Strategy Behind Ongoing Campaign to Cover Up CIA Torture Program Revealed

A second day dawns following the release of the Senate report on CIA torture and it is clear where the action is. The action is going to be in holding the United States accountable to international legal conventions to which it is signatory.

The take-away from two different articles (one by Somini Sengupta, "Americans Involved in Torture Can Be Prosecuted Abroad, Analysts Say"; the other by Joseph Goldstein and Rick Gladstone, "Afghan Leader Expresses Shock at Torture Revelations") is a statement by United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Hashemite scion Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, making clear that “The [International Convention on Torture] lets no one off the hook — neither the torturers themselves, nor the policy-makers, nor the public officials who define the policy or give the orders.”

The Obama administration has argued as recently as last month that the U.S. is in compliance with the International Convention on Torture because of a four-year Department of Justice criminal investigation into the CIA torture program led by federal prosecutor John H. Durham. Durham recommended against bringing charges and Attorney General Eric Holder agreed.

Now the Gray Lady is going to court to access documents from this DOJ investigation in order to allow the public to see some of the interviews with CIA officials and understand the reasoning why no charges were brought by Durham. Charlie Savage has the must-read story, "U.S. Tells Court That Documents From Torture Investigation Should Remain Secret":

Last month, in a presentation in Geneva before the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which oversees compliance with a global anti-torture treaty, the Obama administration pointed to Mr. Durham’s investigation as having fulfilled the United States’ obligation under the treaty to investigate torture. 

The United Nations panel expressed skepticism about the Durham investigation, pressing for details like whether Mr. Durham’s team had spoken only with government officials, or whether it also interviewed any current or former detainees as part of the investigation. A Justice Department lawyer who was part of the delegation defended the investigation as vigorous and told the committee that Mr. Durham’s team had interviewed about 96 witnesses. But he declined to identify them because no charges were filed. 

The Senate and Justice Department investigations trace back to a December 2007 article by The Times that the C.I.A. had destroyed videotapes of interrogation sessions. The Intelligence Committee started an oversight investigation, and the attorney general at the time, Michael B. Mukasey, appointed Mr. Durham to lead a criminal inquiry. 

In 2009, as President Obama took office, the committee voted to expand its investigation into the C.I.A. program. Months later, Mr. Holder announced that he was expanding Mr. Durham’s mandate to look into whether charges should be brought for any interrogation that went beyond approved techniques. 

In 2010, Mr. Durham, an assistant United States attorney in Connecticut, recommended against any charges connected with the tape destruction. The next year, he recommended closing the preliminary investigation into the treatment of about 100 detainees in C.I.A. custody, but elevated two other incidents that resulted in detainee deaths into full investigations. In 2012, he also recommended closing those without any indictments. 

“In light of our assessment of the evidence, the reports thoroughly analyzed the type and nature of criminal charges that could be brought against suspected wrongdoers, along with various defenses that could be raised in opposition to any such charges,” Mr. Durham wrote in his declaration filed on Tuesday. “The reports also discussed what the evidence showed and did not show, and evaluated previous investigations conducted by other entities.”

Accessing these investigatory documents could be the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the CIA torture program. That is why the Obama administration is going to court to block their release.

Charlie Savage does an excellent job concisely tracing the history of both the DOJ and Senate probes to the illegal destruction of the torture tapes in 2005.

Savage also does a superb job of deftly unpacking the mechanics of the cover-up actively perpetrated by the Obama administration. The main line of attack by the CIA and its Republican defenders is that the Senate report is false because it includes no interviews with CIA personnel responsible for the torture. That wasn't by choice of the Senate investigators; that was because CIA personnel wouldn't talk to Senate investigators because of Durham's active criminal investigation.

Savage deftly describes the mechanics of the ongoing cover-up:

The Justice Department said in a statement on Tuesday that its investigators had looked at the full version of the Senate Intelligence Committee report “and did not find any new information that they had not previously considered in reaching their determination,” adding that Mr. Durham’s “inquiry was extraordinarily thorough and we stand by our previously announced decision not to initiate criminal charges.” 

Mr. Holder’s decision in 2009 to open a criminal investigation into the C.I.A.’s treatment of detainees abroad had prompted a political backlash and made it difficult for congressional investigators to speak with current and former agency officials, since they faced legal jeopardy. 

Citing the fact that the Senate investigation would have to rely only on internal C.I.A. documents and not interviews with witnesses, committee Republicans withdrew their support for it. And since the report’s release, defenders of the C.I.A. have argued that the report should not be seen as an accurate and complete historical account.

Michael Davidson, who was the top lawyer for the Senate Intelligence Committee until his retirement in 2011 and who worked on the first four years of its investigation, portrayed the executive branch’s stance as a Catch-22. 

“One agency of the executive branch (the C.I.A.) complains that no one was interviewed,” he said in an email. “Another element of the executive branch (D.O.J.) actually conducted lots of interviews,” he added, referring to the Department of Justice.

“Its investigation made it difficult for a Senate committee to conduct interviews. So check there. Then D.O.J. objects to disclosing them. So checkmate there. That leaves the C.I.A. free to complain about lack of interviews. Pretty neat,” he said.

It is too early to say that we have to returned to the social ferment of the 1970s when the Church Committee and the Pike Committee shined a light on the CIA's family jewels, when the Weather Underground still roamed the land, when athletes were activists. But it seems like we're getting there.

Obama Hamstrung

There is a tendency to overreact to the daily news, to presume that things will turn out worse than they actually do. But today I think it is a fair assessment to say that Obama, from this point forward for the remainder of his presidency, is hamstrung. Republican slaps and scratches will continue with regards to last year's Benghazi attacks; a series of news-hogging investigations on the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party organizations will commence, with a possible silver lining being that light will be shed on the abuse of 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status by overtly partisan, political groups; and as Michael Shear and Jonathan Weisman report today,

Four months into his second term, the president was under increasing assault from Republicans who accused the administration of political bullying and a lack of transparency. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr. Obama’s secretary of health and human services, has drawn criticism in recent days for soliciting corporate donations to pay for the rollout next year of the new health care law.

And on Monday evening, The Associated Press reported that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months of telephone records of its reporters. The company’s editors called it a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering, and Republicans quickly seized on the report.

What has the potential to be the most damaging for Obama is the DOJ investigation of AP. It was paranoia over leaks that brought Nixon down. And what seems to be the case based on a reading of "Phone Records of Journalists Seized by U.S.," by Charlie Savage and Leslie Kaufman, is that Attorney General Eric Holder was goaded into action by Congressional complaints about national security leaks:

Mr. Holder announced the two special leak investigations in June amid calls in Congress for a crackdown on leaks after a spate of disclosures about the bomb plot, cyberwarfare against Iran, Mr. Obama’s procedures for putting terrorism suspects on a “kill list,” and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The revelations had been published by The New York Times, The A.P. and in several books. 

Republicans accused the administration of deliberately leaking classified information, jeopardizing national security in an effort to make Mr. Obama look tough in an election year — a charge the White House rejected. But some Democrats, too, said the leaking of sensitive information had gotten out of control. 

Mr. Holder’s move at the time was sharply criticized by Republicans as not going far enough. They wanted him to appoint an outside special counsel, and a Senate resolution calling for a special counsel was co-sponsored by 29 Republican senators. 

On Monday, however, after The A.P. disclosed the seizure of the records, some Republican leaders criticized the administration as going too far. Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner, said: “The First Amendment is first for a reason. If the Obama Administration is going after reporters’ phone records, they better have a damned good explanation.”And Doug Heye, a spokesman for Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, linked the revelation to a brewing controversy over the targeting of Tea Party groups for greater scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service, saying “these new revelations suggest a pattern of intimidation by the Obama administration.” 

The A.P. said Monday that it first learned of the seizure of the records last Friday afternoon when its general counsel, Laura Malone, received a letter from Mr. Machen, the United States attorney. The letter to Mr. Holder said the seizure included “all such records for, among other phone lines, an A.P. general phone number in New York City as well as A.P. bureaus in New York City, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Connecticut, and at the House of Representatives.” 

The Associated Press is a nonprofit global news cooperative owned by its American newspaper and broadcast members.

A legitimate worry about a hamstrung president, based on recent history -- think post-impeachment Clinton and Kosovo, is he tends to indulge in war-making powers (powers Constitutionally residing with Congress but since the creation of the national security state a de facto part of the executive branch). We'll see what Obama is made of. Many a politician in his position would counter the sudden surge of opposition by whipping up a war scare. Syria is ready at hand, even if Libya is proving more failure than success at this point. All in all things are not looking good.

Democrats Need to Return to the "50-State Strategy"

Eventually Democrats will have to come to the realization that they need to remain constantly mobilized on a national campaign footing; Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy but with resources if not at par at least in the ballpark of a presidential campaign. What are the chances that this will happen? Slim. Obama gets it; in January it was announced that Obama for American would turn into Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) issue-advocacy non-profit able to raise unlimited amounts of money. But chances are that it will be another Change To Win -- a reshuffling of chairs on the Titanic.

A reading of today's paper is all one needs to understand why a full-tilt Democratic mobilization is required. First, from Ashley Parker's frontpage story on Boehner's refusal to bargain on the sequester, "Boehner Halts Talks on Cuts, and House G.O.P. Cheers":

“We asked him to commit to us that when the cuts actually came on March 1, that he would stand firm and not give in, and he’s holding to that,” said Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. “I think Friday will be an important day that shows we’re finally willing to stand and fight for conservative principles and force Washington to start living within its means. And that will be a big victory.” 

Representative Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina Republican who was elected on the 2010Tea Party wave and has had his differences with the speaker, was similarly complimentary toward Mr. Boehner. 

“He’s doing exactly what he said he was going to do, and I think it’s working to our favor and to his,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “I get the feeling that our party is probably more unified right now than it has been at any time in the last several months.” 

Mr. Boehner, in some ways, finds himself the leader of the House Republicans with nowhere to actually lead. 

Among those who placed him in his post and could conceivably remove him, the test of his leadership seems to be how little action he takes. In a closed-door meeting and subsequent news conference this week, Mr. Boehner said the House was done negotiating over spending cuts until the Senate “begins to do something.” 

Mr. Boehner began the new Congress on shaky footing, a seemingly chastened man. Speculation swirled that he might not be able to hold on to his speakership (he did), and he was forced to pass two major pieces of legislation — a last-minute New Year’s Eve deal to avert automatic tax increases, and a Hurricane Sandy relief bill — without the support of the majority of his conference through the help of Democratic votes. On Thursday, Mr. Boehner again moved a piece of legislation through the House without majority support from his rank and file — the Violence Against Women Act. 

The result showed that conservatives seem willing to give him some running room on social issues as long as he holds firm on the fiscal front. 

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama, whose political fortitude he questioned publicly and privately.

It's the Tea Party triumphant. The Tea Party is calling the tune and Boehner is dancing the jig. There is where we're at. Birchers run the show. They're safe in gerrymandered districts, districts which could soon be multiplying if the Roberts Court scraps Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Charlie Savage outlines the devastating impact of losing Section 5 in a story, "Decision on Voting Law Could Limit Oversight," that appears alongside the sequester coverage:

J. Gerald Hebert, who formerly handled voting rights litigation for the Justice Department and is now in private practice, said that losing Section Five would be “devastating to protecting voting rights” because the costs of a lawsuit are so steep. Jon Greenbaum, the legal director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said it would mean that the bulk of changes that now receive automatic scrutiny by the federal government could take effect without any review, eliminating a deterrent against mischief.

Minus a full-tilt mobilization this is our present and our future. The nation is run by neo-Dixiecrat, John Birch Society conservatives. Their power base is the House of Representatives, thanks to the gerrymander and corporate cash, which has been and will continue to be augmented by their other base of power, the Supreme Court.

Paul Krugman's column this morning is a good one, "Ben Bernanke, Hippie." In it he compares those who argued against invading Iraq during the Bush-fomented war hysteria in late 2002, early 2003 to those who have been arguing against implementing austerity during a global recession. In both cases critics of elite groupthink were dismissed as Hippies. Krugman's point is that Bernanke's energetic defense, during an appearance before the Senate on Tuesday, of government action to stimulate a depressed economy has turned him into a Hippie.

Is there a better way to wrap things up here on Friday morning than a track off one of my all-time favorite Hippie albums? Here's "The Poor Ditching Boy," from Richard Thompson's Henry the Human Fly (1970):