Among the treasure trove of documents released on Monday related to the CIA's detention and torture program is a 20-page background paper that, for the first time, describes in extraordinary detail the process of "rendition" and the torture prisoners are then subjected to when they are flown to "black site" prisons.

The document was turned over to the ACLU in response to the civil liberties group's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government late on Monday evening along with numerous others, including previously undisclosed Justice Department legal opinions.

The background paper clearly illustrated that the torture of detainees was systematic and micromanaged by the top officials at the CIA, the Justice Department, medical professionals and, likely, the White House. Previously, the CIA had refused to disclose any details of its rendition program, citing state secrets.

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Faced with impending defeat in a US District Court habeas corpus case, the Obama administration devised a new strategy for continuing the detention of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghani who may have been as young as 12 in 2002 when he allegedly wounded two US soldiers with a grenade.

Justice Department lawyers announced Friday that they would transform Jawad's indefinite detention as an enemy combatant at Guantanamo Bay into a criminal case, thus negating the habeas corpus hearing in Washington, DC, where Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle had accused the government of "dragging [the case] out for no good reason."

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project and one of Jawad's lawyers, blasted the Obama administration for its "pathetic attempt to prolong an outrageous case and to manipulate the court system.

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In early fall 2003, as the scandal over leaking a covert CIA officer's identity was exploding, President George W. Bush claimed not to know anything about the leak and called on anyone in his administration who had knowledge to come "forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true."

How disingenuous the president's appeal was has been underscored again by a new Justice Department court filing sketching out the contents of the 2004 interview between special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Though the Obama administration continues to balk at releasing the full contents of the Cheney interview, it did reveal that Bush and Cheney were in contact about the scandal, including what is described as "a confidential conversation" and "an apparent communication between the Vice President and the President."

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On January 17, 2003, Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo from the Pentagon's top attorney. Attached to the classified document was a set of directives drafted two days earlier by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational issues relating to the interrogations of detainees held by the US Armed Forces in the war on terrorism," the directives said.

Among the issues to be addressed were "policy considerations with respect to the choice of interrogation techniques, including contribution to intelligence collection, effect on treatment of captured US military personnel, effect on detainee prosecutions, historical role of US armed forces in conducting interrogations, recommendations for employment of particular interrogation techniques by [Defense Department] interrogators."

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Dick Cheney and his lawyer, David Addington, pressured the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2005 to quickly approve a torture memo that authorized CIA interrogators to use a combination of barbaric techniques during interrogations of "high-value" detainees, despite objections from senior DOJ officials, according to emails written by James Comey, the agency's former deputy attorney general.

In the emails, Comey also wrote that then Attorney General (AG) Alberto Gonzales was "weak" and had essentially allowed Cheney and Addington to politicize the DOJ. The emails can be found here: Documents: Justice Department Communication on Interrogation Opinions.

"The AG explained that he was under great pressure from the Vice President to complete both memos, and that the President had even raised it last week, apparently at the VP's request and the AG had promised they would be ready early this week," Comey wrote. Gonzales "added that the VP kept telling him 'we are getting killed on the Hill.'"

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President Obama spoke today about new directions in fighting terrorism. He rejected Bush administration policies and reiterated his plans to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center. He vowed to prosecute detainees in federal courts and restated his intention to transfer some detainees to secure prisons within U.S. borders. He also nuanced the hell out of what he hopes to see happen in the criminal justice realms regarding our very own war criminals, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their web of co-conspirators.

Lars Thorwald, an attorney with the DOJ, gave me permission to publish his impression of what he heard this morning (which he originally posted at Daily Kos), with the following disclaimer:

My views are not the views of the Department. I write merely as a private citizen who works as a trial attorney with the Department. I have only public knowledge about the OPR investigation, and this diary should not be construed as revelation of confidential information, because there ain't none there. That is all, carry on.

And now, a legal analysis of Obama's War Crimes speech:

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Illustration: Matt Mahurin
Washington Independent

CIA interrogators provided top agency officials in Langley with daily "torture" updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged "high-level" terrorist detainee, who was held at a secret "black site" prison and waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, according to newly released court documents obtained by this reporter.

The extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials in Langley likely included updates provided to senior Bush administration officials.

The government documents filed May 1 with US District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein included two sets of indexes totaling 52 pages and contained general descriptions of cables sent back to CIA headquarters describing the August 2002 videotaped interrogation sessions of Zubaydah. Those cable transmissions included a description of the techniques interrogators had used and the intelligence, if any, culled from those sessions.

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"My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run."
- Bruce Springsteen, "Livin' in the Future"

When the highest officials of our nation flung open the gates of law and morality and let the wild dogs of torture run, they set in motion a constellation of potentially-indictable federal crimes. While I do not think a grand jury investigation into those violations should be publicly initiated right now, (for strategic reasons discussed here), I do agree entirely with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that the Attorney General must not rule out prosecutions for these violations. In the May 4, 2009, National Law Journal, the Democrat from Rhode Island writes: "The factual record ... has not been fully developed and reviewed - and no good prosecutor would make a final determination until all the facts are in." As usual, the former US Attorney has it exactly right. No responsible prosecutor would do that and, indeed, as long as the record is unfolding, the Attorney General wouldn't be able to render any meaningful final "verdict" of no prosecution even if he wanted to. (And, certainly, no potential defendant could hold him to it.) So - regardless of what the prognosis for prosecution appears to be on any given day - it is critical to keep those revelations coming, as well as to support proposals for a non-partisan commission that will publicly air all the facts, and, most important, not give up on eventual indictments.

So Many Crimes, but How Much Time?

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An ethics report prepared by H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), reached "damning" conclusions about numerous cases of "misconduct" in the advice attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee provided the Bush administration, according to legal and Congressional sources familiar with the findings and news reports.

The report, which also may be critical of legal opinions authorizing domestic surveillance activities, recommends state bar associations conduct a review of Yoo and Bybee's legal work to determine whether they should face disciplinary action, including disbarment.

Bybee, now an appeals court judge in San Francisco, signed the so-called August 1, 2002 torture memo and other controversial legal opinions that Yoo helped to draft. Bybee was head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and Yoo was a deputy assistant attorney general.

Steven Bradbury, the former acting head of OLC, was also a subject of Jarrett's probe and authored three legal opinions in May 2005, reinstating torture against alleged "high-level" terrorist detainees, but it's unknown exactly what the report has recommended Bradbury's punishment, if anything, should be. Bradbury, as it turns out, participated in a final review of the report while he was still acting head of OLC.

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A new draft Department of Justice report, not yet approved by Attorny General Eric Holder, is recommending that Bush administration torture memo authors Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury not be prosecuted, but will apparently ask for disciplinary reprimands and/or disbarment by state bar associatons.

“The report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, is also likely to ask that state bar associations consider possible disciplinary action, including reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions, the officials said,” reports the New York Times.

“The conclusions of the 220-page draft report are not final and have not yet been approved by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The officials said it is possible the final report might be subject to revision, but they did not expect major alterations in its main findings or recommendations.”

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