AG to US: FU

Attorney General Michael Mukasey was on Capitol Hill yesterday, welcoming the House Judiciary Committee—and all of us Americans—to the era of recourse-free government.

In what can’t possibly be over-reported (but, alas, will be noticed by very few—it is not on the front page of the New York Times, for instance, and their short story about the hearing, buried deep inside, only mentions the AG’s face off with Congress over cocaine sentencing guidelines), Mukasey made several startling declarations:

• No, the Justice Department will not be investigating whether the now-admitted-to waterboarding of US prisoners was against the law.
• And, no, the DoJ will not be investigating whether the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance was illegal. Nor will the AG appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.
• And, no, the Department of Justice will not enforce any contempt citations that Congress might bring against administration officials that have failed to honor subpoenas for testimony.

“How can that be?” say so many (Democratic) members of the HJC.

“Because we’re just not going to,” says the imperious AG.

“But aren’t you sworn to uphold the law?” the perplexed HJC members ask.

“We are the law,” blurts Mukasey.

No, that’s not an exact verbatim—but you might be shocked to find just how close it is. The transcripts are quite lengthy, so let me borrow Paul Kiel’s quick summary of an exchange with New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler over appointing a special counsel to look at the warrantless wiretaps (you can find the complete transcript below that post):

The question came after Mukasey had baldly asserted that it was not a "practical view" that the president could order someone to act outside the law. Nadler wanted to know if the president hadn't done just that with his warrantless wiretapping program, which had ignored the constraints of FISA.

Well, Mukasey said, the President had ordered that on the advice of the Justice Department that it was lawful. So, just as he will not initiate an investigation of waterboarding since the DoJ had given its OK, he will also not investigate whether the warrantless wiretapping was lawful, since it was legal, because the DoJ said it was ("there are views on both sides of that" he acknowledged).

You’ve got your Nuremburg Defense, you’ve got your executive privilege, and you’ve got a bucket-full of L’État c’est moi—and it all adds up to the most arrogant, bald-faced, and shameless defense of the unitary executive “theory” ever uttered by this administration (and, yes, I know, that is saying a lot).

What AG Mukasey is claiming—and what he is establishing unless Congress does something quickly to contradict him—is that there is effectively only one branch of government, and that is the Executive Branch. The AG’s statements do not allow for congressional oversight, and they do not allow for judicial oversight. It does not even allow for the rule of law, since the law is whatever the President instructs his Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General to say it is. How can we know what he instructed? We can’t—that’s a state secret or subject to executive privilege. What if a member of Congress, or a judge, or any US citizen has a problem with that? Tough luck—you have no effective recourse beyond the whims or benevolence of the President/Emperor.

This doesn’t just trample on the United States Constitution—it abrogates the Magna Carta.

Perhaps it is easy to chalk this up to business as usual for a corrupt administration that is less than a year from out the door, but that would be letting Mukasey and his bosses off easy, and it would be letting the country down. While it is unbelievable that the establishment media won’t cover this power grab, it will be unforgivable if Congress doesn’t correct it.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Who are you, John Kiriakou? (And who ordered the torture?)

ABC News bills its exclusive interview with John Kiriakou as “Coming In from the Cold: CIA Spy Calls Waterboarding Necessary but Torture,” but where exactly was this spy coming in from?

In his interview with Brian Ross, Kiriakou says a great many things—and it is quite the mixed bag. Sure, he says that he now believes waterboarding to be torture (he tried it and lasted about five seconds), but he also takes a twisted road to say that it was necessary for such a “high value” detainee.

In fact, much of the interview, and much of the tone of the ABC tape, goes to great ends to inflate the importance of Abu Zubaydah. To watch the report, you would believe that Zubaydah was the linchpin to breaking open the whole 9/11 conspiracy, and you would also believe that the crucial information was first divulged by AZ as a direct result of the waterboarding.

Ross and his colleagues do little to undercut this contention. It makes for an exciting exclusive, but not for very good journalism. The truth—if we can ever truly get there in these hyper-secret times—about Abu Zubaydah and his importance seems much, much hazier than Kiriakou or ABC leads us to believe.

Though I don’t have time to post a complete point-by-point (I’m a little under the weather today), I have read numerous major reputable publications on this subject, and I can safely say that for every bit of information that Kiriakou (or, for that matter, George W. Bush) claims was revealed by AZ after his torture, there is credible evidence that the US knew the intel before Zubaydah was even captured. The Washington Post and New York Times have covered this, and even the Report of the 9/11 Commission makes note that the supposedly key information that Kiriakou and Bush like to attribute to AZ—the “nickname” of Khalid Shaykh Mohammed—was known to the US before the attacks of 9/11/01.

Ron Suskind, in his book, The One Percent Doctrine, calls Zubaydah a low-level logistics guy, responsible for making minor travel arrangements, who knew nothing of al Qaeda’s inner workings. Suskind also notes that AZ was, in the words of one intelligence analyst, “insane, certifiable, [a] split personality.”

Like I said—none of that is in the Ross piece. Instead, the takeaway on this is that waterboarding may very well be torture by 2007 standards, but in those heady, just barely post-9/11 days, even torture could be forgiven since it lead to such crucial—and dare I say, because Kiriakou does—life-saving intelligence.

I can already feel the goalposts moving on this debate. Is it not only a matter of time before all the “serious” people “admit” that waterboarding is, y’know, basically a technique that borders on torture now that we look at it, but given the times and the “ticking time bomb,” sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Watch this space.

One interesting thing that John Kiriakou does say, and at some length, is that instructions for this “enhanced interrogation”—like that used to rough up Abu Zubaydah—came directly from CIA headquarters:

The former intelligence officer says the interrogators’ activities were carefully directed from Langley, Va., every step of the way.

“It wasn't up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m gonna slap him. Or ‘I'm going to shake him.’ Or ‘I'm gonna make him stay up for 48 hours.’ Each one of these steps, even though they're minor steps, like the intention shake-- or the openhanded belly slap, each one of these had to have the approval of the Deputy Director for Operations.

“. . . . [B]efore you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He's uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’ And that permission would come. ‘You're allowed to him one time in the belly with an open hand.’"

This is information that should prick up the ears of more than one committee chair in Congress as they begin to ask questions about torture and the destroyed tapes of Abu Zubaydah’s (and at least one other’s) interrogation.

But, to the matter at hand, I still have questions about who John Kiriakou is. Aside from his being a retired CIA officer of undetermined grade, it appears that he now has a job in the business. . . and when I say “the business,” I mean “the industry.”

Lindsay Beyerstein reported yesterday that Kiriakou, who is credited as a “security consultant” on the upcoming Paramount release The Kite Runner, was connected with the film’s producers by “lobbyists from Viacom.”

The film adaptation of the Khaled Hosseini novel has been the center of some controversy of late. Several of the young stars of the film had to be spirited out of their native Afghanistan after fears arose that the boys and their families might be targets of violence because of a simulated rape scene in the movie.

Several papers credit Rich Klein, a “Middle East expert” with Kissinger McLarty Associates (KLA), as having made many of the arrangements for the evacuation. Klein seems to be the go-to guy for many productions looking to film in the Middle East. KLA is a K Street consulting firm formed by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Mack McLarty, the former White House Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton. (I do no know if John Kiriakou is connected in any way with KLA, nor do I know if KLA is the Viacom lobbyist that Beyerstein references.)

It’s a tangled, but interesting connection. One, of course, not mentioned by Ross or ABC. It is also a connection made more interesting when you note the Nightline feature that will appear one day after it aired the Kiriakou piece—that would be an interview with the makers of. . . wait for it. . . The Kite Runner.


UPDATE: It seems that Kevin Drum had some similar thoughts about Abu Zubaydah’s suddenly fast-rising stock.


(cross-posted to Daily Kos and The Seminal)

In Republican America, it’s Always “Giuliani Time”

Call me a wild-eyed optimist (you wouldn’t be the first), but I am salivating at the chance to see any of these whack-jobs try to run away from this garbage in the general election.

The whack-jobs to which I refer are the angry white men who are running for the Republican presidential nomination, and the garbage is their, well, dare I dignify them with the label “ideas”?

Let’s look at some of the comments from Tuesday night’s Republican softball game debate regarding torture. Moderator Britt Hume pitched some absurd scenario about a multi-city nuclear attack by terrorists, and then asked candidates about whether they would endorse “enhanced interrogations techniques,” including “waterboarding.” Rudy Giuliani had this to say:

GIULIANI: In the hypothetical that you gave me, which assumes that we know there is going to be another attack and these people know about it, I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they can think of. Shouldn’t be torture, but every method they can think of.

HUME: Water boarding?

GIULIANI: I would say every method they could think of, and I would support them in doing that because I have seen — [applause] — I have seen what can happen when you make a mistake about this and I don’t want to see another 3,000 people dead in New York or any place else.

And, the mouth-foaming xenophobes’ favorite fringe candidate, US Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO—yes, some folks actually elected this guy) thought that since he was on FOX, he’d plug 24:

I just say that it’s almost unbelievable to listen to this in a way. We are talking about it in such a theoretical fashion. You say that nuclear devices have gone off in the United States, more are planned, and we are wondering about whether waterboarding would a bad thing to do? I’m look[ing] for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you. [applause] There is nothing — if you are talking about — I mean, we are the last best hope of Western Civilization. So all of the theories that go behind our activities, subsequent to these nuclear attacks going off in the United States, they go out the window. When we go under, western civilization goes under. So you better take that into account and you better do every single thing you can as President of the United States to make sure, number one, it doesn’t happen, that’s right. But, number two, you better respond in a way that makes them fearful of you, because, otherwise, you guarantee something like this will happen.

Indeed. It’s the “don’t mess with America because it’s ruled by a crazy SOB and there’s no telling what he might do” theory of deterrence. (Hey, it’s worked so far, uh, yeah, well. . . moving on—)

But, really, why even pretend to be a city on a hill when you’ve got a prison on an island? Which brings us to Guantanamo, and Mitt Romney’s modest proposal:

I am glad [detainees] are at Guantanamo. I don’t want them on our soil. I want them on Guantanamo, where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. I don’t want them in our prisons, I want them there. Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is we ought to double Guantanamo.

So, wait, you want to give the detainees more room, or lock their lawyers up with them, or maybe you just want to signal that on inauguration day 2009, it will be “round up the usual suspects” squared?

Really folks, is there a serious man or woman out there—one who is not drawing an administration paycheck, anyway—that thinks Guantanamo has been a net plus in the “war on terror?” Well, at least I have a new nickname for Romney: Mitt “double Git” Romney.

Also, note that the partisan Republican crowd in South Carolina Tuesday, applauded after Giuliani and Tancredo praised torture. Those are the politically involved people who will be picking their party’s standard-bearer!

The torture that routinely goes on at Guantanamo, or at various secret sites in other countries, has seriously tarnished America’s reputation and undermined its authority throughout the world. Along with Abu Ghraib, these examples of US juris(im)prudence are the best recruiting tools a terrorist could have. The policy, and the false bravado that accompanies it, also puts American servicemen and women in greater danger of being tortured themselves. (Don’t just believe me, Colin Powell said it, too.)

Two-thirds of Americans think the US should abide by international treaties and change the way it treats detainees as prescribed by the UN Commission on Human Rights. Even more think we should allow international courts to monitor our compliance with international treaties—even a majority of Republicans think so! So what country are these Republicans running to be president of?

If a Democratic nominee gets to face off against one of these guys in a debate this fall, and a question about torture or Gitmo comes up, I just hope that the Democrat takes the time to pause, look quizzically at the angry white man across the stage, and say something like, “I’m sorry, I’m just taking a moment to absorb your clueless, venal, soulless, lack of humanity.”

And if the Republican nominee happens to be America’s Sadist Mayor Sadist, I hope our candidate has the gumption and spark to say, “America can’t afford another Giuliani time.”


(cross-posted to Daily Kos)