blackwater bush's death squad

Bill Clinton: "Torture Like on 24 Is OK"
America needs more Jack Bauer like agents says former President

Infowars.net | October 2 , 2007
Steve Watson

RELATED:
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Video Of Torture Master John Yoo Being Asked To Justify "Crushing Children's Testicles" Comments





Former president Bill Clinton has told NBC's Meet The Press that America needs more intelligence agents who make their own rules and engage in whatever actions are necessary like Jack Bauer from the fictional TV show 24 .

"I think what our policy ought to be is to be uncompromisingly opposed to terror--I mean to torture, and that if you're the Jack Bauer person, you'll do whatever you do and you should be prepared to take the consequences... And I think the consequences will be imposed based on what turns out to be the truth." Clinton said.

"If you have any kind of a formal exception, people just drive a truck through it, and they'll say, 'Well, I thought it was covered by the exception,'" Clinton added.

The question was again raised by host Tim Russert after Clinton told him last year that he would authorize torture in a "ticking bomb 24"-style situation.





Clinton went on to state “If you look at the show, every time they get the president to approve something, the president gets in trouble, the country gets in trouble. And when Bauer goes out there on his own and is prepared to live with the consequences, it always seems to work better.".

Clinton's comments represent another case of an influential political figure discussing the benefits of torture in the context of a fictional TV show character.

Earlier this year Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia also used the analogy at a panel discussion on torture, stating "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives... Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.”

We are more used to this kind of dross from Fox News. For example, Laura Ingraham has previously stated that the average American's love of the show is a referendum for the use of torture against anyone considered to be with "Al Qaeda" whether they be American citizens or not. Watch it:



24 has routinely depicted scenes of detainee torture, as well as plot-lines broaching the issue of the detention of American citizens in a time of crisis.

At a time when legislation such as The Patriot Act and The Military Commissions Act are setting the precedent for the detention of American citizens, and in the absence of any real terror 24 serves as the perfect dose of fear-mongering propaganda to encourage acceptance of such attacks upon the fabric of freedom.

24, Threat Matrix, Spooks , and other such shows are contributions to a conditioning mechanism that present torture as a reasonable and ethical method. However, in every case of torture that has come to light in the real world there isn't even a basis of "situational ethics" to justify this with.

Click here to watch a video clip in which Alex Jones explains the hypocrisy of torture and why the doublethink of the "it's bad when the enemy does it but good when we do it" mentality is so dangerous.

Finally, should we really have to endure BIll Clinton, an impeached former president who has been accused of rape and molestation, speaking on "facing consequences" for one's actions based on "what turns out to be the truth"?
 
eots said:
so your ok with death squads ?
Click to expand...

Of course she's not.

She just doesn't believe that it's even the case to begin with. To her, that's "conspiracy theory". I mean, these days it seems like it's considered conspiracy theory to just flat out not trust the government...as if somehow they've been this perfect, truthfully noble entity for the last 230 years.

What you posted about is "unamerican".

The irony never ceases to amaze me.

eots said:
Bill Clinton: "Torture Like on 24 Is OK"
America needs more Jack Bauer like agents says former President
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's sad isn't it?

The former president of the US has to resort to equating a friggin TV show with real situations to justify himself.

But I guess these days that's how you connect with the American people the best...via hollywood.
 
Paulitics said:
Of course she's not.

She just doesn't believe that it's even the case to begin with. To her, that's "conspiracy theory". I mean, these days it seems like it's considered conspiracy theory to just flat out not trust the government...as if somehow they've been this perfect, truthfully noble entity for the last 230 years.

What you posted about is "unamerican".

The irony never ceases to amaze me.



Yeah, it's sad isn't it?

The former president of the US has to resort to equating a friggin TV show with real situations to justify himself.

But I guess these days that's how you connect with the American people the best...via hollywood.
Click to expand...

You do not know my thoughts and thinking...so from know on you can refrain from speaking FOR ME...

thanks..:eusa_naughty:
 
Let's Do try to keep all the conspiracy theiry accusations against Blackwater in one thread please.

The people accused are bodyguards, charged with safe conduct of person(s) from point A to point b. When someone shoots at them, they return fire as a defensive measur to cover facilitating reaching point b in one piece.

The accusation that they are "death squads" is bullshit, unless you've got some real evidence no one else does.
 
Stephanie said:
You do not know my thoughts and thinking...so from know on you can refrain from speaking FOR ME...

thanks..:eusa_naughty:
Click to expand...

Oh come on...I've seen you speak on here, steph. I mean, the little smiley with the finger circling the ear speaks for itself, really. You think that this kind of topic is conspiracy kook fodder...what other conclusion could one possibly come to with you?
 
Paulitics said:
Oh come on...I've seen you speak on here, steph. I mean, the little smiley with the finger circling the ear speaks for itself, really. You think that this kind of topic is conspiracy kook fodder...what other conclusion could one possibly come to with you?
Click to expand...

Actually..the little smiley with finger circling the ear, was more about the thread title and having to watch a youtube presentation...

So see..you don't know me as you seem to think....:badgrin:
 
Blackwater Chief Defends Employees Before House Panel

By JOHN M. BRODER and BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: October 2, 2007
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 —The head of Blackwater USA said today that his company was the victim of “a rush to judgment” by a Congressional committee looking into claims that the company’s contract security guards in Iraq have repeatedly been involved in reckless shootings of civilians.

Erik Prince, the founder and chief executive of Blackwater, insisted that his employees were responding to hostile fire in a controversial Sept. 16 shootout that left at least eight Iraqis dead, a contention that has been vehemently disputed by witnesses and by the Iraqi government.

And Mr. Prince disputed findings released on Monday by the majority staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which portrayed Blackwater security guards as often out of control and indifferent to civilian casualties. The committee is holding a hearing on Blackwater today.

“Based on everything we currently know, the Blackwater team acted appropriately while operating in a very complex war zone on Sept. 16,” Mr. Prince said at a hearing whose lines of debate quickly formed along party lines.

Though he did not specifically address other incidents, he emphasized in his statement that his company’s work in a “hostile environment” was “particularly dangerous and challenging.” He said that though 30 Blackwater employees had lost their lives in Iraq, no one they were guarding had been killed or seriously injured, and added, “There is no better evidence of the skill and dedication of these men.”

But Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is the panel’s chairman, expressed doubt about Blackwater’s contributions. “Privatizing is working exceptionally well for Blackwater,” he said. “The question for this hearing is whether outsourcing to Blackwater is a good deal to the American taxpayer.”

Republicans on the committee urged fellow members not to make up their minds too quickly. Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina elicited from Mr. Prince that 27 Blackwater employees have been killed in Iraq, but no State Department staff members. “Your client is the State Department,” Mr. McHenry said. “The State Department has a contract with you to provide protective service for their visitors.And you’ve had zero individuals under your care and protection killed.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/w...600db5940ed584&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
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Looks rather cut and dried to me. I do note with interest that Rep Waxman obviously is in need of a keeper. The question for the hearing is not whether or not he thinks Blackwater is a good deal for the American taxpayer, but whether or not Blackwater employees acted inappropriately.

Since Blackwater is providing security for State Dept officials ... screw it ... fire them and us Marines. THAT ought to decrease the bodycount.:cuckoo:
 
eots said:
Finally, should we really have to endure BIll Clinton, an impeached former president who has been accused of rape and molestation, speaking on "facing consequences" for one's actions based on "what turns out to be the truth"?
Click to expand...

well, while I wish that someone would make Clinton into a hood ornament, he is right about having the Blackwater soldiers defending the country.
So, score 1 for the former prez.
 
Account of Blackwater Massacre in Iraq
James Glanz and Alissa J. Rubin
October 2, 2007

BAGHDAD: It started out as a family errand: Ahmed Haithem Ahmed was driving his mother, Mohassin, to pick up his father from the hospital where he worked as a pathologist. As they approached Nisour Square at midday on Sept. 16, they did not know that a bomb had gone off nearby or that a convoy of four armored vehicles carrying Blackwater guards armed with automatic rifles was approaching.

Moments later a bullet tore through Ahmed’s head, he slumped, and the car rolled forward. Then Blackwater guards responded with a barrage of gunfire and explosive weapons, leaving 17 dead and 24 wounded — a higher toll than previously thought, according to Iraqi investigators.

Interviews with 12 Iraqi witnesses, several Iraqi investigators and an American official familiar with an American investigation of the shootings offer new insights into the gravity of the incident in Nisour Square. And they are difficult to square with the explanation offered initially by Blackwater officials that their guards were responding proportionately to an attack on the streets around the square.

The new details include these:

- A deadly cascade of events began when a single bullet apparently fired by a Blackwater guard killed an Iraqi man whose weight probably remained on the accelerator and propelled the car forward as the passenger, the man’s mother, clutched him and screamed.

- The car continued to roll toward the convoy, which responded with an intense barrage of gunfire in several directions, striking Iraqis who were desperately trying to flee.

- Minutes after that shooting stopped, a Blackwater convoy — possibly the same one — moved north from the square and opened fire on another line of traffic a few hundred yards away, in a previously unreported separate shooting, investigators and several witnesses say.

The questions emerge from accounts of the outbreak of the shooting in the square.

The car in which the first people were killed did not begin to closely approach the Blackwater convoy until the Iraqi driver had been shot in the head and lost control of the his vehicle. Not one witness heard or saw any gunfire coming from Iraqis around the square. And following a short initial burst of bullets, the Blackwater guards unleashed an overwhelming barrage of gunfire even as Iraqis were turning their cars around and attempting to flee.

As the gunfire continued, at least one of the Blackwater guards began screaming, “No! No! No!” and gesturing to his colleagues to stop shooting, according to an Iraqi lawyer who was stuck in traffic and was soon shot in the back as he tried to flee. The account of the struggle among the Blackwater guards corroborates preliminary findings of the American investigation.

Still, while the series of events pieced together by the Iraqis may be correct, important elements could still be missing from that account, according to the American official familiar with the continuing American investigation into the shootings.

Among the questions still to be answered, the official said, is whether at any time nearby Iraqi security forces ever began firing, possibly leading the Blackwater convoy to believe they were under attack and therefore justified in returning fire. It is also possible that as the car kept rolling toward the intersection, the Blackwater guards believed it posed a threat and intensified their shooting.

Blackwater has said that its guards were fired upon and responded appropriately.

Witnesses close to the places where most of the Iraqi civilians were killed directly facing the Blackwater convoy on the southern rim of the square all give a relatively consistent picture of how events began and unfolded.

The Blackwater convoy was in the square to control traffic for a second convoy that was approaching from the south. The second convoy was bringing diplomats who had been evacuated from a meeting after a bomb went off near the compound where the meeting was taking place. That convoy had not arrived at the square by the time the shooting started.

The events in the square began with a short burst of bullets that witnesses described as unprovoked. A traffic policeman standing at the edge of the square, Sarhan Thiab, saw that a young man in a car had been hit. In the line of traffic, that car was third in line from the intersection where the convoy had positioned itself.

“We tried to help him,” Thiab said. “I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was crying out, ‘My son, my son. Help me, help me.’”

Another traffic policeman rushed to the driver’s side to try to get her son out of the car, but the car was still rolling forward because her son had lost control, according to a taxi driver close by who gave his name as Abu Mariam (”father of Mariam”).

Then Blackwater guards opened fire with a barrage of bullets, according to the police and numerous witnesses. Ahmed’s father later counted 40 bullet holes in the car. Ahmed’s mother, Mohassin Kadhim, appears to have been shot to death as she cradled her son in her arms. Moments later the car caught fire after the Blackwater guards fired a type of grenade into the vehicle.

The taxi driver was a few feet ahead of Kadhim’s car when he heard the first gunshots. He was aware of cars behind him trying to back out of the street or turn around and drive away from the square. He tried frantically to turn his car, but ran into the curb.

Unable to escape, he pulled himself over to the passenger side, which was the one not facing the square, opened the door and crawled out, flattening his body to the ground.

“The dust from the street was coming in my mouth and as I pulled myself out of the area, my left leg was shot by a bullet,” he said.

Accounts in the initial days after the event described Kadhim as holding a baby in her arms. It now appears that those accounts were based on assumptions that the charred remains of Kadhim’s son were mistaken for an infant.

By then cars were struggling to get out of the line of fire, and many people were abandoning their vehicles altogether. The scene turned hellish.

“The shooting started like rain; everyone escaped his car,” said Fareed Walid Hassan, a truck driver who hauls goods in his Hyundai minibus.

He saw a woman dragging her child. “He was around 10 or 11. He was dead. She was pulling him by one hand to get him away. She hoped that he was still alive,” he said.

As the shooting started in earnest Jabber Salman, a lawyer on his way to the Ministry of Justice for a noon meeting, described people crying and shouting. “Some people were trying to escape by crawling, some people were killed in front of me,” he said.

As Salman tried to drive away from the shooting, bullets came one after another through his rear windshield, hitting his neck, shoulders, left forearm, and lower back. “I thought ‘I’m sorry they are going to kill me and I can do nothing.’ ”

Iraqi investigators believe that during the shooting Blackwater helicopters flew overhead and fired into the cars from above. They say that at least one the car roofs had bullets through them.

Minutes after the first shootings, a Blackwater convoy arrived at the other side of the square, where civilian traffic was also backed up and shot into cars, according to an Iraqi official who is a member of the investigation committee set up by the Iraqi government.

“I found three people from that incident in Khadimiya hospital, one died and two were injured,” the Iraqi official said. “Why is the private security shooting again in this area?”

Two weeks after the events that claimed the life of Kadhim and her son, her husband Haithem Ahmed, her daughter Mariam and her younger son, Haider, are still bewildered.

“My son was very gentle, very clever, he was easy to be around, ” said Ahmed, looking down at the floor of the police investigation center where he had come to give more details at the request of Iraqi investigators. “He planned to be a surgeon.”

“She is a beautiful woman,” he said of his wife, speaking as if she were still alive.

Then, he looked at a picture of his son, captured on a memorial video made by a friend and stored on Haider’s cellphone camera. Seeming to forget there were was anyone else in the room, he spoke to the video image.

“I am waiting to meet you in paradise,” he said.
 
If I had a record of no losses my response to every accusation would be "So?" You freakin' people absolutely boggle the mind. After you're done tying these guys' hands behind their backs and they start losing diplomats, you'll be accusing them of not being professional enough to do their jobs.

Absolutely ridiculous.
 
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture ?abhorrent? in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.


But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on ?combined effects? over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion's overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be ?ashamed? when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing ?cruel, inhuman and degrading? treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush's second term and Mr. Gonzales's tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, ?We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law? and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was ?a place of inspiration? that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney's counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department's independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office's tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government's most authoritative interpreter of the law. ?In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,? he said in an interview. ?The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn't like the advice being given.?

The debate over how terrorism suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.'s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner's cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls ?enhanced? interrogation techniques ? the details remain secret ? and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in ?black sites? overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office's proper role.

?The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,? said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, ?lost its ability to say no.?

?The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,? Mr. Kmiec said. ?The office became an advocate for the president's policies.?

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

?We were getting asked about combinations ? ?Can we do this and this at the same time?'? recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: ?These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature ? can they be combined?? Or ?Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme??

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. ?You think you're making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ?Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,'? he recalled. ?We couldn't tell them, ?Do the best you can,' because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.?

Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.

That opinion, which would become infamous as ?the torture memo? after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president's adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Yoo's memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or ?even death.? A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.

Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the C.I.A. caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program ?has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review? and ?has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.?

?The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,? Mr. Little added.

Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed's statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.'s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed's background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.

Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda's structure and plans.

?We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,? Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. ?We were getting good information, and then they were told: ?Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.'?

The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency's surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general's hospital bedside.

Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith left the Justice Department soon afterward. He first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted on its Web site a new legal opinion that appeared to end any flirtation with torture, starting with its clarionlike opening: ?Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.?

A single footnote ? added to reassure the C.I.A. ? suggested that the Justice Department was not declaring the agency's previous actions illegal. But the opinion was unmistakably a retreat. Some White House officials had opposed publicizing the document, but acquiesced to Justice Department officials who argued that doing so would help clear the way for Mr. Gonzales's confirmation as attorney general.

If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president's prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith's dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.

Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith's rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, ?decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,? one Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Bradbury's biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury's father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor.

Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy.

?We all grew up together,? said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. ?You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there.?

But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps.

Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world.

?As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems,? said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. ?At O.L.C., you're not writing law review articles and you're not theorizing. You're giving a client practical advice on a real problem.?

As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president's lawyer.

Mr. Bradbury appeared to be ?fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,? recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times ?vituperative,? said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was ?professional and collegial.?

While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances.

Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was ?very troubled? at the notion of a probationary period.

?If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it,? Mr. Cooper said. ?You're implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job.?

Mr. Bradbury said he made no such concessions. ?No one ever suggested to me that my nomination depended on how I ruled on any opinion,? he said. ?Every opinion I've signed at the Office of Legal Counsel represents my best judgment of what the law requires.?

Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.

?For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste ? extremely hazardous to their health,? Mr. Horton said.

?If you give the administration what it wants, you'll lose credibility in the academic community,? he said. ?But if you hold back, you'll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.?

In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury's approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.

Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.

Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey's opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that ?no lawyer? would endorse Mr. Yoo's justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: ?No good lawyer,? according to someone present.

But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.

?On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,? said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the N.S.A.'s Fort Meade campus on Law Day ? a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the N.S.A. program ? Mr. Comey spoke of the ?agonizing collisions? of the law and the desire to protect Americans.

?We are likely to hear the words: ?If we don't do this, people will die,'? Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

?It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ?no' when it matters most,? he said. ?It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.?

Mr. Gonzales's aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test.

Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the C.I.A.'s methods.

The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.'s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture ? the prohibition on ?cruel, inhuman, or degrading? treatment.

Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.

At the administration's request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.

At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of ?cruel, inhuman or degrading? would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.

?If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,? Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, ?then they are now saying that officials broke current law.?

In the end, Mr. Bradbury's opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain's Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.'s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.

Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ?shocks the conscience? was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.

In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several C.I.A. techniques.

Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration's defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an ?Ask the White House? feature on a Web site.

Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury's public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role.

A senior administration official called Mr. Bradbury's active role in shaping legislation and speaking to Congress and the press ?entirely appropriate? and consistent with past practice. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bradbury ?has played a critical role in achieving greater transparency? on the legal basis for detention and surveillance programs.

Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsel's assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury's role in interrogation policy.

?There are fundamental questions about whether Mr. Bradbury approved interrogation methods that are clearly unacceptable,? Mr. Durbin said.

John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.

?I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country's good, some people will do a lot of it for the country's better,? Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.

?The problem is, once you've got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?? he asked.

ALEX JONES' ENDGAME will be released on the WEB OCT. 26 and on DVD on NOV. 1 - View High Quality Trailers at www.endgamethemovie.com




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Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

NY Times | October 04, 2007
SCOTT SHANE, DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture ?abhorrent? in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.


But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on ?combined effects? over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion's overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be ?ashamed? when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing ?cruel, inhuman and degrading? treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush's second term and Mr. Gonzales's tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, ?We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law? and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was ?a place of inspiration? that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney's counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department's independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office's tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government's most authoritative interpreter of the law. ?In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,? he said in an interview. ?The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn't like the advice being given.?

The debate over how terrorism suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.'s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner's cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls ?enhanced? interrogation techniques ? the details remain secret ? and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in ?black sites? overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office's proper role.

?The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,? said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, ?lost its ability to say no.?

?The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,? Mr. Kmiec said. ?The office became an advocate for the president's policies.?

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

?We were getting asked about combinations ? ?Can we do this and this at the same time?'? recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: ?These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature ? can they be combined?? Or ?Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme??

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. ?You think you're making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ?Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,'? he recalled. ?We couldn't tell them, ?Do the best you can,' because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.?

Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.

That opinion, which would become infamous as ?the torture memo? after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president's adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Yoo's memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or ?even death.? A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.

Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the C.I.A. caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program ?has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review? and ?has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.?

?The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,? Mr. Little added.

Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed's statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.'s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed's background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.

Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda's structure and plans.

?We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,? Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. ?We were getting good information, and then they were told: ?Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.'?

The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency's surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general's hospital bedside.

Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith left the Justice Department soon afterward. He first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted on its Web site a new legal opinion that appeared to end any flirtation with torture, starting with its clarionlike opening: ?Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.?

A single footnote ? added to reassure the C.I.A. ? suggested that the Justice Department was not declaring the agency's previous actions illegal. But the opinion was unmistakably a retreat. Some White House officials had opposed publicizing the document, but acquiesced to Justice Department officials who argued that doing so would help clear the way for Mr. Gonzales's confirmation as attorney general.

If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president's prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith's dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.

Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith's rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, ?decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,? one Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Bradbury's biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury's father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor.

Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy.

?We all grew up together,? said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. ?You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there.?

But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps.

Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world.

?As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems,? said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. ?At O.L.C., you're not writing law review articles and you're not theorizing. You're giving a client practical advice on a real problem.?

As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president's lawyer.

Mr. Bradbury appeared to be ?fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,? recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times ?vituperative,? said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was ?professional and collegial.?

While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances.

Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was ?very troubled? at the notion of a probationary period.

?If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it,? Mr. Cooper said. ?You're implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job.?

Mr. Bradbury said he made no such concessions. ?No one ever suggested to me that my nomination depended on how I ruled on any opinion,? he said. ?Every opinion I've signed at the Office of Legal Counsel represents my best judgment of what the law requires.?

Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.

?For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste ? extremely hazardous to their health,? Mr. Horton said.

?If you give the administration what it wants, you'll lose credibility in the academic community,? he said. ?But if you hold back, you'll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.?

In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury's approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.

Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.

Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey's opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that ?no lawyer? would endorse Mr. Yoo's justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: ?No good lawyer,? according to someone present.

But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.

?On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,? said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the N.S.A.'s Fort Meade campus on Law Day ? a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the N.S.A. program ? Mr. Comey spoke of the ?agonizing collisions? of the law and the desire to protect Americans.

?We are likely to hear the words: ?If we don't do this, people will die,'? Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

?It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ?no' when it matters most,? he said. ?It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.?

Mr. Gonzales's aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test.

Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the C.I.A.'s methods.

The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.'s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture ? the prohibition on ?cruel, inhuman, or degrading? treatment.

Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.

At the administration's request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.

At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of ?cruel, inhuman or degrading? would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.

?If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,? Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, ?then they are now saying that officials broke current law.?

In the end, Mr. Bradbury's opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain's Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.'s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.

Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ?shocks the conscience? was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.

In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several C.I.A. techniques.

Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration's defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an ?Ask the White House? feature on a Web site.

Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury's public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role.

A senior administration official called Mr. Bradbury's active role in shaping legislation and speaking to Congress and the press ?entirely appropriate? and consistent with past practice. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bradbury ?has played a critical role in achieving greater transparency? on the legal basis for detention and surveillance programs.

Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsel's assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury's role in interrogation policy.

?There are fundamental questions about whether Mr. Bradbury approved interrogation methods that are clearly unacceptable,? Mr. Durbin said.

John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.

?I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country's good, some people will do a lot of it for the country's better,? Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.

?The problem is, once you've got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?? he asked























Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

NY Times | October 04, 2007
SCOTT SHANE, DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture ?abhorrent? in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.


But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on ?combined effects? over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion's overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be ?ashamed? when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing ?cruel, inhuman and degrading? treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush's second term and Mr. Gonzales's tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, ?We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law? and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was ?a place of inspiration? that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney's counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department's independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office's tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government's most authoritative interpreter of the law. ?In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,? he said in an interview. ?The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn't like the advice being given.?

The debate over how terrorism suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.'s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner's cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls ?enhanced? interrogation techniques ? the details remain secret ? and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in ?black sites? overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office's proper role.

?The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,? said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, ?lost its ability to say no.?

?The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,? Mr. Kmiec said. ?The office became an advocate for the president's policies.?

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

?We were getting asked about combinations ? ?Can we do this and this at the same time?'? recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: ?These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature ? can they be combined?? Or ?Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme??

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. ?You think you're making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ?Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,'? he recalled. ?We couldn't tell them, ?Do the best you can,' because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.?

Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.

That opinion, which would become infamous as ?the torture memo? after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president's adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Yoo's memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or ?even death.? A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.

Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the C.I.A. caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program ?has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review? and ?has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.?

?The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,? Mr. Little added.

Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed's statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.'s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed's background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.

Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda's structure and plans.

?We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,? Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. ?We were getting good information, and then they were told: ?Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.'?

The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency's surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general's hospital bedside.

Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith left the Justice Department soon afterward. He first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted on its Web site a new legal opinion that appeared to end any flirtation with torture, starting with its clarionlike opening: ?Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.?

A single footnote ? added to reassure the C.I.A. ? suggested that the Justice Department was not declaring the agency's previous actions illegal. But the opinion was unmistakably a retreat. Some White House officials had opposed publicizing the document, but acquiesced to Justice Department officials who argued that doing so would help clear the way for Mr. Gonzales's confirmation as attorney general.

If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president's prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith's dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.

Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith's rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, ?decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,? one Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Bradbury's biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury's father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor.

Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy.

?We all grew up together,? said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. ?You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there.?

But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps.

Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world.

?As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems,? said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. ?At O.L.C., you're not writing law review articles and you're not theorizing. You're giving a client practical advice on a real problem.?

As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president's lawyer.

Mr. Bradbury appeared to be ?fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,? recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times ?vituperative,? said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was ?professional and collegial.?

While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances.

Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was ?very troubled? at the notion of a probationary period.

?If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it,? Mr. Cooper said. ?You're implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job.?

Mr. Bradbury said he made no such concessions. ?No one ever suggested to me that my nomination depended on how I ruled on any opinion,? he said. ?Every opinion I've signed at the Office of Legal Counsel represents my best judgment of what the law requires.?

Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.

?For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste ? extremely hazardous to their health,? Mr. Horton said.

?If you give the administration what it wants, you'll lose credibility in the academic community,? he said. ?But if you hold back, you'll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.?

In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury's approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.

Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.

Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey's opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that ?no lawyer? would endorse Mr. Yoo's justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: ?No good lawyer,? according to someone present.

But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.

?On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,? said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the N.S.A.'s Fort Meade campus on Law Day ? a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the N.S.A. program ? Mr. Comey spoke of the ?agonizing collisions? of the law and the desire to protect Americans.

?We are likely to hear the words: ?If we don't do this, people will die,'? Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

?It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ?no' when it matters most,? he said. ?It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.?

Mr. Gonzales's aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test.

Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the C.I.A.'s methods.

The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.'s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture ? the prohibition on ?cruel, inhuman, or degrading? treatment.

Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.

At the administration's request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.

At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of ?cruel, inhuman or degrading? would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.

?If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,? Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, ?then they are now saying that officials broke current law.?

In the end, Mr. Bradbury's opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain's Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.'s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.

Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ?shocks the conscience? was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.

In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several C.I.A. techniques.

Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration's defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an ?Ask the White House? feature on a Web site.

Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury's public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role.

A senior administration official called Mr. Bradbury's active role in shaping legislation and speaking to Congress and the press ?entirely appropriate? and consistent with past practice. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bradbury ?has played a critical role in achieving greater transparency? on the legal basis for detention and surveillance programs.

Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsel's assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury's role in interrogation policy.

?There are fundamental questions about whether Mr. Bradbury approved interrogation methods that are clearly unacceptable,? Mr. Durbin said.

John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.

?I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country's good, some people will do a lot of it for the country's better,? Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.

?The problem is, once you've got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?? he asked
 
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