I too would enjoin folks not to let our hammering on parts of the CIA be misunderstood as animus to all the CIA does.

As LD well knows, as do most other folks here, there are good folks and not-good folks in any organization.

Wrt to the CIA in particular, there are CIA folks like Valerie Plame Wilson who are on the side of the Angels, and then there are CIA folks sup with the Devil, and enjoy the meal.

And if Valerie were to read our ramblings, I hope she knows that we know the difference!

In this assuming I havent misread her, I would go with Mary @ 36 in her use of the term cul-de-sac. The Nixon administration had a far less sophisticated array of tools to obfuscate & secret abuses than does the Bush-Cheney crimorg in part because a lot of the egos at the top didnt perceive the need for any more idiot-proofing including in particular Nixon who fancied himself not “a” but “THE” pre-eminent American foreign policy genius. Cheney had more pliable material to work with in Ford and someone inclined to consult a lot more widely in Daddy Bush, but in Waterbush he had someone who brought next to no agenda to the White House on foreign policy [and the biases of a Xenophobe at that], with no inclination to question or limit whatever his VP was up to, and the impression that it looked good on him to be seen to give up controls of the nation’s security & intelligence apparatus to an old hand like Cheney. And Cheney’s expertise lying in bureaucratic skullduggery we could have expected him to use everything he’d ever learned to insulate the various branches of that major limb of government power from his patron, from himself, and, vitally, from each other.

In other words the most secure manifestation of compartmentalization he can get.

Plus, my experience with the spooks lurking at the edges of the criminal investigations Ive seen from both sides is that someone like Durham, granting that hes had a better viewpoint than I had [I left prosecution at a point more than a decade short of his first involvement in the New England police corruption investigations] is that they even less revelatory of what’s going on in their world than the part of icebergs above water. I would find it very hard to accept that Durham has been granted access to that world; Cheney wouldn’t stand for it. Nor would I be inclined to accept that he would know what to make of it if he had such access. Your most compromised & corrupt cop is several deviations less twisted than your garden variety spook.

[With all due respect for & appropriate apologies to those for example Ms Valerie Plame Wilson who by appearances tried to maintain some values consistent with civility & hold to some code of ethical behavior in their work, the CIA’s history of abuses & willingness to pander to the political agenda of the administration of the day from a period well within a decade of its inception suggest that they are not at all representative of CIA spook behavior.]

Then there’s the additional problems of the CIA’s cultural hierarchy of granting to spooks a higher sphere of freedom to operate, including barriers to holding them accountable but even to determining who in hell they are. The design is that the only people who know who are spooks are those handling spooks – and many times through several layers of spooks being handled by spooks being handled by spooks etc up to a putative leader of various lines of spooks descending down from him even he doesnt have a handle on. John McLaughlin in particular would be able to make this only too clear.

In sum, were I in Durham’s position, I wouldn’t just resort to OIG because it holds the promise of being the most reliable repository of records on the torture tapes – I would recognize as being the ONLY place the administration will let me go anyway – & moreover VERY LIKELY THE ONLY office bearing the slightest resemblance to a repository of agency-wide records that exists.

Im not trying to appear as a Durham apologist or booster in any of this. He’s a career DOJ lawyer & as I’d expect bmaz or anyone else who has worked in federal prosecution would agree, those types are not prone to turning down assignments generally, & certainly not merely because there will be some problems or challenges involved; if anything such problems & challenges promise to make the job more interesting. The Durhams of the DOJ made a commitment a long time before to work within in the system as best they were able. I left before having to face up to that commitment, but for the most part the top career lawyers I worked with in prosecution offices were like that, the differences between them being mostly things individual things like personal discipline, legal talent, and which of family versus career is more important, or at least before the daily erosion involved in working under Bushies started taking its toll.

Finally, having mentioned him in dispatches & not wishing to throw a dis; I have to ask bmaz why he refers to Roger Clemens’ legal team with such deference yet calls McAmee’s lawyers “stooges”?

Instead, they all proceeded to breach their professional ethics and engage in systemic fraud on the courts – at least, that’s how it looks at first blush (if any of them can still blush)

Also, if someone has a cell phone, they can make a crude copy. I really don’t think the US would have allowed any taping of interrogations to be so out of their hands that they couldn’t control what happened to it – whether it ended up in Soviet hands to be played on international press, whether the an analyst urgently needing to double check on something could or could not get access, etc. Plus, the convesations with the members of Congress that Muller was involved in seemed to indicate that US players had the ultimate say over what happened to the tapes – not foreign sources.

I’m thinking that that OIG was just told things were too classified to copy.

I agree that the OIG isn’t likely to have a master list of documents. For one thing, the intel divisions pretty much have the right to clamp down on what anyone gets, including the anyones in OIG. Plus there was such a mix and mishmash going on – you had the Iraqi general killed in the sleeping bag who got interrogations by some guys (speculation in the articles that this was CIA assisted by MEK or locals of some kind) at night, and “military” suffocation interrogation during the day. Then there would be the guys shipped to foreign countries and involvement of the State Dept and so many things that intertwine and tangle – it would be hard to decide where, for example, OIG for CIA had capability and where instead you were shifting to OIG for DoD or State or DOJ/FBI etc.

Cul de sacs of information within intel communities not required to cough things up to their various IGs and coupled with the umbrella that “Congress” has been briefed and knows anyway – the prime OIG function really – finding things out for Congress for its oversight function.

33 – It’s not just Roberts ruling too. While I don’t remember the exact scope of Durham’s investigation (I didn’t remember that it included a review of responses to 911 commission requests and legislative requests – which I think per 11 are being included) the thing is that when it comes to not only court orders, but situations giving rise to notice about possible future litigations sufficient to cause a litigation hold to go out – - – - go look at Gonzales’ memo of Jan 2002, the one where he says that there is a chance that future administrations will view what they are doing as violations of the war crimes act.

From that statement on – WH Counsel acknowledging in writing in Jan 2002 that there might be future criminal prosecution under the domestic War Crimes Act based on the actions involving detainees – from that statement on there should have been a litigation hold on all things related to those interrogations (at least in my non-litigator, non-criminal, non-ivy view).

From then on, you just had a succession of cases where this became clarified to a greater or lesser degree, either through being raised by a direct motion to the court alleging abuse, coercion, torture, etc. (like those in Padilla, objecting to the arrest/material witness warrant or in Moussaoui) or through being the subject of a subpoena issued by a party (which, unless objected to and litiagated to limit, has the effect of an order) or through being the direct topic of an actual preservation and/or production order issued by a court,

So for any given particular item you may have had a moving target of time from which preservation would be appropriate – but IMO there’s no way that, with the Gonzales statement in the Jan 2002 memo, you can’t say there was a direct acknowledgement there that a litigation hold should be put on all the information related to the detainee treatment that did not comply with the Geneva Conventions.

Computers are notoriously binary. If you search for “fish”, you ain’t gonna find “sharks”.

People, on the other hand, just might react with alarm bells should they stick their toes in the water and find “sharks”.

Same logic applies to the Torture Tape material and any applicability to judicial and congressional inquiries.

That one doesn’t find “Abdullah” in a computer keyword search does not mean there ain’t “sharks” in the water.