Cheney Memoir Against His Presidential Loyalty Principal

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Immediately upon leaving office, the release of Department of Justice internal memos cast a far more sinister light on the former President and Vice President's instaiable appitite for war.

While former President George W. Bush quietly took up residence in the Huston suburbs, former Vice President Richard B.Cheney stayed behind in Washington. He and his daughter Liz, embarked on a media tour to sound the alarm over the new administrations "far left" agenda.

However, it soon became clear that the Cheney's focus was to validate the actions of the Bush Administration, and particularly the legal opinions coming out of the DOJ's Office of Legal Council that attempt to justify torture.

For the better part of two months, Liz Cheney defended, or attempted to defend her fathers actions and was usually left without a logical rebuttal, except "at the end of the day, they kept America safe for 8 years, " which most of the country did not agree with. In order for that statement to be true, George Bush and Dick Cheney would have had to pick up a rifle and stand a post in Afghanistan or Iraq, and we all know that didn't happen. However, we do know what happened the last time that Dick Cheney did pick up a rifle.

With Cheney's memoirs taking shape, it's clear that his distain for Geroge W. Bush goes beyond Bush's refusal to grant a Presidential pardon to Cheney's former Aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Bush did however commute Libby's sentance upon conviction in the Federal Court for purgery.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain -- and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

Some conservatives rebut the argument, noting that Bush was nothing if not stubborn in the face of political and public opposition. Commenting on the story, Joe Scarborough pointed out on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Bush was defiant about the surge in Iraq despite the polls.

When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former White House press secretary Scott McClellan told tales out of school in their own books, Cheney blasted them in the media and said that The presidency is owed loyalty, or at least that was Cheney's view at the time.

That doesn't seem to be the case any longer since his own tell-all book will soon be going to press. Cheney is telling friends that "the statute of limitations has expired" on tensions between them. Last month, Time magazine reported that, Cheney was furious at Bush for not pardoning Scooter Libby, the vice presidential aide who, in Cheney's words, "was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder" by not disclosing all he knew about who leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press.

Cheney is apparently sharing his recollections with groups of friends and associates, sort of prepping them for the disclosures to come in his 2011 book. After one group session, one Cheney associate told the Post's Barton Gellman that the former vice president is mad at 43 for being "shackled" by public opinion:

Told in one session that Bush, in his own memoirs, hoped to explore his personal feelings, Cheney responded that he had no intention of doing that.

Bush DOJ Failed To Hunt For Rightwing Extreamist

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In the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion extremist, the very real problem of extremist violence against abortion providers and clinics has gained a fresh spotlight, even though that violence is not new. After the 1993 murder of an abortion provider, Dr. David Gunn, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which made any use of “force, threat of force or physical obstruction” against doctors and patients a federal crime. The law was an attempt to put an end to the constant wave of death threats, acts of vandalism, and clinic bombings.
According to the National Abortion Federation, the “FACE law has had a clear impact on the decline in certain types of violence against clinics and providers, specifically clinic blockades.” Under the Bush Administration, however, criminal and civil enforcement of the law by the Department of Justice declined dramatically, the Washington Independent’s Daphne Eviatar reports:
The day after Dr. George Tiller was murdered, TWI obtained data revealing that under the Bush administration, criminal enforcement of the federal law designed to protect abortion providers and clinics had declined by more than 75 percent over the last eight years.
But there’s also a civil component to that federal law, known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act. That part of the law allows the attorney general to seek an injunction and compensatory damages for anyone who’s been harmed by any activity that violates the law. And it turns out that the Department of Justice over the last eight years didn’t use that part of the law to protect abortion providers, either.
Eviatar found that, according to DOJ statistics, the Bush Administration “brought only about two criminal prosecutions per year in the entire country under the FACE Act, and never more than four in any single year.” In contrast, under President Clinton the Justice Department “prosecuted 17 defendants for violations of the FACE Act in 1997 alone, and an average of about 10 per year since the law was enacted in 1994.” Evitar reports though that the Bush Justice Department had an even more abysmal record of enforcing the civil component of the FACE Act:
Yet despite these broad powers that Congress granted the attorney general in 1994 to prevent and combat violence against abortion clinics and providers, the Bush administration almost never used them. From 2000 until 2008, during the eight years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department filed only one civil case under the FACE Act. From 1994 until 1999, in contrast, in just five years of the Clinton administration, the Department filed 17 civil cases under the FACE Act — in addition to its much heavier load of criminal cases that we’ve reported before.
Between 2000 and 2008, the National Abortion Federation recorded 3,291 acts of violence against abortion providers and “at least 17 cases of ‘extreme’ violence against abortion providers in the United States, such as arson, stabbing and bomb attacks.” However, the Bush Administration’s Department of Justice “prosecuted only 11 individuals for any acts of violence against abortion clinics or providers.”

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Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.

That opinion, giving the green light for the C.I.A. to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including

waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, "was ready to go out and I concurred," Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times.

While signing off on the techniques, Mr. Comey in his e-mail provided a firsthand account of how he tried unsuccessfully to discourage use of the practices. He made a last-ditch effort to derail the interrogation program, urging Attorney General

Alberto R. Gonzales to argue at a White House meeting in May 2005 that it was "wrong."

"In stark terms I explained to him what this would look like some day and what it would mean for the president and the government," Mr. Comey wrote in a May 31, 2005, e-mail message to his chief of staff, Chuck Rosenberg. He feared that a case could be made "that some of this stuff was simply awful."

The e-mail messages are now in the hands of investigators at the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is preparing a report expected to be released this summer on the Bush administration lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh methods. The inquiry, under way for nearly five years, will be the Justice Department’s fullest public account of its role in the interrogation program, which

President Obama has ended.

In years of bitter public debate, the department has sometimes seemed like a black-and-white moral battleground over torture. The main authors of memorandums authorizing the methods —

John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury — have been widely pilloried as facilitators of torture.

Others, including Mr. Comey,

Jack Goldsmith and Daniel Levin, have largely escaped criticism because they raised questions about interrogation and the law. But a closer examination shows a more subtle picture. None of the Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the interrogation question argued that the methods were clearly illegal.

For example:
Mr. Goldsmith, now a

Harvard law professor, unnerved the C.I.A. in June 2004 by withdrawing a 2002 memorandum written by Mr. Yoo that said only pain equal to that produced by organ failure or death qualified as torture.

In addition, in a previously undisclosed letter to the agency, Mr. Goldsmith put a temporary halt to waterboarding. But he left intact a secret companion memorandum from 2002 that actually authorized the harsh methods, leaving the C.I.A. free to use all its methods except waterboarding, including wall-slamming, face-slapping, stress positions and more.

¶Mr. Levin, now in private practice, won public praise with a 2004 memorandum that opened by declaring "torture is abhorrent." But he also wrote a letter to the C.I.A that specifically approved waterboarding in August 2004, and he drafted much of Mr. Bradbury’s lengthy May 2005 opinion authorizing the 13 methods.

¶Mr. Comey, who had forced a 2004 showdown with White House officials over the

National Security Agency’s surveillance program, concurred in that Bradbury opinion. His objections focused on a second legal opinion that authorized combinations of the methods. He expressed "grave reservations" and asked for a week to revise the memorandum, warning Mr. Gonzales that "it would come back to haunt him and the department," Mr. Comey said in a 2005 e-mail message to Mr. Rosenberg.

Justice Department lawyers involved in the opinions felt torn between what was legal and what was advisable, Mr. Levin said. "Obviously you can only do that which is legal," he said in a recent interview. "But that does not mean you should automatically do something simply because it is legal."

The e-mail messages and documents provide new details about a critical year in the interrogation saga, beginning in mid-2004. The C.I.A. inspector general had questioned the legality and effectiveness of the harsh methods, prompting a review of the program. Under intense White House pressure, the Justice Department lawyers in May 2005 approved a series of opinions that reauthorized the harshest practices.

The lawyers had to interpret a 1994 antitorture law written largely with despotic foreign regimes in mind, but used starting in 2002, in effect, as a set of guidelines for American interrogators. The law defined torture as treatment "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." By that standard, a succession of Justice Department lawyers concluded that the C.I.A.’s methods did not constitute torture.

The only issues that provoked debate were waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith questioned, and some combinations of multiple techniques, which Mr. Comey resisted. Some outside experts agree that the language of the 1994 law is strikingly narrow. "There’s no doubt whatsoever that a great deal of coercive treatment that most people would call torture is not prohibited by the federal antitorture statute," said Benjamin Wittes, a

Brookings Institution scholar who has studied interrogation policy.

But many believe that even under that law, the Justice Department should have recognized that waterboarding, at least, was torture. To argue otherwise, said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a

St. John’s University law professor who has studied the interrogation memorandums, required "extraordinary contortions in language and legal analysis."

Waterboarding, the near-drowning method that Mr. Obama has described as torture, was used on three operatives for Al Qaeda in 2002 and 2003. The C.I.A. never used the technique after it was reauthorized in 2005.

Investigators Examining Interrogations, Legal Advice

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Yesterday, the Washington Post published an article on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Bush-era interrogation techniques. Greg Sargent flagged two paragraphs of the story revealing that the White House intends to release a 2004 CIA report that casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of Bush’s torture program:

When the Justice Department said seven years ago that CIA interrogators at a secret prison in Thailand could make a suspected al-Qaeda leader fear he was drowning, it prescribed precise limits: Water could be poured from a cup or small watering can onto a saturated cloth covering his mouth and nose, inhibiting breathing for up to 40 seconds. It could be repeated, after allowing three or four full breaths, for up to 20 minutes.

But when the technique was employed on Abu Zubaida and later on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al-Qaeda planner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the interrogators in several cases applied what the CIA's Office of Inspector General described in a secret 2004 report as "large volumes of water" to the cloths, explaining that their aim was to be more "poignant and convincing," according to a recently declassified Justice Department account.

To assess whether interrogators complied with the department's guidance, Senate intelligence committee investigators are interviewing those involved, examining hundreds of CIA e-mails and reviewing a classified 2005 study by the agency's lawyers of dozens of interrogation videotapes, according to government officials who said they were not authorized to be quoted by name. Officials familiar with the Justice Department's inquiries into policymaking on detainees during the Bush administration said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has not ruled out conducting a similar investigation.

The issue has attracted scrutiny because of President Obama's statement April 22 that those involved would be immune from prosecution if they "carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House."

Portions of the CIA inspector general report that have been made public and an account of detainees' experiences by the International Committee of the Red Cross highlight other potential excesses: the punching and beating of at least nine detainees in ways that appeared to go beyond authorized abdominal and facial "slaps"; the extended confinement of at least one detainee in a box so small that he had to crouch despite approval only for seated confinement; the slamming of detainees into firm walls, instead of the authorized pushing into a "false" wall that gave way; and the shackling of detainees' arms to overhead hooks or pipes, requiring that the prisoners stand for days at a time, despite the apparent absence of clear, written authorization by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for such shackling before 2005

The videotape study, which the Senate intelligence committee demanded to see in 2005 but did not receive until last year, assessed the legality of interrogations that occurred between April and December 2002. Its conclusions have not been disclosed, and the CIA destroyed the videotapes in late 2005. As early as October 2002, a lawyer for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, Jonathan Fredman, told officers at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that "the videotaping of even totally legal techniques will look 'ugly,' " a recent report by the Senate Armed Services Committee said.

Government officials familiar with the CIA's early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the "top secret" May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month's release of the Justice Department's interrogation memos.

According to excerpts included in those memos, the inspector general's report concluded that interrogators initially used harsh techniques against some detainees who were not withholding information. Officials familiar with its contents said it also concluded that some of the techniques appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994.

Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that "it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks," according to the Justice Department's declassified summary of it. The threat of such an imminent attack was cited by the department as an element in its 2002 and later written authorization for using harsh techniques.
When the report was finished, CIA official Constance Rea told a New York court in January 2008, the inspector general "notified DOJ and other relevant oversight authorities of the review's findings." But two Bush administration officials privy to its conclusions said it did not provoke a specific CIA "referral" to the department suggesting an investigation of potential criminal liability, and no such investigation was undertaken at the time.

A U.S. intelligence official, asked for comment Friday, said that at the time of the inspector general report, the agency's general counsel "took issue with the interpretations of law put forward" in that report. "The bar for criminal referrals is low -- basically the possibility that a crime may have been committed. If it was all as clear-cut as the IG narrative suggests, why were no referrals made?"

The report's conclusions nonetheless prompted CIA general counsel John A. Rizzo to request fresh statements by the Justice Department that what the agency had been doing was indeed legal. Steven G. Bradbury, then deputy assistant attorney general, responded in May 2005 by issuing three opinions explaining why the interrogations did not violate the Convention Against Torture.

Legal experts say that bringing criminal charges against the CIA interrogators or those who ordered harsh methods would be akin to prosecuting police officers for brutality, but it could require also proving that the interrogators acted in bad faith.
David Kaye, a former State Department lawyer who runs UCLA's International Human Rights Program, said, "I don't think we know . . . the mechanics of how OLC legal advice made its way to people in the field, and it's the mechanics that will help investigators know whether there was bad faith in the interrogation program on the ground."

He added that U.S. anti-torture laws bar even "the conspiracy to commit torture," and those are the provisions that "should cause concern for [any] senior-level officials" who sanctioned improper interrogations, even from a distance.