Conservatives: Where to now?

Too busy today for blogging, but I can jot down some musings on the future of the GOP. Predictions are easy!

Some blog commenter the other day complained about the GOP that there's a contradiction between the economic hands-off approach of conservatives, and their moralistic hands-on approach.

Of course, this fellow was shouted down by the faithful, who pointed out the lack of any logical contradiction. But I think those faithful were missing a clue to the level of sophistication of many a voter.

The GOP has lost its national-security credentials, and is finding out how much it needed those to hold the center. What's left is the uneasy alliance of economic and social conservatives.

I think that we will see the GOP revive and prosper when it takes a hands-off approach in general. Gays want to get married? "Fine, go do it and hush up." Someone wants to get an abortion? "Not in my family, I teach my children better." Wilsonian Democrats want to invade some country? "Let the foreigners solve their own problems."

Not that this strain of thought doesn't have its own problems, but it's a lot more appealing to a certain part of the American character than the Republicans For Jesus bandwagon from which pragmatic Republicans keep tumbling off.

Simple-minded about venality

Tim Fernholz writes about Simon Johnson (via DeLong), and quotes some alarmingly naive Johnson critics:

Like another Johnson critic, Harvard's Dani Rodrik, has argued, [Martin] Wolf believes that free-market ideology, rather than the power of moneyed interests, plays a major role in the problem. While conceding that interest group politics is important, both Rodrik and Wolf cite John Maynard Keynes, who famously said that "practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist," to argue that the aggressively laissez-faire policies of the last three decades were driven not just by profit, but by an honestly acquired, if damaging, worldview.

"It really isn't true that Chicago economists and Alan Greenspan and all of these people had the ideas they had about the world because they were venal," Rodrik says. "They didn't do it because they were bought by anybody. They made these policy choices … because they had certain ideas about the way the world works."

Let us concede, arguendo, the good faith of Greenspan and the Chicago economists and their ilk.

Now, how did those people come to be in positions of power?

Because politicians and financiers genuinely respected the purity of their "ideas about how the world works," and decided to heed their advice and put them in power, irrespective of their own political and financial benefit?

Apparently the answer of Wolf and Rodrik is "yes." Good heavens.

Torture timeline -- April 2002 ... or earlier?

We saw last week that CIA was meeting with NSA as early as May 2002 to seek authority to torture prisoners. An excellent Newsweek item on Ali Soufan, the FBI agent whose interrogation of Zubaydah was cut short by CIA torturers, pushes the timeline back further:

As Soufan tells the story, he challenged a CIA official at the scene about the agency's legal authority to do what it was doing. "We're the United States of America, and we don't do that kind of thing," he recalls shouting at one point. But the CIA official, whom Soufan refuses to name because the agent's identity is still classified, brushed aside Soufan's concerns. He told him in April 2002 that the aggressive techniques already had gotten approval from the "highest levels" in Washington, says Soufan. The official even waved a document in front of Soufan, saying the approvals "are coming from Gonzales," a reference to Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel and later the attorney general. (A lawyer for Gonzales declined to comment.)

What this document was--and what, exactly, it authorized--is unclear. Soufan notes that, at that point, there had not been any talk in his presence of waterboarding, the most extreme of the techniques. But, as he later told Justice Department investigators, Soufan considered the methods he witnessed to be "borderline torture." A CIA spokesman declined to comment on what Soufan may have been shown, but wrote in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK: "The Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Department of Justice wasn't the first piece of legal guidance for the [interrogation] program." "There are still gaping holes in the record," says Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who spearheaded the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that forced the disclosure of the Justice memos. The ACLU is now suing for further disclosures.

If May 2002 is when CIA went to NSA with its story of imminent attack, and if that was a cover story for torturing an Iraq-Qaeda link out of the prisoners, then pressure on CIA from Cheney/Rumsfeld would have happened sometime before May.

The article also supports the inference that Gitmo officials knew there were more effective methods than torture, but chose to ignore that:

Soufan became a teacher for other interrogators. McFadden says that in early 2002, Soufan flew to Guantánamo to conduct a training course. He gave a powerful talk, preaching the virtues of the FBI's traditional rapport-building techniques. Not only were such methods the most effective, Soufan explained that day, they were critical to maintaining America's image in the Middle East. "The whole world is watching what we do here," Soufan said. "We're going to win or lose this war depending on how we do this." As he made these comments, about half the interrogators in the room--those from the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies--were "nodding their heads" in agreement, recalls McFadden. But the other half—CIA and military officers—sat there "with blank stares. It's like they were thinking, This is bullcrap. Their attitude was, 'You guys are cops; we don't have time for this'."

If you haven't got time to do it right, do you have time to be indicted for war crimes?

One more piece of the puzzle: James Mitchell, ardent advocate of reverse-engineering SERE into a torture program, a man who had never himself conducted an actual interrogation, appears to have made Soufan's acquanintance:

... the tenor of the Abu Zubaydah interrogations changed a few days later, when a CIA contractor showed up. Although Soufan declined to identify the contractor by name, other sources (and media accounts) identify him as James Mitchell, a former Air Force psychologist who had worked on the U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training--a program to teach officers how to resist the abusive interrogation methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War. Within days of his arrival, Mitchell--an architect of the CIA interrogation program--took charge of the questioning of Abu Zubaydah. He directed that Abu Zubaydah be ordered to answer questions or face a gradual increase in aggressive techniques. One day Soufan entered Abu Zubadyah's room and saw that he had been stripped naked; he covered him with a towel.

The confrontations began. "I asked [the contractor] if he'd ever interrogated anyone, and he said no," Soufan says. But that didn't matter, the contractor shot back: "Science is science. This is a behavioral issue." The contractor suggested Soufan was the inexperienced one. "He told me he's a psychologist and he knows how the human mind works." Mitchell told NEWSWEEK, "I would love to tell my story." But then he added, "I have signed a nondisclosure agreement that will not even allow me to correct false allegations."

Oh, by all means, let's release him from that.

... Okay, gotta get to work, but Emptywheel ratchets back the clock to "December 2001 or January 2002":

In December 2001 or January 2002, a retired Air Force SERE psychologist, Dr. James Mitchell, [redaction that I bet talks about a CIA contract] asked his former colleague, the senior SERE psychologist at JPRA, Dr. John "Bruce" Jessen, to review documents describing al Qaeda resistance training. The two psychologists reviewed the materials, [half line redacted], and generated a paper on al Qaeda resistance capabilities and countermeasures to defeat that resistance. * * *

[classification redaction] Mr. Witsch stated that he worked with Dr. Jessen to develop a set of briefing slides for the [acronym redacted] training. The Department of Defense provided the Committee with slide presentations that appeared to have been produced by JPRA for the March 8, 2002 training. Mr. Witsch testified that the two slide presentations (1) [half line redacted--elsewhere this appears unredacted as Al Qaeda Resistance Contingency Training: Contingency Training for (redacted) Personnel] Based on Recently Obtained Al Qaeda Documents" and (2) "Exploitation" -- appeared to be the same as those used by JPRA in the March 8, 2002 training.

Emptywheel (whose bracketed comments those are) ties this to Jane Mayer's reporting of

a CIA officer who could not be identified, whom a colleague at the Agency described as "a nobody--a pocket-protector-wearing Joe Molecule" who was "in charge of the shrinks on the science side," [who] turned to the former SERE school psychologists. Having retired from the military and been sidelined from the war on terror, Mitchell and Jessen were eager to get involved. "Mike knew these guys," the source working with the intelligence community recounted," and when his colleagues were wimps, he said they would fit the bill."

Torture was not an ad hoc response to uncooperative prisoners. It was something planned for from 9/12/2001, if not sooner. Around the same time that Cheney and Rumsfeld were conceiving the Iraq War.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, urged President Bush to consider bombing Iraq almost immediately after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, says a former senior aide.

Richard Clarke, the White House counter-terrorism coordinator at the time, has revealed details of a meeting the day after the attacks during which officials considered the US response. Already, he said, they were certain al-Qa'ida was to blame and there was no hint of Iraqi involvement. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq," Mr Clarke said. "We all said, 'No, no, al-Qa'ida is in Afghanistan.'"

But Mr Clarke, who is expected to testify on Tuesday before a federal panel reviewing the attacks, said Mr Rumsfeld complained in the meeting that "there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq." A spokesman for Mr Rumsfeld last night said he could not comment immediately.

More to come on all this, one suspects.

Torture and the Iraq War

One of the many things we've been unable to mention re: the torture memos, is the circumstantial evidence that waterboarding etc. were authorized because our prisoners were not confirming the Iraq-Qaeda link so dear to the hearts of Bush and Cheney.

Andrew Sullivan (and Frank Rich) point us towards this passage from the SASC report (still unread by me, alas), in which Major Paul Burney, an Army shrink assigned to Gitmo, states:

[T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.

I.e., different results. Getting the wrong answer? Torture gives you the right answer. You say you're not a witch? Let's see what you say after we ....

N.b. that this quotation concerns Gitmo, not the CIA black sites where Zubaydah and KSM were held. But see this McClatchy story from last week, which quotes Burney and an unnamed "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue" who

said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

That provides the Cheney impetus behind CIA's push to allow torture. The "impending attack" rationale provided to the NSA, on that theory, was simply a cover story.

The way to get that on the record, of course, would be to indict some of the CIA folks who pushed that cover story. But it seems we're not doing that?

(Query: distinguish from torture the practice of indicting small fry to catch big fish.)

... This btw is the best explanation yet why the waterboarding videos had to be destroyed. How many of the questions were, "Tell us about Saddam's support for Osama"? Enough to look pretty damn bad, I suspect.

I'm terribly sorry about those valid, dubious legal conclusions I signed!

Jay Bybee's friends are letting it be known that the good judge is really, really sorry about his role in bringing the United States down to the level of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Good luck with the charm offensive, y'all.

But if we're supposed to decide he shouldn't be impeached for lacking the legal and moral competence for the federal bench, "help" like this is counterproductive:

Tuan Samahon, a former clerk who recalled Bybee's remarks at the reunion dinner, said in an e-mail that the judge defended the legal reasoning behind the memos but not the policy decision.

Urk?

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, which filed a freedom-of-information request regarding the latest memos, said any distinction Bybee may make between the logic of the memos and their application in secret prisons is theoretical at best.

"I don't think the August 2002 memos reflect serious attempts to grapple in good faith with the law," Jaffer said. "These are documents that are meant to justify predetermined ends. They're not objective legal memos at all."

Indeed. Which makes Bybee's efforts to downplay his responsibility all the more repugnant.

"I got the impression that he was not pleased with that bit of scholarship," said an associate who asked not be identified sharing private conversations. "I don't know that he 'owned it.' . . . The way he put it was: He was head of the OLC, and it was written, and he was not pleased with it."

"But he signed it," said Chris Blakesley, a friend and fellow professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Boyd School of Law who was outraged by the memo, which was leaked in May 2004.

"The very evening it came out, we were going to dinner, and I told him how awful it was and I hoped he got a chance to repudiate it," Blakesley said. "He didn't say very much, and it was kind of awkward because our families were there."

"Getting to the personal side of him, my sense is he would love to repudiate them all," Blakesley said. "Which gets to: Why'd you sign it?"

A question the article does not answer in so many words, but I'll give the author credit for the ending:

Bybee's friends said he never sought the job at the Office of Legal Counsel. The reason he went back to Washington, [Bybee friend Randall] Guynn said, was to interview with then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales for a slot that would be opening on the 9th Circuit when a judge retired. The opening was not yet there, however, so Gonzales asked, "Would you be willing to take a position at the OLC first?" Guynn said.

Ambition explains a lot.

Bad apples. Bad branches. Bad tree. Bad fucking orchard.

Scott Horton draws attention to

an amazing document that Attorney General Eric Holder released yesterday, which has still gained little attention. The Holder note presents a summary of CIA interaction with the White House in connection with the approval of the torture techniques that John Yoo calls the “Bush Program.” Holder’s memo refers to the participants by their job titles only, but John Sifton runs it through a decoder and gives us the actual names.

Maybe I've missed this before, but this seems huge to me. Observe:

“[The] CIA’s Office of General Counsel [this would include current Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Condoleezza Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods [on Abu Zubaydah] that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S. military and intelligence community. At this meeting, the CIA proposed particular alternative interrogation methods, including waterboarding.”

The report continues to implicate more Bush officials: “On July 13, 2002, according to CIA records, attorneys from the CIA’s Office of General Counsel [including Rizzo] met with the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [Bellinger], a Deputy Assistant Attorney General from OLC [likely John Yoo], the head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice [Michael Chertoff], the chief of staff to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation [Kenneth Wainstein], [Who he? -TBA] and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] to provide an overview of the proposed interrogation plan for Abu Zubaydah.”

Wowzers. We had assumed, ever since the first August 2002 torture memo came out, that such shoddy "advice" had to be written for the purpose of authorizing what someone had already decided to do. But this is the first thing that, in essence, confirms that was the case.

(Yes, in theory, CIA could've had this wish list but still been ready to drop it if OLC said no, and OLC could've been advising in good faith that all this was really okay ... if you believe that, I have some excellent mortgage-backed securities I'd like to sell you (and yes, I believe I have used that joke before, but no one reads my cruddy blog, so HAH)).

So, the $64,000 question: Where's Cheney? None of these people were Cheney's or Addington's creatures. Is Cheney less culpable than we'd imagined? Or -- and this is certainly what I'd expect CIA to say, but their motives are suspect -- did CIA "originate" this request at the behest of the Office of the Vice-President?

Scooter Libby had Addington's job back then, right? We suspected Cheney couldn't afford to let Libby go to prison -- the day the marshals came to pick him up, Libby might have started remembering a lot of things.

Like a good neighbor, Obama was there

Daniel Larison of The American Conservative, writing at The Week, is a welcome antidote to the Fox-News hyperventilating dumbassery re: Obama's recent South American jaunt:

During the Summit of the Americas last week, Obama avoided the hectoring condescension that all too often marked American foreign policy during the Bush years. Instead, he demonstrated that the American case can be made with a combination of humility and accountability. This shift in tone happens to be the best path for improving America’s reputation abroad, and for increasing U.S. influence. In fact, it has already had the effect of reducing tensions with Russia, opening doors for collaboration with alienated allies such as Turkey, and isolating inveterate critics of the United States to the margins of international discourse.

Most controversially, Obama last week met and shook hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who continues to consolidate his power and tighten control over Venezuelan civil society. Obama also chose not to answer Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s long tirade against U.S. policy. This has led to accusations that Obama has encouraged authoritarian and left-wing leaders in Latin America while discouraging their political opposition. But such complaints fail to grasp that these leaders have always thrived on demonization by Washington.

This is exactly right, and welcome coming from Larison, who is no Obama fan. What strikes me is that FDR took exactly the same approach in his "Good Neighbor" policy (as I was just reading in Herring's From Colony to Superpower last night). That similarity points us to Larison's observation as to what is really ticking off the wingnuts:

Most important, Obama’s willingness to acknowledge America’s past tendency to dismiss the views of allies and to disrespect legitimate foreign interests reflects a degree of self-confidence that has been oddly lacking in the strongest advocates of U.S. hegemony. This is especially notable for a Democratic president--who often feel must prove their hawkishness. Instead of the almost-obsessive need to celebrate American achievements, Obama’s handling of foreign relations has shown a steady, humble confidence in the United States. This is a refreshing departure from foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, as well as from some of Obama’s own more aggressive campaign rhetoric. In contrast to that familiar Democratic “defensive crouch” on matters of national security, Obama has acted as a leader who feels no need to overcompensate for any perceived weakness and no need to apologize for giving priority to rebuilding damaged international relations with both allies and rivals. Indeed, it seems that the problem Obama’s critics have with him is not that he has been admitting American mistakes, but that he has failed to cringe and apologize to them for pursuing the course of action he thinks best for the United States.

Exactly. What maddens the Hannitys and O'Reillys is that Obama doesn't care what they think ... and neither do most Americans. The Fox crowd has internalized the "Democrats are pussies" meme so strongly that they don't know what to do with a non-pussy Democrat. (By which I do not of course mean any biological distinction b/t Obama and Hillary Clinton.)

... Speaking of which, non-biological sense I mean, note this from Emptywheel (whose blog, btw, you should be reading for the top-notch torture-memo coverage which TBA has so conspicuously failed to provide). The feds are going to quit blocking release of further photos of detainee abuse (it's not clear whether these are the photos said to be too shocking to release):

Whether you believe Obama is impeding investigation or playing 11 dimension chess to set it up without looking like the bad guy, his policy on FOIA has already begun to open up the floodgates that may enable public opinion make this happen.

I am reluctant to attribute to Obama the godlike subtlety that his more fervent supporters seem to see, but it would be fascinating if his backtracking on a truth commission, etc., was part of a tactic to seem to be dragged into investigating these crimes.

Not dead, only resting (well, not that either, really)

Wow. A veritable torturepalooza in the media this week, combining with the regrettable misapprehensions of certain judges (ahem), has made it nigh impossible to post anything meaningful here.

Soon I hope to at least get a list of relevant links up for my own future reference, if nothing else; but don't miss ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan on the Zubaydah case (corroborated by Phil Zelikow). The torture memos were originally premised on Zubaydah's resistance to standard interrogation; Soufan and Zelikow call bullshit on that premise.

It's not socialism, it's common-damn-sense

Judge Richard Posner, the "law-and-economics-(but-not-necessarily-in-that-order)" libertarian judge, the judge who's too smart to be on the Supreme Court ... says this:

Some conservatives believe that the depression is the result of unwise government policies. I believe it is a market failure. The government's myopia, passivity, and blunders played a critical role in allowing the recession to balloon into a depression, and so have several fortuitous factors. But without any government regulation of the financial industry, the economy would still, in all likelihood, be in a depression; what we have learned from the depression has shown that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails. The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience--the self-healing powers--of laissez-faire capitalism.

Well knock me over with a feather. Almost as shocking as Alan Greenspan's admission that Ayn Rand's philosophy might not be the final word on real-life markets.

To the extent schmucks like me can figure it out, the problem is that Wall Street guys knew that short-term, they could reap huge bonuses, and long-term ... well, why think about the long term?

I believe in markets. I believe that people follow incentives. Which is why, where bad incentives threaten to lead to economic depressions of Biblical proportions, I think government needs to regulate to reduce the bad incentives. Unfortunately, the people running Washington the past 8 years have had a different philosophy, for which we are all now paying.

Obama: Torture Lawyers not off hook yet

I have to wonder whether this is bluff to fend off the Spanish prosecutions, but on its face, it's encouraging:

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.

All eyes, then, on the OPR report that's still in the pipeline, which may well determine the Torture Lawyers' fate re: U.S. penalties at least. Senator Whitehouse, who appears to think he knows something we don't, says that report will be very bad indeed. One wonders, re: Bradbury, whether the fact that Philip Zelikow strongly disagreed with the 2005 batch of memos will figure in that analysis.

Après Manet, le deluge?

T.J. Clark finds that Manet isn't what he used to be:

The fallen idol whose fate leaves me by far the most uneasy--uncertain, that is, whether the fall is his or mine--is Manet. It keeps happening without my being wholly aware of it. This spring in Chicago, for instance, I realized at the end of a morning in the Art Institute that I had spent long minutes absorbed in the naiveties of a Delacroix lion hunt--wondering at the way the absurd wish-fulfillment called "North Africa" managed to focus and concentrate the painter's energies, producing a green and blue like nobody else's--and I'd never looked, for more than a moment or two, at Manet's street-people on the opposite wall of the gallery. "Velazquez kitsch," I found myself murmuring when I did. Whereas what Delacroix had done with Rubens!

I have my own uneasy feelings about Manet, wondering whether he was the beginning of the end for fine art. The Olympia -- look! a hooker on a bed! -- is only the most extreme example of what, for want of a better word, I call his postmodern tendency. Think of Victorine Meurent dressed up as a bullfighter, looking like ... Victorine Meurent dressed up as a bullfighter. (And did Manet's style really develop beyond, as Clark suggests, a pastiche of Spanish styles?)

The urinal on the museum wall, and Jackson Pollock for that matter, may just be differences of degree, not of kind, from what Manet did in his masterpieces.

Note to self

Lloyd Morgan (via DeLong) quotes a new book by John Kay:

I once debated the relationship between the social sciences with some anthropologists. We adjourned to the pub, and someone bought a round of drinks: the discussion naturally turned to the reasons why. For the economists, the explanation was obvious: the practice of buying rounds minimized transaction costs, reducing the number of exchanges between the patrons and the bar staff. The anthropologists saw it as an example of ritual gift exchange and described the many tribes that had developed similar customs. I proposed a test between the competing hypotheses: did you feel cheated or victorious if you bought more rounds than had been bought for you? Unfortunately, the economists and the anthropologists gave different answers to that question.

Note to self: accept pubcrawling invitation from anthropologists; decline same from economists.

But isn't that economist thinking? Maybe the anthro guys will rub off on me.

The reins in Spain ...

... are not in its AG's hands, as Judge Garzon ignores Candido Conde-Pumpido's scoffing and submits the Torture Lawyers case to a random judge (one of six, who could be Garzon himself), who will then have to decide whether to respect the AG's opinion or else to proceed with the case. H/t Opinio Juris.

(Our last look at this issue suggested that the AG's views were dispositive, but apparently we are still learning how the Spanish legal system works.)

Why the CIA destroyed the waterboarding tapes?

Emptywheel finds a pretty big clue what CIA wanted to hide:

... the May 10, 2005 "Techniques" memo reveals that Abu Zubaydah's interrogator far exceeded OLC guidlines on how to administer waterboarding.

The IG Report noted that in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated, see IG Report at 5, 44, 46, 103-04, and also that it was used in a different manner. See id. at 37 ("[T]he waterboard technique ... was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator ... applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real--and is more poignant and convincing.") see also id. at 14 n14.[my emphasis]

Not only does this implicate Tenet--who was DCI at the time--for further mismanagement, but it implicates his successor Porter Goss.

Goss was in charge when the CIA - having been warned not to destroy the torture tapes - did so anyway. And this OLC memo provides proof that CIA had more to worry about than just that the identities of those depicted administering torture on the tapes would be revealed. We know that the tapes were clear evidence that the interrogators were breaking the law - exceeding even the expansive guidelines laid out in the Bybee Memo on how waterboarding should be used. This memo, in other words, proves what we already suspected - that the torture tape destruction served to obstruct justice.

As Emptywheel's linked post demonstrates, we should not be surprised that Mr. Goss is very, very upset that national security has been Teh Jeopardized!!! by the release of these memos.

... There's an even better explanation, too.

Where to read about the torture memos

The new memos are being given a close reading at Emptywheel and at Opinio Juris -- lots of good stuff, too much to link. Emptywheel is doing an especially good job of teasing out hints at the content of the CIA's report from its inspector general, who evidently found that torture was indeed going on -- and thus had to be squelched by the 2005 Bradbury memos.

No real discussion in Volokh Conspiracy posts, but I've been wasting a good bit of time in various threads.

Scott Horton hasn't gotten a real post up yet, but he does reprint at Balkinization an interview with "the UN rapporteur for torture" (who knew?), and Brian Tamanaha (the only Balkin poster who seems to care anymore, now that Obama's president) has a sharp post on the circular reasoning of the memos.

I'm sure there's lots more out there, but this is what I've seen so far.