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The AP has a story out that seems to clear all the White House lawyers of supporting the destruction of the torture tapes. All of them, that is, except David Addington.
But it also raises still more questions about timing, focusing (as a WaPo article yesterday did) on discussions in 2004. If the substantive discussions happened in 2004, then why did the tapes get destroyed in 2005?
The White House has gone to the trouble of making the NYT correct their headline indicating that news of the involvement of Addington and Gonzales in discussions of the terror tapes differs from the story the White House was pitching–that Harriet Miers was the only one involved.
While the White House is correct that they never officially claimed that Harriet was the only one involved, someone has certainly been shopping that story for over a week. Which is why it behooves those who received that story to out their source, particularly if that person is in the White House.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed that, since the time when Henry Waxman first asked Michael Mukasey to hand over the White House-related materials from the CIA Leak Case investigation, he has proven to be mighty responsive to requests from Congress when it involves covering up for the White House.
Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus have an interesting article describing the debate between CIA and FBI over whether waterboarding worked with Abu Zubaydah. If the timeline they describe is accurate, then it means that Abu Zubaydah gave up his most important intelligence before they started torturing him. As to the information he gave up under torture, the CIA and FBI dispute whether it was useful or not. The implication of the article is that the CIA may have destroyed the torture tapes to hide the fact that the water-boarding was ineffective.
The article explains that Abu
For all his faults, Michael Isikoff certainly allows people to reliably launder leaks through him. And today’s leak offers a clear message to Congress to go after the memo recording a meeting between John Negroponte and Porter Goss, where Negroponte told Goss not to destroy the torture tapes.
Just eight years ago, I remember our country having three independent branches of government. Apparently, the Mukasey DOJ has decided that three branch thing is quaint. In addition to sending Congress snotty letters telling them to back off the torture tape destruction, they’ve sent a similar letter to at least one judge.
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.”
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.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing 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.