New Grand Jury Investigation on Torture, or DoJ Smokescreen?

Cross-posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

News certainly travels fast, sometimes. While it took the U.S. government two years to reply to a request by a Spanish judge regarding whether or not the U.S. has instigated any investigations or proceedings against six high-level Bush administration figures named in a complaint by the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners (see PDF), and it took another three weeks to get the response distributed to the parties involved, and yet another three weeks to have the news of this response released to the world at large, it took less than 24 hours to learn that the entire case was dismissed by the Spanish judge on Wednesday.

In effect, Judge Eloy Velasco sent the case back to the U.S. at the request of the Department of Justice, who argued in their March 1, 2011 letter to the judge that the U.S. is plenty interested in investigating and prosecuting torture and other war crimes. Besides the cases of CIA contractors David Passaro and Don Ayala (Marcy Wheeler discusses the Passaro case here), assorted Defense Department prosecutions of "bad apple" abusers, and the lingering Durham investigation, the U.S. representation cannot dredge up any significant criminal investigations -- except one (if it is one).

The letter rogatory to the Spanish court refers to "pending federal investigations by the United States Attorneys' Office for the Eastern District of Virginia" on "various allegations of abuse of detainees." (p. 3-4 of letter) In addition the letter refers to "pending status and legal restrictions on the disclosure of investigative information, including rules of grand jury secrecy". Since there has been no previous reports on current grand jury proceedings in the Eastern District on detainee abuse that I know of, is this a reference to the former cases since sent from the Eastern District by Attorney General Holder in 2009 for review by special prosecutor John Durham? Or is this something new? Have some of the cases under preliminary review by Mr. Durham now reached full investigation status?

DoJ Keeps Mum on Virginia "Pending" Investigation

In response to such questions, Dean Boyd, spokesman for the National Security Division at the Department of Justice replied to me today, "There is nothing further I can provide to you on this matter beyond what is in the document."

Since the U.S. representation to the Spanish court was meant to convince the judge that the U.S. was serious about seeking investigations and prosecutions regarding torture, it is important to know whether a new stage in the otherwise dilatory investigations by the Obama administration, who famously has announced it would rather look forward and not backwards when it comes to investigating torture, has been hereby announced, or whether this was a con job by DoJ, describing the Eastern District grand jury as somehow still in play, when in reality, its actions on detainee abuse are non-existent, waiting for some determination of the review by Durham and his office.

Durham's review has also been going on for over a year and a half now. But it was last June when, according to an article at Main Justice, Attorney General Holder said in remarks at the University of the District of Columbia Law School, that Durham was near the end of his preliminary review, and ”close to the end of the time that he needs and will be making some recommendations to me.” Did those recommendations include a referral back to the Eastern District for investigation and prosecution of those cases? According to the article, "several Justice officials cautioned that although Durham is nearing completion, it may take weeks or months to absorb his findings and decide what steps, if any, to pursue next."

In a rebuttal letter to the U.S. response, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which has been championing the Spanish prosecution, appears to believe the entire episode as written up in the recent March 1 letter is a smokescreen for a whole lot of nothing. CCR wrote, "The U.S. Submission tries to hide behind the secrecy aspects of the grand jury proceedings to suggest that this investigation is a robust investigation into detainee abuse. It is notable, however, that the United States government has not spoken of any investigation in Virginia when discussing US investigations into US torture..." (PDF).

It must be galling to those looking to the Spanish court, and the hard workers at CCR especially, to see Judge Velasco so quickly take U.S. guarantees of sincerity as good coin. The U.S. had told the court, "The United States will continue to address allegations of abuse by its personnel, at home and abroad, and therefore believes it is appropriate for the Spanish courts to refer complaints related to such matters to the United States for appropriate review and action."

CCR responded, noting the Obama administration policy of impunity for torture among mid-level and high-ranking government figures:

Through its actions and inactions, the U.S. clearly has demonstrated its unwillingness to exercise its jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute the named defendants for serious violations of international law. To refer this investigation from Spain to the United States would be to knowingly transfer this case to be closed.

Those following the torture scandal will find high irony in the U.S. claims that the DoJ Office of Public Responsiblity (OPR) and Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) investigations, into DoJ Office of Legal Counsel malfeasance on the torture memos and on the origins and spread of the DoD torture program, respectively, are somehow indicative of U.S. good faith on investigations. The OPR report found government attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee to be guilty of "professional misconduct," only to have DoJ Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis downgrade the OPR decision. The SASC investigation found the torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere to be the responsibility not of "bad apples" in the military, but of high officials who promoted a program of torture and detention abuse.

It seems unlikely that the Durham investigation is actually going to bear any fruit, or that a grand jury investigation on detainee abuse is actually underway in Virginia. Sooner or later, we will know the truth. But whatever it is, the actions and policy of the Obama administration won't fundamentally change, as high officials, such as those identified in the Spanish case -- David Addington, Jay S. Bybee, Douglas Feith, Alberto R. Gonzales, William J. Haynes, and John Yoo -- are not in any danger of prosecution. The U.S. has made that clear numerous times, and most lately in the response to the Spanish judge.

Two More Essential Articles on OPR/OLC Torture Scandal

I'm too busy to be writing up my own article today. Luckily, there's a lot of excellent work being done right now on the torture situation, coming on the heels of revelations in the DoJ's OPR report on the torture memos, and its ignoble conclusion by DoJ fixer David Margolis to overrule the judgment of the report.

Here's an article by Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel, who has found a crucial piece of extra evidence by carefully sifting through the OPR report, and drawing on her knowledge of the torture scandal:

What If They DID Use Mock Burial with Abu Zubaydah? 

In my last post [The Mock Burial in the OPR Report], I showed that the CIA asked DOJ to approve the use of mock burial, but DOJ refused. I noted that the ICRC report doesn’t appear to show that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to mock burial (though he was subject to confinement in both a small and a larger box).

But what if he was? What if, in the period before the torture memos, James Mitchell subjected Abu Zubaydah to mock burial, and DOJ later refused to give it retroactive approval?

After all, John Yoo specifically said that mock burial violates the torture statute. If he said that–and OPR has records–then what does that mean for those who authorized and carried out mock burial?

Wheeler goes on to describe what she found in the OPR report to back up this thesis. Raw Story picked up her analysis and now has published their own story about it.

Meanwhile, Scott Horton continues his excellent deconstruction/analysis of the Margolis memorandum which exonerated torture memo authors John Yoo and Jay Bybee, concluding their collaboration with the CIA in constructing the torture program was merely, in the matter of writing the torture memos, "bad judgment."

More Investigations for the Torture Lawyers

I am just back from the Alliance For Justice’s panel discussion on the OPR Report, at which I spoke, at the Washington office of Wilmer Hale. The show-stealer was the presentation by Georgetown professor Michael Frisch, one of the District of Columbia’s leading legal ethics experts and a long-time enforcer for the D.C. Bar Council.

Frisch eviscerated both the OPR report and the David Margolis memo. The key ethics inquiry, he argued, was under Rule 1.2(d)—whether Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury were actually counseling a crime. In this case, the evidence that their advice was designed to facilitate torture is clear-cut, torture is a felony, and multiple players putting a scheme in place to torture is a conspiracy to torture. Yet neither the OPR report nor David Margolis even considered this question, focusing all their energy instead on two weak and rarely enforced provisions of the ethics code dealing with the duty of candor and the duty to exercise independent professional judgment....

... the [New York] Times [25 February editorial] zeroes in on what strikes me as the fishiest part of the whole DOJ ethics escapade: the “disappearance” of John Yoo’s and Patrick Philbin’s emails. Emails at an institution like the Justice Department don’t just “disappear.” Someone deleted them. Moreover, for a deletion to be effective enough to avoid an investigation, extraordinary steps have to be taken. In a criminal investigation (as should have taken place), this would have been an act of criminal obstruction. What’s out there that they don’t want us to see?

We, the American people, must demand clear, open, and fair investigations of the government's torture program, and this investigation must be allowed to go wherever it must -- into the executive branch (military, CIA, Justice Department), the Congress, private contractors, etc. A clear evil is eating away at our society, and its most serious symptom is the torture and murder of human beings, and the covering up of these crimes.

OPR Report Whitewash: U.S. DOJ Officially Alibis Construction of Torture Program

Selections from two outstanding articles covering the OPR torture report scandal. Other important articles have appeared as well, both at, for instance, Andy Worthington's blog, and at Marcy Wheeler's Emptywheel.

From Stephen Soldz at Op-Ed News:

Justice Department protects the torture lawyers, persecutes the ethical

The torture memo author John Yoo is excused, according to DoJ hack David Margolis, because he simply demonstrated "poor judgment" in claiming that the abhorrent and patently illegal was legal. Jay Bybee was excused because he, according to Margolis, didn't pay attention when he signed off on torture.

The circle is now closed and smoothed:

* White House desires torture
* CIA demands legal cover
* OLC asked to provide legal rationale
* CIA and White House tell what they want OLC memos to say; CIA provides the so-called "evidence" of safety of torture techniques
* OLC writes the memos, following instructions
* Obama White House then says no one can be prosecuted because they followed the memos
* Memo authors are immune because there was no standard saying that incompetent work on demand designed to legalize hitherto illegal activities is unethical
* Thus, patently illegal activities are able to carried out with no legal culpability for anyone

A beautiful job, now completed by Obama-Holder Justice Department hack Margolis. Future lawless administrations now have a ready template to use to provide legal rationale for any abuses they desire.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

Torture Bored: How we've erased the legal lines around torture and replaced them with nothing.

So murky is the line between torture and tough talk that Dick Cheney can now admit to having endorsed water-boarding on national television. Mark Thiessen, the Bush speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist, can appear on a Catholic television program, not merely to defend torture but to find it consistent with Catholic teachings. Thiessen excoriated CNN's Christiane Amanpour for even calling what we did to prisoners "water-boarding" since we don't, after all, use a big box. And when Bob Barr, former U.S. attorney for the northern district of Georgia and a member of the House of Representatives, suggested at CPAC this past weekend that water-boarding is plainly torture, he was booed. Because it's become an article of faith that whatever Americans do cannot be torture. That's not a legal definition. It's magical thinking. Today there is plenty of room for water-boarding in our sub-basement, and we've thrown in a pinball machine and a jukebox so CPAC can party down there.

And now here comes the long waited report from the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, pushed out late Friday, Timid Mean Time, after having been drafted and redrafted and then papered over with legal analysis that shows that the lawyers tasked with advising the president on the legal floor for torturing prisoners were not fully responsible for being unable to locate it. And because there can be no legal boundaries unless lawyers locate and police them, the conclusion is inescapable: If there is no lawyer competent to identify it, there is no longer a floor at all.

For reasons mostly bad, as David Luban explains in Slate today, DoJ career lawyer David Margolis argued for downgrading OPR's conclusion that the Bush lawyers committed professional misconduct to the far lesser sin of "poor judgment." That means that while Tiger Woods apologized to the nation for his personal marital infidelity, there will never be an apology from anyone for the humiliation and abuse of our captives. According to Margolis, Yoo and Bybee made some bad calls, but, to paraphrase Prof. Jack Balkin, since lawyers are weasels and write their own rules, how much could we really expect from the Bush legal team? In declining to refer Bybee and Yoo for disciplinary proceedings, Margolis determined that the standard for professional misconduct for a lawyer is both ambiguous in theory and astonishingly low in practice.

Politicizing Crime, the OPR Report and the Degeneracy of the Ruling Elite

"Know thou this, that men are as the time is." -- Shakespeare

In an excellent post at Inside-Out the Beltway on the controversy over the shameless refusal by the U.S. Department of Justice to formally charge former Bush-era torture memo attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee with professional misconduct for their work in legitimating torture on behalf of the U.S. military and CIA, Chris in DC makes a very, very important point in a response to one of his commenters (bold emphasis added):

Cetamua asked whether future administrations could prosecute Cheney and others for war crimes even if this one doesn't. I replied that this was theoretically possible (many of these crimes have no statute of limitations), but that the problem with delaying any kind of accountability for high-level misconduct is that, as time passes, the misconduct is seen as condoned by society and thus becomes much more difficult to punish.

This is especially the case where, as here, the establishment mantra throughout that time is that prosecuting the conduct is "criminalizing politics" (when, in fact, the precise opposite is happening: politicizing crime). In fact, establishment acceptance of this cynical distortion is even more harmful than mere reluctance or refusal to prosecute, because framing the criminal activity in a purely political context allows it to become openly advocated in mainstream forums by the political factions that most benefit from a failure to prosecute (e.g., Dick Cheney).

The outcome, then, of the politicization of crime caused by the "criminalizing politics" meme is that the debate shifts from whether the activity is reprehensible and punishable to whether the activity is smart and desirable. Hence, we see the continuing, unashamed arguments from right-wingers not only that brutal torture is not a crime (when done by or for the United States), but that torture is in fact wise and imperative national security policy, with its opponents cynically cast as weak and unserious for even suggesting otherwise.

This is why you cannot play games with matters as severe as these. Backing away from the only morally and legally sane response to war crimes - full criminal investigation and prosecution - is not a "trans-partisan" invitation to politely overcome the rancor and monstrousness of the past, it is the crucial first step to normalization and continuation of that same monstrousness and criminality.

While many will look at the legal aspects of the case, at the Congressional investigations supposedly to follow, etc., the overwhelming effect of reading the Office of Professional Responsiblity (OPR) material (see, for instance, Emptywheel's site, where Marcy Wheeler and a number of associates are dissecting the various components of the OPR report) is of a totally bankrupt, politically criminal government. These people operate at the moral level of an Eichmann. They are infected with the virus of torture, which in its later stages, metastasizes into feelings of omnipotence, delusions of grandeur, malignant narcissism, and outright sociopathy.

I don't believe I've seen such depictions of moral depravity at a fundamental level since the shenanigans of the distaff state of Salò.

Meanwhile, much of the population believes that Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and their associates are somehow going to change all this, even as they have taken clear steps -- not least placing David Margolis in charge of defanging the OPR report (which is from my standpoint underplayed anyway... letting Stephen Bradbury off, for instance) -- to make sure none of the governmental and military/intelligence criminals are ever held to account.

This failure to hold people accountable because the extent of U.S. criminality and illegal actions would become known has poisoned all political action in Washington, and no doubt extends to other components of government, and other issues (as in the recent failure to pass substantive health care reform).

The OPR report is a symptom of the extreme reactionary content of these political times. It is a gauntlet thrown down to the society at large. Are we really what these criminals represent? How can the mainstream press be so morally obtuse that they are not screaming about this from day one? What use a society such as this?

Links (h/t Emptywheel):

• Memorandum for the Attorney General
• OPR Final Report (a searchable copy, courtesy of burnt, is here)
• OPR 1st Draft Report (a searchable copy, courtesy of burnt, is here)
• OPR 2nd Draft Report
• Yoo Response to OPR 2nd Draft
• Yoo Response to OPR Final Draft
• Bybee Response to OPR 2nd Draft
• Bybee Response to OPR Final Draft

See also Jack Balkin's Justice Department Will Not Punish Yoo and Bybee Because Most Lawyers Are Scum Anyway, and Jason Leopold, DOJ Report on Torture Memo: Yoo Said Bush Could Order "Massacre" of Civilians.

Update -- from David Swanson's Yoo, Bybee and Disinformation (I thought this worth quoting at length, especially since I agree with David's suggestions about what to do now):

Everything you're reading about torture lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee getting off the hook is wrong. They are not torture lawyers, they are not off the hook, there never was any hook, they may not be lawyers for long, impeachment and indictment are on the agenda, and you have a role to play.

Calling these men "torture lawyers" is dramatically dumber than labeling Al Capone a tax cheat. These are people who provided "legal" cover for aggressive wars, who put down in documents treated as secret "laws" that any president can launch any aggressive war at his whim, without regard to domestic or international law, Congress, the Supreme Court, you, me, or morality. The very report that is the subject of the latest "news" flurry quotes Yoo declaring that, "Sure!", a president can order a village massacred....

Yoo and Bybee are openly guilty of conspiracy to engage in aggressive war, banned by the U.N. Charter and Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, and of conspiracy to torture, a felony under 18 U.S.C. § 2340A-c and § 2441, and to spy without warrants, banned by the Fourth Amendment. Their memos are public. The fact that everyone waited for years to do anything about it, until they could see the Justice Department's own report on the matter doesn't change the absolute irrelevance of such nonsense. Yoo's and Bybee's actions, no matter what you make of them, consist entirely in authorship of a series of written documents available for all to read. And those documents constitute overwhelming grounds for impeachment and indictment....

The report concludes that these war lawyers "committed intentional professional misconduct". The fact that some schmuck in the DOJ adds a note saying that they don't really mean it, doesn't change the fact that any institution in which Yoo's and Bybee's behavior did not constitute misconduct would need to be destroyed in its entirety beginning with actions to newly identify as unacceptable Yoo's and Bybee's crimes. And that they are crimes is not really impacted by whether or not they are "misconduct".

Of course the war lawyers can and must be disbarred, and you can help at http://disbartorturelawyers.com

Senator Patrick Leahy and Congressman John Conyers understand the need to at least pretend that they are not taking their orders from an agency conducting a transparent fraud.... the reports are now public and the fraud out in the open. But Leahy is asking Bybee to resign, Conyers is avoiding the word "impeachment," and neither one of these gentlemen -- stand-out frauds in their own rights -- is talking about subpoenas.

Two things are needed here. First, we need to deter ongoing crime through punishment....

Second we need to find a way for the public to re-enter our government and gain some modicum of control over what it does. That is going to require restoring powers to Congress, and that is going to require at least one committee at the very least enforcing its own subpoenas through the Capitol Police force, if not the Congress impeaching and removing from office someone who used to work in the so-called executive branch. There is a campaign building pressure to demand Bybee's impeachment at http://impeachbybee.org

The Justice Department has been publicly and lawlessly ordered by the president not to enforce laws against the war lawyers. The threat of the DOJ issuing an official recommendation of disbarment does not exactly qualify as a hook (to be let off of). Nor does impeachment, although it serves the critical purpose of shifting power back to Congress, sufficiently deter ongoing crimes. What's going to be needed in the end is prosecution. But that's going to have to come through massive public pressure and intense pressure from Congress, from abroad, and from a strengthened independent communications system.

DoJ's OPR Report Released on Yoo, Bybee Torture Memos (and David Margolis's Whitewash Memo, too)

Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered the release of the report of the Office of Professional Responsibility's (OPR) investigation into the culpability of the Office of Legal Counsel's activities in constructing the torture memos of August 2002 and beyond. These memos, written by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury and others were rescinded in whole by Barack Obama soon after becoming president.

The OPR release is both interesting and frustrating. It contains both the first draft of the report, the second draft, the final report itself, and the memorandum for Holder written by David Margolis, which, as a Newsweek report predicted, partly exonerated Yoo and Bybee from charges of professional misconduct found in the OPR report itself, reducing their culpability to the much lesser charge of "bad judgment." (I wrote about Margolis's history at DoJ in running point guard on such cover-ups in an article at Firedoglake/The Seminal on a few weeks back. Scott Horton at Harpers also wrote his own article on some of Margolis's checkered career.)

Marcy Wheeler is currently holding forth, with her distinguished crew of commenters, in an open thread on the report over at Emptywheel/FDL. My H/T for the links above for the report go to her; and she also has links to the official replies of both Yoo and Bybee to the reports earlier drafts.

My frustrations regarding the release center around the amount of redactions. Many, if not most of them center around discussions or interactions concerning the CIA. It's clear the CIA played a central role in the vetting of the supposed safety of the SERE-centered torture techniques. CIA psychologists are said to have made representations regarding the safety of the "enhanced interrogation techniques," and solicited similar statements from SERE's parent agency, JPRA. CIA-contract psychologists, including James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, apparently ran the torture interrogations in the Spring/Summer 2002, for which the initial torture memos were written as after the fact justifications. One thing the OPR report does is corroborate that such "EIT" interrogation took place before the memos were written.

What is not well-known is that both government military research, funded through Ft. Detrick, with the participation of CIA researchers, were involved in studying the "uncontrollable stress" of SERE-style torture in 2002. The actual deleterious effects of such torture were well-known to the military and CIA, who either kept such information from the OLC attorneys (which seems less likely now, given the amount of interaction between Yoo and the others with CIA and military attorneys like William Haynes), or lied about it to them, or they all collaborated in submarining such information.

When CIA psychiatrist-expert Charles A. Morgan (one of the key researchers in the Ft. Detrick study mentioned above) denied that his research was for anything but PTSD studies, and also denied links to the CIA, going so far as to scrub such attributions from his Wikipedia page, he didn't count on the fact that online references to his military research, which was not related centrally to PTSD, was available (see long PDF), or that an early draft version of the Intelligence Science Board's Educing Information report specifically lists him with CIA organizational ties, listed as part of the study's twelve man committee of interrogation "experts." (These are documents in my possession, not currently online.) This is a story I will be telling in full in the very near future.

Center for Constitutional Rights has released a statement on news of the report's release, and makes the following points:

In response to the release of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on the conduct of the lawyers involved in crafting and providing legal cover for the illegal torture program, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement:

At first look, the long-awaited OPR report makes it abundantly clear that the decisions about the torture program took place at the highest level, and the damning description of the program further show that the torture memos were written to order by the lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel who played a key role in creating the program. The report underscores the need for a more thorough investigation that has more scope and powers to follow the evidence.

Among others, the lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury have caused incalculable damage to our country and to thousands of victims as a result of the twisted legal advice they provided while at the Office of Legal Counsel. The OLC opinions were intended to provide legal cover for what everyone knew was illegal conduct. They advised the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo outside the law through the purposeful evasion of the Geneva Conventions and they advised the creation of a secret detention network for “enhanced interrogations” in flagrant violation of domestic and international law. Once unthinkable, they authorized and justified torture, rendition and secret CIA detention, often in a hands-on manner so detailed that it gives the lie to the notion they were giving abstract legal advice rather than making policy decisions to use torture

Ultimately Jay Bybee must be impeached, tried and removed from his seat as a federal judge on the 9th Circuit, but he should have the decency to resign immediately.

While the OPR should have recommended state bar associations professionally sanction the attorneys for ethics violations, and it is clear these men should be disbarred and prevented from ever practicing law again, we call on Attorney General Eric Holder to order these men criminally investigated by an independent special prosecutor who is allowed to follow the facts where they lead, all the way up the chain of command. We further call on the state bar associations, who are in no way bound by the conclusions of the report, to sanction the torture lawyers.

In addition, we demand that the OLC and CIA release the all of the records CCR is seeking with co-counsel through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in Amnesty International, CCR, et al. v. CIA, about the CIA’s torture, rendition and secret detention practices. The time has come for the public to see all of the documents that show the role these lawyers played in fashioning one of the most shameful sets of practices ever to emanate from Washington. A review of the OPR Report further confirms the illegal nature of the CIA’s practices; the government cannot abuse the FOIA to conceal these illegal or embarrassing government actions.

Holder/DoJ Cover-up on Torture Memos Investigation: Who is David Margolis?

Adapted from an article previously published at The Seminal/FDL

Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have scooped the press with a Newsweek article claiming to know the verdict of the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility report on the investigations into misconduct and unprofessional behavior by the Bush administration attorneys involved drafting the memos allowing the use of coercive interrogation techniques on prisoners. These techniques were largely derived from reverse-engineering torture inoculation procedures from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE programs.

According to Isikoff and Klaidman, the original verdict of the report was changed after the report was reviewed by the attorneys accused, and then reassessed by long-time DoJ honcho, David Margolis. The Newsweek article explains (emphasis added):

Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources….The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.

In an initial assessment by bmaz at Emptywheel, for whom I owe the H/T for the Newsweek article:

Margolis is nearly 70 years old and has a long career at DOJ and is fairly well though of. Margolis was tasked by Jim Comey to shepherd Pat Fitzgerald’s Libby investigation. In short, the man has some bona fides....

Margolis is, however, also tied to the DOJ and its culture for over forty years, not to mention his service in upper management as Associate Attorney General during the Bush Administration when the overt acts of torture and justification by Margolis’ contemporaries and friends were committed. For one such filter to redraw the findings and conclusions of such a critical investigation in order to exculpate his colleagues is unimaginable.

But the involvement of Margolis in defanging the OPR report, and thereby assuring that governmental agencies or bar associations will not hold John Yoo, Jay Bybee and other Bush-era attorneys accountable for paving the way for legalistic torture, is perhaps not an incidental fact.

Dubious David

The role of Margolis, and the man himself, deserve a closer look. It does not take long to see that 40+ year DoJ veteran David Margolis has some skeletons in his closet, and that his track record is not unblemished.

In a July 2000 letter to the New York Review of Books by by E.L. Doctorow, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Rose Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, singled out Margolis as "point man" on a DoJ "vendetta" against Cointelpro victim Leonard Peltier.

Three months ago, in March, I had a phone call from a lawyer who has never been involved in the Peltier case but was aware of my longtime concern. A friend in the Justice Department had just mentioned to him that the FBI was intensifying its anti-Peltier vendetta within the department, with Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis as the point man.

More recently, a 2008 Los Angeles Times story indicated that Margolis had changed DoJ policy and decided to withhold summaries of OPR investigations. The article noted that " the resolution of most matters investigated by the OPR remains closely guarded, even in cases where courts have found evidence of serious prosecutorial misconduct."

The LA Times continued:

Publishing the summaries "reassures the public that [the Department of Justice] takes its self-regulatory responsibilities seriously and puts prosecutors on notice that they face public embarrassment if they are caught engaging in wrongdoing," said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Fordham Law School in New York.

Associate Deputy Atty. Gen. David Margolis said it was his decision to excuse the OPR from preparing summaries of cases that might be released to the public. He said the decision reflected a lack of resources, as well as concern about balancing public interests with the privacy rights of individual attorneys facing accusations.

A 1999 story involves then Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder and Margolis acting together to spike a serious investigation into the 1993 Waco disaster, and in particular after it was discovered the FBI and DoJ had lied for years about using military incendiary devices at the Branch Davidian siege. Holder was overseeing an investigation led by Republican Senator John Danforth into the Waco Branch Davidian government siege. Bill Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno had taken the investigation out of the hands of U.S. Attorneys in Texas and given to GOP stalwart Danforth, who later exonerated the FBI of any wrongdoing, and recommended indictment of the only whistleblower in the case, U.S. Attorney William Johnston.

From a 9/15/99 Washington Post story:

The Justice Department has removed the entire U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas from further work related to the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex. The broad recusal is intended to avoid conflicts that could impede a fresh investigation being led by former senator John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), a senior Justice Department official said yesterday.

Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said U.S. Attorney Bill Blagg, whose office handled the criminal trial of the Branch Davidians in 1994, requested that his Western District office be recused from further work on Waco. Holder said that it is routine to approve recusal requests and that David Margolis, the senior department official who handled the details of the matter, told him he had never turned down a recusal request….

One of the attorneys in Blagg’s office who is being recused is Assistant U.S. Attorney William Johnston, who recently sent Attorney General Janet Reno a strongly worded letter warning that she had been misled by people within her department about the Waco siege. Holder said the broad recusal had nothing to do with Johnston’s letter.

Holder, who is second-in-command at the Justice Department, has been overseeing the Danforth probe since last week, when Reno recused herself from the matter because she too anticipates being a witness in the Danforth inquiry.

I’d say that Margolis’s “clean” reputation has been meticulously assembled, and I’m sorry if there are progressives who fell for it. Until I investigated further, I had no reason to question it myself. It goes to show that received wisdom if often not wisdom at all, and that we need to have a curious mind when it comes to acceptance of good intentions by this particular government (or maybe any government).

Margolis Covers-up Earlier Interrogation Scandal?

More speculatively, and intriguing, given the claims involved, is Margolis’s involvement in the investigation of a forgotten FBI sting operation against NASA contractors in the early 1990s. Operation Lightning Strike was, according to a Washington Post article at the time, a "20-month Justice Department sting operation focusing on NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston… [resulting] in criminal fraud and bribery charges against nine men and one contractor."

Later, in 1996, a defense committee was formed to support the "NASA-13". The committee, in a petitionto the U.S. House of Representatives Government Reform and Oversight Committee claimed that the men caught up in the Operation Lightning Strike, some of whom were victims of "’frame-ups’ and torture, to obtain prosecutions." David Margolis was mentioned as admitting that an OPR investigation into the case was begun in 1994 to look into "investigative and prosecutive misconduct." However, no results from that report were ever made public. The involvement of Margolis in this case deserves further scrutiny, given it involved serious allegations about coercive interrogations and torture.

A defense committee press release was more specific about the abuses conducted by the FBI:

In a report submitted to Congress today, a team of defense attorneys representing the so-called "NASA-13," requested the US. House of Representatives Government Reform and Oversight Committee to hold hearings and appoint a Special Prosecutor, not affiliated with the U.S. government, to investigate the "NASA-13" cases in the light of scientific research competed by a team of NASA industry experts, defense attorneys and behavioral scientists. This report furnishes evidence that at least one of the NASA/IG Federal agents who conducted the NASA sting operation in Houston from 1991 to 1994 was in fact a highly qualified military intelligence interrogator, who with the FBI, employed a highly dangerous form of "psycho-technology" known in the behavioral science community as "Coercive Persuasion" or "CP", a form of mind control.

The phenomenon of "CP" was first observed in the post-traumatic reactions of Korean War military and civilian POWs. Many of these prisoners had confessed to non-existent crimes and cooperated with the enemy after having been subjected to what was then called "brainwashing."

Given that these claims are coming from a pre-9/11 era, they cannot be said to be derivative of recent news reports and scandals. I am not convinced about what actually went on in this case, but it is notable that the defense committee procured a letter from well-known psychologist, and former government Margaret Thaler Singer backing the claims of the defendants:

I have reviewed the Lightning Strike Victims Questionnaires and summary provided by the NASA-13 Defense Committee, and I concur with the committee’s assessment that there is substantial data in these highly consistent statements to confirm that a program of Coercive Influence was employed in the Interrogations of the Lightning Strike Suspects . The questionnaires uniformly reveal a systematic application of psychological techniques, in an organized programmatic way, within a constructed and managed environment, which was aimed at the participants sense of self and sense of reality, producing extreme anxiety and emotional distress….

Such programs can and regularly do produce psychiatric casualties. Practitioners of these programs attempt to hold the subject at the point of maximum stress, without inducing psychosis. My experience over the past four decades and in observing over 3,000 cases since participating in the evaluation of released Korean POW’s, unfortunately reveals that practitioners of these nefarious methods frequently exceed the limits with devastating results.

According to the defense committee, Department of Defense interrogators played key roles in the interrogations of the defendants, as aspect of the case that has also never been explained.

Now this may all be a lot of smoke, but when one adds in the latest role played by Mr. Margolis in spiking the initial results of misconduct on behalf of Yoo, Bybee, Addington, et al. (if we can believe the Newsweek leak), his appearance in this role does not seem so remarkable. Margolis appears to have a long history of involvement in government frame-up and/or obfuscation of internal misconduct by the FBI or Justice Department prosecutors.

Will we see the intrepid U.S. press look more deeply into this? One could wish this were true. Every once in a while the mainstream press shows what it’s capable of, as with the exposure of torture at Bagram under Obama’s administration, or with Scott Horton’s Harper’s revelations on the 2003 killings of three Guantanamo prisoners, covered-up as supposed "suicides".

But the OPR report is shaping up to be one gigantic cover-up, assuming we ever get to see much of it, after the government censors get done with it.

The country is thick with torture and crime, and unable to free itself from thralldom to its governmental enablers. Let’s see how easily Holder, Obama, and Margolis get away with their cover-up of Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales, and Addington’s lies and alibis. Meanwhile, torture continues as official policy of the Obama administration in the guise of an appendix to the Army Field Manual. But outside of Emptywheel, some former interrogators, and a few others, no one seems to care.

And so it goes.