RAJAB 29, 1429 A.H.
FRIDAY AUGUST 1 2008
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Justifying' torture: Two big lies (I)
By Coleen Rowley and Ray McGovern
Ashcroft is the Attorney General who approved torture before he disapproved it Torture does not yield truthful information. Torture provide the inforation you want to grease the skids for war.
One can assume that former Attorney General John Ashcroft didn’t mean it to be funny, but his testimony on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee might strike one as hilarious, were it not for the issue at hand — torture.
Ashcroft is the Attorney General who
approved torture before he disapproved it, but committee members spared him accusations of flip-flopping.
He explained that he initially blessed the infamous torture memoranda drafted by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and others in mid-2002 because he (Ashcroft) believed it imperative to afford the President “the benefit of genuine doubt” regarding how to protect American lives in the “war on terror.”
But Ashcroft added that, despite this, when concerns about that earlier guidance for interrogations were brought to his attention, changing his mind “was not a hard decision for me.
” A very flexible Attorney General.
“The benefit of genuine doubt?” Perhaps Ashcroft thought that this genteel way of looking at things would appeal to the poorly led, motley group calling itself the House Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Rep.
John Conyers, D-Michigan.
But the rest of us, whose time does not expire in five minutes, cannot buy his defense of torture. For it is based on two demonstrable lies.
Lie Number One According to Ashcroft, “The administration’s overriding goal…was to do everything in its power and within the limits of the law…to keep this country safe from terrorist attack.”
His is merely the latest in a string of torture- exculpating statements adduced to document a myth; namely, that the Bush administration, having failed to prevent the attacks of 9/11, pulled out all the stops to keep us safe from a second attack; and that one of the necessary measures introduced was torture.
It was a situational thing, you see. But even that explanation does not survive close scrutiny.
First, for those with a strong stomach, a sample of recent statements; then proof of their transparency in aiming to create an exculpatory myth:
-- On May 22, 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice publicly discussed the use of enhanced interrogation techniques: “After Sept. 11, whatever was legal in the face of not just the attacks of Sept. 11, but the anthrax attacks that happened, we were in an environment in which saving America from the next attack was paramount.”
-- On June 5, 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden told Jim fear of an imminent attack that led to the controversial interrogation practices a “high-end interrogation technique.” “Keep in mind…you have the nation
suffering, reeling from a recent attack in which 3,000 citizens had been killed, until it was the collective judgment of the American government that these techniques would be appropriate and lawful in these circumstances.”
-- On June 26, 2008, testifying before the Conyers committee, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington added, with some flair: “Smoke was still rising…3,000 Americans were just killed.”
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post used the quote to show how Addington “justified his legal reasoning” regarding enhanced interrogation techniques.
Since members of the Judiciary Committee did little to expose the myth, let us try to help.
Selective Urgency The sense of pressing urgency conjured up by Bush administration folks to justify torture does not square with Coleen Rowley’s direct personal experience in the FBI.
As some will remember, the FBI's joint terrorism task force in Minneapolis had
detained Zacarias Moussaoui on Aug. 16, 2001. Flight school pilots acting as whistleblowers had notified the FBI, against the wishes of their airline employer, of detailed information making Moussaoui the most suspicious student they had ever encountered.
French intelligence soon supplied further background confirming Moussaoui's fighting for a “foreign power” — Chechnyan rebels, whose leader was connected to al-Qaeda. By
Aug. 23, the case was deemed so suspicious, it went all the way to the top of the intelligence community, to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, in a PowerPoint presentation entitled: "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.”
As Rowley revealed in her letter of May 21, 2002, to FBI Director Robert Mueller, there was considerable frustration in her FBI unit in Minneapolis over the inability of FBI headquarters to get its act together and present these facts pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain the secret
FISA Court’s permission to search Moussaoui’s personal effects and laptop computer in the days before 9-11.
Odd Reactions But once the attacks took place on 9-11, confirming the Minneapolis FBI unit’s worst fears and finally overcoming FBI Headquarters’ reluctance to conduct further searches of Moussaoui’s belongings, there was still little sense of urgency.
At that point, Moussaoui sat atop the list of prime sources for information about any “second wave” of attacks. But the Justice Department persisted in its refusal to allow agents to attempt to interview Moussaoui even after the attacks.
During the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, the acting U.S. Attorney denied the unit permission to interview Moussaoui.
Rowley – having seen what just had transpired due, at least in part, to the FBI unit having accepted No for an answer in August – decided to go a rung higher by calling Justice officials in the FBI’s Command Post in Washington on the morning of Sept. 12.
In that conversation, Rowley repeatedly drew attention to the Supreme Court decision (New York v Quarles, 467 U.S. 649, 1984) granting an “exigent-circumstances” exception to the Miranda rule in cases where an interview is judged necessary to protect public safety.
Rowley was told by Justice Department officials that “no such public emergency
existed.” This is what Rowley encountered on 9/11 and 9/12.
Moussaoui remained the only al-Qaeda terrorist in custody for many months, but the Justice Department’s ban on interviewing him remained in place — at huge potential cost by forfeiting the possibility of acquiring information on other terrorist activities about which Moussaoui was very probably aware.
This is not merely theoretical. It appears that Moussaoui almost certainly was acquainted with Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” who on Dec. 22, 2001, almost succeeded in blowing up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with nearly 200 people aboard.
So, in Rowley’s May 21, 2002, letter to FBI Director Mueller, she reminded him that if, as he claimed, priority was now being given to prevention over prosecution, the FBI needed to explore how to apply the Quarles “public safety” exception.
Rowley also reminded Mueller that
Minneapolis had not only been prevented from further investigation of Moussaoui before 9/11 but also was prohibited from interviewing him after the attacks on that day.
Muzzling Moussaoui Rowley tried again in early July 2002, after learning that Moussaoui was hinting he wanted to talk. She called then-Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff to note the
opportunity missed by not interviewing Moussaoui — particularly in view of the suggestive information found on his laptop computer regarding crop dusting and wind currents.
Chertoff was not available; one of his assistants gave Rowley the brush-off.
Rowley’s last try came on Feb. 26, 2003, when she wrote the following as part of a longer letter to Director Mueller:
“If, as you have said, ‘prevention of another terrorist attack remains the FBI’s top priority,’ why is it that we have not attempted to interview Zacarias Moussaoui, the only suspect in U.S. custody charged with having a direct hand in the horror of 9/11?... Moussaoui almost certainly would know of other al- Qaeda contacts, possibly in the U.S., and would also be able to alert us to the motive behind his and Mohammed Atta’s interest in crop dusting.
“Similarly, there is the question as to why little or no apparent effort has been made to interview convicted terrorist Richard Reid, who obviously depended upon other al-Qaeda operatives in fashioning his shoe explosive.
Nor have possible links between Moussaoui and Reid been fully investigated… “In short … lack of follow-through with regard to Moussaoui and Reid gives a hollow ring to our ‘top priority.’”
It may be that Mueller, too, felt powerless at that point but, for whatever reason, he did not respond.
In sum, Rowley’s personal experience, and lots else, persuaded her that the please- understand-we-were-just-doing-all-we-could- to-prevent-a-second-wave-of-attacks excuse for torture is bogus — an outrageous lie.
The time is far past when the President and his torture apprentices should be accorded “the benefit of genuine doubt,” to quote again from Ashcroft’s testimony.
