Closing in on Bush's Torture Cabal: Who Will Take the Fall?

An interview in Esquire magazine of John Yoo, former Bush attorney for the White House's Office of Legal Counsel, and author of two controversial torture authorization memos, may give a hint of what kind of defense Yoo will be present if he decides (under threat of subpoena) to appear before John Conyer's House Judiciary Committee on May 9. Of course, he may decide (or be forced) to fight any appearance. But when career prosecutors start thinking War Crimes Act, and Yoo wakes up and discovers he's expendable, then he might feel differently.

This comes out in Yoo's interview (with the portion below reproduced from TPMMuckraker, bold emphasis added). Note that the time Yoo is talking about is after torture techniques were approved and apparently directed by Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and others in Bush's National Security Council's Principals Committee. The approval came supposedly at the behest of the CIA, who were frustrated with the interrogation of Abu Zubayda, captured in Pakistan in March 2002. (But note, there was an even earlier approval by President Bush, in early February 2002, of which more below.)

Yoo: The interrogation question came up, I think, in March [2002], when Abu Zubaydah was captured. That's what provoked that question …

Esquire: You weren't under extraordinary time pressure?

Yoo: We were under time pressure.

Esquire: Days, weeks?

Yoo: The final version we didn't get done till August [2002]. But we would show drafts before.

Esquire: They were taking action?

Yoo: They needed to have a sense before it was finalized what the basic outlines are.

Esquire: How long did it take to give an answer, go ahead do it?

Yoo: I don't remember.

Esquire: Weeks, months?

Yoo: Probably weeks.

Esquire: So that's a fair amount of time pressure, Zubaydah's in custody.

Yoo: If you had the luxury of time, you'd spend years on this, without a doubt.

Esquire: What concerns came up, back and forth with the White House?

Yoo: There wasn't a lot of back and forth -- people would say this is wrong, you need to delete this. I think that there was no pressure from any other agency from within the department that the opinion was going too far -- or that it wasn't going far enough. It was very much hands off. That doesn't surprise me considering how sensitive the issue was, people wanted the office I think to take the full responsibility.

Deniability and Videotapes

The "office" in question is the Office of Legal Counsel, and Yoo seems to be making the point that, while officially there was "no pressure," in fact, the memo authorizing torture was vetted by others. Furthermore, if anything went wrong, the OLC, and likely Yoo himself, would "take the full responsibility."

This makes weird sense if you understand that in the world of covert operations, deniability is essential. Sometimes it seems preserving deniability is another quaint artifact of the past in this brave new world of neo-con America, as suggested by President Bush's admission that he knew of the Principals meetings, and "approved." (How Bush can say this and still preserve deniability is examined below.)

"Well, we started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And, yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved" …

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, we might remember, was one of the interrogations videotaped by the CIA and subsequently destroyed, as reported by the Washington Post last December. At that time, the issue was whether or not waterboarding Zubaydah -- the preferred CIA technique -- had produced any information of value, or whether the FBI's more traditional forms of interrogation had been more productive. Underneath this controversy was another one regarding the value of Abu Zubaydah's statements in the first place.