Double-think Dubya is at it again. He first creates a ruse that he is going to change the doctrine about torture but then he persuades his buddies to drop legislation that would chisel in stone that legislation. It is a great way to get credit for something that really doesn't happen. Convince America there is no reason to worry about torture anymore, but then go on doing the same. He is recreating a secret while Rice covers for him by taking the blame and deflecting criticism to a legal technicality.
DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON, NY TIMES - At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say. . . The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.
But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.
In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy."
Complete Article
White House Fought New Curbs on Interrogations, Officials Say
January 13, 2005
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - At the urging of the White House,
Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last
month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use
of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence
officers, Congressional officials say.
The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure
arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central
Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of
top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the
mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen
other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.
The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2
vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They
would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a
prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and
would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to
report to Congress about the methods they were using.
But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional
officials said, four senior members from the House and
Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after
the White House expressed opposition.
In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and
made available by the White House on Wednesday in response
to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security
adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds
that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to
which they are not now entitled under applicable law and
policy."
Earlier, in objecting to a similar measure in a Senate
version of the military authorization bill, the Defense
Department sent a letter to Congress saying that the
department "strongly urges the Senate against passing new
legislation concerning detention and interrogation in the
war on terrorism" because it is unnecessary.
The Senate restrictions had not been in House versions of
the military or intelligence bills.
In interviews on Wednesday, both Senator Susan Collins of
Maine, a Republican negotiator, and Representative Jane
Harman of California, a Democratic negotiator, said the
lawmakers had ultimately decided that the question of
whether to extend the restrictions to intelligence officers
was too complex to be included in the legislation.
"The conferees agreed that they would drop the language but
with the caveat that the intelligence committees would take
up the issue this year," Ms. Collins said.
Ms. Harman said, "If there are special circumstances around
some intelligence interrogations, we should understand that
before we legislate."
Some Democratic Congressional officials said they believed
that the Bush administration was trying to maintain some
legal latitude for the C.I.A. to use interrogation
practices more extreme than those permitted by the
military.
In its report last summer, the independent commission on
the Sept. 11 attacks recommended that the United States
develop policies to guarantee that captured terrorists were
treated humanely.
Martin Lederman, a former Justice Department lawyer who
left the department in 2002, said in an interview on
Wednesday that he believed that the administration had
"always wanted to leave a loophole where the C.I.A. could
engage in actions just up to the line of torture."
The administration has said almost nothing about the C.I.A.
operation to imprison and question terror suspects
designated as high-value detainees, even as it has
expressed disgust about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq. Senior officials have sought in recent public
statements to emphasize that the government will continue
to abide by federal laws that prohibit torture.
At his confirmation hearing last week on his nomination to
be attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales said he found
torture abhorrent.
The issue of the C.I.A.'s treatment of detainees first
arose after agency officials sought legal guidance on how
far its employees and contractors could go in interrogating
terror suspects and whether the law barred the C.I.A. from
using extreme methods, including feigned drowning, in the
interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda
leaders captured by the United States. He was apprehended
in Pakistan in early 2002.
An August 2002 legal opinion by the Justice Department said
that interrogation methods just short of those that might
cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of
bodily function or even death" could be allowable without
being considered torture. The administration disavowed that
opinion last summer after the classified legal opinion was
publicly disclosed.
A new opinion made public late last month, signed by James
B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, explicitly rejected
torture and adopted more restrictive standards to define
it.
But a cryptic footnote to the new document about the
"treatment of detainees" referred to what the officials
said were other still-classified opinions. The footnote
meant, the officials said, that coercive techniques
approved by the Justice Department under the looser
interpretation of the torture statutes were still lawful
even under the new, more restrictive interpretation.
Current and former government officials said specific
interrogation methods were addressed in a series of
still-secret documents, including an August 2002 one by the
Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.'s use of some
20 interrogation practices. The legal opinion was sent to
the C.I.A. via the National Security Council at the White
House.
Among the procedures approved by the document was
waterboarding, in which a subject is made to believe he
might be drowned.
The document was intended to guide the C.I.A. in its
interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah and a handful of other
high-level detainees. Instead, it led to a series of
exchanges between the Justice Department and the
intelligence agency as they debated exact procedures to be
employed against individual detainees.
At times, their discussion included an assessment of
whether specific measures, on a detainee by detainee basis,
would cause such pain as to be considered torture.
In addition to Ms. Collins and Ms. Harman, the lawmakers in
the conference committee negotiations were Senator Joseph
I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and Representative
Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan.
The Senate measure to impose new restrictions on the use of
extreme interrogation measures, drafted by Senator Richard
J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, was in an amendment
introduced by Mr. Lieberman and Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona. And in little-noticed comments on
the Senate floor in December, Mr. Durbin complained that
the decision by conferees to delete the measure had been
"troublesome."
"I think the intelligence community should be held to the
same standards as the Department of Defense," Mr. Durbin
said in those remarks, "and taking this language out of the
bill will make that very difficult to monitor, as I hoped
we would be able to do."
A Congressional Democrat said the White House stance had
left the impression "that the administration wanted an
escape hatch to preserve the option of using torture"
against prisoners held by the C.I.A.
The only public statement from the Bush administration
about the kinds of restrictions proposed by Mr. Durbin came
last June, when the Defense Department expressed strong
opposition to a measure in the military authorization bill.
That measure, adopted by the Senate, also imposed
restrictions prohibiting torture as well as cruel, inhuman
and other degrading treatment but it applied only to
Defense Department personnel.
In a letter to Congress, Daniel J. Dell'Orto, the
Pentagon's principal deputy counsel, criticized the
legislation as unnecessary, saying it would "leave the
current state of the law exactly where it is." Mr.
Dell'Orto also criticized as "onerous" and inappropriate
other provisions in the measure that would require the
Pentagon to submit annual facility-by-facility reports to
Congress on the status of detainees.
Ultimately, the House did not include the measure in its
version of that military bill, and the final version of the
legislation included only nonbinding language expressing a
sense of Congress that American personnel should not engage
in torture.
Correction: January 15, 2005, Saturday:
A front-page article on Thursday about legislation
restricting the use of extreme interrogation measures by
American intelligence officers referred incorrectly to the
release of a letter in which Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser, opposed the legislation. While the letter
was indeed provided on Wednesday in response to requests by
The New York Times, it was initially made public as a White
House news release on Oct. 19.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/politics/13intel.html?ex=1106894723&ei=1&en=0fc012be470a699b
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