Did AG Eric Holder doublecross his boss?

When I first heard that Attorny General Eric Holder was at this late date considering prosecutions for detainee mistreatment, I assumed that he was again pondering the windown left open to him by President Obama. That is, to consider prosecuting administration officials who developed detainee treatment policies.

... Obama added that prosecutions for those who drafted the memos would be up to Attorney General Eric Holder. "With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there."
(MSNBC)

Holder had appeared to let that window close for the most part by leaving it up to bar associations to discipline administration lawyers for dispensing bad advice.

But Holder seems to have found another window of opportunity.

"For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it's appropriate for them to be prosecuted," (Obama) told reporters.

The flip side of the president's statement, of course, is that it might be appropriate to prosecute those who strayed from the guidelines for detainee treatment provided by the Bush administration. Those who overstepped the lines drawn by the administration, in other words.

Have we ever had a president so artful in his deployment of English words and phrases? Since Bill Clinton, anyway?

On the one hand, Obama committed to backing the CIA in the name of unity. But he left the door open to prosecuting agents who overstepped the authority granted by the old administration. It is something of a balancing act. One would hope that agents who went beyond their orders have already received in-house discipline. Holder could go well beyond that to charging agents with war crimes, and the CIA might not feel fully supported by the administration if that occurs.

As with Clinton, it helps to keep a magnifying glass on hand to deal with the fine print when the POTUS opens his mouth.


Is it politics?

The CIA, of course, also faces criticism from the left in Congress, stemming from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's charges that the CIA regularly lies to Congress. Pelosi never did much to make her case, but a handful of Democrats recently tried to put a tooth or two in the charge.

Is the Holder story part of a political battle in the federal government among factions in the Democratic Party?

If Obama does not treat carefully, he risks having his CIA turning against him as it did on occasion with President Bush.

Waterboarding in the news

News about waterboarding has spiked this week amid revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped waterboarding sessions.

The most interesting part of the Reuters account occurred on the third of three pages (a pox on the inverted pyramid!).

He said the techniques were "lawful, safe and effective," and approved by the Justice Department and executive branch. But the CIA wanted to make sure it was within the law, "So, on its own, the CIA began to videotape interrogations," he said.

He said the CIA stopped the taping because officials concluded it was not needed as a backup to the agency's other means of documenting interrogations. It destroyed the tapes after making sure they had no more intelligence value and were not relevant to any inquiries.

(Reuters)

I've known too many journalists to trust their paraphrasing, and in the above account two paraphrases appear to work against each other.
1) CIA taped to makes sure it was within the law
2) CIA stopped taping because taping not needed to back up other documentation of interrogations

If they're taping to make sure the technique is within the law, they really only need to tape a given technique once. If that's the sole reason they're doing the taping then no additional reason is needed to stop taping. The second paraphrase implies that the taping was done to provide backup documentation.

Thus, the statement that the CIA stopped the taping because the additional documentation was not needed implies another purpose for the taping.

If I'm the editor I have the reporter(s) clarify that point.

*****

CIA sticking it to the administration, 2004

Because I think it's an important story, and because I see no shame in latching onto Powerline's coattails in order to update the reporting, here's more on the bureaucratic war within the executive branch of the US government:

Pillar's "management team" at the CIA, where he was employed as the national intelligence officer on the Near East/South Asia desk, approved the appearance. According to Novak, the ground rules for the speech were based on the "Lindley Rule," which holds that the speaker, his audience and the event are not to be disclosed, "but the substance of what he said can be reported." That substance, apparently, was a harsh assessment of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq.

Think about that: A senior, unelected CIA official--Paul Pillar--was given agency approval to anonymously attack Bush administration policies less than two months before the November 2, 2004, presidential election. That Pillar was among the most strident of these frequent critics--usually in off-the-record speeches to gatherings of foreign policy experts and business leaders--was well known to his colleagues in the intelligence community and to Bush administration policymakers. His was not an isolated case; CIA officials routinely trashed Bush administration policy decisions, often with official approval, in the months leading up to the Iraq War and again before the election. Pillar, who had complained to a CIA spokesman that someone had violated the ground rules by providing his name to Novak, simply got caught.

(Daily Standard)

So, the CIA set up background press conferences ("not for attribution"stuff) so that CIA officers could criticize the policies of their bosses in the Bush administration. That is a jaw-dropper of a story, but I haven't seen the mainstream media pick up on it at all. Even though they were no doubt present at the press conferences where it was being done.

Or most of them (except for the one who identified Paul Pillar's role) thought that secret was worth keeping.

To make the link to the most obvious parallell, Joe Wilson wrote his now-infamous New York Times op-ed piece, "What I didn't Find in Africa," with the permission of the CIA. You can't ordinarily just go on a clandestine CIA mission and later write a public story about it because you feel like it.
***

The CIA has issued an official statement regarding Rowan Scarborough's book about the bureaucratic war ("Sabotage").
Powerline sees it as a classic non-denial denial.

More of the CIA at war with the administration

Working from a NewsMax story, I found a source story from across the pond.

The headline? "Swiss investigator is criticized for allowing anonymous accusations about CIA prisons"

The Swiss investigator, actually Swiss lawmaker Dick Marty, offered a reason why he allowed anonymous accusations. He had to protect the accusers.

And why did the accusers need protection? Some were apparently with the CIA.

Responding to criticism of his use of anonymous sources from a European Parliament panel, Marty said some of his informants were officials who needed to be protected.

He said some of his sources came from the CIA. Under questioning from lawmakers, Marty said some of those were dissatisfied with the detention policy pursued under Donald Rumsfeld when he was the U.S. secretary of defense.
(International Herald Tribune)

Now, the Valerie Plame affair brought us the notion that leaking classified information requires an investigation. Yet we didn't see an investigation into the leaks regarding the NSA surveillance program. Odds are we won't see one in this case, either, and the reason is probably because the Justice Department is politically sympathetic to the CIA.

The Bush administration has been fighting the current from day one, it seems.

The CIA's "True Confessions" and what to make of it

Via Powerline, we're pointed to this op-ed by Angelo M. Codevilla:

July 2, 2007 -- THE CIA last week released a heavily redacted version of a 1973 report what it considers its fathers' sins. There was nothing new: In the '70s and '80s, agency employees on all sides of the quarrels over what the CIA should do shopped their versions of the report to whoever would listen on the congressional Intelligence Committees (including myself) as well as to the press.

These quarrels were rooted in the deep political, social and personal animosities that split the CIA's founding generation. Riding the post-Vietnam/Watergate wave of U.S. politics, one CIA faction wrote the report to discredit and oust their bureaucratic rivals.

(New York Post)

The piece obviously underscores Powerline's thesis about factions within the executive branch acting to influence policy, including the undermining of the current president (as by giving the OK to Joe Wilson to publish a little piece about his trip to Niger).

Give it a read--it's not particularly long, and it's got some tidbits like this in it:

It is not sufficiently remembered that in the 1950s the CIA helped arm Castro (against the U.S. embassy's wishes) and acted to destabilize the regime he was trying to overthrow. The released report says nothing of this, for the same reason that it mentions nothing about the CIA's sponsorship of Iraq's Ba'ath party, and of its 1959 hiring of a young thug named Saddam Hussein, or of its romance with the PLO. The CIA retains illusions and affections.

The Plame saga drags on

The Wilsons have a lawsuit pending against the Bush administration, but there's always time in Washington to delve into these matters between attempts to hamstring the war effort.

Of note, I believe that Bill Bennett, on his radio program "Morning in America" had held that Plame was not covert when her name was leaked to the press as a CIA operative. I had my doubts, and wondered at his basis for the claim (certainly it had been questioned, but I'd never heard it confirmed that Plame did not maintain covert status).
This Capitol Hill testimony sets that to rest (much better than Patrick Fitzgerald every accomplished it, I would say).

Valerie Plame put a glamorous face and a personal story to Democrats' criticism of the Bush administration Friday, telling a House committee that White House and State Department officials "carelessly and recklessly" blew her CIA cover in a politically motivated smear of her husband.

Plame, the operative at the center of the leak scandal that resulted in last week's criminal conviction of a former top White House official, created more of a stir by her presence on Capitol Hill than by her testimony.

She revealed little new information about the case, which sparked a federal investigation and brought perjury and obstruction of justice convictions of Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. No one has been charged with leaking her identity.

(AP)

It does not excuse the administration at all (if there was any wrongdoing), but Plame put her job on the line when she recommended her husband for the job and he wrote about it.

Wilson's article was fundamentally inaccurate, and of course attention began to focus on how Wilson got a gig like that in the first place.
The Wilson lawsuit strikes me as frankly hilarious. I cannot imagine what sort of evidence the Wilsons have that makes them think the suit has merit; most likely it's designed as a fishing expedition (hoping to search for the evidence by getting administration officials on the witness stand). And to keep the issue in people's minds so that George W. Bush will lose the White House in '08.

The most underreported story of 2006 drags on into 2007

The Powerline folks have stayed after this one; I continue to agree that it's a potentially huge story that isn't getting the attention it probably deserves.

That is, the resistance within the executive branch of the federal government to the executive office. Agencies such as the CIA have apparently intentionally leaked information damaging to the administration where whistle-blower statutes seem to offer no protection--and they're getting away with it.

In today's New York Sun Josh Gerstein reports on the government's reponse to his Freedom of Information Act request regarding the Justice Department's leak investigations: "Leak probes stymied, FBI memos show." The story is mystifying. As I read it I wondered why no grand jury has been convened and evidence gathered the old-fashioned way.
(Powerline permalink)