Less than a month after the NYT first revealed the CIA had destroyed torture tapes, I suggested that Doug Jehl’s November 9, 2005 story may have been the precipitating factor that led the CIA to destroy the torture tapes.

In other words, Helgerson and his staff reviewed the torture tapes sometime between early 2003 and late 2005, quite possibly close to the time of that May 2004 White House briefing.

Which is rather significant, since that earlier period (2003 to 2004) coincides with the period when Helgerson’s office was also investigating the CIA’s interrogation program. Here’s a Doug Jehl story on the report that was published (will coinkydinks never cease?!?!?!) on November 9, 2005, within days of the torture tape destruction and apparently one day after the CIA issued a statement denying they torture (though the statement doesn’t appear in their collection of public statements from the period).

A classified report issued last year by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general warned that interrogation procedures approved by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks might violate some provisions of the international Convention Against Torture, current and former intelligence officials say.

[snip]

The report, by John L. Helgerson, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, did not conclude that the techniques constituted torture, which is also prohibited under American law, the officials said. But Mr. Helgerson did find, the officials said, that the techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the convention.

The agency said in a written statement in March that "all approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture." It reaffirmed that statement on Tuesday, but would not comment on any classified report issued by Mr. Helgerson. The statement in March did not specifically address techniques that could be labeled cruel, inhuman or degrading, and which are not explicitly prohibited in American law.

The officials who described the report said it discussed particular techniques used by the C.I.A. against particular prisoners, including about three dozen terror suspects being held by the agency in secret locations around the world. They said it referred in particular to the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have organized the Sept. 11 attacks and who has been detained in a secret location by the C.I.A. since he was captured in March 2003. Mr. Mohammed is among those believed to have been subjected to waterboarding, in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and made to believe that he is drowning.

In his report, Mr. Helgerson also raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability, the officials said. They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to C.I.A. interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States.

I’ve seen the report’s publication date as either April or May 2004–but in any case, at almost exactly the same time CIA briefed Addington, Gonzales, and Bellinger on the torture tapes. Which makes Helgerson’s claim that he "reviewed the tapes at issue" during that period particularly interesting. Helgerson’s report–which focuses on the treatment of a number of named detainees–may have relied on those torture tapes to form the judgment that the CIA was engaged in cruel and inhuman treatment. In fact, it’s even possible that the CIA briefing in May 2004 pertained not just to Abu Ghraib (which was, after all, a DOD operation, not a CIA one), but also to the fact that the CIA IG had just declared in a written report that the tactics used (and presumably shown in the tapes) amounted to illegal treatment of detainees.

From Hosenball and Isikoff’s preview of Monday’s IG Report, it sounds like I was right.

Nashiri’s interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

According to the sources, the report also says that a mock execution was staged in a room next to a detainee, during which a gunshot was fired in an effort to make the suspect believe that another prisoner had been killed. The inspector general’s report alludes to more than one mock execution.

Before leaving office, Bush administration officials confirmed that Nashiri was one of three CIA detainees subjected to waterboarding. They also acknowledged that Nashiri was one of two al Qaeda detainees whose detentions and interrogations were documented at length in CIA videotapes. But senior officials of the agency’s undercover operations branch, the National Clandestine Service, ordered that the tapes be destroyed, an action which has been under investigation for over a year by a federal prosecutor.

Not only did al-Nashiri’s torturers laugh in his face, the wielded a drill and a gun to make him falsely confess that al Qaeda had nukes.

I can see why they couldn’t let tapes of that lie on a shelf. 

The AP FOIAed Mark Sanford’s calendars and discovered him traipsing about on some undisclosed trips using supporters’ planes. Make sure you read through to the second page, though, where the AP discloses that the Republican Governor’s Association paid for one of Sanford’s nookie runs.

Sanford arranged to meet with his mistress in one of the 2008 RGA trips that he did not disclose. He had been traveling to Ireland for RGA in November, and arranged a meeting with the woman when he returned, according to records he released after the affair became public.

So let’s see. The RGA paid for Mark Sanford’s nookie runs. The NRSC doubled the salary of John Ensign’s mistress and put her son on the payroll. The RNC paid to keep Palin in Prada (which may not have helped her sex life but it sure made for some starbursts in Rich Lowry’s living room).

And yet the NRCC is the Republican entity with the ethics and accounting problems?

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/loauc/ / CC BY-SA 2.0)

It was bad enough that the Bush Administration did away with attorney-client privilege via their warrantless wiretap program. Now the Obama Administration appears to be trying to intimidate lawyers defending Gitmo detainees by threatening them with prosecution for trying to ascertain the identities of those involved in abusing their clients.

The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Investigators are looking into allegations that laws protecting classified information were breached when three lawyers showed their clients the photographs, the sources said. The lawyers were apparently attempting to identify CIA officers and contractors involved in the agency’s interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in facilities outside the United States, where the agency employed harsh techniques.

If detainees at the U.S. military prison in Cuba are tried, either in federal court or by a military commission, defense lawyers are expected to attempt to call CIA personnel to testify.

This seems akin to me with the practice of refusing to tell defense attorneys what was done to their clients, including withholding Abu Zubaydah’s own diary.

But for a more informed take on what’s going on, check out this Bill Leonard post (remember, he used to head ISOO, the organization in charge of the federal security classification and after the AIPAC defendants won the right to call him to testify, the government case against the defendants fell apart). 

With the above as background, it is useful to look at the facts as reported in the WaPost article and assess exactly what the government is trying to do with the critical national security tool of classification. First of all, the classified nature of an intelligence officer’s cover is not sacrosanct. For example, earlier this year Andrew Warren was identified as the CIA Station Chief in Algeria when he was charged with drugging and sexually assaulting two women.

The ready disclosure by the government of Warren’s identity brings up an important provision of Executive Order 12958, as amended, which governs the classification of national security information and which is thus instrumental in investigating any alleged illegal disclosure of classified information. Section 1.7(a) of the order states that "In no case shall information be classified in order to: (1) conceal violations of law…". I have confronted many in government who take the position that this provision has next to no meaning. They argue that this section only prohibits the classification of information with the intent of concealing a violation of law. As such, they argue that classification could legitimately have the "unintended consequence" of concealing a violation of law. Although I do not agree with such a narrow interpretation, it would prove useful to examine the government’s intent in the use of classification in the case of defense attorneys reportedly showing detainees photos of CIA officers.

 [snip]

First of all, there is no evidence that the government took steps to conceal the identity of the CIA officers from the detainees themselves — otherwise showing photos to the detainees would be pointless. In view of the fact that no detainee is authorized access to classified information, the government apparently violated its own provisions by failing to conceal the intelligence officers identity from the detainees.

There’s more–some of which folks here may agree and disagree with. 

But Leonard does raise interesting challenges to the government’s intent to hide the evidence of its own wrong-doing even while winning cases against those it tortured.

Mary reminded me that I wanted to comment on the Bush Administration’s response to Tom Ridge allegation–or rather, confirmation–that the terror alert system was politicized. Politico tells us that when the  were asked about Ridge’s allegation they–apparently all of them–referred reporters to Frances Fragos Townsend and Andy Card.

Ridge did not respond to numerous requests for comment from POLITICO and a number of former top political and national security officials within the Bush administration declined to respond to Ridge, referring POLITICO to Card and Townsend.

Don’t you think that a little odd? That "a number of former top political and national security officials" would all tell reporters to speak to Townsend and Card? Particularly since, as Card Townsend tells it, he didn’t know Ridge was writing a book?

“I didn’t even know Tom was even really writing a book,” said Card.

So what you’re left with is Card claiming he never saw Bush overriding the decisions of the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security, which is different than saying those in NSC didn’t push Ridge towards certain decisions. You’ve got Townsend, the woman whom the Bush Administration didn’t read into the warrantless wiretap program even though it was a core function of her job, claiming that (as with Jim Comey) she never saw any pressure exerted on Ridge.

“Never in my experience did I see any political influence exerted on the cabinet secretary.” 

And you’ve got Andy Card, the guy who, seven years ago, was just rolling out the September new product, claiming the Bush Administration never let politics influence national security decisions.

“We went over backwards repeatedly and with great discipline to make sure politics did not influence any national security and homeland security decisions,” former White House chief of staff Andy Card told POLITICO. “The clear instructions were to make sure politics never influenced anything.” 

If this is the best the Dead-Enders can do to rebut Tom Ridge, I expect Ridge will be having a long and very profitable book tour. Because this response is simply not credible.

Update: Card/Townsend error fixed.

In 2001, terrorists capitalized on George Bush’s inattention and extended vacation to strike at America. Now, Rich Scott’s Conservatives for Patients’ Rights believes it can adopt al Qaeda’s tactics by attacking our country while the President is on vacation. "Even on vacation, the President will get no quarter on the public option from Conservatives for Patients’ Rights." And they’re running an ad that somewhat bizarrely tries to mock Obama’s vacation.

There are obvious problems with this strategy. First, regardless of what you think of the White House strategy on health care, mocking Obama for taking the first week of vacation he has had all year will only invite comparisons with Bush, who spent 977 days at either Camp David or Crawford during his presidency–well over a year on the pig farm where he twiddled as New Orleans drowned and blew off warnings about an imminent al Qaeda by dismissing briefers for "covering their ass." Conservatives for PR may be trying to mock Obama by suggesting he’s traveling to an effete location with no brush to clear. But at least this President hasn’t spent significant portions of his term AWOL during crises, like Bush did.

The big question is whether our press corps will step up to the challenge. 

Already, they have enabled groups like Conservatives for PR to use terrorist tactics–the staging of scary public spectacles–to hijack the debate on health care. The media has magnified fake fear-mongering stunts rather than calming the fear by cutting through the misinformation. And perhaps predictably, the usual suspects are out pitching Conservatives for PR’s nonsensical ad for them. Apparently, Joe Scarborough and Mike Allen don’t understand that treating this ad seriously–reporting this ad without, at the same time, highlighting the irony of attacking Obama on an area in which he exposes Bush’s failures by comparison–only proves that they have been captured by the fear-mongerers hoping to put profits above Americans’ lives.

No matter, though. The President may be headed off for his reasonable one week vacation. But the rest of us will remain vigilant: you and me, the 5,000 people who have given $300,000 in a matter of days to reward those who will stand up and defend real health care reform, and of course, the tireless Jane, who I hope takes a long week on a beach once we win this fight.

Rick Scott assumes that we citizens fighting to defend this country against those mobilizing fear in the service of corporate profits will let down our guard. But if he believes that, he might as well retire to a pig farm to clear brush, because he has badly underestimated the citizens of this country.

Jon Corzine’s campaign wants some more information about just what Chris Christie was doing at the US Attorney’s office while he was handing out multi-million dollar deals to his friends. 

So the Corzine campaign has submitted 18 FOIA requests for information on Christie’s tenure as US Attorney. They have submitted them, each time, to the Executive Office of US Attorneys, which keeps kicking the FOIAs down to the NJ US Attorney’s office, where they appear to be routinely ignored. So today, the Corzine took the next step in its attempts to figure out just what Christie was doing at the US Attorney office.

The campaign filed eight administrative challenges – representing 18 separate requests – with the United States Department of Justice’s Office of Information and Privacy. Despite repeated efforts by the campaign to obtain the information, beginning in March 2009, it has repeatedly been told that the failures to fulfill its requests lie with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey. The records the campaign is seeking from Christie’s tenure as U.S. Attorney include: budgets, travel expenses and schedules – even public ones.

"The United States Attorney’s office has many fine, dedicated, professional lawyers," said Corzine ’09 campaign strategist, Tom Shea. "But, in light of recent reports that Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra is under investigation to determine if he has used the office to help further the Christie campaign, Second Assistant U.S. Attorney Michele Brown has an ongoing financial relationship with Christie and Christie was communicating with Karl Rove about his run for governor from that office, we feel it is even more important we receive the information requested."

The campaign is also seeking details of no-bid contracts Christie awarded while U.S. Attorney, including a $52 million contract to his former boss, ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft. In addition it has demanded Mr. Christie’s communications with former Bush political advisor Karl Rove, and communications between Mr. Christie and current officials in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey since Mr. Christie resigned as U.S. Attorney.

I’m actually somewhat agnostic on this. Perhaps DOJ is not turning over the requested materials for the same reasons DOJ is protecting Dick Cheney’s PatFitz interview–because they’re trying to avoid any appearance of political taint by letting Republicans avoid any scrutiny after the fact. Or it could just be that the people responding to the FOIA heard Christie say he would be hiring a bunch of AUSAs if he won the gubernatorial race, and they’re trying to increase their chance for a swank job by withholding FOIA-able information.

In either case, it stinks.

Cash for Clunkers will, on Monday at 8 PM, have silica liquid injected in its engine and stopped. Or rather, the program will offer rebates for no more new deals after that time.

The U.S. government will shut down its cash-for-clunkers program at 8 p.m. Monday, in a bid to avoid car dealers and shoppers from claiming more than the $3 billion set aside for the program.

The decision means that the program originally expected to generate 250,000 vehicle sales over three months will have likely triggered more than 700,000 in less than one month. While it accomplished its goal of destroying gas guzzlers and spurring the U.S. auto industry to boost production, it’s larger effects on the economy and environment will be debated for years to come.

I’ve been measuring the effects of the program more anecdotally. We know that GM brought back workers in Orion Township, MI, and Lordstown, OH, to make more Malibus and Cobalts for the program–and most other manufacturers had already brought back workers. We know the program cleaned out inventory that had been stuck at the dealers. And I saw a bunch of brand new (!) small cars on the way home from Pittsburgh–particularly a bunch of Saturn Auras (which, with the Malibu, is the biggest car that qualifies across the board for the full benefit). Oh, and I saw a pretty cool Saturn Aura ad last night, too–I think the C4C program allowed manufacturers to free up some money for advertising that has gotten people in dealers.

Who knows whether all this excitement will tail off after Monday. Who knows whether seeing the interest in efficient, smaller cars, will shift the emphasis on these cars going forward? But for now, it has given one of our key industries–and small businesses all over the country–a quick shot in the arm.

Update: SEIU contacted me to say that Andy would in no way be "happy" with triggers–he was asked a hypothetical question and answered it in this way. One of the SEIU’s three demands is a public health insurance option, and the union has been running one of the largest field campaigns in support of that. I’ve changed the post to more accurately represent Andy’s comments.

It’s bad enough that a guy who usually has just as much fight as Rahm is telling ABC that he’d be happy with triggers triggers are a better compromise than co-ops.

He signaled that a more acceptable compromise might be to create a public option whose creation is only triggered if certain circumstances are met.

"It’s obviously better than no public option," said Stern.

Triggers, of course, are Rahm’s favorite gimmick. And Andy-who-sounds-like Rahm must know that triggers mean people who need healthcare now won’t get it until two years beyond whenever this finally gets implemented–years and years down the road. So answer me this, Andy-who-sounds-like-Rahm? Do you really think delaying health care for millions is going to solve the problem you enunciate about winning in 2010?

"I think we’re talking losing control of Congress," said Andy Stern, the President of the Service Employees International Union. "[The failure of health-care reform] would totally empower Republicans to kill all change."

"It’s hard to imagine the Democrats convincing the public that Republicans are to blame for health-care reform going down when the Democrats have such large majorities," he added. "After last year’s promise of change, voters will start feeling buyer’s remorse."

You’re telling me people are not going to feel buyer’s remorse if the Democrats take that same large majority and tell them they can have health care, but only after their current, pre-existing condition either bankrupts or kills them?

"Oh, sure, we lost Dad when good healthcare could have saved him, but we still love the Democrats because Rahm asked so nicely for that two year delay in the guise of triggers and the rest of the Democrats gave it to him."

What surprises me is that Andy-who-sounds-like Rahm knows, in a way that I suspect Rahm doesn’t, how much misery that seemingly innocuous idea of triggers would unnecessarily cause a lot of people.

But I think I’ve discovered why Andy sounds so much like Rahm.

Stern is prepared to use SEIU resources to pressure recalcitrant Democrats in Congress if progress is not made by Sept. 15, the deadline which Senate Finance Committee negotiators have set for themselves.

For now, however, he is holding his fire against fellow Democrats since the president has signaled through his staff that he does not want Democrats shooting at one another.

"We call it: ‘helping the president be successful,’" said Stern with a smile.

Almost word-for-word the prettied up version of Rahm’s fuck-laden attack on the liberal groups "in the veal pen." It’s not that Andy sounds like Rahm–after all, he said neither fuck nor blowjob. Rather, Andy sounds like he has been in the veal pen too long.

Update: the article has been updated to include the following after the trigger comment:

While Stern left the impression that a public option with a trigger was a more acceptable compromise than a co-op, he stopped short of actually endorsing the trigger approach.

I want to belong to a Democratic coalition that recognizes the public option is the compromise!!

As expected, Jeremy Scahill has a piece up on the revelation that CIA was using Blackwater as a Rent-an-Assassin service. He corrects the silence about the role of Buzzy Krongard in both the NYT and WaPo pieces on this.

In a 2006 interview for my book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Krongard said that the company was hired to provide security for the CIA in Afghanistan. "Blackwater got a contract because they were the first people that could get people on the ground," Krongard said. "The only concern we had was getting the best security for our people. If we thought Martians could provide it, I guess we would have gone after them."

The relationship between Krongard and Prince apparently got chummier after the contract was signed. One former Blackwater executive said in 2006, "Krongard came down and visited Blackwater [at company headquarters in North Carolina], and I had to take his kids around and let them shoot on the firing range a number of times." That visit took place after the CIA contract was signed, according to the former executive, and Krongard "may have come down just to see the company that he had just hired."

And he lists a number of other CIA guys who went on to work for Blackwater. (Sort of makes you wonder how many of those people were used as sources for Finder’s propaganda piece yesterday, since a number of them would qualify as "very senior, recently retired CIA officials, clandestine-service officers.")

Scahill’s most important point (one he made with the help of an interview with Jan Schakowsky, who is in charge of this investigation) was that this program–and Cheney’s secrecy about it–meant Blackwater was a more integral part in crafting the Bush era counter-terrorism strategy than Congress.

"What we know now, if this is true, is that Blackwater was part of the highest level, the innermost circle strategizing and exercising strategy within the Bush administration," Schakowsky told The Nation. "Erik Prince operated at the highest and most secret level of the government. Clearly Prince was more trusted than the US Congress because Vice President Cheney made the decision not to brief Congress. This shows that there was absolutely no space whatsoever between the Bush administration and Blackwater." 

Yeah, I can see why that would piss off Congress.

Mark Ambinder takes the opportunity of Ridge’s confirmation that the terror alerts were one big political game to claim he was justified in believing that we DFHers were wrong about the alerts–and in doing so, demonstrates what is so wrong with so much of Village journalism.

Journalists, including myself, were very skeptical when anti-Bush liberals insisted that what Ridge now says is true, was true. We were wrong.  Our skepticism about the activists’ conclusions was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence.  But journalists should have been even more skeptical about the administration’s pronouncements. And yet — we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt.  We can see, now, how pre-war intelligence was manipulated, how the entire Washington establishment (including Congressional Democrats(, including the media, was manipulated by a valid fear of the unknown — but a fear we now know was consciously, deliberately, inculcated. 

Note, first of all, the false binary that Ambinder the so-called journalist sets up:

Our skepticism about the activists’ conclusions was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence. 

Somehow, Ambinder read the minds of "activists" across the country and confirmed that "these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush." Apparently, you see, Ambinder can read the minds of activists, but not Ridge and Bush.

And so then, after reading those minds and/or simply making shit up about why and how "activists" concluded the terror alert system was bogus, Ambinder says that short of having the raw intelligence, journalists have no way of independently assessing whether the terror alerts were a big political game. Either you have gut hatred or you have raw intelligence–there are no other means to get to the truth.

God forbid a journalist use simple empiricism–retrospectively matching terror alerts with reports on which they were based–to assess the terror alerts. God forbid a journalist learn that we went to Code Orange because someone claimed terrorists were going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch, and from that learn to be skeptical of terror alerts going forwards. It’s not as if, after all, the election eve alert was a one-off, the only alert in which the hype was later shown to be over-hype. There was a pattern. And normal human beings equipped with the gift of empiricism that apparently gets weeded out at journalism school tend to look at patterns and conclude that if a relationship consistently has happened in the past, then it probably will exist in the future.

But no!! Journalists can’t do what normal human beings do all the time, and make certain conclusions by watching patterns develop. 

Ambinder’s lame explanation for why we all knew the terror alerts were bullshit but he didn’t is particularly atrocious for two reasons.

First, he relies on a stereotype–the activists motivated solely by their gut hatred of George Bush–to avoid reflecting on why normal people relying on simple empiricism had access to truths that journalists somehow couldn’t access.

But then there’s the stereotype itself, the activists motivated solely by their gut hatred of George Bush. Accepting for a moment the totally bullshit premise that all of the people who believed the terror alerts were bogus hated Bush and were motivated soley by their hatred of Bush–accepting that false premise as true–how do you think those "activists" got their gut hatred of George Bush? Were they all birthed with it?

Or is there the slightest possibility, Ambinder, that they acquired it? Not just because, after we assessed the claims made before the war, concluded they were hyped, and then learned that we were in fact correct that those claims were hyped, we came to loathe a man who would manufacture a case to go to war? But because of a number of other things–things like outing a CIA spy or reversing decades of environmental regulation or telling the rest of the world to fuck off–all of which have proven to have bad consequences for our country. 

You see, by basing his entire self-exoneration on his mind reading of activists and their gut hatred of George Bush, Ambinder can not only avoid really assessing why he was so wrong and real people weren’t about the terror alerts. But he can avoid considering whether there wasn’t an empirical case to be made–that journalists should have made–about the dire effects Bush’s cowboy bullshit was having on our country?

Update: Victory is mine (well, sort of)!

My critics are right. Skepticism about the terror warnings wasn’t just based on gut hatred of Bush, although there was some of that…

There was a growing mistrust of the government’s prosecution of the war on terror… and I have no way of knowing the motivations of…

a majority of the doubters. Yes, journos by pattern give gov’t the benefit of doubt. Doesn’t mean they _should. Not sure why this surprises.

Update: Ambinder has posted a more extensive apology for suggesting he knew why liberals did what they did.

My hindsight bias is no less offensive than the bias I attribute to these liberals. It was wrong to use the phrase "gut hatred." Had I spent more time thinking about the post, I would have chosen a different phrase. And I should have.

Thank you for the apology, Ambinder.