The war of words between the Democratic House leadership and the CIA escalated Tuesday with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer giving his unequivocal support to embattled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said the spy agency misled her on torture tactics used on terrorism suspects.

"There's been a lot of debate about the speaker and the CIA over the past week," Hoyer told reporters Tuesday. "I'm going to be very clear ... I believe the speaker. I believe the speaker when says that she was not specifically briefed on types of ... interrogation techniques that were being employed."

Hoyer called Republican outrage over the Pelosi-CIA briefing controversy a diversionary tactic to "distract the public from focusing what was done, what the justification for doing it was, and for President Bush's comments that we don't torture, we're not using torture ..."

CIA Director Leon Panetta has disputed Pelosi's claim last week. In a message to agency employees, Panetta wrote: "It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress ... Our contemporaneaous records from September 2002 indicate CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of (terrorism suspect) Abu Zubaida, describing the 'enhanced techniques that had been employed.'"

You have to wonder if the news media got hoodwinked again.

The Times doesn't come right out and say it, but ...

Just hours after saying he would never prosecute CIA officers for harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, President Barack Obama opened the door Tuesday to prosecuting the Bush administration officials who OK’d the techniques.

Obama said it’s up to Attorney General Eric Holder – who works for him – to decide whether Bush administration lawyers should be charged with war crimes or any other offense for writing the memo’s approving of such techniques as water boarding.

"I do worry that this gets so politicized that it hampers our ability to function effectively," he said when asked about a possible independent investigation.

“If and when there needs to be a further accounting of what took place during this period,” he added about a possible Congressional inquiry, “it could be done in a bipartisan fashion outside of the typical process that would break down along party lines."

He stressed that “I’m not suggesting that it should be done." But he added that if there were an investigation, it would be "very important” for the American people to see it as an effort to find the truth and not political benefit for one party.

Obama spoke as the liberal group moveon.org launched a campaign to gather signatures on petitions urging Holder to appoint a special prosecutor.

“On Thursday, President Obama released memos that describe, in horrific detail, the torture techniques authorized by the Bush administration. The memos make clear that top Bush officials didn't just condone torture, they encouraged it,” the group said in an email to supporters.

“So far there's been no accountability for the architects of Bush's torture program — the top officials who justified keeping detainees awake for 11 days straight, water boarding them repeatedly, and forcing prisoners into coffin-like boxes with insects.

“We need real consequences for those responsible — it's the only way to keep this from happening again. Attorney General Holder can open an investigation into the torture program — but he most likely won't unless people everywhere speak up and demand it.”

On Monday, former Vice President Dick Cheney argued that the interrogations were productive and necessary to stop terrorist attacks. He urged the Obama administration to declassify and release additional memos that he said document the helpful information drawn out in the interrogations.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he’s asked the CIA to declassify more documents about the interrogation of suspected terrorists beyond those released by the Obama administration - documents he says will show the Bush administration did get results with its techniques.

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney says in an interview with Fox News to be aired Monday evening.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney says in the interview, taped at his home in McLean, Virginia not far from CIA headquarters.

“I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

The interview will air on the Hannity program at 9 pm EDT.

This in from the Daily beast blog: Spanish prosecutors will announced Tuesday that they'll push ahead with an investigation into six Bush administration officials for allegedly aiding and abetting the torture of detainees captured as part of the war on terror. The Bush Six are former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington and former Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith. Read the item here.

For another view of this, here's Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece on Phillippe Sands, the British barrister who gets credit for being among the first to suggest the Bush officials would face international criminal charges.

As for torture allegations, here's the Red Cross report on how U.S. interrogators treated the high-value detainees in secret CIA prisons. CIA director Leon Panetta last week ordered those prisons closed.

The New York Review of Books has a new installment in Mark Danner's reports on the abuse of detainees held in secret CIA prisons after Sept. 11, 2001. As you recall, his previous article focused on what the International Committee of the Red Cross found in its interviews with 14 so-called high value detainees who were delivered from CIA limbo to Guantanamo in September 2006.

What should we do about those who tortured and, more importantly, those who authorized torture in the name of the United States is the theme of Danner's latest piece. The evidence of torture has become irrefutable. Danner writes:

The reports on American torture now fill a shelf next to my desk, beginning with the Taguba Report in 2004, still perhaps the best of them, and then going on to include the ICRC report on Abu Ghraib, the Schlesinger Report, the Fay/Jones Report, the Church Report, the Schmidt Report, and now the Armed Services Committee Report, the full text of which will soon break into the news in all its glory, telling us in much more conclusive detail a story the major outlines of which we already know. More revelations will come from this, and more news, particularly about the mechanics by which prominent senior officials approved use of the "alternative set of procedures" and closely monitored their day-to-day application. We will continue in an endless round-robin of revelation, in which we tell ourselves we are learning something new though in fact, when it comes to the central problem of torture—what we as a society should do about it and whether we will in fact do anything—we are in the end simply repeating to ourselves things, however increasingly detailed and awful, that we already know.

And yet there is one thing we don't really know: Did it do any good? We have Cheney's assertions, but every judicial proceeding that has come to light on Guantanamo seems to argue that little interrogators learned was of any real value. Danner says no one, not those who oppose torture, not those who favor it, really wants to find out the answer.

Aside from the article itself, the New York Review of Books has also reproduced the Red Cross report. It too is well worth the reading.

    A liberal-leaning watchdog group Tuesday seized on President Barack Obama's twin executive orders proclaiming a new era in government openness to demand the release of a broad spectrum of secret Bush administration documents.

     "Signing an executive order is one thing; actually releasing documents is another,'' said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "This the perfect opportunity for the Obama administration to back up its words with concrete action."

    Obama signed the executive orders signaling a new era in government openness and accountability on his first day in office. In a press release Tuesday, the start of his second week as president, Crew asked him to carry out his own orders by releasing these records that the Bush administration withheld from the public:

1. Justice Department documents related to the interview of former Vice President Cheney provided to the FBI as part of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak of former CIA official Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert identity -- an inquiry that led to the conviction of Cheney Chief of Staff Lewis Libby.
2. Secret Service records of White House visitors to help remove the veil of secrecy that currently surrounds the White House.
3. White House documents relating to the Bush administration's alleged failure for years to trace the mysterious disappearance of millions of emails from White House servers even despite an internal report confirming they were missing.
4. White House documents that explain why the Bush administration refused to implement an effective electronic record keeping system in the face of evidence that its current system was an abysmal failure, notwithstanding the development of two other workable systems.
5. White House documents requested by Congress that might explain the full role of President Bush and his White House aides in the firings of nine U.S. attorneys, whose ousters triggered a smajor candal over politicization of the Justice Department.
6. Department of Homeland Security documents that might explain why the Bush administration decided to bypass property of Ray L. Hunt, a major contributor to the Bush presidential library, in proceeding with plans to build a 700-mile fence along the border between the United States and Mexico.
7. All documents of the White House Council on Environmental Quality that might show the extent to which the Bush administration sought to distort scientific conclusions, warning, and predictions on climate change.

 

CIA director Michael Hayden issued the following statement after Obama signed an executive order barring the CIA from maintaining its secret prison system, engaging in harsh interrogation practices or sending prisoners to third countries where they might be tortured. Hayden's statement calls for the CIA to follow the president's instructions "without exception, carve-out or loophole." But he doesn't reject the policies that Obama just banned: "The rendition, detention and interrogation program has been an important one," he said.

Message from the Director: New Interrogation Policy

President Obama issued an Executive Order today setting out new instructions for the detention, rendition and interrogation of captured terrorists. The legal and policy landscape under which the Agency has conducted itself in the global war on terror has changed in the past and we have consistently and scrupulously adjusted our efforts to reflect these changes. This Executive Order is no different. We will review the order carefully and issue appropriate guidance to ensure that we continue to act in consonance with the law and with policy direction. When our government changes its law or policy, we will follow that direction without exception, carve-out, or loophole.

Our Agency has many counter-terror tools in its arsenal. The rendition, detention and interrogation program has been an important one. As intelligence professionals, you, the men and women of CIA, will make the best possible use of the space the Republic has given us to act boldly and bravely in its defense. I have every confidence in your enduring ability to do so, honoring, as always, the laws and values of the democracy we faithfully serve.

Mike Hayden

President Barack Obama today signed his first executive order, ordering that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be closed within one year. A senior administration official says the first step will be to determine which detainees “can be transferred as rapidly as possible to countries that would receive them.” He also ordered the CIA to close any detention center that it is operating anywhere, the administration official says. And he ordered that all interrogations follow the rules laid out in the Army Field Manual, which would prohibit many techniques used by the Bush administration.