In case anybody still cares about this stuff...
Briefing Congress and Destroying Torture TapesBy: emptywheel Monday June 14, 2010 2:38 pm
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As I mentioned in this post, I’ve been weeding through the documents released under FOIA to Judicial Watch last week. I think they suggest there’s a much closer relationship between the CIA misrepresentations on Congressional Briefings and the destruction of the torture tapes than we’ve known before.
Nancy Pelosi Was Proved Fucking RightAs you might recall, Judicial Watch pursued this FOIA because they thought they were going to catch Nancy Pelosi in a lie.
After the torture memos were released, the torture apologists tried to claim that Congress had been briefed on–and had approved–of torture. But Pelosi pointed out that when CIA briefed her in September 2002, they did not tell her and Goss that CIA had already gotten into the torture business. In spite of the fact that that was completely consistent with Porter Goss’ tales of Congressional briefing, the press took Pelosi’s story as an accusation that the CIA had lied. So the right wing transparency group Judicial Watch FOIAed the records of Congressional briefings, with a focus on proving that Pelosi had lied about having been briefed about the torture that had already happened.
Perhaps in response to this hullabaloo, the CIA’s Inspector General started a review of Congressional–particularly Pelosi–briefings on June 2, 2009. After about six weeks of reviewing their documentation, they came to the following conclusion (starting on PDF 27):
* Pelosi was briefed on April 2002, before CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah, and in September 2002, in the briefing under discussion.
* CIA’s own records regarding the September 4, 2002 briefing are so erroneous they show Jane Harman, not Pelosi, received the briefing.
* The only CIA record on the content of the September 4, 2002 briefing is the set of cables between Jose Rodriguez, (probably) Jonathan Fredman, and one other CTC person; this is the cable altered after the fact.
* People from the Directorate of Operations, and James Pavitt personally, repeatedly made claims about the content of the Pelosi briefing over the years, yet none of that sourced any first-hand knowledge or documentation.
That is, as is the case with CIA’s other briefings on torture, they have no fucking clue what they briefed to Pelosi.
Which leaves Pelosi and Goss’ consistent claim that CIA didn’t even tell them they had already waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times by the time they briefed them.
Creating the Illusion of Congressional OversightBut the bigger news, as I pointed out earlier, is that the CIA appears to have been crafting a record of Congressional Briefing in conjunction with their efforts to destroy the torture tapes.
As my earlier post laid out, Jose Rodriguez briefed Pelosi and Goss on September 4, 2002. That was the the day before–according to an October 25, 2002 cable (see PDF 3)–folks at CIA HQ started talking in earnest about the danger of the torture tapes. The following day, the briefers altered their record of the meeting (see PDF 84 and PDF 11-12), though we don’t know what the change entailed. No official Memorandum for the Record was ever made of the briefing and there is no record of Stan Moskowitz weighing in on the accuracy of CTC’s version of the meeting (though he did receive a BCC of it). In other words, CTC made a record of the briefing at the same time as they were laying a plan to destroy the torture tapes, and CIA deviated from standard policy by not making any other record of the briefing (though not completing MFRs of torture briefings appears to have become a habit).
As a side note, I’m not certain, but I believe Jonathan Fredman is one of the other two people involved–along with Jose Rodriguez–in this. On PDF 7 of this set, the IG investigation into Pelosi’s briefings describe the last set of documents in its possession as one that someone turned over to DNI leadership on March 23, 2009. On that date, Jonathan Fredman worked at DNI, making him a likely person to have been asked for his documentation on briefing Congress. The description notes that “he, Director (D)/CTC
” and someone else did the briefing. PDF 11 of the same set quotes from that email: “On 4 September, D/CTC, C/CTC/LGL, and provided notification…” which I believe means Fredman–C/CTC/LGL–was the second of three people in the briefing. PDF 84 of this set shows the actual email. This notes that the third person at the briefing was a CTC/Reports person. If I’m right and Fredman had to turn over his documentation, the notice of the “BCC” to Stan Moskowitz would mean that he wrote the email (because otherwise the BCC wouldn’t show up). A later description says someone–whom I believe to be Fredman, given the CTC/LGL return address–showed it to Rodriguez who determined it to be “short and sweet.” In other words, Fredman, one guy on the hook for translating (or mistranslating) DOJ’s limits to the torturers in the field, may have been the guy helping Rodriguez to tweak that record of the briefing.
But the alteration of the email on the Pelosi-Goss briefing is not the only temporal tie between the destruction of the tapes and the claims about Congressional briefings. As the exchange of emails from PDF 77-81 makes clear, it took almost a month for the CIA to get around to finalizing a cable describing what happened when they briefed Bob Graham and Richard Shelby on September 27. In an email exchange dated October 24, there was some discussion about what should be included, with one email asking “Why not include the names–we did in the HPSCI cable.” It appears that this person wanted Graham, Shelby, and their staffers named by name in the CIA’s records (the draft of the cable at that point referred to them only by title, whereas later versions of the cable–see PDF 88–include Graham and Shelby’s names, and presumably those of their staffers). This exchange–the effort to tailor the record of Congressional notification–took place the day before CIA HQ tried to authorize the taping over of videotapes each day (see PDF 3).
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Much More: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/06/14/briefing-congress-and-destroying-torture-tapes/
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