White House Torture Advisers

"At one meeting in the summer of 2003 -- attended by Vice President Cheney, among others -- Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a highly placed administration source."

ABC reports that, in at least once case, the group's approvals of CIA techniques continued even after the Justice Department formally withdrew the August 2002 memo in 2004.

Will They Be Held to Account?

Marc Ambinder blogs for the Atlantic that "it remains one of those hidden secrets in Washington that a Democratic Justice Department is going to be very interested in figuring out whether there's a case to be made that senior Bush Administration officials were guilty of war crimes."

But legal blogger Jack Balkin says no way. "[S]ections 8 and 6(b) of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively insulated government officials from liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed during the period prior to 2006. Moreover, as [fellow blogger Martin Lederman] has pointed out, there's a strong argument that a later Justice Department would not prosecute people who reasonably relied on legal advice from a previous Justice Department. . . .

"And putting aside the purely legal obstacles to a prosecution for war crimes, there's also the political cost. Why would an Obama or Clinton Administration waste precious political capital early on with a politically divisive prosecution of former government officials? . . .

"It is not that certain members of the Bush Administration haven't committed war crimes. I'm pretty certain that at least some of them have. The point rather is that it is very unlikely that they will ever be brought to justice for it, at least in our own country-- despite the fact that there are statutes on the books which assert that the commission of war crimes violates our laws. . . .

"As I noted in a previous post, the most likely prosecution for war crimes will not occur in the United States; if it occurs at all, it will come through the use of universal jurisdiction against Bush Administration officials who make the mistake of traveling outside the United States."

About Zubaydah

There's one serious flaw in the ABC report: It allows the administration's version of Zubaydah's value as an intelligence asset to go unrefuted. ABC calls Zubaydah a "top al Qaeda operative" and reports that "[a]ter he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up valuable information that led to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh."

But as I've written, administration statements about Zubaydah have been almost entirely contradicted by authoritative accounts from author Ron Suskind and New York Times reporter David Johnston.

Zubaydah, it turns out, was a mentally ill minor functionary, nursed back to health by the FBI, who under CIA torture sent investigators chasing after false leads about al-Qaeda plots on American nuclear plants, water systems, shopping malls, banks and supermarkets.

The most valuable information Zubaydah gave investigators about Mohammed was his nickname, which, as Dan Eggen and Dafna Linzer reported in The Washington Post, the CIA had already learned seven months earlier.

Gitmo Watch

When the administration announced in February that it had filed capital murder charges against half a dozen men allegedly linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the message was clear: The White House wanted a 9/11 trial before the end of Bush's term.