He told the Senate that Pentagon interrogation
methods were "plain vanilla," but e-mails reveal
his top staff met weekly with FBI officials who said they were
torture.
By Mark Benjamin
Aug. 28, 2007 | WASHINGTON | Salon
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will leave office Sept. 17
with a reputation for being untruthful. During his repeated
appearances before Congress earlier this year to explain
the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales answered "I
don't recall" or some variation as many as 70 times
at a sitting. When his replacement comes to Capitol Hill
for confirmation, lawmakers hope they will hear nothing but
the truth.
But one of the men most often mentioned as his replacement
may have some of the same trouble with the truth. Since rumors
of Gonzales' departure surfaced last week, speculation about
his successor has centered on Michael Chertoff, the secretary
of the Department of Homeland Security. Just as Gonzales, under
oath before Congress, failed to recall whether there was dissension
within the Bush administration over a controversial war-on-terror-related
policy, so Michael Chertoff seems to have suffered a similar
lapse of memory while under oath before Congress when pressed
on a different terror-related policy. Gonzales pleaded ignorance
of a rift within the administration over warrantless wiretapping;
Chertoff has denied knowledge of interrogation techniques that
are tantamount to torture, despite regular attendance by his
top aides at meetings on the subject.
"If Mr. Chertoff is nominated, the Senate needs to ask
him some very tough questions about what he knew about the
abuses at Guantánamo," said Hina Shamsi from Human
Rights First.
When Chertoff appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs on Feb. 2, 2005, the subject
was not interrogations. The panel was weighing Chertoff's nomination
to his current post as secretary of homeland security. He was
promptly confronted on the topic, however, by Sen. Carl Levin,
D-Mich. Levin's staff had dug up copies of curious FBI e-mail
traffic about interrogations at the Guantánamo prison
in 2002 and 2003, when Chertoff was head of the criminal division
at the Department of Justice.
That was a pivotal year at the military prison. The Pentagon
was institutionalizing a brutal interrogation program approved
by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Interrogation
teams at the prison employed forced nudity, sleep deprivation,
isolation and sexual humiliation, among other tactics. During
that time, for example, a detainee named Mohammed al-Kahtani
was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator,
to wear women's underwear, and to perform "dog tricks" on
a leash. He was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours on 48 out of
54 consecutive days.
FBI interrogators assigned to Guantánamo had balked
at the methods employed by the DOD. Given its long institutional
knowledge about legal and effective interrogations, the FBI
thought the military interrogations were extremely problematic.
E-mail strings documenting the FBI's objections have been well
publicized.
At the February 2005 hearing, Levin questioned Chertoff about
an e-mail obtained by Levin's staff: a May 10, 2004, communication
from one FBI official, with the name redacted, to another FBI
official, T.J. Harrington. The e-mail rehashes the FBI objections
to the military interrogations at Guantánamo back in
2002.
That FBI e-mail discusses the bureau's concerns at some length.
It also divulges weekly meetings with officials from the Justice
Department's criminal division, in which "we often discussed
DOD techniques and how they were not effective or producing
intel that was reliable." Chertoff was the head of the
DOJ's criminal division from 2001 until the spring of 2003.
The e-mail says that four people from the department's criminal
division attended those meetings and that those attendees "all
agreed DOD tactics were going to be an issue" if the government
tried to prosecute Guantánamo prisoners. In the copy
of the e-mail obtained by Levin, the names of those four criminal
division officials had been redacted.
Under questioning from Levin that day in 2005, Chertoff disavowed
any knowledge of abusive interrogation techniques being employed
at Guantánamo and said he was unaware of those meetings. "I
was not aware during my tenure at the Department of Justice
that there were practices at Guantánamo, if there were
practices at Guantánamo, that would be torture or anything
even approaching torture," Chertoff told Levin. He told
the committee he was unaware of "any use of techniques
in Guantánamo that were anything other than what I would
describe as kind of plain vanilla ... I do not know what the
meetings being referred to are, what the techniques are being
referred to, and who the people are."
Chertoff was sworn in to the Homeland Security post on Feb.
15, 2005, two weeks after the back-and-forth with Levin.
A month later, after pressuring the Justice Department, Levin
obtained another version of the same FBI e-mail describing
meetings about torture. It still contained redactions, but
it does list the names of the DOJ criminal division officials
who attended the meetings with the FBI. One of them was Alice
Fisher, Chertoff's top deputy. Chertoff's counsel, David Nahmias,
also attended, as did two other senior criminal division officials,
Bruce Swartz and Laura Parsky. Swartz, the e-mail showed, had
relayed the FBI's concerns to the Defense Department's Office
of the General Counsel. (The e-mail is reproduced on page 2
of this article.)
If some of Chertoff's top staff were involved in weekly meetings
in which "the DOD techniques" were discussed, it
remains unclear how he could be totally unaware of any of those
discussions. "The secretary always testifies truthfully," said
Laura Keehner, a DHS spokeswoman.
Other close observers of these developments are not so sure. "Either
he lied to Congress or he is a very out-of-the-loop manager
of the division," said Caroline Fredrickson, legislative
director of the ACLU. "It smacks of Alberto Gonzales saying
he did not know anything about these U.S. attorney firings."
And if Chertoff is nominated, it is also unclear how much
this questionable history will matter when he faces another
Senate hearing. "This is unresolved," Fredrickson
said, "which means Congress needs to resolve it."
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