{"id":2963,"date":"2014-03-19T09:38:10","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T15:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=2963"},"modified":"2014-03-19T09:38:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-19T15:38:10","slug":"the-white-house-has-been-covering-up-the-presidencys-role-in-torture-for-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/the-white-house-has-been-covering-up-the-presidencys-role-in-torture-for-years\/","title":{"rendered":"The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency\u2019s Role in Torture for Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Marcy Wheeler<\/a>, The Intercept
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

On May 10, 2013, John Brennan presented CIA\u2019s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report to the President. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.<\/p>\n

The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee\u2019s Torture Report\u00a0\u2013 which Dan Froomkin\u00a0covered here<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 has now zeroed in on the White House.<\/p>\n

Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein\u00a0says<\/a>\u00a0the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents\u00a0\u2013 perhaps thousands of them \u2013 pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Prestonsuggested<\/a>\u00a0last fall? And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0yesterday?<\/p>\n

We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency\u2019s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush\u2019s authorization of the torture program, secret.<\/p>\n

Some time before October 29, 2009, then National Security Advisor Jim Jones\u00a0filed<\/a>\u00a0an ex parte classified declaration with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York,\u00a0<\/em>in response to a FOIA request by the ACLU seeking documents related to the torture program. In it, Jones argued that the CIA should not be forced to disclose the \u201csource of the CIA\u2019s authority,\u201d as referenced in the title of a document providing \u201cGuidelines for Interrogations<\/a>\u201d and signed by then CIA Director George Tenet. That document was cited in two Justice Department memos at issue in the FOIA. Jones claimed that \u201csource of authority\u201d constituted an intelligence method that needed to be protected.<\/p>\n

\"Redacted-phrase-describing-authorization-for-torture<\/a><\/p>\n

As other documents and reporting have made clear, the source of authority was a September 17, 2001 Presidential declaration authorizing not just detention and interrogation, but a range of other counterterrorism activities, including targeted killings.<\/p>\n

Both former CIA Director\u00a0Michael Hayden<\/a>\u00a0and former CIA Acting General Counsel\u00a0John Rizzo<\/a>have made clear that the torture program began as a covert operation. \u201cA few days after the [9\/11] attacks, President Bush signed a top-secret directive to CIA authorizing an unprecedented array of covert actions against Al Qaeda and its leadership.\u201d Rizzo\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0in 2011. One of those actions, Rizzo went on, was \u201cthe capture, incommunicado detention and aggressive interrogation of senior Al Qaeda operatives.\u201d<\/p>\n

As\u00a0Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy,\u00a0noted<\/a>\u00a0 in 2009\u00a0\u2013 shortly after Hayden revealed that torture started as a covert operation \u2013 this means there should be a paper trail implicating President Bush in the torture program. \u201c[T]here should be a Presidential \u2018finding\u2019 authorizing the program,\u201d he said, \u201cand [] such a finding should have been provided to Congressional overseers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0National Security Act<\/a>\u00a0dictates that every covert operation must be supported by a written declaration finding that the action is necessary and important to the national security. The Congressional Intelligence committees\u00a0\u2013 or at least the Chair and Ranking Member\u00a0\u2013 should receive notice of the finding.<\/p>\n

But there is evidence that those Congressional overseers were never told that the finding the president signed on September 17, 2001 authorized torture. For example, a\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0from then ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, to the CIA\u2019s General Counsel following her first briefing on torture asked: \u201cHave enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the President?\u201d The CIA\u2019s response at the time was simply that \u201cpolicy as well as legal matters have been addressed within the Executive Branch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the finding does exist. The CIA even\u00a0disclosed<\/a>\u00a0its existence in response to the ACLU FOIA, describing it as \u201ca 14-page memorandum dated 17 September 2001 from President Bush to the Director of the CIA pertaining to the CIA\u2019s authorization to detain terrorists.\u201d In anorder<\/a>\u00a0in the ACLU suit, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein confirmed that the declaration was \u201cintertwined with\u201d the administration\u2019s effort to keep the language in the Tenet document hidden. When the administration succeeded in keeping that short phrase secret, all effort to release the declaration also ended.<\/p>\n

Enduring confusion about this particular finding surely exists because of its flexible nature. As Bob Woodward described in\u00a0Bush at War<\/em>, CIA Director Tenet asked President Bush to sign \u201ca broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation.\u201d As Jane Mayer described in\u00a0The Dark Side<\/em>, such an order not only gave the CIA flexibility, it also protected the President. \u201cTo give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.\u201d<\/p>\n

When George Tenet signed written guidelines for the CIA\u2019s torture program in 2003, however, he appeared to have deliberately deprived the President of that deniability by including the source of CIA\u2019s authorization\u00a0\u2013 presumably naming the President\u00a0\u2013 in a document interrogators would see. You can\u2019t blame the CIA Director, after all; Tenet signed the Guidelines just as CIA\u2019s Inspector General and DOJ started to review the legality of the torture tactics used against detainees like Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was threatened with a drill and a gun in violation of DOJ\u2019s ban on mock executions.<\/p>\n

Protecting the President?<\/span><\/h3>\n

The White House\u2019s fight to keep the short phrase describing Bush\u2019s authorization of the torture program hidden speaks to its apparent ambivalence over the torture program. Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture\u00a0\u2013 along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture\u00a0\u2013 the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration from Jones that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public.<\/p>\n

As Aftergood noted, such White House intervention in a FOIA suit is rare. \u201cThe number of times that a national security advisor has filed a declaration in a FOIA lawsuit is vanishingly small,\u201d he said. \u201cIt almost never happens.\u201d But as ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, \u201cIt was\u00a0the original authority for the CIA\u2019s secret prisons and for the agency\u2019s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well. \u00a0It\u00a0was the urtext. \u00a0It\u2019s remarkable that after all this time it\u2019s still secret.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Obama\u2019s willingness to go to such lengths to hide this short phrase may explain the White House\u2019s curious treatment of potentially privileged documents with the Senate now \u2013 describing President Bush\u2019s authorization of the torture program and its seemingly contradictory stance supporting publishing the Torture Report while thwarting its completion by withholding privileged documents. After all, the documents in question, like the reference to the presidential finding, may deprive the President of plausible deniability.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to\u00a0Senator Ron Wyden,<\/a>\u00a0the Senate Torture Report found that \u201cthe CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.\u201d Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House.<\/p>\n

Finally, the White House\u2019s sensitivity about documents involved in the torture program may stem from the structure of the finding. As John Rizzo made clear, the finding authorizes not just torturing, but killing, senior al Qaeda figures. Bob Woodward even reported that that CIA would carry out that killing using Predator drones, a program CIA still conducts. And in fact, when the Second Circuit ultimately\u00a0ruled to let<\/a>\u00a0the White House to keep the authorization phrase secret, it did so because the phrase also relates to \u201ca highly classified, active intelligence activity\u201d and \u201cpertains to intelligence activities unrelated to the discontinued [torture] program.\u201d Given what we know about the September 17, 2001 finding, that may well refer to President Obama\u2019s still active drone program.<\/p>\n

In any case, the White House\u2019s seemingly contradictory statements about the Torture Report might best be understood by its past treatment of CIA documents. By releasing the DOJ memos and other materials, the White House provided what seemed to be unprecedented transparency about what the CIA had done. But all the while it was secretly hiding language describing what the White House has done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Marcy Wheeler, The Intercept click here for original article On May 10, 2013, John Brennan presented CIA\u2019s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report to the President. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee\u2019s Torture Report\u00a0\u2013 which Dan Froomkin\u00a0covered here\u00a0\u2013 has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2965,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963\/revisions\/2965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}