It appears that Obama and Holder have drunk Lindsay Graham’s oily elixir. There are so many mountains of ’stuff’ left by Bush/Cheney, that it’s hard to know which pile to shovel at first.

Thanks for all your fine reporting.

But the quoted official, CIA lawyer Jonathan Fredman, told the committee on November 18 that he had made no such statement. In fact, Fredman added in a heretofore confidential, five-page memo, he had stressed at the 2002 meeting with interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility described in the Levin committee’s report, “Interrogation practices and legal guidance must not be based upon anyone’s subjective perception” (emphasis added) but rather upon “definitive and binding legal analysis.”

Remarkably, the 18-page report issued by the committee (headed “Executive Summary”) does not mention Fredman’s vehement — and, in my view, quite plausible — denial of the horrifying words attributed to him in a document of debatable reliability that the report, and Levin, have treated as established fact.

In this case, it was a time constraint; an email can bounce around, as we who use email all know, but a fax is a phone call, direct from point-to-point and it’s finite, pin-pointable in time.

The only other reason one might send a fax through traditional point-to-point phonecalls is to avoid certain forms of scanning or monitoring.

Looks to me like any time we see a fax used in communications, we should focus on immediacy, timing.

Here the Human Rights Watch report on Camp Nama, [scroll down to page 4]excerpt from my notes:

…CIA’s Baghdad Station sent a caable to HQTRS on 08/03/2003 raising concern that Special Ops (TF-6-26) troops who served with agency [CIA] officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. 5 days later [08/08/2003] the CIA issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the CIA barred its officers from working at Camp Nama, but allowed them to keep providing target info and other intel to the TF.

In summer of 2004 Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a HQ in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit’s ops are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

Fair or not, physical suffering is more “poignant” to the general public than psychological suffering. I can hear the Limbaugh chorus, “boo hoo, we made the terrorist depressed. Give me a break.” It would be harder to dismiss detailed medical descriptions of real physical pain, especially if it involved medical instrumentation or blood. It is this I think the CIA is working on hiding now.