Priceless.

Here’s how Yoo described his trip to Gitmo

“A gust of warm, humid air embraced us as we disembarked at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay,” Yoo wrote in his book. “I was the junior person on the flight among the senior lawyers there from the White House, Departments of Defense, State and Justice.

“The group of us who landed that day had no idea that the ‘front’ in the war on terrorism would soon move from the battlefields of Afghanistan to the cells of Gitmo.”

“When our group of lawyers visited Gitmo, the Marine general in charge told us that several of the detainees had arrived screaming that they wanted to kill guards and other Americans. …

“Many at Gitmo are not in a state of calm surrender. Open barracks for most are utterly impossible; some al-Qaeda detainees want to kill not only guards, but their peers who might be cooperating with the United States. The provision of ordinary POW rights…is infeasible.”

Krauthammer has a ridiculous piece up at the WaPo – a Torture is Bad, with two exceptions (ticking time bomb and high value detainee) apology for Bush – two scenarios where those terrorists ‘make us’ Torture them!

Krauthammer is really pushing it with this:

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the “enhanced interrogation” program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from “the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together.“

Fabulous!

The intelligence budgets of the components of the National Intelligence Program (NIP) he mentions above are expensive — FBI = 1.5 billion, CIA = 6 billion, and NSA = 8 billion (2007 estimate, actual amounts classified).

This means that we can shut down all of the intel programs of the above and save a bundle by hiring a few dozen EIT specialists to torture a few people now and then without losing any intelligence coverage or capability.

One thing that I think is worth keeping in mind is where things stood on the rendition front at the time. The US has long accepted the right to bring someone to face trial in the US by use of extrajudicial means, like rendition. That recognition doesn’t “legalize” actions in a foreign country that might be against the law there, but more so makes it no defense to someone who is facing charges in a US criminal court that they were brought before the court from another country without there being extradition.

What had begun under Clinton was a process of doing something else – we went to Egypt and a lot of the al-Qaeda we were looking for at that time had Egyptian ties – they either were Egyptian or had Egytian warrants outstanding or had something that we could convince the Egyptians to issue a warrant for. So we started a different process – where we extrajudicially went into country A and snatched people from there (or got local police or intel to hand them off to us) and we didn’t take those people to the US for a trial. Instead we gave them to another country (Egypt prominent) that had a warrant or claimed jurisdiction over them due to citizenship.

A couple of things at this point. What was the legal basis for those actions? At that point, the Clinton renditions, you were still talking about rendition to a trial somewhere, but to a trial in a country that was on our State Dept lists as sponsoring torture and that typically tortured a confession out of someone, then used that as the evidence at trial for a speedy judgment. There were no OLC memos that we know of supporting those “extra-ordinary” renditions. Instead, the only thing I know of is Scheuer’s claim that he talked the program over with Mary Jo White (then USA for SDNY) and got her input and ok, based on the existence of an Egyptian warrant as the fig leaf.

So going into 9/11 – it’s possible that’s all that would have been out there on that aspect. I asked Mayer about this in a roundabout way when she was “virtually here” for her bookclub bit and she responded but to the side of my question, just saying something like White didn’t believe that US law really did what it needed to do vis a vis going after terrorists.

Then they got their best prize to that point, al-Libi. Pakistan was happy to hand him off to us, extrajudicially, but then what? Well, that damn DIA got in the CIA’s game and started saying – this guy probably isn’t even al-Qaeda per se (more like a guy here in the states running some paramilitary training camp that just so happens to have a lot of the participants who belong to white supremicist groups, but who isn’t running the camp for any one group or claiming membership in any one group). And instead of letting the CIA plant whatever Dick wants into the guy, the DIA is looking at what is going on in Afghanistan as a real honest to God search for Bin Laden (not an excuse for Iraq) and they are trying to get good intel.

What to do – well, that’s when the CIA sends al-Libi to Egypt. Only … Egypt couldn’t even cook up a warrant grounds for him.

So the CIA trumps up a claim that al-Libi is Egyptian. Meanwhile, the FBI (who the CIA doesn’t want to get him) is pretty damn sure he’s Libyan. At that point, it looks to me like the CIA is still trying to find a way around handing off someone to torture and White’s ploy of getting a warrant from the other country isn’t working, so they just cook up the story about him being Egyptian to have some claim.

What I’ve never seen anyone do, and would like to, is to get Albright for the Clinton era Egyptian renditions, and Powell then Rice for the Bush renditions, to pony up on their roles. Because as best I understand it (and I’m not any expert and may be wrong) the “out” under the CAT and our then existing rules and regs on turning over someone to a nation that’s on the torture list is that you get the Sec of State to negotiate assurances with the recipient that they won’t torture.

Was Powell consulted on al-Libi? Did he talk to Egypt and get assurances on al-Libi? Were they all worried about Taft and that he would recommend against it or that Powell just wouldn’t play along, so they cut them out of the loop and used a trumped up claim that al-Libi was Egyptian as their cover?

One thing the torture memos point out is that threats to (and certainly follow through on) turn over a person to a torture sponsor or to turn over family members to such a sponsor is very clearly prohibited. So that issue is not tackled in the memos I’ve read. But it was not only squarely presented in the al-Libi case, but has come up over and over (IIRC, Cloonan mentions that the CIA also told al-Libi as they were loading him up that they were going to go find and rape his mother; Higazy was told his sister was going to get picked up by Egyptian authorities -impliedly to be raped and tortured; Qhatani was told his mother would be brought and dumped alone and unprotected with the male detainees on GITMO; KSM was told his children were going to be abused, etc.

Who knew that to be a patriot you had to have such rape/child abuse fetishes?

Anyway – I think the cia just deliberately made up the Egyptian citizenship story. Then, when it was an election year and they got a bit worried, they got him back. Once Bush was re-elected, they disappeared him permanently, with stories that he was sent back to Libya probably indicating an involvement of someone like Kappes who was handling Bush’s Libyan detente ith Qhaddafy.

And right now with Pakistan imploding Obama needs Kappes, or so he might think.