Lawfare Disappears Democratic Support for Centrist Failures to Claim a “Sea-Change” because of Russia

In a piece that calls Max Blumenthal — author of three books of original journalism — an “activist,” Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic attempts to lay out how the left has split on its response to Russia’s interference in last year’s election. She does a fine job avoiding generalizations about the current stance of the various parts of the left she portrays. But she creates a fantasy past, in which even the center-left has been distrustful of the intelligence community, to suggest the center-left’s embrace of the Russia investigation represents a “sea-change” in its comfort with the spooks.

The story of the American left under Trump, as in the larger story, is one of bifurcation and polarization. It’s a story of a profound emerging divide over the role of patriotism and the intelligence community in the left’s political life. To put the matter simply, some on the left are actively revisiting their long-held distrust of the security organs of the American state; and some are rebelling against that rapprochement.

[snip]

But these arguments have taken place against the backdrop of a much greater and more visible embrace of the investigation on the part of the center-left—and a concurrent embrace by many center-left commentators of actively patriotic vocabulary that is traditionally the province of the right, along with a skepticism about Russia that has not been in fashion in Democratic circles since the Scoop Jackson wing of the party bolted. As Trump has attacked and belittled the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian election interference, the center-left has embraced not only the report but also the intelligence community itself.

[snip]

Political leaders of the center-left always had a quiet peace with the national security apparatus. But the peace was a quiet one, generally speaking, one without overly demonstrative displays of affection or support.

[snip]

[B]roadly speaking, the center-left these days sounds a lot like the mainstream right of the last few decades before Trump came along: hawkish towards Russia and enthusiastic about the U.S.  intelligence apparatus as one of the country’s key lines of defense. And the mainstream right sounds a lot like the center-left on the subject—which is to say very quiet.

This new posture for the center-left, to some degree anyway, has politicians speaking the language of the intelligence world: the language of active patriotism.

Perhaps Jurecic has been asleep since 9/11, and has overlooked how aggressively supportive centrist Democrats have been of the National Security establishment? There’s no sea-change on the center left — none. What she actually presents evidence for is a sea-change on the right, with increased skepticism from some of those (like Devin Nunes) who have been the intelligence community’s biggest cheerleaders in the past.

To create this fantasy past, the foreign policy history Jurecic focuses on is that of the Cold War (a history that stops short of NATO expansion), not more recent history in which members of the center-left voted for a disastrous Iraq War (which Russia opposed), misrepresented (to both Russia and the left) the regime change goals of the Libya intervention, and applauded the CIA effort to back (al Qaeda allied) rebels to carry out regime change in Syria. To say nothing of the center-left’s failure to hold banks accountable for crashing the world economy. The only place those policies show up is in Jurecic’s explanation why “younger” people are more isolationist than their elders.

There’s another stream of thought too, from voices who tend to be younger and more focused on left-wing domestic policy, rather than Cold War-inflected foreign policy—people whose formative political experience dates to the Iraq War, rather than anything to do with the Soviet Union. This stream tends toward isolationism.

It’s not just that the Iraq War and the Wall Street crash, not the Cold War, provided the formative moment for these young people (though many of Jurecic’s claims about the young are immediately supported by descriptions of Glenn Greenwald or other old farts). It’s that these were disastrous policies. And through all of them, the center-left that Jurecic portrays as distrusting the IC were instead enabling and often — certainly for the entire Obama Administration — directing them.

Jurecic’s fantasy of past skepticism about the IC relies on the Democrats’ changing views towards Jim Comey, particularly the treatment of him (and to a lesser degree Robert Mueller) as messiahs.

As Americans gathered to watch James Comey testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a meme emerged on certain corners of the left-leaning internet: people had a crush on the former FBI director. It was his patriotism, his scrupulousness, his integrity that did it. “Get you a man who loves you like [C]omey loves the FBI,” wrote one commenter. “Is COMEY … attractive?” asked another. Declared one: “Comey should be the next Bachelor.”

The trend may have started with Comey, but it hasn’t ended with him. Earlier this month, Vogue reported that special counsel Robert Mueller, too, has been transformed into an unlikely object of adoration.

The point of these outbursts of affection—whatever level of queasiness or amusement they might inspire—is not actually that anyone finds the former FBI director or the special counsel attractive. In the odd parlance of the internet, this kind of language is a way to express intense emotional involvement with an issue. Half-jokingly and with some degree of self-awareness, the many people who profess their admiration are projecting their swirling anxiety and anticipation over the Russia investigation and the fate of the Trump presidency onto Mueller and Comey.

Not only does Jurecic ignore the wild swing Democrats exhibited about Comey, whom many blamed for Hillary’s loss (something both I and, later, Lawfare predicted). But she makes no mention of what happened in 2013 with Jim Comey’s confirmation process, in which a man who signed off on torture and legitimized an illegal dragnet by strong-arming the FISA Court was pushed through by Democrats with one after another fawning statement of admiration, where the only procedural or voting opposition came from Republicans.

You don’t approve Comey with no probing questions about his hawkish past if you’re at all embarrassed about your support for the IC. Yet that’s what the allegedly skeptical Democratic party did.

There’s a reason all this matters, especially given the way Jurecic wields the concept of patriotism in her invention of a sea-change in center-left support for spooks.

I’m on the more progressive (“hard”) left that Jurecic generally portrays as opposing the Russia investigation. Yet I may have written more, myself, than all of Lawfare about it. I think it is real and important. I support the investigations into Russian interference and Trump’s tolerance for it.

But I also think that as part of that review, the center-left — and institutions of centrist policy, starting with Brookings — need to reflect on how their own epic policy failures have discredited centrist ideology and created an opportunity that both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin found all too easy to exploit.

Trump succeeded, in part, because he deceitfully promised to reinvest in the crumbling US interior, rather than overseas. Putin has attracted support in a Europe still paying for the German banks’ follies, a Europe struggling to accommodate refugees escaping a destabilized Middle East. That doesn’t make either of them positive forces. Rather, it makes them opportunists capitalizing on the failures of centrist hegemony. But until the center is either replaced or offers policies that haven’t already failed, Trump and Putin will continue to exploit those failures.

I consider myself a patriot. But true patriotism — as opposed to the messianism she celebrates as patriotism on the center-left — requires honest criticism of America’s disastrous economic and foreign policy failures. Messianism, by contrast, is a position of impotence, where necessary work is supplanted by hope that a strong man will rescue us all.

Ben Wittes and Lawfare generally are right that caricatures of them as handmaidens of the Deep State are too simple. But Jurecic’s analysis is associated with a think tank paid for by funders that include entities that have backed disastrous destabilizing policies in the Middle East — like Qatar, UAE, Haim Saban — as well as those who profit from them — like Northrop Grumman  It was paid for by the banks that centrists didn’t hold accountable for the crash, including JP Morgan and Citi. It was paid for by big oil, including Exxon. It was even paid for by Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who presided over the solicitous Comey confirmation process Jurecic completely disappeared from her narrative of Democrats embracing Comey.

That a Brookings-affiliated analyst has just invented a fantasy past skepticism for spooks on the center-left — the center-left that has championed failed policies — even as she deems the tribalism she portrays as “patriotism” is itself part of the problem. It dodges the work of true patriotism: ensuring America is strong enough to offer the rest of the world something positive to support, rather than something that demagogues like Trump and Putin can effectively consolidate power over.

Does Vice President Pence Believe He Has Declassification Authority?

It is, as I understand it, fairly customary for each new presidential administration to rewrite the Executive Order on classification. George W Bush didn’t do so right away — he finalized his classification EO on March 23, 2003. Obama moved a bit more quickly, superseding the Bush EO with his own classification EO on December 29, 2009.

But even among the flood of Executive Orders that Trump has signed thus far in his term, I don’t believe he has modified the Obama one.

That means a change made in 2003, which was retained in the Obama EO, remains in place: the inclusion of the Vice President among those who is and can name Original Classification Authorities (here’s Bill Clinton’s EO for comparison). Here’s the language that gave Dick Cheney classification authorities:

Classification Authority. (a) The authority to classify information originally may be exercised only by:

    (1) the President and, in the performance of executive duties, the Vice President;

And here’s how Obama slightly tweaked that language to retain that authority for Joe Biden:

a) The authority to classify information originally may be exercised only by:

(1) the President and the Vice President;

Now, Cheney got this authority at an interesting time. That was a key time for Torture cover-up; in fact, sometime in that period, someone in the White House ordered George Tenet to make torture a Special Access Program. He was already pushing back against the CIA whistleblowers who knew the intelligence behind Iraq was crap, an effort that would lead to Scooter Libby sharing Valerie Plame’s identity with Judy Miller on Cheney’s orders (it remains unclear whether Cheney had Bush’s permission to leak this). Yet for some reason, the new classification rules appear most closely connected with Stellar Wind (I believe this had to do with a change in whom Stellar Wind could target).

In any case, from that moment forward, the Vice President has had the authority to classify things. As you can imagine, given Cheney’s role in the Plame outing, there was a heated and still publicly unresolved debate whether the Vice President also got declassification authorities, including of things that the President or Presidential authority had classified.

I raise this issue because more and more people have started raising questions about whether Mike Pence is sabotaging Donald Trump, especially as leaks like this come out of the White House.

President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”

The conversation, during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr. Comey — reinforces the notion that Mr. Trump dismissed him primarily because of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives. Mr. Trump said as much in one televised interview, but the White House has offered changing justifications for the firing.

The White House document that contained Mr. Trump’s comments was based on notes taken from inside the Oval Office and has been circulated as the official account of the meeting. One official read quotations to The Times, and a second official confirmed the broad outlines of the discussion.

If Pence believes — perhaps based on knowledge personally imparted by Cheney allies — that he has the ability to declassify anything that the President can, then he can leak details of White House events with utter impunity. Having him insta-declassify things would be a fairly safe way to feed the never-ending stream of embarrassing information coming out of the White House.

Oh, sure. He’d have utterly venal motive to do so. By feeding the Trump Russian scandal, Pence would make it increasingly likely he’d become President without having to expose his regressive views to the review of voters. But there’s nothing Trump could do about it so long as an EO granting Pence the same authorities that Cheney abused to great effect remains on the book.

McCain Has One Way to Prevent Torture under Trump — Oppose Pompeo and Sessions

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, John McCain made some strong statements about whether President Trump will be able to resume torture.

Republican Sen. John McCain issued a fiery warning to President-elect Donald Trump on the subject of torture Saturday.

“I don’t give a damn what the president of the United States wants to do. We will not waterboard,” McCain told an audience at the annual Halifax International Security Forum. “We will not torture people … It doesn’t work.”

McCain’s comments have gotten quite a lot of approving press since.

But that approving press is misplaced.

After all, tough words will not prevent Trump from resuming torture — no matter what NYT’s rather bizarre story claiming there are obstacles to doing so claims. As I laid out weeks ago, the bureaucratic work-arounds are already in place.

No. The single most effective way for Senator McCain to prevent Trump from resuming torture is to ensure the people he appoints are actually opposed to it.

Already, Trump has named two pro-torture Republicans to top positions: Trump’s Attorney General pick, Jeff Sessions, voted against the anti-torture amendment McCain wrote to try to codify the law. In response to the release of the Torture Report, Trump’s CIA Director pick, Mike Pompeo, declared the torturers “are not torturers, they are patriots.”

McCain — whose comment on torture came the day after Trump named these appointees — has not committed to opposing their nomination. Instead, he just wants to make strong statements that will do little to prevent Trump from ordering Pompeo to resuming the torture.

Maybe that’s why McCain is getting so touchy about the President-elect.

Today, he told two different reporters he didn’t want to answer questions about Trump. Here’s what he said to HuffPo’s Laura Barron-Lopez:

I will not discuss President-elect Donald Trump, ok? And that is my right as a Senator. I do not have an obligation ma’am to answer any question I don’t feel like answering. I’m responsible for the people of Arizona and they just [re-elected] me overwhelmingly.

He said something similar to CNN’s Manu Raju.

Cranky-as-fuck John McCain is ratcheting it up!

But he’s going to need to crank it up even more. McCain, with just two of his colleagues, has the power and moral authority to oppose pro-torture appointees. That would require confronting the leader of his party. But it is also one of the only real ways to prevent the US from resuming torture.

False Reassurances: On Pixie Dusted Executive Orders, Appendix M, and Proxy Detention and Torture

In the wake of Trump’s victory, a number of people have offered some thoughts intended to reassure. In a piece titled, “The United States is not about to spiral into tyranny,” Kevin Drum claimed — among other things — that Trump will have a hard time reversing Obama’s Executive Orders.

Trump will learn that repealing executive orders is harder than he thinks, and it’s unlikely he has the attention span to really keep at it.

And a number of pieces — such as this one from Reuters — point to last year’s language in the NDAA limiting interrogation to techniques that appear in the Army Field Manual.

Trump’s support for water-boarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, also would meet opposition. Congress last year passed legislation barring the use of waterboarding and other “extreme interrogation techniques” widely considered torture. Obama signed the measure into law last November.

Both of those reassurances are overly optimistic.

Pixie Dusting EOs

Even on its face, the idea that Trump can’t reverse Obama’s EOs doesn’t make sense. A president has uncontested authority to pass EOs as he pleases. The only limit on that power is Congress. If sufficient numbers in Congress, backed by sufficiently powerful leaders in Congress, want to contest a president’s public EOs, they can try to legislate or defund an activity.

There is no likelihood of that happening with Trump anytime soon. None. Especially not with the EO that Trump is probably most anxious to reverse, Obama’s order deferring deportation of 5 million people who’ve long been valuable members of American society.

More importantly — and this is something everyone needs to start accounting for — according to two different OLC memos, one used to authorize Iran-Contra, the other used to authorize Stellar Wind, the president doesn’t even have to make the actual implementation of his EOs public.

An executive order is only the expression of the President’s exercise of his inherent constitutional powers. Thus, an executive order cannot limit a President, just as one President cannot legally bind future Presidents in areas of the executive’s Article II authority. Further, there is no constitutional requirement that a President issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of previous executive order. In exercising his constitutional or delegated statutory powers, the President often must issue instructions to his subordinates in the executive branch, which takes the form of an executive order. An executive order does not commit the President himself to a certain course of action. Rather than “violate” an executive order, the President in authorizing a departure from an executive order has instead modified or waived it. Memorandum for the Attorney General, From: Charles J. Cooper, Assistant Attorney General, Re: Legal Authority for Recent Covert Arms Transfers to Iran (Dec. 17, 1986). In doing so, he need not issue a new executive order, rescind the previous order, or even make his waiver or suspension of the order publicly known. Thus, here, the October 4, 2001 Authorization, even if in tension with Executive Order 12,333, only represents a one-time modification or waiver of the executive order, rather than a “violation” that is in some way illegal.

While Jack Goldsmith’s May 6, 2004 Stellar Wind memo supplanted the Yoo memo in which he made this argument, there has been no public repudiation of this logic or the underlying Iran-Contra memo, not by Constitutional scholar Barack Obama, not by Congress.

In other words, no one has invented any kind of requirement that the president let the public or even Congress know what rules he believes he is bound by.  Indeed, it’s absurd to think Obama would have institutionalized something like that, given that (according to CIA General Counsel Caroline Krass) his administration has started hiding its self-authorizations in places besides OLC so we won’t know where to look for them.

Which means a man who used disinformation to get elected has no obligation to tell us what rules he considers himself bound by.

Three shell games that already exist under which to conduct torture

Similarly, the NDAA prohibition on torture is less ironclad than often claimed. That amendment didn’t prohibit torture. Rather, it restricted national security interrogators to the techniques in the Army Field Manual.

The amendment explicitly excluded law enforcement personnel from this restriction. As John Brennan said when he was asked about this way back in 2013, the FBI has its own processes and procedures, many of which remain obscure, others of which include clear loopholes. Importantly, the FBI increasingly operates — as the DEA has long done — overseas, where any problematic processes and procedures can easily be hidden.

In addition, as Jeff Kaye pointed out at the time, the AFM includes a section called Appendix M, which permits the use of a technique called Separation. The UN Committee Against Torture found Appendix M problematic, because it induced psychosis, during the UN review of US practices back in 2014.

But there’s another problem with the AFM. In 2006, Steven Bradbury wrote an OLC memo that basically authorized Appendix M largely divorced from the actual details of it. As I read it, that memo may be used for authorization of techniques used in Appendix M even if they’re not enumerated in the memo, meaning Trump can put anything in Appendix M and claim to have OLC buy-off. In fact, Bradbury incorporated within that memo yearly updates to the Appendix. It basically created a drawer, which might or might not be classified, into which DOD could throw whatever it wants to do.

When Congress passed the NDAA, they required the Appendix M to be reviewed to make sure it is humane and legal — but not until 2017. So while the intent of this amendment was explicitly to prohibit inhumane treatment, it relies on a structure of interpretations left up to the future President. The future President, as it turns out, got elected insisting that waterboarding is not torture.

Finally, the Drone Rule Book (which Trump can throw out on January 20 in any case) explicitly envisions letting our friends detain people, so long as they give us reassurances the person will be treated humanely. The Bush Administration started waterboarding people by watching while Egyptians did the waterboarding for us. It asked Bashar al-Assad (and a number of other countries we still are friends with) do far worse to people on our behalf. There has never been any appetite to eliminate the shell game of proxy detention. Indeed, Obama has used such shell games in Somalia and Kuwait, with tortured alleged in the latter case.

The CIA has been leaking wildly about its concerns about being asked to torture. But the CIA — and its enablers — didn’t do the things to make it impossible to ask them to torture when we had the chance.

“Only Facts Matter:” Jim Comey Is Not the Master Bureaucrat of Integrity His PR Sells Him As

Since Jim Comey’s showy press conference yesterday, the press has rehashed Jim Comey’s carefully cultivated image as a Boy Scout, with outlet after outlet replaying the story of how he ran up some hospital steps once.

Sadly, even DOJ beat journalists seem unable to point out that that image has been carefully cultivated over years. Comey is a PR master.

But as I have written on several occasions, the story is more complicated. That’s true, first of all, because the 2004 hospital confrontation, in which Comey and a bunch of other DOJ officials threatened to quit and therefore allegedly shut down some illegal wiretap programs, did not end in March 2004. On the contrary, for the main unlawful program we know about — the Internet dragnet — that confrontation ended in July 2004 when, after some serious arm-twisting, DOJ got FISC presiding judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to authorize substantially the same Internet dragnet they refused to authorize themselves.  The arguments they used to pull that off are fairly breath-taking.

The hospital confrontation only served to hide illegal surveillance under a new rock

First, they told Kollar-Kotelly she had to reauthorize the dragnet because terrorists wanted to plan an election year plot; as I note below, that claim was largely based on a fabrication.

Then, they argued that the standard for approval of a bulk Pen Register/Trap and Trace order was the same (arguably lower) as any other PRTT order focused on an individual. Kollar-Kotelly, DOJ argued, had no discretion over whether or how to approve this.

DOJ told Kollar-Kotelly she had no authority to do anything but approve their expansive plan to collect Internet data from telecom switches. “[T]he Court ‘shall’ authorize a pen register … if an application brought before it complies with the requirements of the statute.” Even though, by collecting Internet metadata in bulk, the government would take away FISC’s authority to review whether the targets were agents of a foreign power, DOJ argued she had no authority to determine whether this bulk data — which she deemed an “enormous” amount — was “relevant” to the FBI’s investigations into terrorism.

And that meaning — which the government expanded even further in 2006 to claim the phone records of every single American were “relevant” to the FBI’s standing terrorism investigations — “requires no stretching of the ordinary meaning of the terms of the statute at all,” they claimed, in apparent seriousness.

DOJ further argued that’s the way the FISA court — which Congress created in 1978 to provide real judicial review while permitting the executive to keep its foreign spying secret — is supposed to work. Having FISC rubber-stamp the program they themselves had refused to authorize “promotes both of the twin goals of FISA,” DOJ argued, “facilitating the foreign-intelligence collection needed to protect American lives while at the same time providing judicial oversight to safeguard American freedoms.”

Their claim this involved oversight is especially rich given that DOJ and FISC argued then — and continued to argue at least through 2010 when John Bates would reauthorize and expand this dragnet — that the FISC had no authority to impose minimization procedures for bulk collected data, which has historically been the sole way FISC exercises any oversight. Then, during the period of the very first dragnet order, NSA “discovered” it was violating standards Kollar-Kotelly imposed on the collection (effectively, violating the minimization procedures). But in spite of the fact that she then imposed more requirements, including twice quarterly spot checks on the collection, those violations continued unabated until NSA’s Inspector General finally started, on Reggie Walton’s order, an (aborted) real review of the collection in 2009. At that point, OGC all of a sudden “discovered” that their twice-quarterly spot checks had failed to notice that every single record NSA had collected during that 5 year period had violated FISC standards.

In short, the program was never, ever, in legal compliance. That was the solution Comey achieved to the unlawful program he got shut down.

DOJ’s — Jim Comey’s — efforts to undercut FISC not only led to other really problematic FISC decisions based on this precedent (including, but not limited to, the phone dragnet in 2006 and upstream collection in 2007), but also gave illegal collection the patina of legality solely by making someone else authorize a program she couldn’t oversee.

DOJ deliberately bypassed Congress because they knew it wouldn’t approve the surveillance

Along with radically changing the nature of FISC in the wake of the hospital confrontation, DOJ — Jim Comey — affirmatively bypassed Congress because they didn’t want to tell America it was spying on them in bulk.

DOJ pointed to language showing Congress intended pen registers to apply to the Internet; they pointed to the absence of language prohibiting a pen register from being used to collect data from more than a single user, as if that’s the same as collecting from masses of people and as if that proved congressional intent to wiretap everyone.

And then they dismissed any potential constitutional conflict involved in such broad rereadings of statutes passed by Congress. “In almost all cases of potential constitutional conflict, if a statute is construed to restrict the executive, the executive has the option of seeking additional clarifying legislation from Congress,” the heroes of the hospital confrontation admitted. The White House had, in fact, consulted Majority Leader Tom DeLay about doing just that, but he warned it would be too difficult to get new legislation. So two months later, DOJ argued Congress’ prerogative as an independent branch of government would just have to give way to secrecy. “In this case, by contrast, the Government cannot pursue that route because seeking legislation would inevitably compromise the secrecy of the collection program the Government wishes to undertake.”

This was a pretty big assault on separation of powers, and not one justified by the efficacy of the program or the needs of the collection.

While I won’t go into it here, this is all about the best known part of the Stellar Wind program that was not so much “shut down” as “dumped into someone else’s legal lap.” There’s another aspect of Stellar Wind — one I don’t yet fully understand — that Comey reauthorized on his own, one that has gotten no reporting. I hope to return to this.

Comey’s DOJ lets itself be manhandled into reauthorizing torture and surveillance

There’s an intimately related effort Comey gets some credit for which in fact led to fairly horrible conclusions: torture. Jack Goldsmith, with Comey’s backing, also withdrew the shoddy John Yoo memo authorizing waterboarding and other torture (Goldsmith also prevented Yoo from retroactively authorizing more techniques).

But on July 2, 2004 — two weeks before Goldsmith left — the intelligence community found another detainee it just had to torture, Janat Gul, based on already questioned claims he wanted to plan an election year attack. They had a Principal’s Committee meeting to discuss what to do. After Jim Comey and John Bellinger left the meeting, the PC agreed to engage in torture again (though not waterboarding). Five days later Goldsmith wrote to ensure the IC knew this meant they had to follow the guidelines laid out under the original Yoo memo. By September, after Gul and some associates had been tortured extensively — each time with Dan Levin writing what I’m sure he imagined to be a soundly reviewed approval for the torture — Levin had approved waterboarding again, along with the techniques Goldsmith had prevented Yoo from retroactively and unilaterally authorizing. OLC repeatedly promised a more fulsome memo laying out the approval offered, ostensibly in reaction to an immediate need, in 2004. Jim Comey initiated that process in fall and December 2004. But in the end, the technique memos completed by Steven Bradbury in May 2005 authorized both waterboarding, as well as all the other conditions (primarily techniques use in combination) Comey seems to have tried to have set to make them impossible to use again. Comey resigned right before these memos were finalized, so it’s possible he made another — failed — attempt to prevent the illegal program by threatening to quit; he did, however, stick around for another three months before he moved onto his sinecures at Lockheed and Bridgewater.

Here’s the tragic thing about this unsuccessful effort to impose order on the torture program: it, like the Iraq War itself, was based on a fabricator.

CIA came to Comey and others, said, “this guy wants to attack the presidential elections so we need a dragnet and torture,” to which DOJ said okay.

The CIA in March 2004 received reporting from a source the torture report calls “Asset Y,” who said a known Al-Qaeda associate in Pakistan, Janat Gul — whom CIA at the time believed was a key facilitator — had set up a meeting between Asset Y and Al-Qaeda’s finance chief, and was helping plan attacks inside the United States timed to coincide with the November 2004 elections. According to the report, CIA officers immediately expressed doubts about the veracity of the information they’d been given by Asset Y. A senior CIA officer called the report “vague” and “worthless in terms of actionable intelligence.” He noted that Al Qaeda had already issued a statement “emphasizing a lack of desire to strike before the U.S. election” and suggested that since Al-Qaeda was aware that “threat reporting causes panic in Washington” and inevitably results in leaks, planting a false claim of an election season attack would be a good way for the network to test whether Asset Y was working for its enemies. Another officer, assigned to the group hunting Osama bin Laden, also expressed doubts.

[snip]

Nevertheless, the CIA took seriously Asset Y’s claim that Gul was involved in an election plot and moved quickly to gain custody of him after his arrest by Pakistan in June 2004. Even before CIA rendered Gul to its custody, Tenet started lobbying to get torture techniques reapproved for his interrogation.

On June 29, Tenet wrote National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice seeking approval to once again use some of the techniques whose use he suspended less than four weeks earlier, in the hope of gathering information on the election season plot. “Given the magnitude of the danger posed by the pre-election plot and Gul’s almost certain knowledge of any intelligence about that plot” Tenet wrote, relying on Asset Y’s claims, “I request the fastest possible resolution of the above issues.”

[snip]

Soon after the reauthorization of the torture and the Internet dragnet, the CIA realized ASSET Y’s story wasn’t true. By September, an officer involved in Janat Gul’s interrogation observed, “we lack credible information that ties him to pre-election threat information or direct operational planning against the United States, at home or abroad.” In October, CIA reassessed ASSET Y, and found him to be deceptive. When pressured, ASSET Y admitted had had made up the story of a meeting set up by Gul. ASSET Y blamed his CIA handler for pressuring him for intelligence, leading him to lie about the meeting.

By 2005, CIA had concluded that ASSET Y was a fabricator, and Janat Gul was a “rather poorly educated village man [who is] quite lazy [who] was looking to make some easy money for little work and he was easily persuaded to move people and run errands for folks on our target list” (though the Agency wasn’t always forthright about the judgment to DOJ).

During Comey’s entire effort — to put order to the dragnet, to put order to the torture — he was in fact being led by the nose by the CIA, once again using the report of a fabricator to authorize actions the US had no business engaging in.

If that were all, I’d consider this a tragic story: poor Jim Comey trying to ensure the US does good, only to be undermined by the dishonest folks at the CIA, using asymmetric information again to ensure their ass gets covered legally.

Jim Comey refuses to review what he did in 2004 and 2005

But here’s the part that, in my opinion, makes being snookered by the CIA unforgivable. Thus far, Comey has refused to read the full Torture Report to learn how badly he got snookered, even though he promised Dianne Feinstein to do so in his confirmation process.

I am specifically intrigued by Comey’s apparent lack of curiosity about the full report because of his actions in 2005.

As these posts lay out (one, two), Comey was involved in the drafting of 2 new OLC memos in May 2005 (though he may have been ignorant about the third). The lies CIA told OLC in 2004 and then told OLC again in 2005 covering the same torture were among the worst, according to Mark Udall. Comey even tried to hold up the memo long enough to do fact gathering that would allow them to tie the Combined memo more closely to the detainee whose treatment the memo was apparently supposed to retroactively reauthorize. But Alberto Gonzales’ Chief of Staff Ted Ullyot told him that would not be possible.

Pat [Philbin] explained to me (as he had to [Steven Bradbury and Ted Ullyot]) that we couldn’t make the change I thought necessary by Friday [April 29]. I told him to go back to them and reiterate that fact and the fact that I would oppose any opinion that was not significantly reshaped (which would involve fact gathering that we could not complete by Friday).

[snip]

[Ullyot] mentioned at one point that OLC didn’t feel like it would accede to my request to make the opinion focused on one person because they don’t give retrospective advice. I said I understood that, but that the treatment of that person had been the subject of oral advice, which OLC would simply be confirming in writing, something they do quite often.

At the end, he said that he just wanted me to know that it appeared the second opinion would go [Friday] and that he wanted to make sure I knew that and wanted to confirm that I felt I had been heard.

Presuming that memo really was meant to codify the oral authorization DOJ had given CIA (which might pertain to Hassan Ghul or another detainee tortured in 2004), then further details of the detainee’s torture would be available in the full report. Wouldn’t Comey be interested in those details now?

But then, so would details of Janat Gul’s torture, whose torture was retroactively authorized in an OLC memo Comey himself bought off on. Maybe Comey has good reason not to want to know what else is in the report.

Sure, he may be doing so to prevent Jason Leopold from liberating the report via FOIA. But in doing so, he is also refusing to examine his own actions, his own willingness to reauthorize the dragnet and torture he had just shut down in the service of a lie. He is refusing to consider whether the deals he made with the devil in 2004 were unsound.

Even here, I might just consider this a tragic story, of a morally just man bested by bureaucratic forces both more sinister and dishonest than Comey.

Except for Comey’s Manichean view of the world.

His world is separated into the Good Guys who should have access to encryption and the Bad Guys who should not, the loyal people like Hillary who can be “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” with no legal consequences and the disloyal people like Thomas Drake who get prosecuted for doing the very same things.

That’s not the world where self-proclaimed Boy Scout Jim Comey assents to the reauthorization of torture and dragnets based on a fabrication with no repercussions or even soul-searching.

I mean, I get it. There is no place for Boy Scouts in the top ranks of our national security state. I get that you’re going to lose bureaucratic fights to really immoral causes and manipulative spooks. I get you’re sometimes going to get the so-called trade-off between liberty and security wrong, especially when you get lied to.

But given that reality, there is no place for pretend Boy Scouts. There is no place to pretend your world is as easy as running up some hospital steps, victory!, we’ve vanquished presidential abuses so let’s go dismantle separation of powers! That’s just naive, but in the service of the FBI Director, it legitimizes a really unjust — morally-rather-than-legally-based — method of policing.

Comey seems to believe his self-created myth at this point, and that’s a very dangerous spot for a guy deigning to be the investigator and prosecutor of who is loyal and who disloyal.

Update: Matthew Miller wrote up his criticism of Comey’s abuse of power here.

Update: Here’s an interview I did for Pacifica on the email question generally.

CIA Lied about Leaking to Screw David Passaro and Protect Bush and Tenet

In the SSCI Torture Report, it has two references to how press people were leaking details of the the torture program to the press even while lawyers were claiming that the program was top secret. In this document, someone notes “our Glomar fig leaf is getting pretty thin.” In this one, a lawyer admits the declaration he had just written “about the secrecy of the interrogation program” was “a work of fiction.”

This document explains why the CIA was playing such games: to screw over David Passaro, a CIA contractor who was being tried for assaulting a detainee.

I know there is an urgency about the 7th Floor to attempt to defend the CIA program in the public domain. However, we need to have the 7th Floor confront the inconsistency in filing a CIPA declaration in Passaro about how critical it is to keep this information secret and at the same time planning to reveal the darn near the [sic] entire program. These goals are not obviously compatible.

I’ve written about Passaro at length before. Here’s a summary of what happened, which is basically that an insurgent suspect was brought into a remote base and — after being interrogated by 4 different people — died. Passaro was indicted just as the (and probably because) the Abu Ghraib scandal was breaking. Before he was indicted, he had a period working at Fort Bragg, during which he put together a bunch of documents to defend himself, which was then confiscated. But he clearly intended to expose details about the torture program and the Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification (Passaro was working under a separate program authorized by the MON, the Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams). Of particular note, he asked for documents pertaining to CIA torture that would have clearly implicated George Tenet and George Bush (because, effectively, Passaro’s activities were directly authorized by that same MON).

In response, Passaro got bullshit discovery, some document that had been superseded by the ones that would have implicated the two Georges, rather than the one that would have made it clear techniques he was accused of using against the detainee had been approved, indirectly in that MON, by the President.

There are, in my opinion, several other reasons (witnesses and other information withheld) why Passaro did not get a fair trial. So I don’t actually know whether we know what happened and who should have been found guilty for it.

But one thing is now clear.

Even while CIA was leaking information to the press in an effort to spin their torture program, they were at the same time submitting sworn declarations in Passaro’s case designed to ensure he wouldn’t get the documents proving that George Tenet and George Bush had ordered precisely the kinds of things he was being tried for doing. The CIA was lying to protect the muckety-mucks, to include the President, while fucking the scapegoat, the one guy the government still points to to pretend they can prosecute torture.

CIA Finally Declassifies “Gloves Come Off” Memorandum of Notification Reference

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Back in 2012, I wrote a series of posts on the Obama Administration’s extraordinary efforts to censor this title. (post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6post 7, post 8)

The title was part of some smart CYA on the part of George Tenet. When things started to go south with the torture program in 2003, he wrote this document, ostensibly putting order to the torture program, but also making it clear the whole thing operated on Presidential authority. (The document, which should have been released to David Passaro in his criminal trial for torturing a detainee who subsequently died, was withheld, which prevented him from pointing out anything he did, he did with Presidential approval, so Tenet’s CYA didn’t help him at all.)

The judge in ACLU’s lawsuit to liberate torture documents, Alvin Hellerstein, decided the language should not be censored, and ordered the government release it. Then National Security Advisor Jim Jones wrote a secret declaration stating that it could not be disclosed. All the while, ACLU thought they were fighting to release a description of waterboarding, when in fact Hellerstein was trying to force the Administration to release the single detail that torture had been done on the President’s order.

But the Second Circuit overruled Hellerstein, declaring these 8 words a source and method (for the record, I guessed exactly what was behind the redaction so their secret was only useful for legal challenges).

That the torture program operated pursuant to a Finding (that is, as a covert op) had long been known thanks to blabby CIA types like John Rizzo. But it was formally declassified as part of the Torture Report. It got released today as part of a Jason Leopold lawsuit.

So there you have it. “Presidential Memorandum of Notification of 17 September 2001.” A secret Obama fought to the circuit court, now public for all the world to see.

It doesn’t feel so momentous, does it?

Lawyer Who Filed Crime Report against SSCI Staffer, Robert Eatinger, Complains about Lack of Trust

Robert Eatinger, whose name was redacted 1,600 times in the Senate Torture report, and who went on to file a crime report against Senate staffers for using materials provided to them by CIA, is complaining about lack of trust in this summary of Edward Snowden’s role in surveillance debates.

“The loss in trust with the U.S. public and businesses has a real operational effect. Despite Hollywood portrayals, U.S. intelligence has limited authorities, personnel, and resources,” Robert Eatinger, former senior deputy general counsel at the CIA, said. “Our intelligence agencies depend on the willingness of U.S. persons and companies to provide information and assistance, either voluntarily or through a contract mechanism. A loss in trust reduces the number of Americans willing to assist our intelligence agencies. It reduces not only voluntary assistance but also the number of companies willing to enter into contracts.”

“We have seen recent examples of major U.S. companies not only declining to help U.S. intelligence, but activity seeking to frustrate it. Perhaps the most obvious is Twitter, Inc.’s recent directive to the data analytics company Dataminr to cease selling data, not precisely defined in the press reporting, to U.S. intelligence agencies,” Eatinger added.

At least according to Twitter, this is a false representation of what has happened. Twitter says that its policy on Dataminr selling data to the intelligence community is longstanding, not a recent change.

Constitution Project’s Katherine Hawkins actually tried to have Eatinger’s name unredacted in the released summary via the formal process to do so, with no luck.

I can think of few things that have eroded trust in recent years than the serial coverups of CIA’s torture, in which Eatinger has had a central role.

So I guess they went to the expert in eroding trust.

Hillary Promises Not to Order the Military (!?!) to Torture

Though I agree with the general sentiment that Donald Trump should not be trusted with America’s nuclear codes, there’s a lot I loathed in Hillary’s foreign policy speech yesterday.

Her neat espousal of American exceptionalism, with the specter that another country could make decisions about our lives and jobs and safety, is especially rich coming from a woman who has negotiated several trade deals that give corporations the power to make decisions about our lives and jobs and safety.

I believe with all my heart that America is an exceptional country – that we’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth. We are not a country that cowers behind walls. We lead with purpose, and we prevail.

And if America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum – and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then they’ll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety – and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit.

That is not an outcome we can live with.

The rest of her riff on American exceptionalism — with weird claims like, “America’s network of allies is part of what makes us exceptional” and “Allies provide staging areas for our military” — is worth an entirely separate post.

Her cavalier invocation of dead bodies and prolonging depressions exhibits a lack of self-awareness.

I’m frankly baffled by her description of her plan to defeat ISIS, as well as her warnings elsewhere about allowing terrorists in Syria or emboldening ISIS, both of which past Hillary actions have done.

We need to lash up with our allies, and ensure our intelligence services are working hand-in-hand to dismantle the global network that supplies money, arms, propaganda and fighters to the terrorists. We need to win the battle in cyberspace.

[Applause]

And of course we need to strengthen our defenses here at home.

That – in a nutshell – is my plan for defeating ISIS.

Hillary never talks about how she’ll get the Saudis — one of those allies she wants to “lash up with” — to stop fostering terrorism. That seems like a first step.

I’m even more curious what she intends with “strengthening our defenses here at home,” especially coming just lines after she falsely claimed San Bernardino was an ISIS attack? We already arrest scores of people for their support for ISIS, for doing things like RTing ISIS propaganda. To do much more — and to find the San Bernardino couple before they attacked — would have required far more domestic spying. Is that what Hillary has planned?

But here’s the thing that most disturbs me about her hawkish speech. Note how she attacked Trump for his embrace of torture.

He has said that he would order our military to carry out torture and the murder of civilians who are related to suspected terrorists – even though those are war crimes.

[snip]

So it really matters that Donald Trump says things that go against our deepest-held values. It matters when he says he’ll order our military to murder the families of suspected terrorists. During the raid to kill bin Laden, when every second counted, our SEALs took the time to move the women and children in the compound to safety. Donald Trump may not get it, but that’s what honor looks like.

Two times in a formal, pre-written speech, delivered with tele-prompters, Hillary claimed Trump had said he’d order our military to carry out torture and murder of civilians. But that’s not what he said. He spoke generally, and when speaking of torture he has talked about “interrogators,” without reference to agency. Sure, that could mean DOD (and some DOD interrogators did torture under George Bush). It could also mean the FBI, the agency which currently leads high value interrogations and which John Brennan has said must have its “own processes and procedures and laws that govern its activities,” separate from the techniques permitted in the Army Field Manual.

But the assumption of everyone listening to Donald Trump’s promise to torture was that he’d ask CIA to do the business. Both former CIA Director Michael Hayden and current CIA Director John Brennan thought that’s what he meant, anyway.

While Hillary was Secretary of State, the government killed the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, effectively murdering the family of a suspected (dead) terrorist.

It’s bad enough that she’s lecturing Trump about our deepest-held values. But she’s also not promising to the one thing she appears to be promising: refusing to order the CIA — not the military — not to torture.

CIA Achieves a Whole New Scale of Torture Evidence Destruction

I once made a list of all the evidence of torture the CIA or others in the Executive Branch destroyed.

I thought it time to start cataloging them, to keep them all straight.

  • Before May 2003: 15 of 92 torture tapes erased or damaged
  • Early 2003: Dunlavey’s paper trail “lost”
  • Before August 2004: John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s torture memo emails deleted
  • June 2005: most copies of Philip Zelikow’s dissent to the May 2005 CAT memo destroyed
  • November 8-9, 2005: 92 torture tapes destroyed
  • July 2007 (probably): 10 documents from OLC SCIF disappear
  • December 19, 2007: Fire breaks out in Cheney’s office

(I put in the Cheney fire because it happened right after DOJ started investigating the torture tape destruction.)

Since that time, there have been at least two more:

  • CIA stealing back copies of cables implicating the President from SSCI servers
  • Someone modifying one of the black sites at which the 9/11 defendants were tortured, with Gitmo approval

But apparently, last summer, CIA’s Inspector General destroyed something else: both his disk-based and server based copies of the Torture Report.

But last August, a chagrined Christopher R. Sharpley, the CIA’s acting inspector general, alerted the Senate intelligence panel that his office’s copy of the report had vanished. According to sources familiar with Sharpley’s account, he explained it this way: When it received its disk, the inspector general’s office uploaded the contents onto its internal classified computer system and destroyed the disk in what Sharpley described as “the normal course of business.” Meanwhile someone in the IG office interpreted the Justice Department’s instructions not to open the file to mean it should be deleted from the server — so that both the original and the copy were gone.

At some point, it is not clear when, after being informed by CIA general counsel Caroline Krass that the Justice Department wanted all copies of the document preserved, officials in the inspector general’s office undertook a search to find its copy of the report. They discovered, “S***, we don’t have one,” said one of the sources briefed on Sharpley’s account.

Sharpley was apologetic about the destruction and promised to ask CIA director Brennan for another copy. But as of last week, he seems not to have received it; after Yahoo News began asking about the matter, he called intelligence committee staffers to ask if he could get a new copy from them.

Sharpley also told Senate committee aides he had reported the destruction of the disk to the CIA’s general counsel’s office, and Krass passed that information along to the Justice Department. But there is no record in court filings that department lawyers ever informed the judge overseeing the case that the inspector general’s office had destroyed its copy of the report.

Two key parts of this story: Sharpley appears to have no idea who decided to nuke the report off the IG server. Hmmmm.

And DOJ has been suppressing this detail in filings in the FOIAs for the Torture Report itself (which may be what led Dianne Feinstein to make an issue of it last week).

Click through if you want a really depressing list of all the ways Richard Burr is trying to disappear the report.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the entire report got disappeared. But destroying the whole thing is rather impressive.

Update: Katherine Hawkins reminds of of another one: the hood Manadel al-Jamadi wore when he suffocated to death while being tortured disappeared under circumstances the CIA IG considered non-credible.

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