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The Timeline of Torture Tape Destruction in John Durham’s Documents

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As I said the other day, most of the documents we received the other day are the 13 or so documents that CIA had cleared for FOIA release, but over which John Durham had declared a law enforcement privilege. This chart compares what we got with what had been declared in Vaughn Indices in November (this showed the hard copy documents explaining the destruction of the torture tapes) and January (this showed the electronic documents discussing the destruction of the torture tapes; there are 6 files total to this index). While this doesn’t show us everything John Durham is looking at (presumably, there are a number of documents that are too sensitive to release), looking at the documents from this perspective gives us a sense of what Durham is investigating.

As you’ll see from the chart, I have numbered the documents from 1 to 27. I just assigned them in the order the documents appear in the complete PDF file. I’ll also refer to the PDF number for each document.

The Documents Not on Durham’s List

First, assuming I matched the documents up to the Vaughn descriptions properly, there are four documents that were not on Durham’s list:

  • Document 9, January 9, 2003, Review of Interrogation Videotapes (PDF 24-28)
  • Document 11, June 18, 2003, Interview Report (PDF 33-37)
  • Document 22, December 3, 2007, Potential Statement (PDF 86-93)
  • Document 23, December 10, 2007, Trip Report (PDF 95-99)

I believe these documents all did appear elsewhere in the earlier FOIAs on this (I’m going to try to find the Vaughn descriptions later), but presumably CIA had earlier said it could not release them, which meant it was that decision, rather than Durham’s determination, that had prevented their earlier release.

Most of these documents (except the questions) pertain to the CIA Office of General Counsel review of the torture tape, and the Inspector General’s subsequent discovery that the original review had neglected to mention key details about blank tapes and discrepancies between what was portrayed in the video and what OLC authorized. Curiously, their release seems to be tied to the events reported by the WaPo, in which John McPherson, reportedly the lawyer who conducted that review, was given immunity to testify before the grand jury in the last month or so. In other words, now that McPherson has testified about this stuff, CIA has decided to release the details of his review publicly. I have included the documents in the timeline below.

Update: I’ve added in some of the dates reflected in the Vaughn Indices that I think flesh out this timeline. Those dates will not be bolded.

The Chronology on the Tapes

Many of the rest of these documents pertain to the correspondence regarding videotapes. The chronology they show is:

April 13, 2002: Interrogators start videotaping interrogations.

April 17, 2002: Two page Top Secret cable providing guidance on the retention of video tapes.

April 27, 2002: A letter directing the tapes “should all be catalogued and made into official record copies” and asking when they would “arrive here.” (Document 1; PDF 1)

May 6, 2002: Someone sends a cable providing guidance to “please do not tape over or edit videos of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations” and “please preserve all videos.” Note, we don’t get the original copy of this, but it appears in an email forwarding the cable to Scott Muller and John Rizzo in January 2003. (Document 10; PDF )

September 5, 2002: According to October 25, 2002 cable (see below), “HQS elements discussed the disposition of the videotapes” and determined that “the continued retention of these tapes … represents a serious security risk.” (Documents 2 and 3; PDF 3-7)

September 6, 2002: Two emails: A five-page email between CIA attorneys regarding a draft of a cable discussing the disposition of the video tapes, and a one-page email between CIA attorneys on the revisions of a draft cable regarding the disposition of the video tapes.

October 25, 2002: Cable directing field to tape over tapes each day and promising someone will deploy to assist in destroying the existing tapes. (Document 2, Document 3; PDF 3-7)

October 27, 2002: Some excerpts the October 25 cable and another one (which is entirely redacted) into a one-page summary. Note that both prior cables were classified Secret, but this summary is classified Top Secret. (Document 4; PDF 9)

November 28, 2002: It appears this cable was included among those collected in Document 12 some time after the tape destruction. But what we got in FOIA cuts off the cable (and entirely redacts what is there). (PDF 39-50) Note that the November 11, 2009 Vaughn Index described document 12 as a 13 page document, but we’ve only got 12 pages.

November 30, 2003: John McPherson reviews the torture tapes. This is noted in an undated timeline of the facts surrounding the torture tape destruction. (Document 25; PDF 103-104)

December 1, 2002: A two-page email that discusses the notes of a CIA attorney.

December 3, 2002: After McPherson reviewed the videotapes on November 30, someone sent out a cable stating that it was a mistake to move the videotapes, and ordering that “no tapes will be destroyed until specific authorization is sent.” Documents 5, 6, and 7 all appear to be identical copies of this cable, save for routing information that is redacted; the routing on Document 6 is very long. (PDF 11-18)

December 3, 2002: A one-page email outlining the destruction plan for video tapes.

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How Abu Zubaydah’s Sleep Deprivation Got Out of Control

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The latest CIA document dump also provides more background on how Abu Zubaydah got subjected to extended sleep deprivation long before it was approved. PDF page 113-114 explains:

After consulting with the NSC and DOJ, CTC[redacted] originally approved 24-48 hours of sleep deprivation.

In April 2002 CTC[redacted] learned that due to a misunderstanding, that time frame had been exceeded.

However, CTC[redacted] advised that since the process did not have adverse medical effects or result in hallucinations (thereby disrupting profoundly Abu Zubaydah’s senses or personality) it was within legal parameters.

There a number of important points about this.

First, note the timing: April. When AZ was still recovering from bullet wounds and surgery.

This was also the same time period when (oops!) Binyam Mohamed was being subjected to extended sleep deprivation, presumably pursuant to the same kind of “misunderstanding.”

But also note the language. The “profoundly disrupt the senses or personality” is the language on severe mental suffering that John Yoo gave John Rizzo on July 13, 2002, which Jonathan Fredman sent to the torturers as their guideline on torture. It seems likely, then, that this (oops!) sleep deprivation was the “incident” that CIA was so concerned about as they were writing the Bybee Memos.

CIA’s Lawyer Did Not Find Alteration of Torture Tapes “Noteworthy”

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As I noted in my last thread, the latest ACLU document dump is here. And this is, indeed, the set of documents John Durham was withholding for his investigation.

I’ve long been interested in the role of the earlier destruction of the torture tapes in Durham’s investigation. As you recall, in December 2002, when the interrogators were getting antsy to destroy the torture tape, a CIA Office of General Counsel lawyer, John McPherson, reviewed the torture tapes to make sure they matched the cables. He reportedly said the tapes matched the logbooks and the direction the interrogators received. But when CIA’s Inspector General reviewed the tapes in May 2003, they discovered that 15 of the tapes were largely or completely blank and or damaged.

OIG found 11 interrogation tapes to be blank. Two others were blank except for one or two minutes of recording. Two others were broken and could not be reviewed. OIG compared the videotapes to logs and cables and identified a 21-hour period of time” which included two waterboard sessions” that was not captured on the videotapes.

I’ve long wondered whether one of the reasons the CIA destroyed the torture tapes is because a review of the tapes would have revealed that the torturers altered the tapes to avoid capturing certain activities on video. The latest dump appears to confirm this happened before December 2002.

On January 9, 2003, McPherson did a report on his review of the tapes (PDF 24-28). Though it is heavily redacted, it appears that he reviewed the log book and the video, claimed to have watched every minute of the video, and declared that the video accurately reflected what had been recorded in the logbook.

Note, it is not clear from the unredacted materials whether he reviewed the guidance to the interrogators as to what they were supposed to be doing–even though that was purportedly one of the reasons he conducted the review.

It appears that PDF 33-37 is the interview report the Inspector General did with McPherson on June 17, 2003, after they had reviewed the torture tapes themselves in May 2003. This report appears to show McPherson admitting that he saw some of the tapes were partially blank, or had snow on them.

[Redacted] for many of the tapes one 1/2 or 3/4 of the tape “there was nothing.” [Redacted] on some tapes it was apparent that the VCR had been turned off and then turned back on right away. [Redacted] on other tapes the video quality was poor and on others the tape had been reused (taped over) or not recorded at all. [Redacted] The label on some tapes read “interrogation session,” but when viewed there was just snow. [Redaction] did not make note of this in [redaction] report. [Redaction] estimated that “half a dozen” videotapes had been taped over or were “snowy.”

Though he claims not to have noticed that two of the tapes were broken (though perhaps they were broken later). When asked why he had not reported the blank tapes in his report, McPherson said he didn’t find that “noteworthy.”

Furthermore, it appears to indicate that McPherson had not reviewed the guidelines given to the interrogators when he did his review.

When asked if it was consistent with guidance [redacted] would have to check guidance before answering.

In other words, his review did not do what it was purported to do. It did not review whether the interrogators were following guidelines.

After the initial December 2002 review, CIA gave clear instructions to the interrogators not to destroy or edit the tapes. However, it appears that the review–inasmuch as it didn’t reveal glaring concerns with the tapes and didn’t actually review whether the interrogators were following instructions–was largely a whitewash of the original tapes in an effort to green light their destruction.

Is John Durham Finally Done?

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While we’re waiting to get the documents discussed in these NYT and WaPo and WSJ stories, in which (among other things) Dusty Foggo’s Deputy records that Porter Goss “laughed and said that actually, it would be he, PG, who would take the heat” about the destruction of the torture tapes, I wanted to look at this passage from the NYT:

One American official familiar with the matter cautioned that the e-mail messages were merely the account of one unnamed C.I.A. official, not the results of a formal investigation.

“It’s a little risky to draw cosmic conclusions from something like that,” he said.

And this similar passage, from the WaPo:

“There may have been some people who thought precise procedure wasn’t followed, but I haven’t heard of anyone who believed at the time that any law had been broken,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the subject of an ongoing investigation. “That’s quite a different thing.”

I raise these quotes–dismissing the damning nature of the emails while suggesting they don’t amount to criminal activity–because these emails look like they could be some of the 13 documents John Durham withheld in the ACLU’s FOIA. For example, the documents described appear to be some of these documents.

Document 5, November 8, 2005, Request for approval to proceed w/authorization of tape destruction

This document is a one-page cable from the field to CIA Headquarters requesting permission to destroy 92 videotapes.

Document 2, November 9, 2005, Request approval to destroy field videotapes

This document is a fourteen-page email chain with six embedded cables. Three of the cables relate to the decision to destroy the 92 videotapes. The remaining cables discuss an unrelated counter-terrorism operation.

Document 4, November 9, 2005, Videotape destruction confirmation

This document is a one page cable from the field to CIA Headquarters, confirming the destruction of the videotapes.

Document 23, November 25, 2005, Short backgrounder of tape destruction

This is a three-page email chain that provides background information on the tape destruction.

I’m interested in whether these documents are the 13 documents, because Durham was withholding those until his investigation was finished. Which would sure suggest that Durham may be finished.

Now, Robert Bennett appears in all these stories talking about how Rodriguez should be treated as a hero for destroying these tapes. The quotes make Bennett sound almost desperate to defend his client. So maybe … just maybe … we’ll get an indictment over this.

Or the two officials quoted (perhaps they’re the same guy) are simply trying to tamp down expectations before John Durham announces all this was hunky dory.

One more thing. The WSJ version of the story notes that the CTC drafted the request to destroy the tapes on November 4.

More than a year later, on Nov. 4, 2005, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was asked to draft language requesting approval from Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then chief of the agency’s National Clandestine Service, to destroy the tapes, the memorandum says. Mr. Rodriguez authorized the tapes’ destruction four days later, it says.

November 4 was the day after Leonie Brinkema asked the government whether it had any tapes of interrogations of various detainees, and the same day that a member of Congress wrote a letter to CIA’s IG (I suspect this was one of Jay Rockefeller’s requests to see the IG report on the tapes). It was just days after the Dana Priest article on the black sites. But I’m sure the timing is all a coinkydink.

Daniel Levin’s Last Minute “Combined” Memo

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I’ve been looking through some old FOIA documents and noticed an interesting email exchange turned over in one of last August’s document dumps (PDF 21-22). It’s an email chain between a CTC lawyer (whose name we don’t know) and John Rizzo and others regarding a draft of the Combined OLC Memo. I’ve reversed the order of the email string so it appears chronologically.

02/02/05 12:56PM

From: CTC Lawyer

To John Rizzo [and others, redacted]

cc: [redacted]

Subject: Draft OLC opinion on combined techniques has arrived

OLC wants our comments ASAP (if we have any hopes of having it completed and signed by COB Friday).

OLC also asks if its OK to share this draft opinion with appropriately cleared DOD (Jim Haynes, [redacted] and a few others) and State attorneys (currently only two, Will Taft and now also John Bellinger).

02/02/05 01:26PM

From: John Rizzo

To: CTC Lawyer

cc: [redacted]

Who are “a few others” at DOD? [redacted] cleared into EITs, and perhaps [redacted] (check on this) but no one else in DOD OGC, as far as I know. Outside of lawyers, I don’t see this is any of anyone’s business on the DOD policy side.

02/02/05 01:38PM

From: CTC Lawyer

To: John Rizzo

cc: [redacted, fewer total recipients than first email]

Agree this should be limited to lawyers. I thought, though, that perhaps [redacted] was EIT briefed. The expert, of course, is [redacted].

Now, there are a whole slew of reasons I find this email exchange to be interesting.

Note the date: February 2, 2005. That was two days before Daniel Levin’s last day at OLC, which explains the rush to get this memo approved “by COB Friday.” Read more →

2005 Story: Chertoff Opposed Technique Threatening Imminent Death

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I’ve been poking DOJ’s version of the events leading up to the Bybee Memo and hope to elaborate on that at a further time. But for now, I want to point to this 2005 article, apparently attempting to scuttle Michael Chertoff’s nomination to be Secretary of Homeland Security by raising his role in approving torture (there are a couple of versions of this article, so if you’re having problems seeing what I’m looking at try this post). The article clearly states that Chertoff opposed the approval of a technique that involved the threat of immediate death.

But in other instances Mr. Chertoff opposed some aggressive procedures outright, the officials said. At one point, they said, he raised serious objections to methods that he concluded would clearly violate the torture law. While the details remain classified, one method that he opposed appeared to violate a ban in the law against using a “threat of imminent death.” [my emphasis]

We now know, of course, that CIA was trying to get mock burial approved.

This revelation is interesting because it confirms what the documentary evidence suggests: that Chertoff was one, if not the major, source of trouble for David Addington’s plan to green light torture. And given the story’s report that Chertoff approved waterboarding even while he opposed what was probably mock burial, it suggests that the problem was not necessarily Chertoff’s squeamishness, but rather Ali Soufan’s reaction, when the torturers first threatened to use mock burial in May 2002, that it was torture. Furthermore, all of this accords with the work I’ve done on the role of the July 13 memo, which shows that CIA had an “issue arise” in response to which they got John Yoo write a memo excusing things like death threats (but also disruption of the senses) by invoking expert advice.

The story is interesting for other reasons, including its fairly early reference to SERE’s role in the torture techniques.

Many of the interrogation techniques in the C.I.A.’s list were adopted from the Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Rescue, and Escape training program.

But for the moment, I’m just noting it because it does seem to confirm the narrative we’re seeing in the documentary evidence.

How CIA Avoided Negligent Homicide Charges in the Salt Pit Killing

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Since the AP story on the Salt Pit death, reporters have focused a lot of attention to a particular footnote in Jay Bybee’s second response to the OPR Report and what it claims about intent (and, to a lesser degree, what it says about Jay Bybee’s fitness to remain on the 9th Circuit). In it, Jay Bybee references a memo CIA’s Counterterrorism Center wrote in response to Gul Rahman’s death at the Salt Pit; the memo argued that the CIA officer in charge should not be prosecuted under the torture statute because he did not have the specific intent to make Rahman suffer severe pain when he doused him with water and left him exposed in freezing temperatures.

Notably, the declination memorandum prepared by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Section regarding the death of Gul Rahman provides a correct explanation of the specific intent element and did not rely on any motivation to acquire information. Report at 92. If [redacted], as manager of the Saltpit site, did not intend for Rahman to suffer severe pain from low temperatures in his cell, he would lack specific intent under the anti-torture statute. And it is also telling that the declination did not even discuss the possibility that the prosecution was barred by the Commander-in-Chief section of the Bybee memo.

As Scott Horton noted the other day, analysis of the torture statute should not have been the only thing in the declination memo. Prosecutors should have analyzed whether or not Rahman’s killing constituted negligent homicide, among other things.

Note that the declination, issued by politically loyal U.S. attorneys who were subsequently rewarded with high postings at Main Justice, carefully follows the rationalizations that Yoo and Bybee advanced for not prosecuting deaths or serious physical harm resulting from state-sanctioned torture. But the obvious problem, as John Sifton notes at Slate, is that torture and homicide are hardly the only charges that could be brought in such a circumstance. Negligent homicide or milder abuse charges would have obviously been available, and a survey of comparable cases in the setting of state and local prisoners suggests that they are far more common. By looking only at homicide and torture, the prosecutors were paving the way for a decision not to charge.

But the OPR Report and the Legal Principles/Bullet Points documents it describes may explain why this didn’t happen. The Legal Principles/Bullet Points document shows that CIA claimed–possibly, with the tacit approval of the Principals Committee–that the only two criminal statutes that could be applied to its interrogation program were the Torture Statute and the War Crimes Statute.

As a threshold matter, Horton appears to be misstating what the declination memo described in the footnote is and–more importantly–who wrote it. “Politically loyal US Attorneys” did not write the declination described here. Some lawyer at CIA’s CTC wrote it. That’s because, as the OPR Report explains in the section preceding the entirely redacted passage that discusses this letter (the declination letter appears on PDF 98, which appears in the same section as the following quotes from pages PDF 96 and 97), DOJ told CIA to go collect facts about the abuses they reported in January 2003 (which include the Salt Pit killing and threats of death used with Rahim al-Nashiri) themselves.

According to a CIA MFR drafted by John Rizzo on January 24,2003, Scott Muller (then CIA General Counsel), Rizzo and [redacted] met with Michael Chertoff Alice Fisher, John Yoo, and [redacted–probably Jennifer Koester] to discuss the incidents at [redacted]. According to Rizzo, he told Chertoff before the meeting that he needed to discuss “a recent incident where CIA personnel apparently employed unauthorized interrogation techniques on a detainee.”

[snip]

Chertoff reportedly commented that the CIA was correct to advise them because the use of a weapon to frighten a detainee could have violated the law. He stated that the Department would let CIA OIG develop the facts and that DOJ would determine what action to take when the facts were known. According to Rizzo, “Chertoff expressed no interest or intention to pursue the matter of the [redacted].

On January 28, 2003, CIA Inspector General John Helgerson called Yoo and told him that the CIA OIG was looking into the [redacted] matter. According to Helgerson’s email message to Rizzo, Yoo “specifically said they felt they do not need to be involved until after the OIG report is completed.” Rizzo responded to Helgerson: “Based on what Chertoff told us when we gave him the heads up on this last week, the Criminal Division’s decision on whether or not some criminal law was violated here will be predicated on the facts that you gather and present to them.”

Alerted that, in the course of interrogating detainees, CIA had killed one and threatened to kill another detainee, DOJ’s first response (at least according to two different CIA versions of what happened) was to tell CIA to go collect information on the events themselves. Only after CIA finished investigating and presented the facts of the case would DOJ weigh in on whether a crime had been committed.

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Why John Yoo’s Attempts to “Negate” the Torturers’ Intent Fails

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In my last post, I showed how the Bybee Two memo, purporting to find each of ten torture techniques used with Abu Zubaydah legal, was a very specific response to John Yoo’s July 13 memo to John Rizzo. The July 13 memo had basically said, “if you consult with experts that tell you techniques won’t cause prolonged mental harm, then it will “negate” any intent you had to use specific acts listed in the torture statute to cause mental pain and suffering.” So, in response, CIA barraged John Yoo and Jennifer Koester with information purportedly showing that waterboarding and sleep deprivation did not cause prolonged mental harm, Yoo and Koester threw it into a memo, and said that as a result those techniques weren’t torture.

But there’s a problem with the gimmick (even aside from the offensiveness of the premise): the timing.

The memo itself bears evidence that the CIA had already used at least some of these techniques by the time they asked for the opinion. And the details we now know surrounding the process make it clear that they didn’t even consult the experts until after they used some of the techniques. Indeed, it appears that one of the studies they claim to have “consulted” was actually an experiment they conducted on Abu Zubaydah himself. That is, they’re citing their own “study” on Abu Zubaydah as their expert advice to prove they didn’t have the intent of causing him prolong mental suffering.

The torturers had already used the techniques before getting approval

Now, there are many reasons to suspect that the torturers used waterboarding (and perhaps mock burial) before August 1. But I can’t prove that. But their single-minded concern about mental suffering–and not physical suffering–dating back at least to July 10, 2002 strongly suggests that they may have already done something to cause AZ prolonged mental suffering. Otherwise, what would explain the imbalance in their focus?

But there are several details in the Bybee Two memo itself that show they had already used some of the techniques on AZ.

Take, for example, my observation of the other day: a draft of Abu Zubaydah’s psychological evaluation noted that “he showed strong signs of sympathetic nervous system arousal (possibly fear) when he experienced the initial ‘hard’ dislocation of expectation intervention following session 63.” [my emphasis] Well, it turns out we have seen that term, “dislocation of expectation” before … in the Bybee Two memo, where Yoo describes the whole point of the ten torture techniques!

As part of this increased pressure phase, Zubaydah will have contact only with a new interrogation specialist, whom he has not met previously, and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (“SERE”) training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since they began. This phase will likely last no more than several days but could last up to thirty days. In this phase, you would like to employ ten techniques that you believe will dislocate his expectation regarding the treatment he believes he will receive and encourage him to disclose the crucial information mentioned above. [my emphasis]

They knew at this point that AZ had already been subjected to such a condition, even while they were purportedly approving the ten techniques in the future.

More damning, though, are the admissions that they had already subjected him to sleep deprivation. There’s the admission they had subjected him to sleep deprivation in the description of the technique itself.

You have orally informed us that you would not deprive Zubaydah of sleep for more than eleven days at a time and that you have previously kept him awake for 72 hours, from which no mental or physical harm resulted.

Then there’s a more interesting reference, because it shows up in the section on page 8 that regurgitates his psychological evaluation.

During detention, Zubadaydah has manged his mood, remaining at most points “circumspect, calm, controlled, and deliberate.” He has maintained his demeanor during aggressive interrogations and reductions in sleep. You describe that in an initial confrontational incident, Zubaydah showed signs of sympathetic nervous system arousal (which you think was possibly fear). [my emphasis]

Now, this entire larger section repeats back the content of the psychological evaluation (though the use of the word “confrontational” shows they were citing from the later draft of it), almost all in the same order at the paragraph level as it appears in the evaluation. There is nothing in the unredacted document referring to sleep deprivation. But this entire passage otherwise replicates the paragraph spanning pages 3-4 of the evaluation. Which strongly suggests that the redaction also spanning pages 3-4 includes a discussion of both aggressive interrogations and sleep deprivation.

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How John Yoo Negated the Mental Suffering of Death Threats in the Bybee Two Memo

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It’s time to read the Bybee Two memo again.

Since the OPR Report came out, we’ve learned the following (some of it was already out there, but I, at least, hadn’t noticed it):

  • After his 63rd interrogation session, Abu Zubaydah experienced what his torturers call “hard dislocation”
  • An “issue arose” during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that two CIA lawyers discussed via email on July 10, 2002
  • In the days following CIA lawyers’ discussion of that issue, Criminal Division Chief Michael Chertoff got his own briefing on the torture memo (July 11), followed the next day by a meeting with Alberto Gonzales and probably David Addington (July 12), followed the next day by a larger briefing including Gonzales, Chertoff, John Rizzo and FBI Chief of Staff Daniel Levin that covered both the planned torture techniques and the torture memo (July 13)
  • After Chertoff told CIA at that July 13 meeting that he would not issue an advance declination of prosecution for torture, Rizzo asked for and received a memo laying out “the elements of the torture statute;” the July 13 memo focused closely on the definition of intent to cause mental suffering; Yoo’s supervisors John Ashcroft and Jay Bybee claim to be unaware of the memo
  • In his cable to AZ’s torture team written after both Bybee Memos were completed, Counterterrorism Center lawyer Jonathan Fredman relied on the language on intent from the July 13 memo, not the Bybee One memo
  • Also after the meeting at which Chertoff refused an advance declination, David Addington appears to have directed John Yoo to include several affirmative defenses in the Bybee One memo
  • The next draft of the memo–dated July 23 and for the first time addressed to Alberto Gonzales–included the affirmative defenses Addington had asked for as well as language on intent to cause mental harm adopted from the July 13 memo
  • In the days following that draft, several things happened to change the approach to torture authorization
  • CIA removed mock burial on its list of torture techniques because approving it would hold up the overall memo
  • CIA asked for a separate letter addressing specific techniques–what would become the Bybee Two memo
  • As part of several packets of information they received from CIA on the long term mental effects of torture, Yoo and Jennifer Koester almost certainly received a draft psychological evaluation noting that AZ had experienced “hard dislocation” after session 63, though we can’t prove that they saw that phrase because the copy of the document they received has been altered before being released in FOIA
  • A large packet of information received on the same day as one of the draft psychological evaluations disappeared from the OLC SCIF

All those details make it fairly clear that the Bybee Two memo was designed to respond to the July 13 memo. But they also help to prove that it failed to do what it was intended to do.

How John Yoo told the CIA to “negate” their specific intent to torture

Yoo’s July 13 memo stated that several things were necessary to prosecute torture for the infliction of mental suffering:

  • The commission of certain kinds of predicate acts, that included but were not limited to the use of procedures designed to profoundly disrupt the senses and/or the threat of imminent death
  • The infliction of prolonged mental harm as a result of those predicate acts
  • The specific intent to inflict the severe mental suffering from those predicate acts

But even if someone had the specific intent to commit those predicate acts and prolonged mental harm resulted, Yoo included an escape hatch. He basically said that if a person had conducted studies and based on those studies had concluded that prolonged mental harm would not result, then he could claim to have been operating with a good faith belief that those actions did not cause prolonged mental harm.

Specific intent can be negated by a showing of good faith. Thus, if an individual undertook any of the predicate acts for severe mental pain or suffering, but did so in the good faith belief that those acts would not cause the prisoner prolonged mental harm, he would not have acted with the specific intent necessary to establish torture. If, for example, efforts were made to determine what long-term impact, if any, specific conduct would have and it was learned that the conduct would not result in prolonged mental harm, any actions undertaken relying on that advice would have be [sic] undertaken in good faith. Due diligence to meet this standard might include such actions as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts, or evidence gained from past experience.

In other words, to “negate” the specific intent to cause prolonged mental harm that constituted torture, you could do a bunch of study and if that study showed no prolonged mental harm had resulted from these actions in the past, you could then claim that you had no idea that those actions might cause prolonged mental harm in the future, and therefore any deliberate actions that ended up causing prolonged mental harm weren’t really torture.

Abracadabra!!!

As I’ll show below, the Bybee Two memo was designed to show that CIA had done that kind of study. (Note, this is not an original observation; I’m fairly certain both Jeff Kaye and William Ockham have made this observation in the past.) But, as I’ll show in a follow-up post, it fails in what it was designed to do.

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CIA Lawyers Were Discussing “Issue that Arose” Three Days Before July 13 Fax

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My focus on the multiple versions of Abu Zubaydah’s psychological assessment led me to review the CIA OIG Vaughn Declaration from last August, and one document that was withheld caught my eye.

The document strongly suggests that the July 13, 2002 John Yoo fax that appears to have been used as CIA’s general authorization for torture was written in response to a specific issue that had already arisen with Abu Zubaydah.

The Vaughn Index was written in response to ACLU’s FOIA for documents relating to what would have been shown on the 92 destroyed torture tapes. From the descriptions in the Vaughn, it’s clear that most of the documents include things like plans for torture techniques written both before after after Abu Zubaaydah’s torture, plans for black sites, communication about the investigation into detainee treatment (I presume that treatment of al-Nashiri would be included, since his interrogations were also on the destroyed tapes, but not the Salt Pit death of Gul Rahman, which wasn’t taped), and interviews from the investigation.

And though there are a few documents that clearly are efforts to improve on the techniques used against AZ (including pictures), there are relatively few documents in CIA IG custody from the period of AZ’s most intense interrogation. There are:

  • “4-pages of handwritten notes, dated April 3, 2002, by a CIA officer regarding the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.”
  • “A 1-page email,” dated April 5, 2002, “with an attached two page cable from a CIA attorney to a CIA officer regarding the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.”
  • A “four page cable from the field to CIA Headquarters,” dated April 11, 2002, containing “information relating to the CIA’s terrorist detention and interrogation program” (note, this was the day Yoo officially started on the Bybee Memo).
  • A May 15, 2002 “two page memo from one CIA officer to another CIA officer discussing information, provided by Abu Zubaydah, relating to a classified counter-terrorism operation.”
  • A “1-page of handwritten notes dated July 24, 2002 from a CIA officer describing proposed interrogation techniques that could be considered for use on detainees.”
  • A “two page cable from the field to CIA Headquarters,” dated August 12, 2002, and “a 6-page cable from the field to CIA Headquarters,” dated August 24, 2002, both containing “information relating to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.”

(There’s also a cable listed with the date July 26, 2006, which given its place in the Vaughn Index might actually have been dated July 26, 2002, discussing AZ’s status.) There are also a few documents that pertain to discussions in DC (for example, a Memorandum of Understanding recording CIA’s version of an early meeting on the Bybee Memo).

Then there’s the email that sparked my interest, labeled Email-591, dated July 10, 2002, and classified as Top Secret.

This document is a 2-page email chain between CIA attorneys. The document contains the attorneys’ legal analysis as it relates to a specific issue that arose in the context of the CIA’s counter-terrorism program, which was created in anticipation of litigation.

In other words, on July 10, 2002, two of CIA’s lawyers were discussing something that came up–almost certainly (given the scope of the FOIA response) during Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation–in anticipation of litigation. And three days later, CIA lawyer John Rizzo would attend a meeting at which DOJ Criminal Division head Michael Chertoff refused to give CIA an advance declination for any crimes committed during Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation and FBI Chief of Staff Daniel Levin announced that the FBI would no longer have anything to do with the CIA’s interrogation program. Ostensibly, those responses came partly in response to Rizzo’s description of purportedly proposed torture techniques. Yet after that meeting, Rizzo asked John Yoo for a letter “setting forth the elements of the torture statute.” And the fax Yoo wrote in response–rather than the formal Bybee One opinion–would serve as CIA’s internal guide for the role of intent in the torture statute, particularly the way intent purportedly played into torture having to do with the infliction of several mental suffering.

All of which suggests the torturers did something to inflict severe mental suffering on Abu Zubaydah–one the CIA’s own lawyers recognized might result in litigation–just before July 10, 2002.

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