo;s not an  accident that military misdeeds  such as those at Abu Ghraib go right to  trial, while CIA investigations  drag on for years &mdash; and drag down  morale.<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">Because that may well have been the point, you know? And it may well  have been why the torture tapes were destroyed. The torturers appear to have been more interested in testing the  limits of Abu Zubaydah&rsquo;s human endurance than they were in getting  usable intelligence from him. And one of the things those tapes may well  have shown was up to 21 hours of human experimentation&ndash;potentially  pushing techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation beyond all  limits, potentially using <strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/emptywheel.firedoglake.com\/2010\/02\/25\/what-if-they-did-use-mock-burial-with-abu-zubaydah\/\">techniques  like mock burial the torturers asked for but didn&rsquo;t get approved<\/a><\/strong>,  and potentially using other techniques entirely.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">An excellent question! Why was the CIA involved with interrogating the detainees? For that matter, why was the FBI involved? Or the DoJ? Or the White House? In the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/emptywheel.firedoglake.com\/2010\/04\/22\/why-were-the-torture-tapes-destroyed\/#comment-231442\"><strong>comments<\/strong><\/a>, <strong>Jason Leopold<\/strong> ran across this article from 2007:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/id\/76574\">Paper Trail: Who authorized the CIA to  destroy interrogation videos?<\/a><br \/>  <font color=\"#990000\">Newsweek<\/font><\/strong><br \/>  by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball<br \/>  Dec 11, 2007<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">&#8230; Throughout the same period, said one of the former officials, a  senior CIA lawyer, John Rizzo, now the agency&#8217;s acting general counsel,  was also conducting discussions on what to do with the tapes with White  House lawyer Harriet Miers. Two sources said that Rizzo also discussed  the issue with officials at the Justice Department, which had issued  classified guidelines outlining how the CIA&#8217;s interrogation program  should operate. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\">The reason CIA officials involved the White House and  Justice Department in discussions about the disposition of the tapes was  that CIA officials viewed the CIA&#8217;s terrorist interrogation and  detention program &mdash; including the use of &quot;enhanced&quot; interrogation  techniques &mdash; as having been imposed on the agency by the White House. &quot;It  was a political issue,&quot; said the former official, and therefore CIA  officials believed that the decision as to what to do with the tapes  should be made at a political level, by Miers &mdash; a former personal lawyer  to President Bush and later White House staff secretary and counsel &mdash; or  someone else directly representing the president. <\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">The current and former officials said that discussions  between Clandestine Service officials and their superiors and between  the CIA and White House unfolded in what one source described as &quot;fits  and starts&quot; between 2003, when the matter first arose, and late 2005,  when Jose Rodriguez Jr., then head of the Clandestine Service and still a  CIA officer today, made the final decision that the tapes should be  destroyed&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">This 2&frac12; year old article is a pretty good read about the tape destruction and other things. They either found or were handed some candid sources. It brings up a good general question about lines of authority. From the outset, things were run from the White House [Cheney\/Addington] &#8211; all things. It really was a <em>Unitary Executive<\/em>. The <strong>DoJ\/White House Axis<\/strong> was up and running soon after 9\/11, turning out <strong>OLC<\/strong> Memos that consolidated the Commander-in-Chief&#8217;s power. <\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">They were onto this prisoner thing pretty quickly &#8211; <strong>GITMO<\/strong>, Rendition, suspending Geneva, habeas corpus, Military Tribunals. The question being raised here is a good one &#8211; Why not let the <strong>DoD<\/strong> do what it does, deal with <strong>PoW<\/strong>s? After all, we did declare War. Instead, the <strong>DoJ<\/strong>, <strong>OLC<\/strong>, <strong>FBI<\/strong>, <strong>CIA<\/strong> were all part of things from the start. It&#8217;s even more surprising since the <strong>Secretary of Defense<\/strong> and his <strong>Deputy<\/strong> were insiders &#8211; Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. It doesn&#8217;t make sense for the <strong>DoD<\/strong> to be squeezed out, at least on the surface.<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">The obvious answer is that the <strong>CIA<\/strong> is less constrained than the <strong>DoD<\/strong>. The article suggests that the <strong>CIA<\/strong> was <strong><font color=\"#200020\">reluctantly<\/font><\/strong> in charge of the interrogations [&quot;<strong><font color=\"#200020\">imposed on the agency by the White House<\/font><\/strong>&quot;]. The <strong>CIA<\/strong> had certainly already been up to their necks in matters Afghanistan. And, according to <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/judiciary.senate.gov\/hearings\/testimony.cfm?id=3842&#038;wit_id=7906\"><strong>Ali Soufan<\/strong><\/a>, when Tenet found out the FBI was having some success with interrogation, he got territorial and sent in his own people [contractors]:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">Immediately after Abu  Zubaydah was captured, a fellow FBI agent and I  were flown to meet him  at an undisclosed location. We were both very  familiar with Abu Zubaydah  and have successfully interrogated al-Qaeda  terrorists. We started  interrogating him, supported by CIA officials  who were stationed at the  location, and within the first hour of the  interrogation, using the  Informed Interrogation Approach, we gained  important actionable  intelligence. The information was so important  that, as I later  learned from open sources, it went to CIA Director  George Tennet who was  so impressed that he initially ordered us to be  congratulated. That was  apparently quickly withdrawn as soon as Mr.  Tennet was told that it was  FBI agents, who were responsible. He then  immediately ordered a CIA CTC  interrogation team to leave DC and head  to the location to take over  from us. <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">As much as I&#8217;d love to speculate on why the White House micromanaged the way things were done and the way each of the players did what they do, this time around, I&#8217;ll just address the most obvious point. <strong>That&#8217;s a hell of a way to run a railroad!<\/strong> Whether they had nefarious motives, or were paranoid, or were inexperienced, or were just plain control freaks, they minimized the possibility that any agency in the mix could operate at its best.<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"200\" vspace=\"4\" hspace=\"4\" border=\"1\" align=\"left\" src=\"http:\/\/theconnective.files.wordpress.com\/2009\/01\/mandelbrot_set2.jpg\" \/>When I can escape looking for their hidden motives and just think about the broad style&nbsp; of their governance, they essentially destroyed the effectiveness of many of our impressive institutions by sticking their inexperienced [and not very competent] noses in everybody else&#8217;s business. No one was able to function in their area of expertise. The CIA was asked to interrogate prisoners of war, and had to contract a couple of retired military types who were fish out of water and seemed to get inspiration from old war movies and the tv program &#8211; 24 Hours. The post-war reconstruction of Iraq was run by a State Department Ambassador reporting to the Department of Defense who essentially shut down the army and government of Iraq. The DoJ became a vehicle for Law evasion rather than enforcement. The State Department, run by a General, was out of the loop altogether. And the center of command was in the Dick Cheney&#8217;s OVP coordinated by the most arrogant man in Washington, David Addington. <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" hspace=\"4\" height=\"113\" border=\"1\" align=\"right\" src=\"http:\/\/t1.gstatic.com\/images?q=tbn:4PmFtHdBGBYLGM:http:\/\/repairstemcell.files.wordpress.com\/2009\/03\/fractal-square-root.jpg\" \/>Dick Cheney was good at politics in the House of Representatives. He ran the country the same way, playing people off against each other, giving out assignments not based on expertise but more on leverage. He trusted no one so he micromanaged everyone. And the War was run by Donald Rumsfeld, a grumpy old man who listened to no one. In that climate, no wonder everything went so badly. As for the tapes, my guess is that Jose Rodriguez realized he was in a power vacuum, and just took matters in his own hands, destroying the tapes to protect his CIA buddies who had been drawn into doing something they didn&#8217;t know how to do. When there&#8217;s this much chaos in a system, the problem is at the top, and the people downstream act on their own steam.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why Were the Torture Tapes Destroyed? By: emptywheel April 22, 2010 &#8230; I am, however, interested in the question he ends his piece with: why was CIA&ndash;and not DOD&ndash;tasked with these interrogations? But what&rsquo;s really too bad is that Durham hasn&rsquo;t been tasked with explaining the broader mystery of why, in the first place, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}