Glenn Greenwald: Oligarchical Decay

[babylonsister]

Oligarchical Decay
by Glenn Greenwald


A new lengthy article in this morning’s New York Times purports to set forth “new details about why the tapes were made and then eliminated.” Written by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti (who broke the original story), what the article primarily does is rely on anonymous sources to assign principal responsibility for the tapes’ destruction to mid-level CIA official Jose Rodriguez. But in doing so, the article identifies, in passing, the critical question that remains unanswered: what was the involvement of George Bush and Dick Cheney in the videos’ destruction?

Scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began investigating the program, and some insiders believed the inquiry might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.

Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation of interrogations in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded that some of the C.I.A.’s techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture. Current and former officials said the report did not explicitly state that the methods were torture.

A month later, as the administration reeled from the Abu Ghraib disclosures, Mr. Muller, the agency general counsel, met to discuss the report with three senior lawyers at the White House: Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel; David S. Addington, legal adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney; and John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council.

The interrogation tapes were discussed at the meeting, and one Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Mr. Bellinger advised the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes. The positions Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Addington took are unknown. One person familiar with the discussion said that in light of concerns raised in the inspector general’s report that agency officers could be legally liable for harsh interrogations, there was a view at the time among some administration lawyers that the tapes should be preserved.

Shane and Mazetti previously reported that “several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.” In that article, they quoted one senior intelligence official “with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been ‘vigorous sentiment’ among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes.” The White House has simply refused to say whether they were behind the decision.

Just consider how significant that question is, and how striking it is that it remains unanswered. By the time Addington and Gonzales were discussing this matter, it was well known — obvious — that those interrogations tapes were critically relevant to a number of judicial proceedings and government investigations, including The 9/11 Commission’s. It is thus highly likely, to put it mildly, that any decision to destroy that evidence would constitute the crime of obstruction of justice, the same federal felony for which Lewis Libby has now (in a different matter) been convicted.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/30/6064/

[Tuesday_Morning]

1. more...

And here are the two top legal aides to the President and the Vice President participating in a meeting where the destruction of this vital evidence was expressly considered, yet we do not know what it is that they said. Did they advise that the tapes be destroyed of give implicit permission for it? If so, it very likely means that Bush and/or Cheney (and certainly their top aides) committed serious felonies.

[babylonsister]

3. Very serious, but will they ever have to account for themselves?

I have huge doubts.

[Ineedchange]

6. More Bad Nightmares

At this point the most we can hope for are bad nightmares but that assumes they have some sort of moral or ethical conscious since impeachment is not on the table!!!!

[leftchick]

8. a huge NO!

sadly. :(


http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/11770

The low cost of high dudgeon, or why the CIA video scandal is going nowhere


by Weldon Berger | Dec 27 2007 - 2:32pm |

Justice can't be obstructed when there's none to be had. The most important thing to remember about those CIA torture flicks is that thanks to Congress and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, nothing on them short of pure murder is prosecutable.

Along with ratifying the Bush administration's Guantanamo kangaroo courts and eliminating habeas corpus under many circumstances, the Military Commissions Act amended the War Crimes Act of 1996, decriminalizing some breaches of the Geneva Conventions, leaving the definitions of the rest to the president—at present that well-known legal scholar, George W. Bush—and providing retroactive immunity for government personnel who committed war crimes prior to 2006.

The law was the final element in a long-running Bush administration criminal conspiracy to violate the War Crimes Act that began in 2002 with John Yoo's memo defining torture down, and culminated in the passage of the Military Commissions Act by an obliging Congress. Unless it is repealed, any attempts to prosecute even those war crimes still deemed illegal here in the land of the free require a White House blessing. Raise your hand if you think that's going to happen.

It's possible that administration and CIA officials are still at risk for destroying the videos if any of them can be proved to have done so in violation of an order by the Zacarais Moussaoui trial judge to produce transcripts or other documentation of CIA terrorism suspect interrorgations.

But that's what presidential pardons are for.

Further complicating the picture is that at least four members of Congress knew the videos existed before they were destroyed, and before the Moussaoui trial. The Gang of Four—the chairs and senior minority members of the Senate and House intelligence committees—which at the time included Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Jay Rockefeller (D-AT&T) in the Senate and Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Jane Harman (D-CA) in the House, were briefed on the videos as early as 2003, three years before Moussaoui was tried.

Harman says she was never informed that the videos were destroyed, which means that she had every reason to believe the government was concealing them from the Moussaoui court.

That would make her, and her fellow Gang of Four members, party to any conspiracy aimed at obstructing the Moussaoui defense, just as they and former Gang of Four member Nancy Pelosi were party to the administration's Geneva Conventions violations after they were briefed on the administration's intention to legitimate torture.

[enough]

2. This is why we need impeachment. There is no other rule of law for them.

another snip from Greenwald>

In case after case, our political establishment has adopted the “principle” that our most powerful actors are immune from the rule of law. And they’ve adopted the enabling supplemental “principle” that any information which our political leaders want to keep suppressed is — by definition, for that reason alone — information that is “classified” and should not be disclosed.

The instruments used to secure these prerogatives are numerous and growing. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick this week summarized the Bush administration’s 10 most egregious legal inventions to enable lawbreaking, including the “states secrets privilege” which has now “has ballooned into a doctrine of blanket immunity for any conduct the administration wishes to hide” and the claim that “everyone who has ever spoken to the president about anything is barred from congressional testimony by executive privilege.” All of these developments have a common strain, a shared objective: ensuring that our highest political officials and our most powerful corporations are beyond the reach of the law.

Thus, our establishment believes that any information that would shed light on whether our most powerful actors have broken the law is information that shouldn’t be disclosed. In those accidental cases when — via unauthorized leaks — information is disclosed that demonstrates that crimes have been committed, our establishment bands together to insist that nothing be done, that there is no need to investigate or hold anyone accountable, and that the only real wrongdoing is by those “the leakers” who disclosed the lawbreaking.

snip>

[Truth2Tell]

4. Let's just remember

that we can onlytrust The New York Times about as far as we could throw a truck full of rocks. There is useful information to be gleaned from this, but only to a point.

[enough]

5. I agree, T2T, but Greenwald's point still holds.

That is, the political establishment of our country is behaving as if there is no rule of law for those in power. In fact, he is focused on the question that is not answered in the article.

[Truth2Tell]

10. Very true.

I just worry The Times is going to try to help cover some ass at the WH. Greenwald is is still right on - fer sher.

[enough]

7. Scott Horton at Harpers provides another skeptical reading of the NYT article:

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90002060

Today the New York Times’s Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti offer us a further exploration of the CIA’s torture tapes, this time with a focus on why they were created and how this influenced the decision to destroy them. It’s an important article, and it offers more than one new piece to the current jigsaw puzzle. But it needs to be consumed with more than just one grain of salt.

snip>

Let’s think through what we’re being told for a moment. And let’s start with the circumstances. The Administration has launched what Laura Rozen recently termed “Operation Stop Talking,” a program designed to insure that all intelligence officers and former officers maintain complete silence about what transpired with these tapes. This has included some very heavy handed measures, including an FBI investigation targeting John Kiriakou. My own sources tell me that Rozen’s reporting is right on the money about this—the word has been put out that any one allowing further information to slip out, or corroborating Kiriakou’s account, can expect severe retribution. And what is the objective of this extraordinary public relations project? Again, the aspect of Kiriakou’s remarks that gave rise to it was his detailed depiction of the Justice Department’s and the White House’s role in the entire process.

snip>

The Times story reflects the latest Administration effort at damage control, and it has to be understood in that light, which is to say, very skeptically. Is it true that the decision to tape and the decision to destroy the tapes was taken far down the ranks within the CIA and that the White House had no involvement in it? Note how they carefully sprinkle in the reference to the suggestion that “Bush agreed” that he should not be briefed on the location of the black sites. They are really working very hard to put whatever distance they can between Bush personally and the criminal decisions in play here.

much more>


Again, as Greenwald says, it's what NOT being said that matters.

[babylonsister]

9. I just hope Congress doesn't drop the ball on this. These

vacations they take are nerve-wracking.

[cosmicdot]

11. knr

[WinkyDink]

12. In 1973, this would have begun impeachment hearings. Ah, the good old days!