Things are not looking good for former embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and after all the trouble he’s having trying to find a job.  According to documents obtained by the ACLU, Gonzales approved use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” against Abu Zubaydah as White House Counsel four months prior to a request to the Justice department for its opinion.  Zubaydah was captured at the end of March in 2002 but the first memo from DOJ is dated August 1, 2002.  Gonzales has cockily said that he does not believe that Attorney General Eric Holder will prosecute him.  Take a look at his justification.

“I don’t think that there’s going to be a prosecution, quite frankly.” Gonzales said. “Because again, these activities … They were authorized, they were supported by legal opinions at the Department of Justice.”

Holder “will have to make a decision as to whether or not move forward with an investigation or a prosecution,” Gonzales said. “But under those circumstances, I find it hard to believe.”

Well there goes his defense that he was just following DOJ’s advice.  One would guess that when Gonzales made the above statement back in January he was not counting on public discovery that he authorized the use of torture techniques months before the DOJ opinions were rendered.  Very interesting.

So instead of following legal opinion Gonzales was relying on his political bosses and his own warped beyond recognition interpretation of the Convention Against Torture.  Considering the fact that disbarment is on the table for attorneys involved in the authorization of torture, Gonzalez’s employment prospects just dropped significantly.  See more of the story regarding the secret authorizations from the Bush White House below.

One source with knowledge of Zubaydah’s interrogations agreed to describe the legal guidance process, on the condition of anonymity.

The source says nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

A new document is consistent with the source’s account.

The CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet late Tuesday as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top-secret cables that went from Zubaydah’s black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows, someone sent headquarters several cables a day.

See full article at NPR here

“[B]y definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”  Yes, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice pulled the Nixonian defense when asked whether waterboarding is torture.  Rice was caught up again when a fourth grader from Bethesda asked the following question during the former Secretary’s first public appearance since leaving office. 

What did Rice think about the things President Obama’s administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?  

This time however Rice had honed her story a bit.  She first expressed how terrified the administration was that America would be attacked again and then went on to say that she did not pull the Nixonian defense in her prior statement on this topic but had misspoke.  What she had meant to say was the president would never authorize an action that was in violation of the Convention Against Torture….yea right!  We’ll take the first honest, unprepared answer thank you.  Rice also claimed as her defense in the prior statement that she merely “conveyed the information” to the appropriate actors but played no part in the actual decision to waterboard detainees.  What we did find out is that Rice is clearly not an attorney nor is she informed as to what is considered a violation of the UN Convention Against Torture and the lack of defenses thereof.  We have included the relevant sections and non-defenses for her to study before her next press outing.

United Nations Convention Against Torture and other Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 

PART 1 -Article 1:    Definition of Torture

1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.

PART 1 – Article II:   No Defenses

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Dick Cheney and his daughter have been all over the networks cheerleading how the waterboarding interrogation methods condoned by the Bush administration worked and produced reliable intelligence that thwarted alleged subsequent attacks in the United States following 9/11.  There have been several easily verifiable facts that disprove the Cheney family conclusion.  In addition, Col. Steven Kleinman, an experienced military interrogator, disagrees with Cheney’s pronouncements that waterboarding works.  Col. Kleinman, an actual member of the military and experienced interrogator who fought in Iraq, says that enhanced interrogation techniques torture does not produce actionable intelligence.  See an excerpt of interview below.   Or listen to the entire interview here.

SIEGEL: SERE. Explain what that was.

KLEINMAN: SERE is an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance and escape, and specifically, what we’re talking about here is resistance-to-interrogation training, which is a very formal set of strategies and methods to resist hostile interrogation.

The origins of this as I understand it were during the Cold War — the U.S. trained its people in what might happen to them if they were taken hostage, say as POWs in Korea by the Chinese?

Precisely so. Even before the Korean War, during the Soviet show trials that occurred shortly after World War II, we as the U.S. government observed very odd and inexplicable behavior — people claiming to be CIA agents who weren’t on the CIA payroll. More intelligence came in to describe these … interrogation methods that were being used to compel people to produce what can be described as propaganda — a mixture of truth with a heavy overlay of falsehoods.

What you’re describing is taking techniques that U.S. military personnel had been trained to resist … [and] using those very techniques on the people the U.S. was detaining in Iraq?

Exactly, and I think a key point that your listeners need to understand, so they can grasp the gravity of the situation, is that the primary objective of that approach to interrogation was not truth … but somebody’s political truth. In the Korean War, they actually compelled some of our pilots to admit to dropping chemical weapons on cities and so forth, when in fact that didn’t happen. Now, that stands in stark contrast to intelligence interrogation, where the overriding objective is provide timely, accurate, reliable, comprehensive intelligence.

And these harsh interrogation methods had been used by the Soviets and the Chinese to get people to say things that weren’t true?

That’s true. And it’s not just harsh physically, but I think the element that was more persuasive was their ability to induce what is known as debility, depression and dread through emotional and psychological techniques that profoundly altered somebody’s ability to answer questions truthfully even if they wanted to. It truly undermined their ability to recall, so therefore it would call into question its efficacy in an intelligence-based interrogation.

I want you to describe the interrogation that’s included in the Senate report. You witnessed an Iraqi detainee in a room that has been completely darkened?

Yes, I walked into this room, and it was a small room with the walls painted black. There was an interrogator sitting in a chair. To his left was an interpreter. The detainee was kneeling with his wrists handcuffed behind his back before the interrogator. Standing behind the interrogator was a guard carrying a — I don’t recall now if it was wood or iron rod — and it was almost stereotypical, being patted into his hand like it was some B movie, gangster movie, if you will.

And the questions were posed to the detainee, interpreted. The detainee would answer, the answer was interpreted, and upon that interpretation, the interrogator would slap him across the face. For those who have read the report, they talk about in survival training, an “insult slap.” It’s very important to understand that those are affected in a very careful fashion, and to truly shock someone rather than hurt them. And this type of slap was much more forceful. The other difference is, it was being delivered systematically, and when I walked in, I asked how long it had been going on, and I was told “30 minutes.” So this individual had been slapped continuously while he was on his knees for 30 minutes.

What did you make of that interrogation?

In my mind, that was no longer an interrogation. You don’t obtain information of any value that way. It was punitive, precisely, so I quickly brought that to a stop.

I pulled the interrogator out and I explained why that was against the law. I tried to explain why it wasn’t operationally useful. He followed orders, because he had to, because I was a senior officer, but you could tell he didn’t buy into my rationale by any stretch.

Had you witnessed one rotten interrogation that had gone wrong or was it routine?

It didn’t take long to realize this was a systematic approach. And it wasn’t because there were bad apples or these people had some flaws in their character. It was just that there were operators out there on the ground who needed what we call “actionable intelligence” — reliable intelligence for them to run an operation within 24 hours, and they simply were not receiving that from their interrogators using the standard interrogation methodology, which was designed for a completely different war and a completely different time.

And so, people were reaching out to other methods, not understanding the subtle yet profound difference — using a method that was proven successful in obtaining propaganda, while on the surface it seems very effective, underneath it all it is very ineffective and counterproductive. … Any individual can force any other individual to admit to practically anything, but that’s not the purpose of interrogation. I could see these people had lost the bubble on that.

There’s a mention in the report of how you were received by some of these U.S. servicemen. To understate it, it was not well?

I think it would be a fair statement to say I was the most unpopular officer in that area, if not in the entire country of Iraq … There was one gentleman who was acting very odd toward me, and one time I walked by his tent, and it just happened to be the two of us, and he was sharpening a knife, and he looked up, and he said that “it wouldn’t be recommended that I sleep too lightly while I was at that camp.” It didn’t take me long to understand his meaning.

You were that unpopular. He was suggesting some harm might come to you?

And the reason I was unpopular is that people couldn’t understand why I had stopped an interrogation, and the rationale that I heard repeatedly was …”If I had been captured by al-Qaida or some of these insurgents, that’s how I would expect to be treated.” And my response was always … “Let us not let the adversary set the standard, especially if it causes us to lower our standard.”

The Senate report cites memos that confirmed your accounts of what happened, but the same memos say that you did not take your story further up the chain of command. Why not?

I came across that, and I was stunned … I was directed to write a report … and I described in great detail what happened and why those were violations of the Geneva Convention. But I was directed to send my report up my chain of command … and I was ordered to keep it within those channels — for classification, for security purposes … So I did everything, even beyond what was reasonable. I did make my chain of command very clear. I did make the Department of Defense inspector general’s office aware. It was classified. Had I spoken out at that time … I could have been charged with divulging classified information.

UPDATE:

Just in from the Washington Post, the the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) two-page attachment, titled “Operational Issues Pertaining to the Use of Physical/Psychological Coercion in Interrogation,” was just obtained by WaPo and revealed a few interesting facts concerning the torture question.  See below.

The military agency that helped to devise harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as “torture” in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon’s chief lawyer and warned that it would produce “unreliable information.”

“The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel,” says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week. . . . . .

The JPRA attachment said the key deficiency of physical or psychological duress is the reliability and accuracy of the information gained. “A subject in pain may provide an answer, any answer, or many answers in order to get the pain to stop,” it said.

In conclusion, the document said, “the application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably the potential to result in unreliable information.” The word “extreme” is underlined.

Washington Post Story  hmmm.  So Bush lawyers were told by the people who actually devised the “enhanced interrogation” torture techniques that the information produced would be “unreliable” and they approved it anyway…hmmm

Apparently Condoleeza Rice verbally ok’d the use of waterboarding to interrogate alleged al-Qaida terrorist Abu Zubaydah in July 2002 when she was National Security Advisor.

According to the new narrative, which compiles legal advice provided by the Bush administration to the CIA, Rice personally conveyed the administration’s approval for waterboarding of Zubaydah, a so-called high-value detainee, to then-CIA Director George Tenet in July 2002.

Condoleeza Rice denied participating in torture as late as last year.

Last fall, Rice acknowledged to the Senate Armed Services Committee only that she had attended meetings where the CIA interrogation request was discussed. She said she did not recall details. Rice omitted her direct role in approving the program in her written statement to the committee.   .  .  .  .   .  .

The new timeline [released yesterday] shows that Rice played a greater role than she admitted last fall in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The narrative also shows that dissenting legal views about the severe interrogation methods were brushed aside repeatedly.

It appears that several senior officials endorsed the torturous practice and urged their continuance.

The Director of Central Intelligence in the spring of 2003 sought a reaffirmation of the legality of the interrogation methods. Cheney, Rice, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales were among those at a meeting where it was decided that the policies would continue. Rumsfeld and Powell weren’t.

And there is more

Days after Rice gave Tenet the nod, the Justice Department approved the use of waterboarding in a top secret Aug. 1 memo. Zubaydah underwent waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002.

In the years that followed, according to the narrative issued Wednesday, there were numerous internal legal reviews of the program, suggesting government attorneys raised concerns that the harsh methods, particularly waterboarding, might violate federal laws against torture and the U.S. Constitution.

But Bush administration lawyers continued to validate the program. The CIA voluntarily dropped the use of waterboarding, which has a long history as a torture tactic, from its arsenal of techniques after 2005.

If I were Rice, Cheney, Gonzalez, Ashcroft, or Rumsfeld, I would not be traveling to any foreign country that recognizes international law any time in the near future.