CIA Top Lawyer: Could Have Easily Stopped Torture, But Didn’t

CIA Top Lawyer: Could Have Easily Stopped Torture, But Didn’t

EDUCATE! CIA, TORTURE, WARS AND MILITARISM 
By John Rizzo, www.politico.com
January 7th, 2014 

The CIA torture program under President Bush should have been considered a war crime and a violation of US law and people like the author of the article should be prosecuted for their role.  It is distressing to see someone who used his law license to provide legal cover for this illegal activity profiting from the torture program.  In fact, I filed Bar complaints against Rizzo and other lawyers who worked for President Bush and President Obama urging their disbarment or other punishment for using their legal license to authorize these crimes. (Obama famously took no action against the US torturers or their enablers, saying “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” I’m sure every criminal would have appreciated that special treatment.)  Here’s a video of a press conference we organized to discuss these issues.  One point that Rizzo makes in the article below that I do agree with, replacing the torture program with a murder program is ironic (to put it kindly). Certainly President Obama approving the murdering of people, making the president and the military prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner is also a war crime.  While we like to think that this is a new post-9/11 reality in the Untied States, the reality is their is a long history of CIA torture going all the way back to nearly the founding of the CIA.  As the School of the Americas Watch has documented torture has been part of the US training of dictators and military officials for decades.  During the Clinton administration the senate ratified and the president signed the Convention Against Torture in 1994 as well as the War Crimes Act in 1996 but it started the ‘rendition program’ which had US officials bringing suspects to other governments to be tortured.  The rendition program was approved by Attorney General Eric Holder when he worked in the Clinton Department of Justice.  


Bar complaints against Rizzo and other lawyers 
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/torture_lawyers/index.php

Here’s a video of a press conference 
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL84E4BBE617CDC4DC

long history of CIA torture 
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1795/

School of the Americas Watch has documented torture 
http://www.soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98


During the Clinton administration the senate ratified and the president signed the Convention Against Torture in 1994 
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/05/torture-obama-administration

  The rendition program was approved by Attorney General Eric Holder when he worked in the Clinton Department of Justice
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22569.htm



“I Could Have Stopped Waterboarding Before It Happened”

The CIA’s former top lawyer tells  how he could have stopped the torture program but decided not to.

In fact, as late as 2005, I relayed to Steve Hadley, who had succeeded Rice as national security adviser, a recommendation by the CIA inspector general that President Bush be briefed on what the EITs were. Hadley responded evenly: “That recommendation will be taken under advisement.” I did not hear anything further on the subject.

So I was startled, to say the least, when I read Decision Points, President Bush’s 2010 memoir. In it, Bush not only forthrightly defended the use and effectiveness of EITs but put himself in the middle of their conception and employment on Zubaydah and KSM. On pages 168 through 171, he wrote the following:

[In late March 2002] CIA experts drew up a list of interrogation techniques that differed from those Zubaydah had successfully resisted. George [Tenet] assured me all interrogations would be performed by experienced intelligence professionals who had undergone extensive training. Medical personnel would be on-site to guarantee that the detainee was not physically or mentally harmed. . . .

I took a look at the list of techniques. There were two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal. I directed the CIA not to use them. …

[On March 1, 2003,] George Tenet asked if he had permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed… . “Damn right,” I said.

All of this was news to me. And some of it didn’t compute. The president reviewed the EITs to be used on Zubaydah in advance? When would that have been? The Agency began them just a couple of days after we got the go-ahead memo from the OLC. As for the two techniques he said he vetoed, I have no idea what they could have been. As far as I knew, only one technique was dropped, but that was by mutual consent of the CIA and the Justice Department. Finally, there would have been no need to consult with the president in advance before using EITs on KSM—a few weeks after the techniques were approved for Zubaydah, we had gotten the OK from Justice that all the EITs it had green-lit for use on Zubaydah could also be applied to similarly key al Qaeda figures like KSM.

I was in daily contact with Tenet in the run-up to the authorization of the EITs and their use on Zubaydah and the other detainees in the 2002 to 2003 time frame. All during that time, Tenet had said nothing about any conversations he had with the president about EITs, much less any instructions or approvals coming from Bush. It simply didn’t seem conceivable that Tenet wouldn’t have passed something like that on to those of us who were running the program. I was simply curious as hell—just what was Bush talking about? Had I been missing something this important all along?

After reading Bush’s book, I sent Tenet an email in November 2010 in which I posed the question as directly as I could: Were Bush’s assertions accurate? Tenet’s response was just as direct: He did not recall ever briefing Bush on any of the specific EITs.

I am left baffled by all this. I view President Bush as a man of great integrity, but how could Tenet—how could anyone, for that matter—ever forget having conversations with the president of the 
United States about something like that? It’s impossible.

Rizzo believes that President Bush was not aware of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. Yet in his memoir, Bush (pictured here with former CIA Director George Tenet in 2001) claims Tenet briefed him on the program. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

In the final analysis, I find the episode perplexing but nonetheless admirable on Bush’s part, odd as that sounds. My experience over the years is that a president, and those closest around him, instinctively try to put some distance between him and risky, politically controversial covert actions the CIA is carrying out, even when those actions are being conducted pursuant to a specific authorization by the president. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “plausible deniability.” In his memoir, however, Bush does the exact opposite: He squarely puts himself up to his neck in the creation and implementation of the most contentious counterterrorist program in the post-9/11 era when, in fact, he wasn’t.

Now, that’s a stand-up guy.

***

Today, the EIT program has been dead and buried for four years, as have the CIA secret prisons. Thus, by all appearances, the Agency is out of the detention and interrogation business. To me, the most ironic lesson to be drawn by the post-9/11 era is this: It is far less legally risky, and in many quarters considered far more morally justifiable, to stalk and kill a dangerous terrorist than it is to capture and aggressively interrogate one. When Abu Zubaydah was located in a house in Faisalabad, the Agency ordered its Pakistani colleagues to take him alive. After wounding him, the CIA moved heaven and earth to get him the medical care that saved his life. Subsequently, he was subjected to extensive waterboarding, as was Khalid Sheik Mohammad a year later. Both men, of course, would go on to become the two most prominent and productive subjects of the Agency’s enhanced interrogation program. That the CIA so instinctively and insistently hewed to this approach shouldn’t be surprising. First and foremost, it is an intelligence-collection organization. You can’t collect intelligence from a dead man.Rizzo book cover

According to a nonstop stream of media accounts over the past four years, the fulcrum of the Obama administration’s strategy is killing people, a lot of people, via a relentless and escalating barrage of drone attacks. I don’t doubt that virtually all of them were bad guys who richly deserved their fate. Yet it also seems evident that the U.S. government’s efforts to capture and interrogate al Qaeda operatives overseas have effectively ground to a halt.

So where does that leave the CIA in combating terrorism? I can’t imagine the Agency ever again coming close to running detention facilities or engaging in any sort of even mildly coercive interrogation practices. Given the enduring controversy over the legacy of “waterboarding” and “black sites”—the widespread vitriol generated by the popular 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty is but one example of this phenomenon—I can’t see any president ever reopening that can of worms. What’s more, no CIA director in his or her right mind would ever let the organization go down that path again. To do so would be beyond folly. I don’t think even another catastrophic 9/11-like attack will change that.

I would respectfully predict that future presidents will not only continue to be in the business of killing, but will double down on it. And that the CIA will salute the commander in chief and be in the middle of it, without hesitation or resistance.