John Sifton has just written in The Daily Beast that in the “Bush-era documents about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program”, just released by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Justice, “it’s difficult to know what they say: Many key sections of the most important documents contain heavy redactions”.
Nevertheless, Sifton, says. “There are some striking new pieces of information. One of the most important parts of the report comes not with grisly details of waterboarding or the program’s excesses with power drills or threats of rape, but confirmations and new revelations about White House involvement in approving the expansion of the CIA interrogation program in the summer of 2003…”
Sifton continues: “To review, it is already known that the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (EITs) was initially approved for one detainee (and one detainee only): Abu Zubaydah. It appears that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in that approval in mid-2002. Yet as the OIG report makes clear, EITs were also later used on other detainees: Nashiri in November 2002 and KSM in March 2003. (The techniques were presumably also used on CIA detainee Ramzi Bin al-Shaiba after his arrest in September 2002.) How could this EIT ‘expansion’ occur, when there was no legal authorization for it? … It was previously unclear how the expansion of torture from Abu Zubaydah to other detainees occurred and whether it was formally authorized at the time. Now we know more: The inspector general is saying that in late 2002 the CIA expanded the use of EIT techniques on other detainees without any real or formal authorization from OLC. The report, unfortunately, glosses over the point, describing the EIT expansion like an organic or natural process, like a weather pattern moving in from Canada. But the facts are there: The CIA began torturing additional detainees in late 2002, without any real approval for the expansion of EITs (beyond the Abu Zubaydah interrogation). True, the report says the CIA ‘consulted’ with OLC during this period, but it is clear from later parts of the report and from the 2004 Goldsmith letter that no formal opinion was issued or promulgated authorizing the use of EITs on other detainees until at least June 2003, well after most of the worst abuse had occurred. This is a point with major legal ramifications—without formal authorization, how can anyone involved in the subsequent authorization assert that their actions were legally authorized? We also learn from the report that the principals of the National Security Council—including Cheney—took part in this after-the-fact cover-up authorization at a meeting on July 29, 2003 … According to a May 2009 Senate report that I wrote about previously, the attendees of that July 2003 meeting included CIA’s George Tenet and Rizzo and key Bush administration officials Rice, Ashcroft, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and Cheney. (According to both Monday’s OIG report and the May 2009 Senate report, senior CIA officials later briefed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell on the program, in September 2003.) According to Rizzo’s office, none of the persons in any of these briefings in July or September 2003 ‘expressed any reservations about the [CIA] program’.”
A quick review of the releases: “First, the CIA released a copy of the long-awaited report of John Helgerson of the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, focusing on CIA detention and interrogation issues. Second, the CIA released two ‘papers’ — essentially internal CIA intelligence reports — discussing information supposedly obtained from the interrogation of CIA detainees. (Former Vice President Dick Cheney requested these documents be released earlier this year. He insists the documents will vindicate him by showing that the CIA program was vital and produced important information. From an initial reading, it appears Cheney’s hopes are misplaced.) Third, late on Monday, the Department of Justice released several documents from the Office of Legal Counsel, reauthorizing the use of the CIA program in 2006 and 2007. Also late on Monday, the Department of Justice released several documents sent to OLC from the CIA in mid- to late 2004 describing how the CIA interrogation program worked in practice, containing new chilling details about how interrogators actually implemented the program on actual detainees … Several new facts emerge in the OIG report. We learn, for instance, that CIA interrogators working in the “High Value Detainee” (HVD) program at times went beyond even the permissive boundaries set by the Bush-era White House: They threatened detainees with death, conducted mock executions, threatened to rape detainees’ mothers, and kill their children. Attorney General Eric Holder has now appointed a special prosecutor to investigate these excesses. (It seems the Obama administration is sticking to its guns about not investigating ‘authorized’ techniques.) There are also disturbing details about how the program began. The report confirms earlier allegations that the CIA started cooking up its torture tactics in late 2001, before any HVDs had even been captured, bringing in psychologists from the now-infamous SERE program, which teaches military personnel how to handle abusive interrogations by enemies. The report also details serious issues with non-HVD interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including cases of detainees’ deaths. We also learn that hours of videotaped interrogations, including portions showing detainees being waterboarded, were missing even from the tapes that the inspector general viewed in 2003, before the CIA destroyed all the tapes in late 2004 … Best of all, the report confirms and expands on information from an April 2009 Senate report detailing that Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft helped provide after-the-fact approvals for an expansion of the CIA program from late 2002 through 2003, a point that may be their legal undoing”.
This good reporting can be read in full here .