Did Chertoff lie to Congress about Guantánamo?
He told the Senate that Pentagon interrogation methods were "plain
vanilla," but e-mails reveal his top staff met weekly with FBI officials
who said they were torture.
By Mark Benjamin
Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at his confirmation
hearing on Capitol Hill, Feb. 2, 2005.
Aug. 28, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will leave
office Sept. 17 with a reputation for being untruthful. During his
repeated appearances before Congress earlier this year to explain the
firing of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales answered "I don't recall" or some
variation as many as 70 times at a sitting. When his replacement comes to
Capitol Hill for confirmation, lawmakers hope they will hear nothing but
the truth.
But one of the men most often mentioned as his replacement may have some
of the same trouble with the truth. Since rumors of Gonzales' departure
surfaced last week, speculation about his successor has centered on
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Just as Gonzales, under oath before Congress, failed to recall whether
there was dissension within the Bush administration over a controversial
war-on-terror-related policy, so Michael Chertoff seems to have suffered a
similar lapse of memory while under oath before Congress when pressed on a
different terror-related policy. Gonzales pleaded ignorance of a rift
within the administration over warrantless wiretapping; Chertoff has
denied knowledge of interrogation techniques that are tantamount to
torture, despite regular attendance by his top aides at meetings on the
subject.
"If Mr. Chertoff is nominated, the Senate needs to ask him some very tough
questions about what he knew about the abuses at Guantánamo," said Hina
Shamsi from Human Rights First.
When Chertoff appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs on Feb. 2, 2005, the subject was not
interrogations. The panel was weighing Chertoff's nomination to his
current post as secretary of homeland security. He was promptly confronted
on the topic, however, by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. Levin's staff had dug
up copies of curious FBI e-mail traffic about interrogations at the
Guantánamo prison in 2002 and 2003, when Chertoff was head of the criminal
division at the Department of Justice.
That was a pivotal year at the military prison. The Pentagon was
institutionalizing a brutal interrogation program approved by
then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Interrogation teams at the
prison employed forced nudity, sleep deprivation, isolation and sexual
humiliation, among other tactics. During that time, for example, a
detainee named Mohammed al-Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front of a
female interrogator, to wear women's underwear, and to perform "dog
tricks" on a leash. He was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours on 48 out of 54
consecutive days.
FBI interrogators assigned to Guantánamo had balked at the methods
employed by the DOD. Given its long institutional knowledge about legal
and effective interrogations, the FBI thought the military interrogations
were extremely problematic. E-mail strings documenting the FBI's
objections have been well publicized.
At the February 2005 hearing, Levin questioned Chertoff about an e-mail
obtained by Levin's staff: a May 10, 2004, communication from one FBI
official, with the name redacted, to another FBI official, T.J.
Harrington. The e-mail rehashes the FBI objections to the military
interrogations at Guantánamo back in 2002.
That FBI e-mail discusses the bureau's concerns at some length. It also
divulges weekly meetings with officials from the Justice Department's
criminal division, in which "we often discussed DOD techniques and how
they were not effective or producing intel that was reliable." Chertoff
was the head of the DOJ's criminal division from 2001 until the spring of
2003. The e-mail says that four people from the department's criminal
division attended those meetings and that those attendees "all agreed DOD
tactics were going to be an issue" if the government tried to prosecute
Guantánamo prisoners. In the copy of the e-mail obtained by Levin, the
names of those four criminal division officials had been redacted.
Under questioning from Levin that day in 2005, Chertoff disavowed any
knowledge of abusive interrogation techniques being employed at Guantánamo
and said he was unaware of those meetings. "I was not aware during my
tenure at the Department of Justice that there were practices at
Guantánamo, if there were practices at Guantánamo, that would be torture
or anything even approaching torture," Chertoff told Levin. He told the
committee he was unaware of "any use of techniques in Guantánamo that were
anything other than what I would describe as kind of plain vanilla ... I
do not know what the meetings being referred to are, what the techniques
are being referred to, and who the people are."
Chertoff was sworn in to the Homeland Security post on Feb. 15, 2005, two
weeks after the back-and-forth with Levin.
A month later, after pressuring the Justice Department, Levin obtained
another version of the same FBI e-mail describing meetings about torture.
It still contained redactions, but it does list the names of the DOJ
criminal division officials who attended the meetings with the FBI. One of
them was Alice Fisher, Chertoff's top deputy. Chertoff's counsel, David
Nahmias, also attended, as did two other senior criminal division
officials, Bruce Swartz and Laura Parsky. Swartz, the e-mail showed, had
relayed the FBI's concerns to the Defense Department's Office of the
General Counsel. (The e-mail is reproduced on page 2 of this article.)
If some of Chertoff's top staff were involved in weekly meetings in which
"the DOD techniques" were discussed, it remains unclear how he could be
totally unaware of any of those discussions. "The secretary always
testifies truthfully," said Laura Keehner, a DHS spokeswoman.
Other close observers of these developments are not so sure. "Either he
lied to Congress or he is a very out-of-the-loop manager of the division,"
said Caroline Fredrickson, legislative director of the ACLU. "It smacks of
Alberto Gonzales saying he did not know anything about these U.S. attorney
firings."
And if Chertoff is nominated, it is also unclear how much this
questionable history will matter when he faces another Senate hearing.
"This is unresolved," Fredrickson said, "which means Congress needs to
resolve it."
(article goes on to include photocopies of a FBI document)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/28/chertoff/
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