Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture

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 [...]

After Philip Zelikow advocates closing Guantanamo Bay, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — who, earlier in the hearing, praised President Obama for his “responsible view” about Guantanamo — tries to bait Zelikow with a question about Guantanamo’s “recidivism rate.” (The implication being the Bush Pentagon let dangerous terrorists out of Guantanamo to immediately return to the [...]

Philip Zelikow details an argument that was “deployed against me” when he opposed torture in the Bush administration: “We briefed the following members of Congress — name name name name name name name — and they didn’t have a problem with this.”
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) brought the point up to argue against the political argument [...]

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 [...]

According to Ali Soufan, the battle lines in the internal debate at the CIA facility where Abu Zubaydah was to be tortured broke down this way: “FBI and CIA all had the same opinion that contradicted with the contractor.” The “contractor” is most likely James Mitchell, a former SERE psychologist. This is the first time [...]

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 [...]

Former State Department adviser Philip Zelikow at this morning’s Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing testified that when he saw the so-called torture memos written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, “It seemed to me that the OLC interpretation of U.S. Constitutional Law in this area was strained and indefensible. I could not imagine [...]

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 [...]

David Luban, a law professor and expert on legal ethics at Georgetown University, just called the torture memos written by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel “a legal train wreck.”
“The rules of professional ethics forbid lawyers from counseling or assisting clients in illegal conduct,” Lujan, the first witness testifying at today’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee [...]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, which is conducting its own investigation into the CIA and torture, appeared to signal her opposition to chartering a separate commission on torture, let alone prosecution. Sticking up for her inquiry, which will wrap up within a year, she said that alongside the six [...]