Here's something that happened on Friday that maybe got lost in the Pelosi Shuffle the media was so invested in this week, and which started out that very same way, with Andrea Mitchell asking Sen. Ron Wyden about what Pelosi knew, or actually in a rare case asking what it said about the CIA's credibility instead--but still talking he said/she said. Check the video:
Note how easily and dismissively Wyden moves away from the Pelosi question, for whatever reason, and zeroes in on what for him is a more central question: why aren't we talking about the way in which the Bush administration consistently failed to inform properly? He claims he was "kept in the dark" until 2006, linking the Bush administration's failures to the 1947 National Security Act, which he refers to a couple of times. That's a nice summary link which is then applied to an analysis of the NSA wiretapping scandal--another prime example of the administration totally holding out on Congress. But it has this key section:
Under current statute, the President is to ensure that the congressional intelligence committees are kept “fully and currently informed” of U.S. intelligence activities, including any “significant anticipated intelligence activity.” According to legislative history, the term “fully and currently informed,” is intended to mean that complete and timely notice of actions and policies is provided, and that the committees will be informed of intelligence activities in such detail as the committees may require.
Further, the Senate in report language said it expected the executive branch not to limit itself to providing full and complete information upon request from the committees, but to affirmatively keep the committees fully and currently informed.
It's on this basis which Wyden is making his complaint. Mitchell waves a copy of the CIA's briefing schedule and claims it shows a series of proper briefings on torture procedures, but Wyden says they were still not properly informed. For an administration which was already torturing before they had whipped up a legal "justification" for it, and were using it to extract false confessions to once again "justify" a new war against Iraq, I'm afraid it's all beside the point compared to that.
But it's good to see Wyden shifting the focus back to the Bush administration...and that is in fact where the discussion lies, not the CIA or intel units themselves. The way Congress was briefed was led from the top, principally Dick Cheney. Heck, if he was telling them how to torture to get info the intel agencies already told him didn't exist, why wouldn't he tell the CIA to lie about what they were doing to Congress?
Wyden also gets some digs in on Cheney himself, saying he (Wyden) is pretty confused about why the former VP wants all those documents released, because Wyden seemed confident there wasn't going to be anything to exonerate him. So he joined Cheney in challenging to have all of the material declassified, including a letter of complaint regarding intel darkness along with two other Senators.
Wyden goes on to say he really thinks a special commission of some kind is necessary to look into all this, and I think as a result of the Pelosi nonsense there is a definite Briar Patch Syndrome working here--Wyden was almost smirking when talking about declassifying the documents and calling for more investigation.
Note how Wyden didn't defend Pelosi in the least, except by way of saying the CIA lied to them all the time, or at least omitted and delayed. If she has to go, politically speaking, with the reward being some kind of toothful investigation, is it worth it? Or--gasp--would it simply be the right thing to do?
Amid the noise from Third Way centrists like uberelite David Broder, suggesting we'd all be better off if we just "walked on by" (to quote another disgusting media elitist), Oregon's senior Senator has put himself out front for the more rationally composed among us, going on Rachel Maddow's show last night to strongly affirm Bush admin interrogations as "torture" and declaring himself open to prosecutions if evidence warrants. It's worth watching the whole thing, but Wyden's excerpt starts around 3:30:
He doesn't go too far out on a limb with affirmative statements, but does establish that the locus of control for investigating is the Department of Justice, and that he will be actively involved in passing any information out of his intel committee to AG Holder and the DoJ. A sampling of his comments:
First of all, it is very clear that waterboarding is torture. We prosecuted after WWII the Japanese, for doing it to our folks...I think the President has laid out a plan for moving forward. First, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that I serve on, we're out of the gates now. We've got people in place, we're doing the inquiry, and given the fact that many of us protested these interrogation techniques as soon as we found out, we are very motivated to get to the truth. When we get that information, certainly if there are matters that need to be followed up on, such as matters before the Justice Department, we will get it to them...The Justice Department is an independent agency. It's our job to find the facts....I was one of 19 Senators who opposed Judge Bybee at the time. I was particularly troubled by his approach to the Geneva Conventions, matters that he'd written on. With respect to the issue of impeachment, that's before the House of Representatives. If it comes to the US Senate I'd sit as a juror and at that point I'd be making judgements.
Emphasis mine, because we desperately need more pushback on this simple truth: waterboarding was torture. I hope it spreads. Overall, good talk. Let's see the action behind it.
A column that hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention in the Oregon blogosphere so far is one by the terrific Glenn Greenwald, now publishing at Salon.com. In it, Greenwald takes Senators Feinstein and our own Ron Wyden to task, for what he called backtracking on standards both had touted strongly over the last year regarding torture. Both had separately championed the Army Field Manual as a strong guide of accepted non-coercive techniques, and urged a unified American standard for all agencies following one guideline--which they said they hoped the AFM would fulfill.
I want to try to leave Feinstein out of it; so far it doesn't seem her office has tried to respond to his allegations in any case. But Wyden's people did make a response, so above the fold are what Greenwald surmises, and how Wyden's office responded. First Glenn:
Wyden's comments were even worse:
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, another top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said he would consult with the C.I.A. and approve interrogation techniques that went beyond the Army Field Manual as long as they were “legal, humane and noncoercive.” But Mr. Wyden declined to say whether C.I.A. techniques ought to be made public.
What makes this so notable is that, for the last year, Feinstein and Wyden were both insistent that the only way to end torture and restore America's standing in the world was to require CIA compliance with the Army Field Manual -- period. But as long as George Bush was President, it was cheap and easy for Feinstein and Wyden to argue that, because they knew there was no chance it would ever happen.
Senator Wyden could not feel more strongly that Congress and the Administration need to establish clear-cut interrogation rules that apply to all agencies and that ensure that the United States never again uses interrogation techniques that are anything but legal, humane and noncoercive. In fact “legal, humane and noncoercive” are the only words directly attributable to him in the New York Times story. As I mentioned in our conversation, I believe that your article unfairly ascribes positions to Senator Wyden that he did not express in his interview with the New York Times or anyone else.
Glenn's rebuttal was that he thinks her later acknowledgement that perhaps the AFM isn't the best repository of the unified standard, is a backtrack from a unified standard or one that would allow the CIA or other intel agencies to use their own rules. With a lot of respect for Glenn, after talking with top Wyden aide Josh Kardon, asking a series of written questions I think he's gotten a little worried about a backtrack where it doesn't necessarily seem one has taken place.
(Pat's on a bit of a roll lately. This one is syndicate-quality, IMO... - promoted by torridjoe)
I was going to post a list of links to "related stories" that might justify why a person would wonder whether the Democrats leave their spines behind when they go to work. But a quick Google search provided such a long and extensive list ... who's got the time?
Earlier this year, Senator Ron Wyden got a bit of ink -- including a mention in Jane Mayer's article on the Central Intelligence Agency's black sites in The New Yorker -- for putting a hold on the nomination of John Rizzo as general counsel of the CIA. As a result of the hold, the Bush administration withdrew the nomination.
But as articles in the International Herald Tribune and elsewhere pointed out, by the time Wyden placed his hold, Rizzo had already served as acting general counsel for most of the past six years.
In August, I wrote a letter to Wyden, asking him whether his hold on Rizzo's nomination to permanent status would have "any effect on his status as de facto general counsel at the CIA."
Yesterday, of course, news came out that the CIA had destroyed "at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program."
According to the article from The New York Times:
The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.
As the general counsel to the CIA, there's a vanishingly small possibility that John Rizzo was not involved in any decisions about what did or did not "expose agency officials to legal risks" or whether the existence of the videotapes should be shared with the various committees investigating both the 9/11 attacks and CIA detention programs.
In his response to me -- coincidentally dated Halloween -- Wyden says he placed his hold on Rizzo because of his demonstrated willingness to "let major programs go forward without a firm legal foundation in place", referring specifically to the 2002 Justice Department legal opinion on what constitutes torture.
At Wyden's August town hall, I asked him whether he trusted the Bush administration. My interpretation of his "trust but verify" comment then was that deep down Wyden did trust the administration to do the right thing, despite years of obvious lying to Congress, the American people, and the rest of the world. Maybe even to themselves. After I posted about his remark, one of his aides reportedly told torridjoe from Loaded Oyrgun that "Wyden does NOT trust the President on Iraq, Iran and civil liberties."
Wyden's Halloween letter to me ends this way:
I am pleased the the President has withdrawn Mr. Rizzo's nomination, and I am hopeful that the President will now pick somebody who will ensure that our national counterterrorism programs have the solid legal foundation they need.
Why would we expect these things from Gordon Smith? When he gets an order from Mitch McConnell on how to vote, that's how he votes. It's so much easier than having to think for yourself. And it leaves a lot more time for golfing!
It just goes to show how valuable an undistinguished, unprincipled backbencher can be in the Senate.
Let's make sure all the voters know where Gordon Smith, member of the party of "family values", stands on torture:
(a diary I promised myself to write, but find myself rescued once again by the community. Here NoL quotes JAGs, the sine qua non of military law: "The Rule of Law is fundamental to our existence as a civilized nation. The Rule of Law is not a goal which we merely aspire to achieve; it is the floor below which we must not sink." Indeed. - promoted by torridjoe)
Recently, the Oregonian's resident right-wing crank David Reinhard wrote the obligatory and trite column repeating the right's talking points advocating waterboarding and torture:
TORTURE, WATERBOARDING AND THE LAW
Thursday, November 01, 2007
David Reinhard
The Oregonian
But is any and all waterboarding torture and therefore illegal? I don't think so. First, if all waterboarding is torture, why does the U.S. government waterboard its own folks in survival training programs? It doesn't gouge out trainees' eyes or rip out fingernails to get them ready to withstand the horrors of capture. Is it because waterboarding is safe and painless?
...
If your answer is that waterboarding is, or should be, illegal and used only in limited situations with a wink and a nod, you really haven't answered in a principled way. You fudge rather than face the issue. It may make you feel warm and virtuous, but it's meaningless. You still favor waterboarding when push comes to shove. You're just willing to let others (presidents and interrogators who could be prosecuted under the wink-and-a-nod construction) do the dirty work.
If you oppose all waterboarding, because you deem it torture and we should never torture, you're at least bringing some moral clarity to the issue. But the "never justified" stand flunks the ticking bomb test. It fails to balance the temporary distress of the al-Qaida operative against the lives of his likely victims.
...
I mean, by anyone's standards, that column is just weak. It is laughably simplistic and well, just plain dumb. It's your standard right-wing "analysis". Reinhard had nothing new or insightful to add to the specious rantings that we have already read on every right-wing blog and heard from every zombified Bushie sychophant on Fox News. (Torture, naked pyramids, waterboarding, all are now a part of those vaunted "family values", I guess.)
A few questions for Mr. Reinhard that might require him to go beyond phoning it in:
(Excellent summary. Restoring habeas should be a Congressional priority, and I expect all non-Smith candidates to back that priority. - promoted by torridjoe)
Gordon Smith has no respect for our fundamental Constitutional rights, including the right to be free from arbitrary arrest by a tyrannical government. The party bosses ordered him to vote for the Military Commissions Act, so he did.
Included in the bill, passed by Republican majorities in the Senate yesterday and the House on Wednesday, are unique rules that bar terrorism suspects from challenging their detention or treatment through traditional habeas corpus petitions. They allow prosecutors, under certain conditions, to use evidence collected through hearsay or coercion to seek criminal convictions.
The bill rejects the right to a speedy trial and limits the traditional right to self-representation by requiring that defendants accept military defense attorneys. Panels of military officers need not reach unanimous agreement to win convictions, except in death penalty cases, and appeals must go through a second military panel before reaching a federal civilian court.
By writing into law for the first time the definition of an "unlawful enemy combatant," the bill empowers the executive branch to detain indefinitely anyone it determines to have "purposefully and materially" supported anti-U.S. hostilities. Only foreign nationals among those detainees can be tried by the military commissions, as they are known, and sentenced to decades in jail or put to death.
At the same time, the bill immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year. It gives the president a dominant but not exclusive role in setting the rules for future interrogations of terrorism suspects.
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