It’s Not National Security; It’s CYA

Yesterday, CNN’s Political Ticker blog reported that the ACLU agreed to give the Department of Justice an extra two weeks to release those three declassified memos on the Bush torture program:

The release of sensitive “torture” documents has been delayed again after an agreement between lawyers for the Obama administration and the American Civil Liberties Union, a source said Thursday.

Only an hour before a court-ordered deadline to make the documents public or explain why they would not, government lawyers submitted a court filing that gives them until April 16 to release three controversial 2005 memos.

The memos, written by a top Justice Department lawyer, provided legal guidance to the entire executive branch, including the intelligence agencies, on permissible “enhanced interrogation techniques” that could be used against suspected terrorists taken into custody.

The article does not really explain why DOJ lawyers requested the delay, but proceeding to the end of the article, one finds these two paragraphs:

Government officials have privately acknowledged to CNN there has been an intense internal debate about whether the memos can be released without harming national security.

Intelligence community officials have led opposition to the release, saying making them public could provide important information that could be useful to any suspected terrorists captured by the United States in the future.

Those two paragraphs caught my eye, because I had just seen a Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff about that internal opposition — which apparently is more like an apocalyptic battle (emphasis is mine):

A fierce internal battle within the White House over the disclosure of internal Justice Department interrogation memos is shaping up as a major test of the Obama administration’s commitment to opening up government files about Bush-era counterterrorism policy.

As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. “Holy hell has broken loose over this,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities.

Brennan is a former senior CIA official who was once considered by Obama for agency director but withdrew his name late last year after public criticism that he was too close to past officials involved in Bush administration decisions. Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National Security Council, argued that release of the memos could embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA, either by participating in overseas “extraordinary renditions” of high-level detainees or housing them in overseas “black site” prisons.

Brennan got CIA Director Leon Panetta to back him, and the two of them managed to halt the declassification process, despite the fact that AG Eric Holder had asked that the memos be declassified and released, and White House attorney Gregory Craig had approved that request.

That is the reason for the delay asked for by the DOJ and agreed to by the ACLU:

The continued internal debate explains the Justice Department’s decision late Thursday to ask a federal judge for another two-week delay (until April 16) to file a final response in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the release of the memos. The ACLU agreed to the two-week delay only after Justice officials represented that “high-level Government officials will consider for possible release” the three 2005 memos as well as another Aug. 1, 2002, memo on torture, that has long been sought by congressional committees and members of Congress, according to a motion filed by Justice lawyers with U.S. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in New York, who is overseeing the case.

The 2002 memo, written by former Justice lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo, concluded that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques could be used against Qaeda suspects without violating a federal law that prohibits torture. That memo was publicly withdrawn by the Justice Department in 2004 after its existence became publicly known and sparked a public controversy. But a new set of Justice lawyers—led by Steven Bradbury, the newly installed chief of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel—later secretly authored additional memos in the spring of 2005 that essentially approved the same techniques, permitting the agency to barrage terror suspects with a combination of physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping and frigid temperatures, according to a 2007 New York Times account. Those memos concluded that the harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA would not violate Geneva Conventions restrictions on “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners.

We definitely did dodge a bullet with Brennan, didn’t we?

… One begins to realize how deeply important it was that Brennan didn’t get the top CIA job. You see now his attachment to the torture regime he pretended to oppose and his fierce loyalty to CIA officers who may have committed war crimes and now seek to prevent the American people from finding out what was done in secret, against the law, in their name.

Only the president can resolve this. And [when] he does, we will see more clearly than at any previous point how committed he really is to change we can believe in.

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