The first of who knows how many Senate subcommittee hearings on the Bush administration torture regime was held today by Sen. Whitehouse's Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, with star witnesses Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who actually did get useful intelligence from Abu Zubaydah using legal interrogation procedures, and Philip Zelikow, the former State Department attorney who wrote a memo in opposition to the OLC torture memos.
On Countdown tonight, Sen. Whitehouse summed up the major findings of today's hearing.
There's so many points here that it's hard to pick them all apart. There's the point that it's wrong. There's the point that it's ineffective. There's the point that it's illegal. There's the point that in order to get there they had to disrupt and wreck a lot of American democratic process in order to get there. And then there's the final part which is . . . my focus on the lying, which is that there is a huge sales and spin campaign going on to misrepresent what took place....
We accomplished three things today. We showed that the factual predicates in the OLC memos about what had happened were false. We showed that administration lawyers who got a look at the OLC opinions were horrified and tried to push back, and instead of engaging in a debate to see if they were right or wrong they were just squelched and shut down. And we showed that by the standards against which attorneys should be judged for malfeasance experts agree that the OLC opinions don't cut the mustard and that they qualify for sanction.
Some of the high (and low) -lights of the hearings:
- Despite the Bush administration's efforts to destroy all copies of Zelikow's dissenting memo, the memo has been found and is being reviewed for declassification.
- The torture supporters who have continued to insist that torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and Jose Padilla "worked" have a continued timeline issue in trying to say that these "approved" techniques were effective. The techniques weren't "approved" until after the interrogations of KSM and Padilla. This is a key point in the ongoing discussion of whether CIA operatives might have thought that they were operating under legal guidance and would thus have potential immunity under President Obama's promise that operatives acting in "good faith" would not be prosecuted.
- Soufan described how Bush either lied or was lied to about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. From Think Progress:
Whitehouse read a portion of Bush’s speech describing Zubaydah’s interrogation, and asked Soufan whether it was an "accurate" depiction. Soufan said it appeared Bush had been told "half-truths," and agreed with Whitehouse that he then repeated these "half-truths":
WHITEHOUSE: Does that statement accurately reflect the interrogation of Abu Zubydah?
SOUFAN: Well, the environment that he’s talking about, yes, it reflects, you know, he was injured, he required medical care. But I think the president — my own personal opinion here, based on my recollection — he was told probably half-truth.
WHITEHOUSE: And repeated half-truth obviously. The statement as presented does not conform to what you know to be the case from your experience on hand.
SOUFAN: Yes. Yes sir. Yes sir.
- Lindsey Graham is still an unprincipled torture apologist and idealogue. He browbeat a witness, refusing to allow him to finish his responses to Graham's inane questioning if that answer was proving to be too good; he let the cat out of the bag, suggesting that it was Dick Cheney who decided who went to Guantanamo; and he revealed that he hadn't been keeping up with recent developments in the unfolding torture story:
While directing hostile questioning at a witness during the Senate torture hearing, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham cited an infamous ABC News report from 2007 that said a terror suspect broke under minimal waterboarding, and suggested it undercut the claim that torture didn’t work.... When the witness pointed out that the story had been debunked, he stared into the distance without saying anything and moved right on to a new round of questioning.
- Sen. Feingold, one of the people who has seen Dick Cheney's "torture worked" memos, says they are not as significant as Cheney would have us believe, saying that they won’t prove torture was "necessary" or that the techniques "were the best way to get information out of detainees."
Obviously, today's hearing just scratched the surface of what we know happened thus far, but Soufan was strong and effective in shooting down the effectiveness argument, as was Zelikow in addressing the dubious legal reasoning and the internal politics that led to the torture memos. It can be summed up by Zelikow by way of Daphne Eviatar:
"The arguments I was making were pretty profound," answered Zelikow. "Because if I was right, their whole interpretation of the CID standard [the standard for "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment," forbidden by the Convention Against Torture and by the U.S. Constitution] was fundamentally unsound."
So they had "a few options," Zelikow said. One is, "let’s take another look at this" and see if there’s any validity to the different opinion, or, "they could say, Zelikow, this shows how rusty you are in practicing law. We need to tell you why you’ve misunderstood this area of the law."
But in fact, said Zelikow, "they didn’t do any of those things." They chose a third option. "They just said, ‘we don’t want to talk about it.’"
And it’s that third option — intentionally burying your head in the sand — that demonstrates bad faith and an intent to ignore the relevant law, as the legal ethics expert David Luban testified.
Excellent liveblogging can be reviewed by reading: Spencer Ackerman, Marcy (all of today's posts), Kossack Jesselyn Radack, and the Kossack liveblogging team.