Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy sent a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding Wednesday saying he has been “kept in the dark” about previously undisclosed memos sent to the CIA by the White House explicitly authorizing the agency’s interrogators to torture suspected terrorist detainees.
Leahy’s letter was prompted by a report in the Washington Post Tuesday that said former CIA Director George Tenet wanted assurances directly from the White House that CIA interrogators could use long outlawed techniques, such as waterboarding, against detainees. The memos were written in June 2003 and June 2004. It is unknown who drafted the memos.
The disclosures undercut assertions by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials who have blamed cruel treatment of detainees on “a few bad apples” who acted on their own.
“You and I have communicated several times about the Judiciary Committee’s oversight and legislative interest in the Government’s use of torture, such as waterboarding, and other harsh interrogation practices,” Leahy’s letter to Fielding says. “Most recently, Senator [Arlen] Specter and I wrote to you in August, again seeking materials about the legal justification for these practices.
“In your August 22 response, you refused our requests while claiming that the White House has been most accommodating to this Committee and to the Congress in its inquiries on these matters. Several Judiciary Committee Republicans went so far as to rely on your letter while contending that the White House had been forthcoming and there was no need to subpoena Department of Justice materials that have been withheld during the last five years.
“I now read in The Washington Post that the White House issued two previously undisclosed memoranda to the CIA in 2003 and 2004. It is disturbing to be reminded, at this late date, of the stonewalling, misdirection and lack of accountability that has characterized this administration from its first days in office. Not only did those White House memoranda come as a surprise to me and the Senate Judiciary Committee, but I see from [Senate Intelligence Committee] Chairman [Jay] Rockefeller’s reaction that he was kept in the dark, as well.”
Rockefeller said the Post report, if accurate, “represents the latest example of the Bush Administration withholding critical information from Congress and the American people in an attempt to limit our oversight of sensitive intelligence collection activities.”
“The Senate Intelligence Committee is in the midst of an investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program, including the Department of Justice’s determination that the use of waterboarding on prisoners is lawful,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “If White House documents exist that set the policy for the use of coercive techniques such as waterboarding, those documents have been kept from the Committee. That is unacceptable.”
Earlier this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor of authorizing Leahy to subpoena a wide-range of documents from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) involving the agency’s legal advice to the White House on issues such as interrogation tactics and domestic surveillance.
The Judiciary Committee gave Leahy the authority to issue subpoenas any time even when Congress is out of session. However, Leahy’s office said the senator would first consult with Judiciary Committee members before he subpoenas any documents.
Leahy did not say whether he would issue a subpoena to try and gain access to the undisclosed torture memos. Even if Leahy did subpoena the White House, it’s unlikely the Bush administration would comply given that Bush’s term in office will soon come to an end.
Leahy said despite the committee’s “best efforts” to work with the Justice Department and the White House the OLC’s work “has largely been kept secret.”
“For the last eight years, the Bush-Cheney administration has been having the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) write secret laws by creating interpretations of the laws Congress has passed,” Leahy said. “There is no justification for keeping OLC legal interpretations secret from this Committee, let alone the index I have long sought. I seek this authorization after years of being rebuffed and slow-rolled in our attempts to find out how this administration has interpreted and applied the laws written by Congress.”
In April, President George W. Bush told an ABC News reporter during an interview that he approved of meetings of a National Security Council’s Principals Committee, whose advisers included Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, where these officials discussed specific interrogation techniques the CIA could use against detainees.
In June, Levin released dozens of pages of documents that detailed a pattern of humiliation, abuse and even torture inflicted on detainees was a deliberate policy of the Bush administration – debated by mid-level lawyers at the CIA and the Pentagon, given legal cover at the Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of government.
Two weeks ago, Rice admitted for the first time that she led high-level discussions beginning in 2002 with other senior Bush administration officials about subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists detained to waterboarding, according to documents released last month by Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.
