Apparently, in addition to sending out a chain letter stating "butt out" to five or six members of Congress yesterday, DOJ also sent a letter to Judge Henry Kennedy, telling him not to get involved in the torture tape question (h/t Scarecrow).

The Bush administration told a federal judge it was not obligated to preserve videotapes of CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists and urged the court not to look into the tapes’ destruction.

In court documents filed Friday night, government lawyers told U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy that demanding information about the tapes would interfere with current investigations by Congress and the Justice Department.

Now, BushCo is apparently claiming–to Kennedy, at least–that the CIA was free to destroy the torture tapes since the tapes didn’t come from Gitmo.

Kennedy ordered the administration in June 2005 to safeguard "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay."

Five months later, the CIA destroyed the interrogation videos. The recordings involved suspected terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

Government lawyers told Kennedy the tapes were not covered by his court order because Zubaydah and al-Nashiri were not at the Guantanamo military prison in Cuba. The men were being held overseas in a network of secret CIA prisons. By the time President Bush acknowledged the existence of those prisons and the prisoners were transferred to Guantanamo, the tapes had been destroyed.

Of course, such sophistry won’t work for Leonie Brinkema–whose questions about interrogation tapes would seem to have included the Abu Zubaydah tapes. Nor should they cover the FOIA court battle in Alvin Hellerstein’s court, which pertain to all detainees held abroad.

When word of mistreatment of detainees surfaced, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request targeting the CIA and others on October 7, 2003 and May 25, 2004, seeking records concerning the treatment of all detainees apprehended after September 11, 2001 and held in U.S. custody abroad. This, of course, would mean not only in Guantanamo but in the secret prisons in Eastern Europe operated by the CIA.

That is, either Kennedy’s order or Hellerstein’s order must have applied to those tapes when they were destroyed.

But apparently, DOJ is going to tell every other branch the same thing: interviewing people from the CIA might complicate the joint DOJ/CIA investigation of the torture tape destruction.

Funny. Less than a decade ago, I seem to remember, we had three full and independent branches of government.

Michael Mukasey has engaged in a remarkable bit of sophistry with his refusal to clue Congress in on the joint DOJ/CIA IG investigation into the destruction of the torture tapes. He explains his decision as an attempt to avoid "any perception that our law enforcement decisions are subject to political influence."

As to your remaining questions, the Department has a long-standing policy of declining to provide non-public information about pending matters. This policy is based in part on our interest in avoiding any perception that our law enforcement decisions are subject to political influence. Accordingly, I will not at this time provide further information in response to your letter, but appreciate the Committee’s interests in this matter. At my confirmation hearing, I testified that I would act independently, resist political pressure and ensure that politics plays no role in cases brought by the Department of Justice. Consistent with that testimony, the facts will be followed wherever they lead in this inquiry, and the relevant law applied.

Of course, the "political influence" Mukasey was asked to address during his nomination hearings was the kind exerted when a Senator or a Congresswoman called the Attorney General privately to demand that a USA either accelerate the prosecution of a political figure or be fired. In this matter, Mukasey has been asked to respond to what is an almost unparalleled degree of bipartisan support for an open inquiry into a matter that just stinks, already, of a cover-up. Leahy and Specter (and Reyes and Hoekstra and Durbin and Biden and more) called for a procedure that had oversight built in.

And Mukasey said no.

Now, part of me would like to give Mukasey the benefit of the doubt, to believe he’s just going to great lengths to avoid the kind of politicization that occurred under Gonzales. Except that his response to the House Intelligence Committee suggests he’s trying to avoid all oversight into this matter.

Additionally, lawmakers from both parties accused the Justice Department of obstructing a House Intelligence Committee inquiry by advising the CIA against cooperating with it.

"Earlier today, our staff was notified that the Department of Justice has advised CIA not cooperate with our investigation," House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, and the panel’s top Republican, Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, said in a joint statement Friday.

"We are stunned that the Justice Department would move to block our investigation," Reyes and Hoekstra said. "Parallel investigations occur all of the time, and there is no basis upon which the Attorney General can stand in the way of our work. … It’s clear that there’s more to this story than we have been told, and it is unfortunate that we are being prevented from learning the facts. The executive branch can’t be trusted to oversee itself."

In a letter Thursday to CIA Director Michael Hayden, the House panel asked the CIA to hand over by Friday all documents and cables regarding the interrogation tapes and their destruction. But the Justice Department since has advised the CIA to refuse the request, a committee official said Friday on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak for the committee.

However imperfectly they exercise oversight, it is the duty of the two intelligence committees to exercise such oversight. And preliminary accounts suggest that, while members of the Gang of Four didn’t object to the torture itself (with the exception of Jane Harman), they did object to the destruction of the torture tapes. Therefore, in addition to expressing contempt regarding multiple court orders, the destruction of the torture tapes also reflects contempt of Congress. Yet Mukasey wants to investigate it himself.

Now, Mukasey suggests there’s no whiff of impropriety in all this.

Finally, with regard to the suggestion that I appoint a special counsel, I am aware of no facts at present to suggest that Department attorneys cannot conduct this inquiry in an impartial manner. If I become aware of information that leads me to a different conclusion, I will act on it.

Yet this statement comes from the guy who signed the material witness warrant for Jose Padilla back in 2002, a warrant that almost certainly relied on the testimony of Abu Zubaydah. Thus, even Mukasey himself has improper conflicts, to say nothing of lawyers (Stephen Bradbury, I’m looking at you) who may have given opinions authorizing the destruction of the tapes.

John Dean seems to think the ACLU’s motion to hold the CIA in contempt may be the best means from discovering what really went on.

There are three court orders that may have been violated, but one in particular strikes me as a very serious problem for the CIA. Accordingly, we may well be in the unique situation in which a pending civil lawsuit might flush out some answers, and the federal judiciary might thus embarrass the other branches into actually taking meaningful action. I say "might" because the Bush Administration thinks nothing of stiffing federal court judges who seek information, and they probably figure they can tap-dance for the federal judiciary – along with all the other inquiries — until they are out of Washington on January 20, 2009.

Nevertheless, the situation in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union, could well force the Bush Administration’s hand. An order holding the CIA in contempt of court might get the Administration’s attention.

Let’s hope so, because it looks increasingly unlikely that the Administration will be exposed to any more oversight under Mukasey than it was under Gonzales.

The increasingly valuable WikiLeaks reveals that a Mass Communications Specialist at Gitmo has been altering Wikipedia and other web resources to hide detainee numbers and otherwise counter reports of poor conditions at the prison.

The US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has been caught conducting covert propaganda attacks on the internet. The attacks, exposed this week in a report by the government transparency group Wikileaks, include deleting detainee ID numbers from Wikipedia last month, the systematic posting of unattributed "self praise" comments on news organization web sites in response to negative press, boosting pro-Guantanamo stories on the internet news site Digg and even modifying Fidel Castro’s encyclopedia article to describe the Cuban president as "an admitted transexual" [sic].

Shayana Kadidal, Managing Attorney of the Center for Constitutional Rights Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative, said in response to the report:

"The military’s efforts to alter the record by vandalizing Wikipedia are of a piece with the amateurism of their other public relations efforts: [such as] their ridiculous claims that released detainees who criticize the United States in the media have ‘returned to the battlefield’."

We finally got rid of Karen Hughes as Chief Propaganda Specialist. But we’ve apparently got some schmo in Cuba trying to pitch Castro as a transsexual. 

Stuff like this always reminds me of my discovery, as a college professor, that most Americans have the crudest understanding of how language works. I can’t decide how to judge the trade-off. It means our government rarely gets away with propaganda. But it also reflects a widespread inability to think critically.

At least that’s what I take from this quote:

In the e-mail version of the Politico Playbook this morning, Mike Allen quotes “a senior administration official” lamenting that “they should have burned the NIE and kept the tapes.” The official was referring to the administration’s debacles with the intelligence community since the new NIE on Iran was released and the CIA revealed that it had destroyed videotaped interrogations.

In the month of December, CIA 2, Dick Cheney 0.

David Ignatius picks up on a point I raised last week. We need to have better oversight of our intelligence activities.

Reading the newspapers over the past week, you would have to conclude that this oversight system is broken. It was intended to set clear limits for intelligence activities and then provide bipartisan political support for the operatives who do the dirty work. Instead, the process has allowed practices that are later viewed as abuses — and then, once the news leaks, it has encouraged a feeding frenzy of recrimination against the intelligence agencies.

And then he goes on to identify one of the biggest problems with our intelligence committees–partisanship.

The oversight process has broken down in a deeper way: The intelligence committees have become politicized. Members and staffers encourage political vendettas against intelligence officers they don’t like, as happened when Goss brought his congressional aides with him to the CIA. The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran has become a political football; so has negotiation over legal rules on intercepting foreign communications, one of the nation’s most sensitive activities. The bickering has turned the intelligence world into a nonstop political circus, to the point that foreign governments have become increasingly wary of sharing secrets.

Now, perhaps there is some partisanship regarding the FISA debate that I don’t know about. That’s certainly the impression I got from Jane Harman’s words in this video (I originally figured it was a stab at people like me, who consider accountability a non-partisan issue, and who object to her constant search to get rolled to forge a bipartisan compromise on telecommunication immunity). But if anything, the FISA votes have been characterized thus far as very bipartisan, with the Blue Dogs making a majority with the Republicans. Mike McConnell’s last minute abandonment of the Democratic bill? That’s another thing, but not something we can blame the committee for.

But the other evil partisanship Ignatius mentions–Goss’ political vendettas, the attack on the Iran NIE’s conclusion–are Republican fights. Largely, Cheney’s fights.

I’m going to come back to this after I got to a meeting and do some Christmas shopping. But what’s really at issue here is that the Republican Party has become the party of propaganda. And when people question or expose their propaganda, it becomes a fighting issue.

I do think we’re entering a real discussion about Intelligence Oversight. But if one of the players is intent on creating propaganda, how is that discussion going to play out?

MadDog points out that the documents released through FOIA to EFF are available. These are documents, remember, relating to communications about the FISA amendment between DNI McConnell and Congress or representatives of telecom companies.

Declaration of what’s included

Document dump one

Document dump two

I’m reading through things now. But one thing is immediately apparent. There is almost no trace of any conversations between telecom companies and ODNI employees–there’s just one phone slip.

ODNI located one document that is potentially responsive to request number one. This document is a telephone message slip that contains the handwritten personal notes and mental impressions of an ODNI employee. This document is being withheld because it is not an agency record under FOIA. In addition, the documents qualifies to be withheld pursuant to FOIA exemptions 1,3,5 and 6.

Boy, those phone companies, they’re pretty careful, huh?

In case you’re wondering, here’s what those exemptions refer to:

(b)(1) EXEMPTION – Protects Classified Matters of National Defense or Foreign Policy
This exemption protects from disclosure national security information concerning the national defense or foreign policy, provided that it has been properly classified in accordance with the substantive and procedural requirements of an executive order.

(b)(3) EXEMPTION – Information Specifically Exempted by Other Statutes

This exemption incorporates the disclosure prohibitions that are contained in various other federal statutes. As originally enacted in 1966, Exemption 3 was broadly phrased so as to simply cover information "specifically exempted from disclosure by statute." The new Exemption 3 statute prohibits agencies from releasing under the FOIA any proposal "submitted by a contractor in response to the requirements of a solicitation for a competitive proposals," unless that proposal "is set forth or incorporated by reference in a contract entered into between the agency and the contractor that submitted the proposal."

(b)(5) EXEMPTION – Privileged Interagency or Intra-Agency Memoranda or Letters<

This exemption protects "inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums of letters which would not be available by law to a party …in litigation with the agency." As such, it has been construed to "exempt those documents, and only those documents, normally privileged in the civil discovery context."

(b)(6) EXEMPTION – Personal Information Affecting an Individual’s Privacy

This exemption permits the government to withhold all information about individuals in "personnel and medical files and similar files" when the disclosure of such information " would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." This exemption cannot be invoked to withhold from a requester information pertaining to the requester.

I wonder whose "mental impressions" are considered national defense information?

While it has clear Isikovian blind spots–like the rather obvious coincidence between the terror tapes timeline and the events in Leonie Brinkema’s courtroom–there are some interesting tidbits in this Isikoff-Hosenball article on the "paper trail" of the decision to destroy the torture tapes. Most importantly, it sounds like the Directorate of Operations lawyer who purportedly authorized the destruction of the tapes only said there was no legal reason not to do so.

Included in the paper trail is an opinion from a CIA lawyer assigned to the Clandestine Service that advises that there is no explicit legal reason why the Clandestine Service had to preserve the tapes, according to both former and current officials. The document does not, however, directly authorize the tapes’ destruction or offer advice on the wisdom or folly of such a course of action, according to a source familiar with its contents, who declined to be identified discussing the controversial topic.

Which suggests this lawyer had no fucking clue that Judge Leonie Brinkema had asked the government about such tapes explicitly, within weeks of the time when the tapes were destroyed. I’m guessing that was by design–the only way they could figure out how to get a legal opinion defending the indefensible, the destruction of evidence.

Apparently, the tapes themselves never entered this country.

But the tapes themselves were never brought onto U.S. territory; they were kept, and later destroyed, at a secret location overseas.

But an electronic copy of the tapes did. Isikoff and Hosenball’s source claims there’s no reason to believe that electronic copy still exists.

At one point portions of the tapes were electronically transmitted to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., so a small number of officials there could review them. A counterterrorism source, who also asked for anonymity when discussing this subject, said that there was no reason to believe that any recordings of such an electronic feed still exist.

Uh huh. Sure there’s not.

The article presents conflicting views on the role of John Rizzo (and it refutes claims made elsewhere that Rizzo was unaware of the tapes’ destruction).

Throughout the same period, said one of the former officials, a senior CIA lawyer, John Rizzo, now the agency’s acting general counsel, was also conducting discussions on what to do with the tapes with White House lawyer Harriet Miers. Two sources said that Rizzo also discussed the issue with officials at the Justice Department, which had issued classified guidelines outlining how the CIA’s interrogation program should operate.

[snip]

Current and former officials familiar with Rizzo’s views said he was never comfortable with the idea of the tapes being destroyed. But Clandestine Service officials involved in the matter believe they never got explicit instructions from him to preserve the tapes.

If I had to wild-arse-guess, I’d say Rizzo is going to take the fall for this. And I think he knows that. After all, it’s always the firewall protecting top aides in the White House who takes the fall.

And in case the CIA’s many leakers this week haven’t already made it abundantly clear that they’re going to pin responsibility on the White House for the torture, they make it explicit here.

The reason CIA officials involved the White House and Justice Department in discussions about the disposition of the tapes was that CIA officials viewed the CIA’s terrorist interrogation and detention program—including the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques—as having been imposed on the agency by the White House. "It was a political issue," said the former official, and therefore CIA officials believed that the decision as to what to do with the tapes should be made at a political level, by Miers—a former personal lawyer to President Bush and later White House staff secretary and counsel—or someone else directly representing the president. [my emphasis]

I’m really fascinated by this point, because it portrays Harriet’s involvement as political, not legal. Given the timing, that would be the most likely scenario (Harriet didn’t become White House Counsel until 2005, so the early negotiations on this occurred when she was in a non-legal role.) But that raises the question of whether Bush got any legal advise about destroying the tapes. Was AGAG involved, at either the White House or DOJ or both? Or is the destruction of evidence in this Administration considered a non-legal matter?

Spencer Ackerman has a more complete version of Nancy Pelosi’s statement about when she was briefed on torture techniques.

On one occasion, in the fall of 2002, I was briefed on interrogation techniques the Administration was considering using in the future. The Administration advised that legal counsel for the both the CIA and the Department of Justice had concluded that the techniques were legal.

I had no further briefings on the techniques. Several months later, my successor as Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, was briefed more extensively and advised the techniques had in fact been employed. It was my understanding at that time that Congresswoman Harman filed a letter in early 2003 to the CIA to protest the use of such techniques, a protest with which I concurred.

And then he makes what I consider a gross misreading of the statement.

One: Pelosi isn’t saying that she knew how detainees were interrogated. She’s saying she was told that all techniques used in those interrogations were considered legal. So did she know what those techniques were, and what they entailed? We’ll find out, or get stonewalled trying.

Two: Never mind the brief mention of Jane Harman’s protest. Pelosi just threw Harman under the bus. It’s no secret that the two Californians don’t get along. But she didn’t need to put the blame on her committee successor in her statement on this controversy.

Let’s take the key clauses from Nancy’s statement. I’ve bolded them up there in the statement so it’s crystal clear that they’re direct quotes, written in plain language.

1. I [Nancy Pelosi] was briefed on interrogation techniques
2. Jane Harman, was briefed more extensively and advised the techniques had in fact been employed
3. Harman filed a letter in early 2003 to the CIA to protest the use of such techniques, a protest with which I concurred

So, Pelosi in fact says clearly she was told about the interrogation techniques–albeit not in great detail. She notes only that Jane Harman got a more detailed briefing and got notice that the intelligence community was actually using them. But how, if she mentions Harman’s protest and says she concurred with it, is that throwing Harman under the bus? If anything, it’s Nancy trying to claim that she just didn’t have enough gory details in the 2002 briefing to make the correct objection that Harman made after the 2003 briefing. But she’s not denying that she was briefed on interrogation techniques and she’s not throwing Harman under the bus.

We all know these two have had some disagreements. But this, at least according to Nancy Pelosi, was not one of them.

Hoo boy, Mukasey’s having a heck of a honeymoon, isn’t he? In addition to running the joint CIA-DOJ investigation of the destroyed terror tapes, now Feingold (on both SJC and SSCI) wants him to answer the questions he refused to answer in his nomination hearings.

Dear Attorney General Mukasey:

During the hearing on your nomination to be Attorney General and in your answers to questions submitted for the record, you repeatedly refused to answer questions related to interrogation techniques on the grounds that you had not yet been briefed on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program. I was disappointed with these responses. Familiarity with the CIA program should have been irrelevant to a legal opinion about practices such as waterboarding, which have been employed by dictatorships for generations and historically condemned by our own government.

Nonetheless, now that you have been sworn in as our nation’s Attorney General and presumably have been briefed on the program, I urge you to provide your views on its legality to Congress at the earliest possible date. As a member of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, I believe that a full and informed exchange between yourself and Congress is critically important if our intelligence activities are to be conducted consistent with our laws and Constitution and subject to appropriate congressional oversight. Such transparency would also be long overdue, given the refusal of the Department of Justice to provide to Congress any legal opinions on the program.

I oppose any interrogation techniques not authorized by the Army Field Manual, as do majorities of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. I do not believe that their use is legally or morally defensible or that it makes our nation safer. It is my hope that, under your leadership, the Department of Justice will take a fresh look at the CIA’s program, and that you will urge the President not to veto legislation that would end the use of so-called "alternative interrogation techniques." I request that you provide current and any past Department legal analyses to Congress, and that you provide your views on the program to Congress at the earliest possible date.

That said, I think this is good politics. It takes the pressure caused by the news of the torture tape destruction and ratchets it up another level. All, hopefully, to force Bush to accept restrictions against torture.

(Or Is it Civil War?)

There has been a lot of hand-wringing in this post, suggesting that the story revealing some Democratic members of the Gang of Four was a hit piece by Republicans (or, specifically, Porter Goss). That strikes me as an overly Manichean view of things, in which an article that makes Democrats look bad could only be a Republican hit piece. There’s another party in this equation–the Intelligence Community. The events of the last ten days make more sense, it seems to me, if you consider all of those events as a revolt on the part of the Intelligence Community.

Start with the release of the NIE. Pat Lang passes on the explanation that the NIE was declassified after "intelligence career seniors" threatened to leak the NIE to the press, legal consequences be damned.

The "jungle telegraph" in Washington is booming with news of the Iran NIE. I am told that the reason the conclusions of the NIE were released is that it was communicated to the White House that "intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary" if the document’s gist were not given to the public. Translation? Someone in that group would have gone to the media "on the record" to disclose its contents.

Dafna Linzer and Peter Baker provide the polite version–but still point to a senior intelligence officer who describes making the decision in the first person plural.

By last weekend, an intense discussion broke out about whether to keep it secret. "We knew it would leak, so honesty required that we get this out ahead, to prevent it from appearing to be cherry picking," said a top intelligence official. So McConnell reversed himself, and analysts scrambled over the weekend to draft a declassified version.

So somewhere in the ranks of the "career seniors" and the "top intelligence officials" some folks made a decision to confront Dick Cheney’s war-mongering directly. That’s a pretty serious escalation of the long-brewing conflict between Cheney and the Intelligence Community.

Then there’s the blockbuster by Mark Mazzetti (NYT’s intelligence reporter) revealing the destruction of the torture tapes. He sources it to:

current and former government officials

several officials

current and former government officials

former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue

But not Porter Goss (who would otherwise qualify as a "former government official"); Goss declined to comment through a spokesperson. And also not Michael Hayden, who wrote a letter to pre-empt Mazzetti’s story that provides a laughable party line for CIA officers to parrot.

Now, there’s nothing that says Mazzetti’s sources, save the last one (who provided the most detail about the rationale for making the tapes) were intelligence officials. Indeed, Mazzetti includes a link to the DOJ letter to Leonie Brinkema on the recently discovered tapes, suggesting he has been mucking around at DOJ, too (Eric Lichtblau, NYT’s DOJ reporter, gets credit on the article). Clearly though, much of this story comes from some people within the CIA who were closely involved with the decision to make the tapes, but who don’t necessarily approve of the decision to destroy them.

In the ensuing uproar over this, focus has shifted from the timing of this story. Few people have asked, for example, whether the uproar over this story is going to make it harder for Bush to veto the Intelligence Authorization Bill which would require the CIA to abide by the interrogation techniques described in the Army Field Manual–effectively prohibiting CIA use of waterboarding. Or, will the scrutiny that the this story will bring make it easier to summon the two-thirds majority to override a Bush veto? While I can’t guarantee it was intentional, I’d say the story on the destroyed terror tapes benefits those in DOJ and CIA who would like CIA to stop using methods considered torture. My amateur understanding is that that is by no means everyone at CIA–but that there are significant numbers who are uncomfortable with CIA officers engaging in activities that will expose them to legal difficulties in the future.

Congress’ apparent bi-partisan response to the news of the torture tape destruction was outrage directed at the intelligence community (though Pat Roberts may be an exception to this; he remains mum on the whole issue). Of note, the HPSCI threatened to hold hearings on the entire process of interrogations, rather than just the destruction of the torture tapes.

And, voila, we get the story revealing that Congressional leadership–including some of the same Members of Congress launching investigations into CIA’s interrogation methods–were briefed on them and, with the apparent exception of Jane Harman, did not object right away. For those who complain that the Pelosi comments in the WaPo had to have come from a Pelosi enemy, she issued a statement that in no way contradicts the depiction in the WaPo.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among the lawmakers who attended the briefing, issued a statement on Sunday saying that she eventually did protest the techniques and that she concurred with objections raised by a Democratic colleague in a letter to the C.I.A. in early 2003.

That is, she did not raise objections when she first attended briefings in 2002, as the HPSCI Ranking Member. She only later "concurred" in objections, presumably the objections Jane Harman raised after she replaced Pelosi is HPSCI ranking member. So when Congress was briefed in 2002, it appears, they gave legal sanction to the methods they were briefed on. It matters little that Pelosi has been replaced by Reyes and Graham by Jello Jay and Goss by Hoekstra; what matters is that when Congress had the opportunity to intervene, it did not do so.

Which, if I were the CIA about to undergo painful Congressional inquiries into past practices, I would want to be clearly established.

So here’s what has happened in the last 10 days. The Intelligence Community has severely undercut Dick Cheney’s propaganda efforts and threatened his plans to bring us to war. Someone–perhaps DOJ or perhaps CIA or perhaps both–has made it a lot harder for Bush to veto a bill getting the CIA out of the waterboarding business. And, at the same time, CIA has made it crystal clear that the waterboarding itself–as distinct from the destruction of the torture tapes–had legal sanction from Congress’ top intelligence leaders.

That all makes sense to me, in a way that doesn’t require the involvement of Republicans smear masters at all.

One more note. I suggested this might be a civil war within the CIA. That’s premised on two things. First, as far as I understand it, CIA officers are split over whether they think CIA should be in the waterboarding business. If so, the leak on the torture tapes may well be an attempt to force the issue on the part of those opposing torture. Furthermore, there’s an interesting chronology, in which the briefings and legal approval for torture happened before Porter Goss’ tenure (when he was giving it legal sanction in Congress), whereas the destruction of the tapes happened during Goss’ tenure as DCI. And, voila, the officer who had the most direct clash with Porter Goss before he resigned to protest Goss’ cronyism, Steven Kappes, is back in a senior position at CIA. So this may be a fight between the Gosslings and the professionals. But even granting Porter Goss’ Republican affiliation, that doesn’t mean any of this is a partisan fight.