philip zelikow

Via Andrew Sullivan, Marc Ambinder gives the Obama administration’s rationale for opposing a truth commission on torture:
In the [Obama administration's] view, a commission would expose secrets without any means of determining whether they’re properly protected or not, and they’ve been warned that the nation’s spy services would simply cease to function effectively if they’re forced [...]

The CIA has been saying it briefed the leadership of the Congressional intelligence committees in 2002 about the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on detainees like Abu Zubaydah. Its implication is that Congress tacitly or explicitly consented to the torture that interrogators inflicted on those detainees — and, implicitly, if the CIA is going to come [...]

During this morning’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) who chaired the hearing, asked Philip Zelikow, the former state department adviser, about the reaction he received when he objected to the interrogation techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel. Whitehouse noted that “lawyers love to debate. It’s our nature to [...]

“Do you know a guy named… K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asks Ali Soufan, referring to a former CIA official who alleged that — at an interrogation he never portrayed himself as attending — Abu Zubaydah broke after his initial waterboarding.
“Last week he retracted that,” Ali Soufan responded.
Graham: “Can you say there was no good [...]

More on that last point, building on something Soufan just said. The top CIA interrogator at the Abu Zubaydah interrogation was “100 percent in sync with the FBI view” about how to interrogate the al-Qaeda detainee without torturing him “because he’s a professional interrogator.” The head of the CIA team interrogating Abu Zubaydah, he further [...]

Here’s Ali Soufan, from his written opening statement and his spoken summary, delivered from behind the wooden partition.
One aspect of Ali Soufan’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that’s now somewhat cleared up, according to the ex-FBI agent’s opening statement: the FBI and the CIA/SERE-contractor team were in a back-and-forth during the spring of 2002 for how [...]

The Judiciary subcommittee didn’t, ultimately, get a copy of Philip Zelikow’s 2005 memorandum opposing torture, written when he was counselor to the State Department. But in his opening statement — which the committee’s distributed but he he’s just started delivering — he provides a pretty big hint as to what he argued:
The issue is not [...]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) doesn’t really like this hearing. He says he doesn’t “question the chairman’s motivation,” which is an elegant locution, and proceeds to assert what Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) calls “facts not in the record” — that torture worked, basically. Graham fears the criminalization of a policy debate if there are prosecutions of [...]

Live from Dirksen Senate office building 226: you’re not going to see former FBI agent Ali Soufan, one of the two stars of today’s Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture. Over by the far side of the room is a wood-paneled maroon partition — it looks like something behind which a Victorian lady would change [...]

One thing that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wants in hand when he calls Philip Zelikow to testify next Wednesday: the memo Zelikow wrote in 2005 as an aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushing back against the Bush administration’s effort at giving torture the cover of law. A Whitehouse staffer says the senator has [...]