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History > 2008 > USA > Terrorism (III)
A video frame of Abu Yahya al-Libi.
Photograph:
IntelCenter, via Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
April 3, 2008
Rising Leader for Next Phase of Al Qaeda’s War
NYT
4.4.2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/world/asia/04qaeda.html
Editorial
The Torture Sessions
April 20, 2008
The New York Times
Ever since Americans learned that American
soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a
disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States
law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality?
The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear
knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only
approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of
harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from
justice those who followed the orders.
We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its
Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC
News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national
security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy:
Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the
attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
These officials did not have the time or the foresight to plan for the aftermath
of the invasion of Iraq or the tenacity to complete the hunt for Osama bin
Laden. But they managed to squeeze in dozens of meetings in the White House
Situation Room to organize and give legal cover to prisoner abuse, including
brutal methods that civilized nations consider to be torture.
Mr. Bush told ABC News this month that he knew of these meetings and approved of
the result.
Those who have followed the story of the administration’s policies on prisoners
may not be shocked. We have read the memos from the Justice Department
redefining torture, claiming that Mr. Bush did not have to follow the law, and
offering a blueprint for avoiding criminal liability for abusing prisoners.
The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very
highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact,
about the ways Mr. Bush and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in
the name of saving the American way of life.
We have questions to ask, in particular, about the involvement of Ms. Rice, who
has managed to escape blame for the catastrophic decisions made while she was
Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, and Mr. Powell, a career Army officer who
should know that torture has little value as an interrogation method and puts
captured Americans at much greater risk. Did they raise objections or warn of
the disastrous effect on America’s standing in the world? Did anyone?
Mr. Bush has sidestepped or quashed every attempt to uncover the breadth and
depth of his sordid actions. Congress is likely to endorse a cover-up of the
extent of the illegal wiretapping he authorized after 9/11, and we are still
waiting, with diminishing hopes, for a long-promised report on what the Bush
team really knew before the Iraq invasion about those absent weapons of mass
destruction — as opposed to what it proclaimed.
At this point it seems that getting answers will have to wait, at least, for a
new Congress and a new president. Ideally, there would be both truth and
accountability. At the very minimum the public needs the full truth.
Some will call this a backward-looking distraction, but only by fully
understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law
and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair
the damage and ensure it does not happen again.
The Torture Sessions, NYT, 20.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/opinion/20sun1.html
McCain, Iraq War
and the Threat of ‘Al Qaeda’
April 19, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER and LARRY ROHTER
As he campaigns with the weight of a deeply unpopular war on
his shoulders, Senator John McCain of Arizona frequently uses the shorthand “Al
Qaeda” to describe the enemy in Iraq in pressing to stay the course in the war
there.
“Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how
things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw
troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an
attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic
front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew,
Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.”
Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr.
McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed
nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have
been aroused by the name “Al Qaeda” since the Sept. 11 attacks.
There has been heated debate since the start of the war about the nature of the
threat in Iraq. The Bush administration has long portrayed the fight as part of
a broader battle against Islamic terrorists. Opponents of the war accuse the
administration of deliberately blurring the distinction between the Sept. 11
attackers and anti-American forces in Iraq.
“The fundamental problem we face in Iraq is that there is not a single center of
gravity, as in the cold war, but a whole constellation of contending forces,”
said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism and counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown
University. “This is much more fractionated than most people could imagine, with
multiple, independent moving parts, and when you have that universe of networks,
you can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.”
The entity Mr. McCain was referring to — Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also known as
Al Qaeda in Iraq — did not exist until after the United States invaded Iraq in
2003. The most recent National Intelligence Estimates consider it the most
potent offshoot of Al Qaeda proper, the group led by Osama bin Laden that is now
believed to be based on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
It is a largely homegrown and loosely organized group of Sunni Arabs that,
according to the official American military view that Mr. McCain endorses, is
led at least in part by foreign operatives and receives fighters, financing and
direction from senior Qaeda leaders.
In longer discussions on the subject, Mr. McCain often goes into greater
specificity about the entities jockeying for control in Iraq. Some other
analysts do not object to Mr. McCain’s portraying the insurgency (or multiple
insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a “perfectly
reasonable catchall phrase” that, although it may be out of place in an academic
setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that “does not lend itself
to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing,” said Kenneth M.
Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the
Brookings Institution.
But some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous
generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting
Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred
Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a
professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is
technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is
given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole
said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if
anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.”
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is just one group, though a very lethal one, in the stew
of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal
gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly
illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army’s unsuccessful effort to wrest
control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an
explosion of violence.
The current situation in Iraq should properly be described as “a multifactional
civil war” in which “the government is composed of rival Shia factions” and
“they are embattled with an outside Shia group, the Mahdi Army,” Ira M. Lapidus,
a co-author of “Islam, Politics and Social Movements” and a professor of history
at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail message. “The Sunni forces are equally hard to
assess,” he added, and “it is an open question as to whether Al Qaeda is a
unified operating organization at all.”
In recent months, Mr. McCain has also been talking more about the threat posed
by Iranian influence in Iraq, bringing him in line with American military
officials, who in the wake of the Basra fighting seem increasingly convinced
that Iranian support for Shiite groups now constitutes the primary security
threat in Iraq.
Mr. McCain acknowledged those concerns on Tuesday night in an interview with
Chris Matthews on MSNBC when he said that “we now see the Iranians beginning to
reassert an age-old Persian ambition, as you know, to increase their influence,
particularly in southern Iraq.”
In talking about both threats, Mr. McCain tripped up last month on a visit to
the Middle East, when he mistakenly said several times that the Iranians were
training Qaeda operatives in Iran and sending them back to Iraq. Prompted by one
of his traveling companions, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Mr.
McCain corrected himself, saying that he had misspoken and had meant to say Iran
was training “other extremists” in Iraq.
And Mr. McCain went beyond what he usually says and what his foreign policy
advisers believe during a back-and-forth with Mr. Obama at the end of February.
It began when Mr. Obama said at a Democratic debate that while he intended to
withdraw American forces from Iraq as rapidly as possible, he reserved the right
to send troops back in “if Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq.”
Mr. McCain seized on the remark. “I have some news,” he said at a
town-hall-style meeting in Tyler, Tex. “Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It’s called ‘Al
Qaeda in Iraq.’ My friends, if we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base.
They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen.”
In general, Mr. Obama’s views track with those of many independent analysts. In
a speech last August, he criticized President Bush by saying: “The president
would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of Al Qaeda’s war
against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates Al Qaeda in Iraq — which didn’t
exist before our invasion — and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are
training new recruits in Pakistan.”
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wants to begin withdrawing troops, has
spoken of leaving some troops behind to fight Al Qaeda, deal with Sunni
insurgents, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly help the
Iraqi military. She warned last year of the dangers if Iraq turned into a failed
state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda.”
Few, including Mr. McCain, expect Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group, to
take control of Shiite-dominated Iraq in the event of an American withdrawal.
The situation they fear and which Mr. McCain himself sometimes fleshes out is
that an American withdrawal would be celebrated as a triumph by Al Qaeda and
create instability that the group could then exploit to become more powerful.
“Al Qaeda in Iraq would proclaim victory and increase its efforts to provoke
sectarian tensions, pushing for a full-scale civil war that could descend into
genocide and destabilize the Middle East,” Mr. McCain said this month. “Iraq
would become a failed state. It could become a haven for terrorists to train and
plan their operations.”
Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser, said during a
recent conference call with reporters that in the event of an American pullout,
“you might not necessarily see a single entity taking charge.” But such a
withdrawal could empower Shiite militias in the south and Kurds in the north,
leaving Al Qaeda “free to try to impose its will” and lead to increased
sectarian violence that “would be very likely to draw neighbors into the
conflict,” he said.
While “it is absolutely incorrect to describe the Sunni insurgency in Iraq as
driven by Al Qaeda, you can’t properly talk about Iraq without talking about Al
Qaeda in Iraq” and its importance in the larger war against terror, said Reuel
M. Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist at the Central Intelligence Agency
who is now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
“Bin Laden is a pretty good judge of the history of his own organization and its
future, and he looks upon Iraq as the great battle, the make-or-break issue that
will decide the fate of the ummah,” the global community of Islamic faithful.
When Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior military commander in Iraq, testified to
the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Mr. McCain sought an endorsement
of his focus on Al Qaeda. But General Petraeus responded with an evaluation more
nuanced than the argument Mr. McCain typically offers on the campaign trail. Al
Qaeda “is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as
it was, say, 15 months ago,” he said.
In response to another of Mr. McCain’s questions, General Petraeus replied, “The
area of operation of Al Qaeda has been greatly reduced in terms of controlling
areas that it controlled as little as a year a half ago.”
McCain, Iraq War and
the Threat of ‘Al Qaeda’, NYT, 19.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/us/politics/19threat.html
Illustration: Andrés Vera Martínez
The Torture Memo, and the Outrage
NYT 7.4.2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/opinion/l07torture.html
Letters
The Torture Memo,
and the Outrage
April 7, 2008
The New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “ ’03 U.S. Memo
Approved Harsh Interrogations” (front page, April 2):
It’s high time that the authors of the Bush administration’s legal recipe book
for torture be brought out of the kitchen and into the courtroom. Yet despite
volumes of highly credible evidence of human rights crimes, or even war crimes,
a negligent Congress continues to fail miserably in its responsibility to
mandate proper investigations into these cruel policies.
The United States’ moral and political standing in the world have completely
eroded, and legitimate prosecutions of crimes against humanity against the
United States have been compromised. Congress must finally face its own
complicity in torture with concrete measures — not shortsighted hearings — by
ordering a full, independent investigation into how torture became United States
modus operandi and holding those responsible accountable. Curt Goering
Deputy Executive Director
Amnesty International USA
New York, April 2, 2008
•
To the Editor:
The Bush administration attributes detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere to
the rogue actions of a few soldiers and a lack of clear interrogation
guidelines. But the mounting evidence, particularly the declassified memo by
John C. Yoo, a former Justice Department official, proves that administration
officials themselves are responsible for the torture and cruel treatment of
detainees in United States custody.
The continuing effort to exempt the president from anti-torture law, among other
revelations, shows that the government’s calculated policy of torture originated
at the highest levels of the administration. The Justice Department’s
interpretation of long-held tenets of American and international law provided
the executive branch with the unlimited power to treat detainees as it saw fit.
Longstanding legal precedents were willfully twisted to justify a systematic
regime of abuse employing the expertise of military psychologists and medical
personnel. These “enhanced” techniques inflicted severe and lasting harm on
detainees — the kind of harm explicitly criminalized by the United States War
Crimes Act.
The use of these interrogation techniques has eroded our international standing
and compromised the rule of law. The question is no longer who is responsible.
The question now is whether they will be held accountable.
Frank Donaghue
Chief Executive
Physicians for Human Rights
Cambridge, Mass., April 3, 2008
•
To the Editor:
Your April 4 editorial “There Were Orders to Follow” brings attention to
additional evidence that it could take years to unearth the full extent of the
damage inflicted on our nation by this Bush administration.
While it will never happen, once the election is over, an independent commission
should be appointed to investigate once and for all the nation’s unseemly march
to war, the administration’s apparent disregard for civil liberties and
international standards of conduct, and its support of policies that served to
advance cronyism, self-dealing and economic waste on a monumental scale.
For future generations to be able to identify and marginalize such conduct, it
needs to be identified and exposed. While security demands vigilance to thwart
the enemy from without, we should not ignore the more insidious dangers posed by
contemptible policies foisted on us from within.
Robert I. Goodman
Rye Brook, N.Y., April 4, 2008
To the Editor:
I was reminded of how differently the Truman administration was advised to
respond to the Soviet Union.
In 1946 George F. Kennan was asked to explain why the Soviet Union was behaving
as it was. In his famous “long telegram,” Kennan discussed how the Kremlin
leaders justified the dictatorship and the “cruelties” they inflicted, along
with the threat that Communist expansion posed to the West.
The way to respond to despotism and the Communist threat, he concluded, was to
“have the courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and
conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us
in coping with this problem of Soviet Communism, is that we shall allow
ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”
It is more than regrettable that John C. Yoo and others in the Bush
administration failed to remember Kennan’s sage advice. Kenton Clymer
DeKalb, Ill., April 4, 2008
The writer is a presidential research professor and chairman of the history
department at Northern Illinois University.
The Torture Memo, and
the Outrage, NYT, 7.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/opinion/l07torture.html
Rising Leader for Next Phase of Al Qaeda’s War
April 4,
2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET
On the
night of July 10, 2005, an obscure militant preacher named Abu Yahya al-Libi
escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan and rocketed to fame in the world
of jihadists.
The breakout from the Bagram Air Base by Mr. Libi and three cellmates — they
picked a lock, dodged their guards and traversed the base’s vast acreage to
freedom — embarrassed American officials as deeply as it delighted the jihadist
movement. In the nearly three years since then, Mr. Libi’s meteoric ascent
within the leadership of Al Qaeda has proved to be even more troublesome for the
authorities.
Mr. Libi, a Libyan believed to be in his late 30s, is now considered to be a top
strategist for Al Qaeda, as well as one of its most effective promoters of
global jihad, appearing in a dozen videos on militant Web sites in the past
year, counterterrorism officials said. At a time when Al Qaeda seems more
inspirational than operational, Mr. Libi stands out as a formidable star whose
rise to prominence tracks the group’s growing emphasis on information in its war
with the West.
“I call him a man for all seasons for A.Q.,” said Jarret Brachman, a former
analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency who is now research director of the
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. “He’s a warrior. He’s a poet. He’s a
scholar. He’s a pundit. He’s a military commander. And he’s a very charismatic,
young, brash rising star within A.Q., and I think he has become the heir
apparent to Osama bin Laden in terms of taking over the entire global jihadist
movement.”
The secrecy that envelops Al Qaeda’s leadership structure makes such estimates
speculative, other analysts noted. But one Islamist insider said that in
addition to youth and charisma, Mr. Libi possessed one skill that Al Qaeda’s
leaders had been lacking: religious scholarship. Perhaps with this in mind, Al
Qaeda is featuring Mr. Libi, who spent two years in Africa studying Islam, in as
many of the videos as the group’s top leaders, Mr. bin Laden and Ayman
al-Zawahri.
“Bin Laden is an engineer and Zawahri is a medical doctor,” said Dr. Muhammad
al-Massari, a Saudi dissident who lives in London. “So it is important that they
also present someone who has the role of scholar.”
The varied roles that Mr. Libi plays in these videos, from recruiter to
ideological enforcer, also shed light on Al Qaeda’s shifting tactics. In recent
months, those tactics have come to include defensive maneuvers aimed at defusing
the media counteroperations of the United States and its allies.
Mr. Libi delivers his message with a preacher’s cadence. His black turban drapes
down his chest, and he alternates between white Arabic robes and camouflage
jackets.
“O Muslim youth in the East and West, who listen to God calling you: ‘Go forth
to war, whether it be easy or difficult for you, and strive hard in God’s cause
with your possessions and your lives,’ ” he said in a video sermon released this
year.
But increasingly, Mr. Libi uses his videos not to expand Al Qaeda’s base, but to
shore it up. He has lashed out at moderate Muslim scholars who accuse Al Qaeda
of using false interpretations of the Koran to justify jihad. He has mocked
Saudi Arabia’s efforts to persuade jailed militants to give up the fight.
In a 93-minute speech released last fall, Mr. Libi urged supporters to brace
themselves for a surge in psychological warfare loaded with false propaganda. He
cited a rumor that Al Qaeda’s constitution calls for killing anyone who breaks
from the group: “Al Qaeda and its leaders are too noble and pure to descend to
the rotten level of such nonsense.”
These and other frank communications by Mr. Libi have led intelligence analysts
at the West Point center and elsewhere to pore over his videos like
Kremlinologists looking for operational clues to Soviet intentions.
Mr. Libi began as a militant on a scholarly path, according to a Libyan man who
says he knew him. His older brother, now imprisoned in Libya, had been a crucial
figure in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, whose members went to Afghanistan
to help defeat the Soviet Union.
Mr. Libi, who went to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, was sent back to northern
Africa to study Islam in Mauritania. When he returned two years later,
Afghanistan was no longer a battleground for militant Libyans, but rather a
haven: the Taliban controlled most of the country.
Mr. Libi’s training in warfare was minimal, and his early work as a preacher
rarely touched on militant action, according to the Libyan man who said he had
met Mr. Libi in Afghanistan, and who spoke on condition of anonymity out of
security concerns. “He started to visit training camps and talk about Shariah,”
or Islamic law, this man said in a telephone interview, about “morals,
etiquette, how to act.”
Then a year after 9/11, Mr. Libi was seized by Pakistani authorities and turned
over to American authorities, who eventually put him in the Bagram prison.
In one video produced after their escape in 2005, Mr. Libi and his fellow
fugitives recounted their breakout, crediting God with distracting their
captors. A new version now circulating on jihadist Web sites re-enacts some of
the escape with dramatic flair.
Mr. Libi, who has also used the names Hasan Qaiid and Yunis al-Sahrawi, is
assumed to be in the Afghan-Pakistani border area.
He appears to have worked his way quickly into Al Qaeda’s inner circle. He was
among the leaders who sent letters of rebuke to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the
militant leader who was killed in Iraq in 2006, who they felt was undermining
the group’s global strategy by killing too many civilians.
“I share with you your great jihad,” he wrote in a letter dated Nov. 20, 2005,
according to a translation obtained from the West Point group. “I hope that you
will lay open your heart for the acceptance of what I say.”
In subsequent video appearances, Mr. Libi cast himself as a utility man for Al
Qaeda. He rebutted Muslim scholars who criticized suicide bombers in Algeria; he
urged Muslims to carry out attacks in Europe in revenge for the Danish cartoons
of the Prophet Muhammad.
Asked to assess Mr. Libi’s stature, the State Department’s counterterrorism
chief, Dell L. Dailey, who retired from the Army as a lieutenant general, said
in an e-mail message, “Abu Yahya is a senior Al Qaeda member, a top strategist
for the group, and trusted and presented as one of the group’s most effective
promoters of jihad.”
He has also become the leader of a Libyan contingent of fighters in the
Afghanistan and Pakistan region, particularly after the death this year of
another key militant who went by the name of Abu Laith al-Libi, said Evan F.
Kohlmann, an analyst who testifies as a government witness in terrorism trials.
(The two Mr. Libis were not related.)
Abu Yahya al-Libi’s most frank discussion of Al Qaeda’s information war with the
West came in the video released last fall, “Dots of the Letters.”
In assessing the state of Islamic militancy worldwide, Mr. Libi dwelled on
“defectors” who have denounced violence, internal spats among militants and
fatwas or Islamic legal pronouncements, from moderate Muslims who seek to
criminalize jihadists. He went so far as to specify six ways that the United
States and its allies might try to exploit this disharmony through psychological
warfare.
Efforts by the Pentagon to undermine Al Qaeda have intensified in recent months
in Iraq, said military officials in Baghdad, including using imams to meet with
American-held detainees for religious talks before they are released and
publicizing militants who disavow their violent ways.
In his video last fall, Mr. Libi sought to brace Al Qaeda’s adherents for
tactics like this, which he said would fail. The retractions of captured
militants would be particularly ineffective, given their prisoner status, he
argued.
“Tell me,” Mr. Libi said, “what do you expect from someone who sees the sword
above him, the rug in front of him and the sheik dictating to him the proof and
evidence for the obligation of obeying the ruler?”
Margot Williams contributed reporting.
Rising Leader for Next Phase of Al Qaeda’s War, NYT
4.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/world/asia/04qaeda.html?hp
’03 U.S.
Memo Approved Harsh Interrogations
April 2,
2008
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON
— The Justice Department in 2003 gave military interrogators broad authority to
use extreme methods in questioning detainees and argued that wartime powers
largely exempted interrogators from laws banning harsh treatment, according to a
memorandum publicly disclosed on Tuesday.
In a sweeping legal brief written in March 2003, when the Pentagon was
struggling to determine the appropriate limits for its interrogators, the
Justice Department gave the Pentagon much of the same authority it had provided
to the Central Intelligence Agency in a memorandum months earlier. Both
memorandums were later rescinded by the Justice Department.
The disclosure of the 2003 document, a detailed 81-page opinion written by John
C. Yoo, who at the time was the second-ranking official at the Office of Legal
Counsel at the Justice Department, is likely to fuel the already intense debate
about legal boundaries in the face of a continuing terrorist threat.
Mr. Yoo’s memorandum is the latest document to illuminate the legal foundation
that Bush administration lawyers used after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to
give the White House broad powers to capture, detain and interrogate suspects
around the globe.
The thrust of Mr. Yoo’s brief has long been known, but its specific contents
were revealed on Tuesday after government lawyers turned it over to the American
Civil Liberties Union, which has sought hundreds of documents from the Bush
administration under the Freedom of Information Act.
Some legal scholars said Tuesday that they were amazed at the scope of the
memorandum.
“This is a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency,” said
Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and the
Washington College of Law at American University. “It’s also a road map for the
Pentagon for fending off any prosecutions.”
The memorandum gave the military broad latitude to use harsh interrogation
methods. It reasoned that federal laws prohibiting assault were not applicable
to military interrogators dealing with members of Al Qaeda because of White
House authority during wartime. It also argued that many American and
international laws would not apply to interrogations overseas.
“Even if an interrogation method arguably were to violate a criminal statute,
the Justice Department could not bring a prosecution because the statute would
be unconstitutional as applied in this context,” it reads.
Justice Department lawyers later rescinded both Mr. Yoo’s memorandum and the
similar one written for the C.I.A. in August 2002. In a book published last
year, Jack Goldsmith, who as head of the Office of Legal Counsel made the
decision to rescind the memorandums, criticized the documents, saying they had
used careless legal reasoning to provide national security agencies with
sweeping interrogation authority.
Written to William J. Haynes II, who at the time was the Pentagon’s general
counsel, Mr. Yoo’s document was meant to give legal guidance to Defense
Department lawyers as they wrestled with a list of interrogation methods for
prisoners at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The document explains that Mr. Haynes had asked the Justice Department “to
examine the legal standards governing military interrogations of alien unlawful
combatants held outside the United States.”
The Pentagon was trying to set clear guidelines for military interrogators after
Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time, withdrew approval for
some interrogation techniques opposed by some senior military lawyers.
Ultimately, Mr. Yoo’s memorandum provided the legal foundation for the group’s
final report, which defended the use of harsh interrogation methods.
Similar to the document written for the C.I.A. in August 2002, Mr. Yoo’s
memorandum offered a narrow definition of what constitutes torture.
“The victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is
equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so
severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of
significant body functions will likely result,” Mr. Yoo wrote.
Despite the wide latitude the document gave to the military, the Pentagon never
authorized some of the harshest interrogation methods used by the C.I.A.,
including waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique.
Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the Yoo
memorandum seemed to give military interrogators “carte blanche” to use any
techniques and suggested that it was the legal underpinning for abuses that
occurred months later at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
No Pentagon investigations have found that any senior Bush administration
officials were complicit in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
The investigations did find, however, that for several years after the Sept. 11
attacks, the Pentagon failed to set uniform standards for military
interrogations worldwide.
Martin S. Lederman, a former lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel who now
teaches at Georgetown University, noted Tuesday night on the legal blog
Balkinization that Mr. Yoo’s memorandum was issued on a Saturday one day after
his boss, Jay S. Bybee, left the Justice Department.
Some legal experts and civil liberties groups have for years criticized the
August 2002 memorandum written for the C.I.A. as overly expansive in the
authority it gave the agency to interrogate detainees.
That memorandum was also written by Mr. Yoo, who is now a law professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, but it was signed by Mr. Bybee and for
several years has been commonly known as the Bybee memo.
It was prepared after an internal debate in the government about the methods
used to extract information from Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden’s top
aides, after his capture in April 2002.
The document provided a legal foundation for coercive techniques used later
against other high-ranking detainees, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is
believed to be the chief architect of the Sept. 11 attacks and was captured in
early 2003.
The Detainee Treatment Act passed by Congress in 2005 required the Defense
Department to restrict interrogation methods to those set out in the Army Field
Manual, which bans coercive interrogations.
Last year, President Bush issued an executive order narrowing the list of
approved techniques for the C.I.A. Intelligence officials have said that
waterboarding is not on the list of currently approved techniques but that
President Bush could authorize its use during an emergency.
Scott Shane contributed reporting.
’03 U.S. Memo Approved Harsh Interrogations, NYT,
2.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/washington/02terror.html?hp
Books of
The Times
The
Family That Spawned 9/11
April 1,
2008
The New York Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Steve
Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed
portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of
Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his
relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping
his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.
“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling,
culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia, while
shedding new light on the “troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected,
secret-burdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the
United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the
traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the
West.
It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family
epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and
Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book
that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the
political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s
Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A.,
Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”
That earlier work focused on the rise of Islamic extremism during the
anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden first emerged
as a leader, while this volume looks at the familial, cultural and political
forces that shaped him as he came of age in Saudi Arabia.
Parts of Mr. Coll’s narrative are heavily indebted to other reporters’
pioneering work on this subject — most notably, Peter Bergen’s two books on Mr.
bin Laden, and “The Looming Tower,” Lawrence Wright’s searing book about Al
Qaeda and the road to 9/11. But by focusing on Mr. bin Laden’s conflicted
relationship with his family and that family’s complicated relationship with the
West, Mr. Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker who also worked for many years
at The Washington Post, has added fascinating new details to our understanding
of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry black
sheep, intent on lashing out at the very people — the Saudi royal family and the
United States of America — that his father and brothers had cultivated in their
business dealings for years.
Just as recent books like Jacob Weisberg’s “Bush Tragedy” have underscored the
role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W. Bush’s presidency and his
decision to go to war against Iraq, so this volume underscores the role that
Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden’s radicalization and
his declaration of war against America.
Mr. Coll traces how Osama — who was still a boy when his father, Muhammad, was
killed in an airplane accident in 1967 — found a succession of father figures in
a series of radical mentors, including a high school gym teacher who involved
him in an after-school Islamic study group and Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic
scholar who introduced the young Osama to “the concept of transnational jihad.”
Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of bizarre connections among its dramatis
personae, suggesting that there are often less than six degrees of separation
when it comes to the new globalized world of international finance. We learn,
for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden began his rise by working as a bricklayer
and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, which had been formed to
manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and that the
huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business
with well-known American firms like General Electric, and draw on advice from
the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of
state and Bush family adviser.
We also learn that Jim Bath, a former reserve pilot with the Texas Air National
Guard who used to carouse with George W. Bush, later became a business partner
in Houston with Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother.
The ultimate self-made man, the family patriarch Muhammad bin Laden left an
impoverished and deeply religious canyon village to seek his fortune (during an
early interlude in the pilgrim city of Jeddah, he was so poor that he reportedly
slept in a ditch he dug in the sand) and through a combination of skill, acumen
and the assiduous cultivation of the royal family, became the king’s principal
builder, overseeing renovations of sacred sites in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.
He would bequeath to his children not just a fortune, but also what Mr. Coll
calls a “transforming vision of ambition and religious faith in a borderless
world.” His British-educated son, Salem, who took over the company after his
death, would expand its international reach, and he would also embrace a
Westernized, jet-set existence that allowed him to indulge his eccentricities to
the fullest.
In fact, Salem emerges from this volume as a compelling, larger-than-life
figure, a picaresque playboy, at once guileless, brilliant and self-indulgent,
who held together the increasingly fractious bin Laden clan through sheer force
of will and charisma. Salem, who dressed in jeans, loved airplanes and liked to
play the harmonica, reportedly “paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in
Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in
seven languages.”
Mr. Coll reports that Salem organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, shipped
thousands of cases of Tabasco sauce back to Saudi Arabia and dreamed of marrying
four women from four Western nations: his estate, he imagined, would resemble
the United Nations, with four houses, one flying an American flag, one a German
flag, one a French flag and one the Union Jack. Salem died in 1988 in a plane
accident in Texas.
As for Osama bin Laden, Mr. Coll, like Mr. Wright in “The Looming Tower,”
suggests that the Qaeda founder’s turn to international war against the United
States was not inevitable. Mr. Coll writes that when the Saudi royal family
agreed in the summer of 1990 to the arrival of American troops in response to
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Mr. bin Laden “offered no public dissent” at the
time, but “moved quickly with the rest of his family to protect his personal
fortune against the possibility that the Al-Saud regime might collapse.”
Although he had come to see himself as an “international Islamic guerrilla
leader,” his views at the time, Mr. Coll writes, were still “nuanced, changeable
and laced with contradictions.”
Increasingly at odds with the Saudi royal family, Mr. bin Laden left the kingdom
in 1991 for the Sudan, where he bought a farm and raised horses and sunflowers
while training jihadis (whom he sent to places like Bosnia). “Osama seemed to
believe during this period,” Mr. Coll writes, “that he could have it all in
Sudan — wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious
devotion and jihad — all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due
a proper sheikh. He did not yet seem to grasp that his enterprise, particularly
in its support for violence against governments friendly to or dependent upon
the Al-Saud, might prove difficult to reconcile with the interests of his family
in Jeddah.”
In June 1993, Mr. Coll reports, the family, most likely under pressure from the
Saudi government, moved to expel Osama as a shareholder of the Muhammad bin
Laden Company and the Saudi bin Laden Group. The following year the family
publicly repudiated him, the Ministry of Interior announced that he had been
formally stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and Mr. bin Laden began writing
lengthy essays denouncing the royal family, which he circulated by fax.
By 1995, Mr. Coll writes, there was “a hint of King Lear in the wilderness” to
his exile: he was out of money, one of his wives had divorced him, and his
eldest son had left him to return to Saudi Arabia. Isolation fueled Mr. bin
Laden’s self-righteousness, however, and his wrath increasingly focused on the
United States, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government
to expel him from Khartoum, leading to his exile in 1996 back to the harsh lands
of Afghanistan.
While he careered toward violence, other members of his family moved to
strengthen their ties with the West. There were family investments in
enterprises ranging from Iridium, a satellite communications network, to the
Hard Rock Cafe franchise in the Middle East.
In the days after 9/11 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in
Washington — who met with President Bush on the evening of September 13 — helped
arrange (with F.B.I. permission) a special chartered plane flight to carry more
than a dozen bin Ladens, some of whom had been living in the United States for
years, back home to Saudi Arabia. Subsequent F.B.I. investigations “turned up no
evidence of complicity by the bin Laden family in terrorist violence,” Mr. Coll
writes, and a decision seems to have been made at the White House sometime early
in 2002 that, barring the emergence of new evidence, “the U.S. government would
not sanction the bin Laden family in any way because of its history with Osama.”
One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were
“millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of
the non-evil variety.”
THE BIN
LADENS
An Arabian Family in the American Century
By Steve Coll
Illustrated. 671 pages. The Penguin Press. $35.
The Family That Spawned 9/11, NYT, 1.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/books/01kaku.html
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