For some, it can be tempting to lay the blame for the Iraq war at the feet of a small, disingenuous neoconservative cabal. In reality, the debacle was a collective effort, involving legions of people, some dishonest, others well-intentioned. But there is one man, still obscure, whose claim to being the prime mover in the selling of the war is at least as strong as that of any Beltway hawk, and whose agenda was wholly personal, not political.
In his new book, "Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War," Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin gives the most comprehensive account to date of the man who was the source of much of the faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the U.S. invasion. Drogin explains how "Curveball," a still-anonymous Iraqi who defected to Germany in 1999, came to be a principal source for American intelligence, even though the CIA didn't even know who he really was until after the war had begun. Drogin's narrative is simpler and sadder and, in some ways, more disturbing than if this really was just a tale about a known liar and the neocons who loved him. Instead, it's the story of a man desperate for political asylum and what he was willing to say to get it; of German intelligence officers who wanted to tweak their American rivals; and of American intelligence officers who were determined to give their bosses what their bosses wanted. Salon spoke to Drogin by telephone.
Who is Curveball?
Curveball is an Iraqi engineer, a very low-level engineer, who defected to Germany in 1999 and was plucked out of a refugee line. He was in an asylum camp. And he began to spin a rather fantastic story. They interviewed him and interrogated him through most of 2000 and 2001. And his story was unconfirmed and unverified. He was never vetted in the sense of people going to Baghdad and tracking down to see whether his background was what he claimed it to be -- because under those conditions it was impossible to do. But after 9/11 his story suddenly was literally plucked out of a safe at the CIA, and within weeks the official CIA analysis of Saddam's threat from biological weapons changed quite dramatically. This is in 2001. And by the time we get to the fall of 2002 and the real run-up to the war, his information is so dominant at the CIA that they virtually hang all of the biological weapons information on him, despite the fact that they had never met him and didn't even know his name. All the information was coming from the Germans.
By the time we get to the president's State of the Union speech in 2003 before the war, that contained some of the information from Curveball. And, as we all remember, when [then-Secretary of State] Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 just before the war, these pictures of trucks, these cartoon drawings of trucks that the CIA had prepared, were the highlight of his presentation. He referred to this eyewitness who had worked directly on these trucks, who had witnessed an accident that had killed a dozen people. And ... [Powell] told me later, it was the most important part, the most credible part of his entire speech. Unfortunately it was all a fraud. So that's who Curveball was.
How does this all go so wrong? How does the Bush administration and the CIA come to see Curveball as this incontrovertible source?
My take on the CIA is that it's a lot like any other bureaucracy, except that the people there are trained to lie, cheat and steal. But in terms of motivations -- in terms of what drives decisions -- it's not a whole lot different from perhaps what drives Enron. That is, there are a lot of ambitious people, there are a lot of rivalries, there's a lot of bureaucratic infighting, not only within the agency, but between the CIA and its rivals in Washington -- the Defense Intelligence Agency and some of the others. And especially between the CIA and ... foreign intelligence services belonging to other governments. And what happened in this case was a confluence of those forces, those really rather tawdry forces, combined with really spineless leadership, which allowed this unconfirmed information to rise to the top.
And what's fascinating to me is that we now know in retrospect that a huge amount of the prewar intelligence did rest on Curveball's shoulders. And the reason I say this is because, if you go back to just before the war, the CIA did not claim that Saddam had nuclear weapons. They said he was eight to 10 years out. And the International Atomic Energy Agency, the director, Mohamed El-Baradei, went up to the U.N. Security Council on March 7 and announced that we have been to all of these sites, and there is no evidence of the kinds of infrastructure you would need to build nuclear weapons. And also, by the way, [El-Baradei said,] the evidence that has been furnished to us, the documents, was what he referred to as "not authentic," which translated as forged. This was the American paperwork that was given to him.
So the nuclear stuff had all fallen apart. That left only the chemical and the biological. All of the postwar investigations in this country and in Britain said basically that all of the bad intelligence on biological weapons came from Curveball, that without him they really had no case whatsoever. But the surprise was that, at least at the CIA, the analysts in the chemical weapons department, the third leg of this triad, if you will, before the war they were unsure of what they had. They thought the evidence was quite ambiguous on the chemical weapons. They said they were "drifting."
In the 1980s Saddam had a huge chemical weapons program and he only really started up -- he had a crash program for the production of biological warfare agents just before the 1991 war. So, in this case what happens is that when they see that the biological weapons people are claiming with high confidence that Saddam not only has a robust biological weapons program but that it's even larger and more developed than it was before the first Gulf War, they looked around and said, "Well, geez, if he's got that, then he must have chemical weapons, too, because that's the way he did it last time." And so they just ramped up their conclusions. They basically said, "Well, forget about our doubts, it must be true." And so it all sort of pinpoints back down to this one guy. He's obviously not the only reason we went to war. He wasn't the only pretext. But, more and more, the evidence seems to hang on his shoulders, ironically.
I was struck by something you wrote in your epilogue, which is that the defector didn't con the spies so much as the spies conned themselves.
You know, I came out of this almost sympathetic to Curveball. In the sense that he is, as best I can tell, not a whole lot different from -- that he was basically a shlub. Here's a guy who's basically a middle-class guy, he's running away from tyranny to find freedom in the West. You know, my great-grandparents did that, most Americans have somebody in their background who did that. And he gets there and he does something in Germany that is very common there, because -- I looked at this at some length. Because, you know, Germany is the most popular place anywhere in Europe to apply for asylum ... but still, it's a very tricky thing to do. Only one in 25 applicants in general gets asylum in Germany. It's better for Iraqis, but still it's only one in 25 overall. So what he tried to do was jump the line. He told some lies, and he jumped the line. And the reason I say they conned themselves is because, when you look at what he actually said -- to the extent that's available -- and you look at how it got twisted by the time Colin Powell is telling the world about it, there's a big difference. I'm not suggesting that Colin Powell made that up. What I'm saying is that the passage of information -- the way it came down the bureaucracy, the rivalries, the problems of translation, the problems of perception, the problems of who was analyzing what -- they managed to not only embrace his account, they twisted and they magnified it, until it really took on a life of its own and became something very different from what his original account was.
Curveball has been portrayed as a tool of those in the Bush administration looking to go to war. And you see him more as a consequence of people just trying to do what they saw as their job, not as some sort of Cheney-ite plot.
I really feel quite strongly on this. It is self-evident that George Bush took us to war, that he's the one who's responsible, and that he made a political decision based on the information that he was given. Where I disagree with the conspiracy theories about all of this [is] this idea that there was this little cabal of people who were determined to do this, that they were going to twist the intelligence and that they cherry-picked the intelligence. The point of the Curveball story, and the rest of the prewar intelligence, is that they didn't have to do that. They were being served twisted intelligence by the shovel load by the CIA. If you look at the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, it is wrong in every single statement regarding chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. They didn't have to go cherry-pick anything. They didn't need the [Pentagon's] Office of Special Plans. They didn't need these guys in the Pentagon feeding them stuff. They didn't even need [Iraqi émigré and prominent neoconservative ally Ahmed] Chalabi. They had all of this stuff coming in through the portholes.
My take on it is that, before 9/11, the accusation was that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement failed to connect the dots. With Curveball, they made up the dots. In my way of thinking, it's a much worse situation. To me, this was the worst intelligence failure in American history. Never before has America gone to war and sacrificed so much blood, treasure and prestige on chasing an utter delusion. Curveball is the defining story of the prewar intelligence period. It explains the forces that led to this fiasco, and it tells how it is and why it is that we went down this rabbit hole in Iraq.
The problem here is that for the CIA -- and, by their nature, the intelligence services -- there is accountability within the [congressional] oversight committees. But there is no public accountability. In this case, [former CIA director] George Tenet got his Medal of Freedom afterward. I mean, it's sort of bizarre to me. The whole thing would be a farce, except the stakes were so dreadfully, awfully high.
You reported on Curveball for the Los Angeles Times. How did you get interested in him in the first place?
I had been covering national security and intelligence for the paper in Washington since 1998. And in the summer of 2002, I think it was Aug. 26, Dick Cheney went to Nashville to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and gave a very bellicose speech in which he said flat-out, Saddam is two years away or so from having a nuclear weapon and there is "no doubt" that he has chemical and biological weapons. And it was sort of a shot across our bows, for anyone who was listening, that basically was saying, "OK, thanks, we're done with Afghanistan, we're now going to turn our gun sights on Iraq." And that had sort of been rumored for a while, but this was a very clear and deliberate statement. And I began at that point focusing full-time on trying to understand what it was we really knew and what it was we didn't know about Saddam's weapons program. I went to Iraq after the liberation of Baghdad and spent some time with the weapons hunters ... I went out on some of these attempts to find WMD, and came back even more disillusioned. The weapons hunts at that point just seemed to me absurd. They had no idea what they were doing, and we had been told with such certainty that these weapons existed, and we'd go out there, and they were just sort of bumbling around in the desert at that point.
So, when George Tenet gave a speech at Georgetown University in February of 2004, exactly one year after Powell's speech, he made a reference at that time that said we're still trying to get access to the chief source on the mobile and biological weapons units. And when that happened it was like a red flag, it was like, What do you mean you're still trying to get access? You mean you haven't talked to him? And I was working with a colleague, a great reporter named Greg Miller, and he and I spent a month or so trying to track that down, and that led to the first Curveball story. So we broke that in March of 2004, and followed that up with several stories, and then I wound up with a very extensive investigation with another reporter in the fall of 2005, and that led to the book.
What's the role that Ahmed Chalabi plays here?
In this case he becomes a detour. He becomes a dot. What happened here was that, after Curveball came out -- and this was not known at the time -- it turned out that he had an older brother who fled Iraq in 1992, and who had joined Chalabi's organization in England in its early stages. But he and his brother were estranged. And there's a back story here, which is that it appears that Curveball went to jail in Baghdad before he fled, for either an unpaid debt or a theft, something involving money that the brother owed. So the two brothers were estranged. And in 2001, they haven't spoken now for nearly a decade, the elder brother working for Chalabi calls up Curveball in Germany and says, "Dr. Chalabi would like to know, we heard you're in Germany, do you have any information about weapons of mass destruction that we can give to the Americans, we're trying to help them with all of this." And Curveball, who's a semi-psychotic at this point in terms of his paranoia -- I shouldn't say psychotic; his behavior was very bizarre and he was clearly terrified of assassinations and reprisals, and the Germans had to move him several times and change his name and change his address and all of that. The phone call from the brother apparently just sent him over the edge. He was convinced they had tracked him down. And so that was the end of his cooperation with the Germans.
None of this came out until after the war, when the Americans in Baghdad -- the CIA in Baghdad -- tracked down Curveball's mother and she told them about the brother, and they found him [Curveball's brother] then in Baghdad working in Chalabi's organization at a place called the Hunting Club, and they were able to confirm the telephone call. So he did have a brother who worked for Chalabi. But no one was able to prove -- and Chalabi repeatedly, angrily denied -- that he had sent Curveball out as a deliberate plant. And the reason that this is credible in this case is that Chalabi did send out numerous people -- I think 20 is the number who have been identified -- who came out through the Iraqi National Congress, and in almost every case proved to be providing false information of one kind or another. But in every one of those cases, they were handed off directly to the Americans.
When the CIA found out about the brother, they totally freaked out because they thought, Oh my God, we've been set up, Chalabi really pulled the wool over us on this one. But in the end it was determined that it was just another fluke in this case, but one that sent them all going crazy for quite a while.
You mentioned that the Germans kept changing Curveball's name, and I noticed in the very front of your book that you're not using his real name. Do you know his real name? Did the CIA know his real name?
Well, I know names that I've been given. But in the absence of finding him -- which I was unable to do, I made three trips to Germany -- I can't say for sure that I do. The name I used in the book is the name I was told he used when he first came into Germany. But I never saw any paperwork on that. That was just the name I was given. And I say flat-out [in the book] that was not his name, so I'm trying to be very careful about that. The CIA -- there's an interesting story here. The Germans refused to identify their source to the Americans; in part this was "pride of service," as they called it, like "We have this great source, and you don't, na na na," and in part this was sort of the nature of the business. You as a reporter wouldn't give me your best confidential source, and the CIA certainly doesn't turn over its best sources to the German intelligence, and the Germans feel the same way. And part of it was a deliberate deception on the part of the Germans that I think backfired, in which they claimed that Curveball did not speak English and that he hated Americans. In fact, he spoke much better English than he spoke German, and according to his mother, at least, what Curveball essentially said was that he loved America and he wanted to move here. So the Germans refused to give up his name.
But [the Americans] did eventually track [Curveball] down. And they finally got access to Curveball in Germany. In March of 2004, they were finally allowed to do an interview with him. And that was the first time they ever met him, a year after the war. And it was on the basis of that that they declared him a fabricator.
What did you think of the review of your book that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, written by another important figure in the story of prewar intelligence, [former New York Times reporter] Judy Miller?
Certainly the first half of her review is all positive. I think she gets it, she understands the story. The bottom half of her review ... she does two things there that surprised me.
She's arguing that the problem in the book is that I'm accusing George Tenet and these other guys of lying, but that I don't really identify them and the evidence for that is weak and I should have stayed with the thrust of my story, which is that this is about incompetence at lots of levels at U.S. intelligence agencies. I guess my response to that is, well, [incompetence] is what the book is about; it's not about accusing individuals of lying, it's about a system that was so ham-fisted that people who raised questions were shoved to the side, contradictory evidence was ignored, skeptics were sort of sidelined and the story just snowballed at lots of levels.
I've never quite understood -- this is not just about the review -- the fixation that people have to try and prove that George Bush or George Tenet or somebody else deliberately lied. I mean, they took us into a war based on shockingly insufficient evidence; isn't that bad enough?
And then the second part of Judy's review that surprised me is, in a sense I think she got suckered again. She really fell for George Tenet's argument in his book that this was entirely the fault of [former CIA chief of covert operations in Europe] Tyler Drumheller, that Tyler Drumheller didn't ring the alarm loudly enough or enough times. She says George Tenet says he met with Tyler 22 times between February of 2003 and July of 2004. That may be, but guess what -- that's all after the war. So what's the point? And whether Tyler said something before those 22 meetings is indisputable; there's documentary evidence, there are witnesses, that he repeatedly raised red flags at different stages. He was the only one, he and his aides, the only one in the CIA to get it right. And Tenet -- and, I think, those around him, and apparently Judy -- can't seem to forgive him for that.
I'm very grateful to her for writing this review, I'm very grateful to the Wall Street Journal ... I really don't want to get into a pissing match here with Judy Miller, who was hired to write a review, does a review and is entitled to her opinion ... I think Judy was very unfairly vilified for the reporting she did ... I think her reporting, she honestly did what she thought was right and, like with this thing with Tenet, she was a victim of the sources she had.
When you've got a story this convoluted, how do you as a reporter untangle it?
You know, I look at this case, and I say so in the introduction or the author's note, that this is a "Rashomon" kind of case. "Rashomon" was, you know, a Kurosawa film about a murder, in which the version you get as the viewer is from the four people involved in it, and you get violently different versions of events. And what I was trying to do with this story, as I understood it as I tracked it, was I became increasingly aware that it depended on where you sat as to how you viewed this case as it was developing.
The infighting within the CIA turned, really, in some cases, on an understanding of a word. It was so odd. The Directorate of Operations, the D.O., which is the clandestine service, for them when you say [a source] is "credible," that means that person has been vetted, his information is reliable, he's a known source, he's a proven person who is trustworthy. But for the analysts who are coming out of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, the D.I., the word "credible" meant that the story itself, that is, the information, was plausible. And that's two very different things. So they were sometimes talking and speaking the same language in the same meetings, and yet taking away very different understandings about what was going on. And the D.O. side was furious, just absolutely jumping up and down, trying to stop this case or at least raise warnings that Curveball had not been vetted, he was not credible in their eyes. And the D.I. side, which ultimately won the battle, was saying, "Hey, he's credible, his story makes sense, everything we can look at here makes sense to us, so we're going to go with it."
So I'm looking at this and trying to meld these various points of view and tell the story as it was happening in real time. So that we have some understanding of how something this awful, something so truly tragic, could happen. And frankly, I don't see anything out there in the various reforms that would stop this from happening again -- that's the real sad part of this. This was about leaders who were trying to please the president, and there was no attempt to stop it.
Every time there were whistle-blowers in the organizations, the CIA or wherever, who tried to raise red flags, they were either shut down by their supervisors, who basically said it's not your problem, don't worry about it, somebody else must know about this. Or else, in a couple of cases after the war, when people tried to bring truth to power to make people understand, they were literally treated like heretics. It was like a cult over there. They were banished. One guy was told -- it was like the Soviet Union -- he was told he needed psychiatric counseling. He went into work one day, and he was told he had a new office. He was put in the visitors' room, with no secure computer and no phone. Another guy, he was banished to what he called Siberia, an office at the end of a long corridor where there was construction going on. That's their way of dealing with people.
A group made up of former directors of Central Intelligence and the CIA has written to President Obama, asking him to overrule Attorney General Eric Holder and stop an investigation into cases in which CIA employees and contractors went beyond the interrogation limits set by the Bush administration.
The letter is signed by everyone who's headed the CIA since 1973 and is still living, with just two exceptions -- former President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Included among the signatories are three men appointed to their post by former President Clinton -- R. James Woolsey, John Deutch and George Tenet -- and two appointed by President George W. Bush, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden.
"Attorney General Holder’s decision to re‐open the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute. Moreover, there is no reason to expect that the re‐opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused," the letter says.
"If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless. Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions .... [T]his approach will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country. In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us."
The Justice Department has put out this statement in response:
The Attorney General works closely with the men and the women of intelligence community to keep the American people safe and he does not believe their commitment to conduct that important work will waver in any way.
Given the recommendation from the Office of Professional Responsibility as well as other available information, he believed the appropriate course of action was to ask John Durham to conduct a preliminary review. That review will be narrowly-focused and will be conducted by a career prosecutor who has shown an ability to handle cases involving classified information. Durham has not been appointed as a special prosecutor; he will be supervised by senior managers at the Department.
The Attorney General’s decision to order a preliminary review into this matter was made in line with his duty to examine the facts and to follow the law. As he has made clear, the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.
The full letter is available in PDF form here.
Earlier this week, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he supported current Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to open an investigation into certain CIA abuses of detainees. Now, he's taking it back.
In an interview with a Washington Times radio program Tuesday, Gonzales said, "We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists. And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it's action in prosecuting the war on terror."
On Thursday, in a new interview with the Times, the former attorney general was singing a different tune.
"Contrary to press reporting and based on the information that's available to me, I don't support the investigation by the department because this is a matter that has already been reviewed thoroughly and because I believe that another investigation is going to harm our intelligence gathering capabilities and that's a concern that's shared by career intelligence officials and so for those reasons I respectfully disagree with the decision," Gonzales said. "I respect the right of the attorney general to make this decision based upon his judgement of the facts, but again based upon what I know I disagree with the decision."
When a reporter for the Times read his original quote back to him, Gonzales replied, "[I]t's an endorsement of [Holder's] right to exercise his discretion. I'm just saying I would have exercised my discretion in a different manner, given the information I have .... So when I talk about how we expect people to abide by a certain set of rules, and if they don't they ought to be looked into, it's been looked into."
Former Vice President Cheney says he's offended by Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to investigate certain cases of CIA treatment of detainees that went beyond even the Bush administration's guidelines. Not every one-time member of that administration agrees with him.
In fact, someone who knows a bit about where Holder's coming from supports the move: Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
"We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists," Gonzales said in an interview with a Washington Times radio program. "And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror."
Among other things, Gonzales' comments are notable for their accurate description of what's going to happen with this investigation. Many on the right have portrayed the inquiry as much broader than it actually is; in fact, it's going to focus on a limited number of cases of interrogators who crossed the lines the Bush administration laid out for them, and it won't necessarily lead to prosecutions. If this investigation ends with a conclusion that there's reason to proceed, then there'll be a fuller investigation and that will lead to the actual decision on whether or not to prosecute.
WASHINGTON -- On Monday afternoon, the Justice Department released a report by the CIA inspector general on the CIA's interrogation procedures and use of "enhanced interrogation techniques." The May 2004 review provides many disturbing details about just what enhanced interrogation entails. Salon has culled two dozen pages from the 234-page report that describe, among other things, diapering, mock executions, threats to kill a detainee's children and the use of a power drill for interrogations, a technique once employed by Saddam Hussein. The report indicates that some agency personnel were worried that they would later have to answer for these interrogations in court.
In addition, the report includes a 2002 psychological evaluation of al-Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah, forwarded to John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel and now renowned for providing much of the Bush administration's legal justification for torture. The evaluation says that Abu Zubaydah is mentally stable and a powerful figure within al-Qaida. Both assertions are diametrically opposed to the characterization of Abu Zubaydah in Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine," an authoritative account of the Bush administration's counterterrorism efforts.
Today, a controversial report compiled by the CIA's inspector general in 2004, is finally set to be released. Even with the ghosts of Abu Ghraib lingering, Americans will likely receive another reminder that U.S. operatives, acting under the authority of the Bush administration, did in fact engage in torture while attempting to combat terrorism. Newsweek reported Friday that the inspector general's report will show that CIA interrogators used mock executions and threatened a prisoner with a gun and an electric drill. The report could increase pressure on the Obama administration to begin formal investigations into the interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects during the Bush presidency. The Wall Street Journal also reports today that President Obama intends to distance itself from the abusive practices of the Bush years by creating a new interrogation team to handle high-value detainees.
Here's a look at what prominent voices on the left and the right are saying about the report prior to its release and how they're responding to the news that the Justice Department may reopen some prisoner-abuse cases.
Marcy Wheeler, aka "emptywheel," Firedoglake: "But notice what is not on this list? ... The Office of Public Responsibility report, which has been due out all summer, and last we heard was at the CIA being reviewed to protect (presumably) John Rizzo's role in crafting OLC memos that claimed to authorize torture ... If it is, indeed, DOJ's plan to release all the other torture documents save the OPR report, it will have the effect of distracting the media with horrible descriptions of threats with power drills and waterboarding, away from the equally horrible description of lawyers willfully twisting the law to 'authorize' some of those actions. It will shift focus away from those that set up a regime of torture and towards those who free-lanced within that regime in spectacularly horrible ways. It will hide the degree to which torture was a conscious plan, and the degree to which the oral authorizations for torture may well have authorized some of what we'll see in the IG Report tomorrow ... If it is, indeed, DOJ's plan to release the IG Report and announce an investigation without, at the same time, releasing the OPR report, it will serve the goal of exposing the Lynndie England's of the torture regime while still protecting those who instituted that regime.
Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent: "But pay attention as well to what might not get released today: another long awaited report, this time from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility about the propriety of legally sanctioning the interrogation program by the Office of Legal Counsel ... But without the OPR inquiry on the Office of Legal Counsel — which Holder has pledged to declassify — the CIA inspector general report will present stories outside of the context that gave rise to them ... Without that context, it won’t be possible to understand what drove interrogators to enter those interrogation chambers, even if the torture they applied was more severe than what the department’s lawyers specified was acceptable."
Atrios: "Threatened execution isn't torture because it doesn't actually destroy any organs."
Digby: "The article goes on to say that Jay Bybee ok'd these tactics so long as they weren't intended to cause lasting mental harm, so Holder's (potential) inquiry will necessarily skip looking at these events. If someone is going to be prosecuted for torture, it has to be for something other than threatening to use an electric drill on someone or partially drowning them. That would only be considered torture if some faceless bureaucrat hadn't written a memo authorizing them. Oh well."
Daphne Eviatar, Washington Independent: "As Newsweek reported Friday evening, the CIA inspector general report expected to be released on Monday reveals that the CIA staged mock executions to terrify terror suspects into talking. Regardless of whether interrogators got the information they were looking for, these actions were clearly against the law. It is a violation of both the federal anti-torture statute, and of international law, to threaten a suspect with imminent death. Yet there was no other possible purpose for staging a mock execution in a room next to a detainee — complete with gunfire to suggest a prisoner had been killed — other than to terrify the detainee into believing that he would be next."
Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, Newsweek: "At the same time the administration releases the inspector general's report, it is also expected to release other CIA documents that assert the agency collected valuable intelligence through the interrogation program. For months, former vice president Dick Cheney has called for these documents to be released. However, a person familiar with the contents of the documents says that they contain material that both opponents and supporters of Bush administration tactics can use to bolster their case. The Senate Committee on Intelligence is now conducting what is supposed to be a thorough investigation of the CIA's detention-and-interrogation program. The probe is intended not only to document everything that happened but also to assess whether on balance the program produced major breakthroughs or a deluge of false leads."
David Johnston, New York Times: "Mr. [Eric] Holder [Attorney General] was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general’s report and other materials."
Tom A. Peter, Christian Science Monitor: "The incidents described in the report are among the most extreme examples of 'enhanced interrogation' techniques used by CIA interrogators. While waterboarding and sleep deprivation were approved in legal memos from the Justice Department, other methods, such as using a power drill appear to have been improvised methods not specifically mentioned by the Justice Department. One former US official described some of these practices ... as being done 'almost in juvenile detective mode.'"
Bobby Ghosh, Time: "Five Questions for the CIA IG's Interrogation Report ... 1. Who was really behind the interrogation regime? ... 2. Did the interrogations work? ... 3. What did the interrogators really do? ... 3. What did the interrogators really do? ... 5. What happened before August of 2002?"
Kathryn Jean Lopez, the National Review: On the possibility of reopening some prisoner-abuse cases: "This seems potentially shamefully dangerous."
Jeffrey H. Smith, general counsel of the CIA from 1995 to 1996, Washington Post: "If media reports are accurate, the conduct detailed in the inspector general's report was contrary to our values. It caused harm to our nation and cannot be repeated. But prosecuting those who actually carried out that behavior has consequences that could further harm our nation. Even if the attorney general concludes that a criminal charge could be brought, other factors must be considered. Sometimes broader national objectives must be given greater weight."
Nancy Pelosi may be on to something after all.
The House speaker has alleged that the CIA lied to her, and Republicans have reacted angrily to the suggestion. But a Monday ruling from a prominent federal judge is a reminder that the Agency and its employees aren't always perfectly honest. has ruled that as many as six CIA officials committed fraud in order to protect a covert agent from a 1994 eavesdropping lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth has ruled that as many as six CIA officials committed fraud in order to protect a covert agent from a 1994 eavesdropping lawsuit. Lamberth also referred Jeffrey Yeates, a CIA attorney, for disciplinary action stemming from the suit, which was brought by a former agent at the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Lamberth has delayed action until he determines if any of five others – including former CIA Director George Tenet – should face contempt charges or sanctions for failing to notify the court that an agent was no longer covert.
The DEA agent, Richard Horn, said his home in Burma was illegally wiretapped by the CIA in 1993 and that two former high-ranking CIA officials, Arthur Brown and Franklin Huddle, Jr., attempted to have Horn relocated because of their discontent with Horn’s work with Burmese officials on the country’s drug trade.
In 2000, Tenet filed court papers asking that Brown’s involvement in the case be dismissed due to his status as a covert agent. Lamberth threw out the case against Brown in 2004, and he was seemingly off the hook up -- until last year when Lamberth discovered Brown’s cover was lifted in 2002, though the CIA continued to file documents saying Brown was still covert.
Lamberth also blasted CIA Director Leon Panetta, saying Panetta has given conflicting viewpoints about what should be revealed in the Horn case.
Of course, there’s also the inevitable “He said, He said” game between Brown and John Rizzo, former acting CIA general counsel. Rizzo said the office of general counsel didn’t know about Brown’s change in status until 2005, but that one attorney -- Yeates -- knew about the change and withheld the information from the court and his supervisors. Brown has disputed Rizzo’s account.
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