John Yoo may no longer be in the Bush administration, but his arguments for letting administration officials break the law when they think they should have apparently lingered inside the Justice Department.

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.

The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity,” a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.

Case-by-case judgments, of course, opens the door pretty wide. It creates a legal dynamic in which interrogators can utilize illegal methods on detainees, and the administration prefers that they have a certain “flexibility” (my word, not theirs).

“The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,” said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.

In other words, “Torture for bad reasons isn’t the same thing as torture for good reasons. On the prior, the law matters. On the latter, not so much.”

As of Sunday, the official line on the destruction of the CIA’s torture tapes was that the agency had been warned to preserve the videos. The White House, in particular, was at least tacitly aware of the videos’ existence, and the White House counsel’s office urged the CIA to keep them intact.

So, who exactly was involved in identifying incriminating evidence and giving the order to destroy it? The NYT reports today that CIA lawyers “gave written approval in advance” of the 2005 video destruction.

The former intelligence official acknowledged that there had been nearly two years of debate among government agencies about what to do with the tapes, and that lawyers within the White House and the Justice Department had in 2003 advised against a plan to destroy them. But the official said that C.I.A. officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the C.I.A. was never given a direct order not to destroy the tapes.

“They never told us, ‘Hell, no,’” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘You cannot destroy them,’ we would not have destroyed them.”

Kevin Drum summarized just how weak the latest version of events from the Bush administration really is: “The White House had been in the loop for two years. The CIA had received letters from both the Justice Department and congressional leaders arguing that the tapes shouldn’t be destroyed. The CIA’s top lawyer had been involved for the entire time. And yet we’re supposed to believe that, in 2005, a mid-ranking agency lawyer suddenly decided the tapes could be destroyed and the head of the clandestine branch then gave the order to do so without anyone else being involved? Really? Does anyone actually believe this story?”

No, not if they’re paying attention they won’t. Oliver Willis’ observation was quite apt: "The #1 Rule for the Bush Administration: If they say something, don’t believe them.”

Download | play Download | play

On Tuesday PBS Frontline: "Extraordinary Rendition" explored Bush's use of the CIA to kidnap persons from sovereign nations and fly them to secret locations at CIA Black Sites or to prisons in other countries to be tortured and held indefinitely in secret without charges. Although the practice of "extraordinary rendition" did not originate under Bush, after Sept 11 "the program expanded beyond recognition—becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, "an abomination." What began as a program aimed at a small, discrete set of suspects—people against whom there were outstanding foreign arrest warrants—came to include a wide and ill-defined population that the Administration terms "illegal enemy combatants."

Continue reading »

That's the actual NY Times headline. (reg. req.)

How sad is it that this would be considered a printable news item? I know that the conventional wisdom during the elections was that Bush was the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with (which to my mind is the lamest standard to have for the highest office in the land, but I digress). Does that necessarily translate into wanting someone as Commander in Chief that you'd be surprised to learn reads the news? Sorry, but that's really taking anti-intellectualism to a whole new low. (h/t JR)

Is there hope for newspapers after all? Readers may be abandoning the printed versions, but over the last couple of years, at least one person seems to have started reading them, at least sometimes. He lives in the White House.

President Bush declared in 2003 that he did not read newspapers, but at his final news conference of the year last week, he casually mentioned that he had seen something in the paper that very day.

Continue reading »

The president's interest in capturing Osama bin Laden has evolved over time. After the al Qaeda leader orchestrated the attacks of 9/11, Bush pledged to get bin Laden "dead or alive." Six months later, after bin Laden proved to be elusive, the president said, "I truly am not that concerned about him."

So it should come as no surprise that the CIA unit dedicated to getting bin Laden is no more.

The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The official response is that there are still plenty of officials responsible to tracking bin Laden and that the terrorist remains a "high priority." But I'm curious, if President Kerry had allowed the CIA to disband the intelligence unit tasked with hunting bin Laden, would conservatives just shrug their shoulders?

-- Guest Post by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report

(The Pajamas Media formerly OSM, formerly PM-formerly the artist known as Prince, reference is obviously a joke.)

Tonight the NY Times confirmed the story that Jane broke-which C&L, and Jeralyn wrote about last night saying that a conversation between Viveca Novak, a reporter for Time magazine and Rove's lawyer:

"led Rove to change his testimony last year to the grand jury in the C.I.A. leak case, people knowledgeable about the sequence of events said Thursday....read on"

This is obviously bad news for Rove. (Is there another Fitzmas present coming?)

Tina Brown wrote a column today in defense of Bob Woodward saying preposterous things like: "I believe Woodward when he says he didn't think the leak he heard about Valerie Plame's job was important at the time."--"He hoarded the info for some larger reportorial purpose because that's what Big Beasts do- But navigating the porous demands of living as a Human Brand instead of a human being gets more complex every day."

Of course it's all the bloggers fault: "Mainstream Media are trapped in the pincer assaults of the fact-free ethical anarchy of the blogosphere...."

It would be nice if Tina Brown took her own advice and did a little fact checking on herself. It seems that we have better sources than Tina and her buddies. (*sources couldn't confirm a tie with Tina Brown and PM/OSM/PM and the artist known as Prince )

The Agonist has his say.

To the Staff:
Judy Miller has retired from The New York Times effective today.
In her 28 years at The Times, Judy participated in some great, prize-winning journalism. She displayed fierce determination and personal courage both in pursuit of the news and in resisting assaults on the freedom of news organizations to report. We wish her well in the next phase of her career.
Bill

P.S. Judy asked that I share with you a letter I sent regarding my recent memo to the staff. It follows, and speaks for itself.

Dear Judy,
I know you've been distressed by the memo I sent to the staff about things I wish I'd done differently in the course of this ordeal. Let me be clear on two points you've raised.
First, you are upset with me that I used the words "entanglement" and "engagement" in reference to your relationship with Scooter Libby. Those words were not intended to suggest an improper relationship. I was referring only to the series of interviews through which you -- and the paper -- became caught up in an epic legal controversy.
Second, you dispute my assertion that "Judy seems to have misled" Phil Taubman when he asked whether you were one of the reporters to whom the White House reached out with the Wilson story. I continue to be troubled by that episode. But you are right that Phil himself does not contend that you misled him; and, of course, I was not a participant in the conversation between you and Phil.
I wish you all the best for the future.

Regards, Bill

Judy responds in this article. She says she was leaving partly because "some of her colleagues disagreed with her decision to testify in the C.I.A. leak case." Really? I thought they were pissed that you became a stenographer for the administration instead of an investigative reporter.

Arianna: Fine, Judy didn’t screw Libby. Just the American public. Good riddance.

The NY Times also has: "The following are documents and articles related to the case looking into the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer...read on (Hat tip from the Petrelis Files)

Judy Miller's Article

Go read it and let me know what you think. I have to run out so I can't get to it now. There's a diary here. Atrios and AmeriaBlog join in the fun...

A Personal Account, by JM.

One quick thing from the article:

"My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A. My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003 "

Isn't that a breach right there? Valerie Plame's connection (with or without her name) to Joe Wilson or to the CIA should never have been mentioned to anybody at all.

I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday....read on"

No wonder there's a freezing cold ripping through the heart of Washington.