Did Chertoff lie to Congress about Guantánamo?
He told the Senate that Pentagon interrogation methods were "plain
vanilla,"
but e-mails reveal his top staff met weekly with FBI officials who said
they
were torture.
By Mark Benjamin
Aug. 28, 2007 | Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will leave office Sept.
17
with a reputation for being untruthful. During his repeated appearances
before Congress earlier this year to explain the firing of eight U.S.
attorneys, Gonzales answered "I don't recall" or some variation as many as
70 times at a sitting. When his replacement comes to Capitol Hill for
confirmation, lawmakers hope they will hear nothing but the truth.
But one of the men most often mentioned as his replacement may have some
of
the same trouble with the truth. Since rumors of Gonzales' departure
surfaced last week, speculation about his successor has centered on
Michael
Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Just as
Gonzales, under oath before Congress, failed to recall whether there was
dissension within the Bush administration over a controversial
war-on-terror-related policy, so Michael Chertoff seems to have suffered a
similar lapse of memory while under oath before Congress when pressed on a
different terror-related policy. Gonzales pleaded ignorance of a rift
within
the administration over warrantless wiretapping; Chertoff has denied
knowledge of interrogation techniques that are tantamount to torture,
despite regular attendance by his top aides at meetings on the subject.
"If Mr. Chertoff is nominated, the Senate needs to ask him some very tough
questions about what he knew about the abuses at Guantánamo," said Hina
Shamsi from Human Rights First.
When Chertoff appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security
and
Governmental Affairs on Feb. 2, 2005, the subject was not interrogations.
The panel was weighing Chertoff's nomination to his current post as
secretary of homeland security. He was promptly confronted on the topic,
however, by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. Levin's staff had dug up copies of
curious FBI e-mail traffic about interrogations at the Guantánamo prison
in
2002 and 2003, when Chertoff was head of the criminal division at the
Department of Justice.
That was a pivotal year at the military prison. The Pentagon was
institutionalizing a brutal interrogation program approved by
then-Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Interrogation teams at the prison employed
forced ****ity, sleep deprivation, isolation and ***ual humiliation, among
other tactics. During that time, for example, a detainee named Mohammed
al-Kahtani was forced to stand ****d in front of a female interrogator, to
wear women's underwear, and to perform "dog tricks" on a leash. He was
interrogated for 18 to 20 hours on 48 out of 54 consecutive days.
FBI interrogators assigned to Guantánamo had balked at the methods
employed
by the DOD. Given its long institutional knowledge about legal and
effective
interrogations, the FBI thought the military interrogations were extremely
problematic. E-mail strings do***enting the FBI's objections have been
well
publicized.
At the February 2005 hearing, Levin questioned Chertoff about an e-mail
obtained by Levin's staff: a May 10, 2004, communication from one FBI
official, with the name redacted, to another FBI official, T.J.
Harrington.
The e-mail rehashes the FBI objections to the military interrogations at
Guantánamo back in 2002.
That FBI e-mail discusses the bureau's concerns at some length. It also
divulges weekly meetings with officials from the Justice Department's
criminal division, in which "we often discussed DOD techniques and how
they
were not effective or producing intel that was reliable." Chertoff was the
head of the DOJ's criminal division from 2001 until the spring of 2003.
The
e-mail says that four people from the department's criminal division
attended those meetings and that those attendees "all agreed DOD tactics
were going to be an issue" if the government tried to prosecute Guantánamo
prisoners. In the copy of the e-mail obtained by Levin, the names of those
four criminal division officials had been redacted.
Under questioning from Levin that day in 2005, Chertoff disavowed any
knowledge of abusive interrogation techniques being employed at Guantánamo
and said he was unaware of those meetings. "I was not aware during my
tenure
at the Department of Justice that there were practices at Guantánamo, if
there were practices at Guantánamo, that would be torture or anything even
approaching torture," Chertoff told Levin. He told the committee he was
unaware of "any use of techniques in Guantánamo that were anything other
than what I would describe as kind of plain vanilla ... I do not know what
the meetings being referred to are, what the techniques are being referred
to, and who the people are."
Chertoff was sworn in to the Homeland Security post on Feb. 15, 2005, two
weeks after the back-and-forth with Levin.
A month later, after pressuring the Justice Department, Levin obtained
another version of the same FBI e-mail describing meetings about torture.
It
still contained redactions, but it does list the names of the DOJ criminal
division officials who attended the meetings with the FBI. One of them was
Alice Fisher, Chertoff's top deputy. Chertoff's counsel, David Nahmias,
also
attended, as did two other senior criminal division officials, Bruce
Swartz
and Laura Parsky. Swartz, the e-mail showed, had relayed the FBI's
concerns
to the Defense Department's Office of the General Counsel. (The e-mail is
reproduced on page 2 of this article.)
If some of Chertoff's top staff were involved in weekly meetings in which
"the DOD techniques" were discussed, it remains unclear how he could be
totally unaware of any of those discussions. "The secretary always
testifies
truthfully," said Laura Keehner, a DHS spokeswoman.
Other close observers of these developments are not so sure. "Either he
lied
to Congress or he is a very out-of-the-loop manager of the division," said
Caroline Fredrickson, legislative director of the ACLU. "It smacks of
Alberto Gonzales saying he did not know anything about these U.S. attorney
firings."
And if Chertoff is nominated, it is also unclear how much this
questionable
history will matter when he faces another Senate hearing. "This is
unresolved," Fredrickson said, "which means Congress needs to resolve it."
......
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/28/chertoff/
|
