What will Obama do?
Obama can go after the criminals who authorized torture.Things are moving right along in the wake of the HJC v. Miers decision last week.
White House Counsel Fred Fielding has already responded to Rep. John Conyer's (D-MI) letter requesting "quick compliance" with the ruling and an answer to the subpoena issued to White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten for documents relating to the politicization of the Department of Justice.
Fielding (predictably) demurred, citing the recent motion for appeal, but he did comply to Conyer's other request: a meeting between the two parties to try to "work cooperatively to resolve these issues." From Fielding's letter to Chairman Conyers:
However, the fact that the Executive has noticed an appeal in this matter does not signify that we think further litigation is the exclusive path forward. . . this Administration has responded to more than 650 Congressional inquiries and investigations, and through negotiation and accommodation with Congressional committees has been able to resolve all but a very few of them. . . Toward that end, and hopefully as a prelude to meaningful discussions between us, I propose that members of our respective staffs meet as early as next week to re-commence discussing possibilities for reaching an accommodation between the Branches in this matter.
National Security Archive
Update, April 24, 2008
Court Sets Deadline for White House Answers on Missing E-mail
Magistrate Judge Cites "Lack of Precision" in White House Statements
Order Could Force White House to Save Individual Workstation Files;
Action Comes in Response to Archive Motion
http://www.nsarchive.org
For more information contact:
Meredith Fuchs - 202/994-7000
John B. Williams/Sheila L. Shadmand [Jones Day] - 202/879-3939
Washington, D.C., April 24, 2008 - Responding to the National Security Archive's
motion in the pending White House e-mail lawsuit, Magistrate Judge John M.
Facciola of the U.S. District Court today ordered the White House to provide
"precise information" about the users of the e-mail system from 2003 to 2005
and how many of their hard drives still
survive today.
Citing the "lack of precision" in White House statements and its changing story
about which backup tapes have been preserved, Magistrate Judge Facciola also ordered
the White House to "resolve any ambiguities ... once and for all" and identify
the specific dates between March 2003 and October 2003 for which no backup tape
exists.
The magistrate judge also recommended that District Judge Henry H. Kennedy issue
a series of orders that would compel the White House to search the individual
workstations of White House staff, preserve the personal folders
(.PST files in the Microsoft environment) where e-mail may have been stored,
and secure any portable or external media that may contain e-mail from March 2003
to October 2005. Referring to the White House position that it has no formal
program for distributing "hard or external drives, CDs, DVDs, jump, zip, hard,
r floppy disks," Magistrate Judge Facciola commented "[o]ne would hope that
the components have filled the void left by [Office of Chief Information Officer]
by implementing policies and procedures to "track and manage" the removal and/or
transfer of [Executive Office of the President] data..."
"It is remarkable that the EOP, absent this Court's order, has not taken the most
elementary steps to preserve very basic sources of the missing e-mail --
steps that, even as the Court notes, should in this day and age be conducted
as a matter of course in any litigation," commented Sheila Shadmand of Jones Day,
counsel for the Archive.
"The Court is reacting to the inconsistencies in the White House statements:
e-mail are lost one day, the next they are not; e-mails are recoverable,
then they are not; backup media is saved, then it is not," added Meredith Fuchs,
the Archive's General Counsel."What worries us is that time is passing –
there are only 8 ½ more months until this administration leaves office and
if nothing is done soon not only could the e-mails disappear for good, but the
federal records that are commingled with the presidential records could get
swept away and become inaccessible for the next 12 years."
"This ruling is a major victory for accountability at the White House,"
commented Tom Blanton, director of the Archive. "We have seen delay after delay,
and constantly changing stories, none of which come up to the standards that
are required by law."
The ruling comes in litigation brought by the National Security Archive
against the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives
and Records Administration to preserve and restore missing e-mail federal records.
A chronology of the litigation is available here. The suit was filed on
September 5, 2007; a subsequent virtually identical lawsuit filed by
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has been consolidated
with the Archive's lawsuit.
Visit the Web site of the National Security Archive for more information about
today's posting.
http://www.nsarchive.org
Judge orders White House to clarify whether or not missing e-mails are recoverable
| Nick Langewis Published: Thursday April 24, 2008  |  | ||||
| Print This Email This | ||||
The order stems from a lawsuit by the National Security Archive, filed on September 5, 2007 against the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives and Records Administration, claiming that a possible 5-to-10 million e-mails were either improperly preserved as Presidential records, as required by law, or lost entirely.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), in a 2007 address, called such a breach of record-keeping requirements reminiscent of the "18-minute gap" in the infamous Nixon White House tapes, subpoenaed during the Watergate scandal.
The "missing" e-mails cover a 473-day period, which includes the date of CIA agent Valerie Plame's outing and a string of U.S. Attorney firings widely believed to have been politically motivated. The White House was ordered to preserve all known e-mail records in November of 2007.
"This ruling is a major victory for accountability at the White House," said Tom Blanton, National Security Archive director. "We have seen delay after delay, and constantly changing stories, none of which come up to the standards that are required by law."
Between late 2001 and early 2002, the Automated Records Management System (ARMS), put in place by the Clinton Administration to store e-mail records, was dismantled, with the Bush Administration proposing a switch to ECRMS, or the Electronic Communications Records Management System. In the meantime, a temporary procedure of manually archiving each staffer's records was put in place.
E-mails began to disappear on January 3, 2003, and ECRMS was ultimately never put in place. Backup tapes were re-used until October of 2003.
Tom Blanton wasn't nuts when he told a room full of open-government fans to act squirrely.
Scientists have found, he informed us last Friday, that "squirrels have no idea where they've dug that hole and put that nut." They survive the winter by planting enough nuts that "wherever they go, they're likely to uncover a couple of buried items," he explained. "But if not enough squirrels plant not enough nuts, they're all going to starve."
Then he drove the point home: "
As news gatherers, as news publishers and as citizens, we're going to starve - our democracy, our accountable government, our information flows - unless we get out there and plant some FOIA requests, write some stories and get the story out."Blanton and the research organization he heads, the National Security Archive, have made it their mission to plant Freedom of Information Act requests all across the federal government to shed light on what agencies are doing in our name. FOIA is the 1966 federal law that requires agencies to give people records they ask for (with certain exceptions), supposedly in timely fashion and without regard to why the information is being sought.
Through FOIA, the archive has uncovered fascinating nuggets of history as well as documentary treasure troves of insight into how government operates.
Right now, the archive's Web page, www.nsarchive.org, links to:
National Security Archive staff filed a FOIA request for all related documents and received a file that included Elvis' letter on American Airlines stationery seeking a meeting with Nixon; talking points recommending that the president ask the singer to create a TV special about getting high on life, not drugs; and a photo of Nixon inspecting Elvis' cufflinks. (You can see these on the group's site.)
During its history, the privately funded group has filed more than 35,000 open records requests and collected 8 million to 10 million documents, Blanton told an audience at the First Amendment Awards banquet sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists' Fort Worth chapter last Friday.
Release of the "family jewels" last year came about after the archive had asked a range of federal agencies for their 10 oldest pending FOIA requests. Though the law sets specific deadlines for turning over information requested by the public, they often aren't met - sometimes for years. A request for the "family jewels" had sat unfilled for 15 years, Blanton said.
Because of a 2005 executive order signed by President Bush and because of FOIA changes pushed into law last year by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, many agencies are reducing their backlogs of old open-records requests. But the two senators are continuing to try to strengthen FOIA.
The law never has been really popular with those who must comply with it, Blanton said. President Lyndon Johnson signed it grudgingly.
In 1974, President Ford vetoed a bill designed to put teeth into it, on the advice of two key aides and a Justice Department lawyer: Dick Cheney (now vice president), Donald Rumsfeld (later defense secretary) and Antonin Scalia (now a Supreme Court justice).
Congress overrode Ford - to the enduring public benefit.
There's no doubt that the U.S. government is among the world's most open. But it helps that nosy reporters ask questions and that courageous government employees are willing to blow the whistle when they see questionable practices and wrongdoing.
"The good news is that when you shine a light on things, they get fixed," Blanton said.
Mushrooms might thrive in the dark, but democracy doesn't do so well.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Linda P. Campbell is a columnist and editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Readers may write to her at 400 W. 7th Street, Fort Worth, Texas 76102, or via e-mail at lcampbell@star-telegram.com.
 John C. Yoo, now a law professor in Berkeley, Calif., defended his memo, saying, "Our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near boilerplate." |
| Photo Credit: Photo By Karen Ballard/for The |
The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.
The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality."
Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed.
Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided the legal foundation for the Defense Department's use of aggressive interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into military jails from Afghanistan and U.S. forces prepared to invade Iraq.
Sent to the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers.
"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense," Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations -- that it must "shock the conscience" -- that the Bush administration advocated for years.
"Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification," Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.
The declassified memo was sent by the Defense and Justice departments late yesterday to Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Carl M. Levin (Mich.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), who had seen the document in classified form and pushed for its release.
The document is similar, although much broader, than a notorious memo primarily written by Yoo in August 2002 that narrowly defined what constitutes illegal torture. That document was also later withdrawn.
In his 2007 book, "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith, who took over the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo departed, writes that the two memos "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis."
The documents are among the Justice Department legal memoranda that undergirded some of the highly coercive interrogation techniques employed by the Bush administration, including extreme temperatures, head-slapping and a type of simulated drowning called waterboarding.
Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, defended the memo in an e-mail yesterday, saying the Justice Department altered its opinions "for appearances' sake." He said his successors "ignored the Department's long tradition in defending the President's authority in wartime."
"Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution," Yoo wrote, "our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near boilerplate."
Yoo's 2003 memo arrived amid strong Pentagon debate about which interrogation techniques should be allowed and which might lead to legal action in domestic and international courts.
After a rebellion by military lawyers, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 suspended a list of aggressive techniques he had approved, the most extreme of which were used on a single detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner, military investigators later would determine, was subjected to stress positions, nudity, hooding, exposure to dogs and other aggressive techniques.
Largely because of Yoo's memo, however, a Pentagon working group in April 2003 endorsed the continued use of extremely aggressive tactics. The top lawyers for each military service, who were largely excluded from the group, did not receive a final copy of Yoo's March memo and did not know about the group's final report for more than a year, officials said.
Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, said yesterday after reading the memo that it appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found "downright offensive."
Martin S. Lederman, a former lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel who now teaches law at Georgetown University, said the Yoo memo helped create a legal environment that allowed prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib.
"What else could have been the source of belief in Iraq that the gloves were off and all laws could be disregarded with impunity?" Lederman asked. "It created a world in which everyone on the ground believed the laws did not apply. It was a law-free zone."
In a 2004 memo for the Navy inspector general's office, then-General Counsel Alberto J. Mora objected to the ideas that cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment could be allowed at Guantanamo and that the president's authority is virtually unlimited.
Mora wrote that he spoke with Yoo at the Pentagon on Feb. 6, 2003, and that Yoo "glibly" defended his own memo. "Asked whether the President could order the application of torture, Mr. Yoo responded, 'Yes,' " Mora wrote. Yoo denies saying that.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
The Supreme Court yesterday issued a broad ruling limiting presidential power and the reach of international treaties, saying neither President Bush nor the World Court has the authority to order a Texas court to reopen a death penalty case involving a foreign national.
The Pentagon has released a legal memorandum that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects on the grounds that president George Bush's authority during wartime overrode any international ban on torture.
The justice department memo, dated March 14 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al-Qaida and Taliban detainees overseas so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives. It argues that poking, slapping or shoving would not give rise to criminal liability, and also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect".
But even if an interrogator harmed a detainee in a way prohibited as torture under international law they would not be criminally liable because, the memo argues, the president's wartime power as commander in chief is not limited by UN and other international treaties against torture.
"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. "Even if the criminal prohibitions outlined above applied, and an interrogation method might violate those prohibitions, necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability," the memo concluded.
The memo was rescinded in December 2003, nine months after Yoo sent it to the Pentagon's top lawyer, William J Haynes. Although its existence has been known for years, its release marked the first time its contents in full have been made public.
Haynes, the defense department's longest-serving general counsel, resigned in late February to return to the private sector. He has been criticised for his role in crafting Bush administration policies for detaining and trying suspected terrorists that some argue led to prisoner abuses at the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
Yoo's memo became part of a debate among the Pentagon's civilian and military leaders about what interrogation tactics to allow at overseas facilities and whether US troops might face legal problems domestically or in international courts.
Also of concern was whether techniques used by US interrogators might be used as justification for harsh treatment of Americans captured by opposing forces.
The justice department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA's use of waterboarding, which simulates drowning, when interrogating terror suspects. It was unclear whether the Yoo memo, which focuses only on military interrogators, will be part of that inquiry.
The declassified memo was released as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to force the Bush administration to turn over documents about the government's war on terror. The document also was turned over to lawmakers.
Justice department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said its release
"represents an accommodation of Congress's oversight interest in the area of wartime interrogations".
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project, said Yoo's legal reasoning puts "literally no limit at all to the kinds of interrogation methods that the president can authorise".
"The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority,"
Jaffer said. "The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did."
The 81-page legal analysis largely centers on whether interrogators can be held responsible for torture if torture is not the intent of the questioning. And it defines torture as the intended sum of a variety of acts, which could include acid scalding, severe mental pain and suffering, threat of imminent death and physical pain resulting in impaired body functions, organ failure or death.
The "definition of torture must be read as a sum of these component parts," the memo said.
The memo also includes past legal defenses of interrogations that Yoo wrote are not considered torture, such as sleep deprivation, hooding detainees and "frog crouching," which forces prisoners to crouch while standing on the tips of their toes.
"This standard permits some physical contact," the memo said. "Employing a shove or slap as part of an interrogation would not run afoul of this standard."
The memo concludes that foreign enemy combatants held overseas do not have defendants' rights or protections from cruel and unusual punishment that US citizens have under the Constitution. It also says that Congress "cannot interfere with the president's exercise of his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war".
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the memo "reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration." He called for its release four months ago.
"It is no wonder that this memo ... could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn," said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. "This memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country's status as a beacon of human rights around the world."
Justice Department says legal opinion on Executive orders is classified
Posted on 3/12/2008 at 20:49:11 by BBVM
John Byrne
Published: Wednesday March 12, 2008
Refuses to provide legal opinions on executive power
The Bush Administration's Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel is refusing to turn over a document providing its analysis of Bush's justification for executive orders.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists, the office said the document was "classified."
Steven Aftergood, who writes the Secrecy News blog for the Federation, requested the legal opinion after a Democratic senator referenced it on the Senate floor.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the freshman senator who ousted Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) in 2006, said he'd reviewed three documents that outlined Justice Department opinions.
"For years, under the Bush administration, the Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice has issued highly classified, secret legal opinions related to surveillance," Whitehouse said in a Dec. 7, 2007 floor statement. "This is an administration that hates answering to an American court, that wants to grade its own exams, and OLC is the inside place the administration goes to get legal support for its spying program."
"As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I was given access to those secret opinions and spent hours poring over them. Sitting in that secure room, as a lawyer, as a former U.S. attorney, legal counsel to Rhode Island's Governor, and State attorney general, I was increasingly dismayed and amazed as I read on," he continued.
Whitehouse gave two examples from the documents he read: An Executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new Executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous Executive order. Rather than violate an Executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.
The President, exercising his constitutional authority under article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President's authority under article II.
In other words, the president can decide whether his own interpretation of the law is lawful.
"We requested a copy of that seemingly innocuous, if questionable, opinion under the Freedom of Information Act," Aftergood wrote at Secrecy News. "But the request was denied."
Aftergood only requested the documents relating to executive orders, not those directly related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Aftergood's request, along with the Office of Legal Counsel's response, can be read in PDF format here.
Justice Department says legal opinion on Executive orders is classified
February 19th, 2008
These are responses to questions posed by Eva Brita Järnefors, editor of the Swedish Journal of Psychology. The answers are by Rea Farberman, the Executive Director for Communications at the American Psychological Association. e.
This is part of a set of articles, together with U.S. psychologists accused of participating in torture by Eva Brita Järnefors and “That psychologists have prevented abuse against detainees is a fantasy” by Stephen Soldz [me]. I encourage you to read them all. The original of all three, in Swedish and English is available as a pdf here; all three can also be accessed in html from here.
“We want to see the documents of the `enhanced´interrogation techniques”
-We have written to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to expedite the review of the documents that have provided the basis for the “enhanced” interrogation techniques, says Rea Farberman, the Executive Director for Communications at the American Psychological Association, APA, in Washington.
To inform about the APA policy adopted at the 2007 convention, you sent the 2007 resolution to key members of the Congress, to President George W Bush, and to key officials within the Dep. of Defense and CIA. Have you received any positive answers from these institutions?
The “responses” have come in the form of invitations to meet with both Congressional and Federal officials to share information. These meetings have given us the opportunity to more fully communicate APA’s position that torture and other forms of abusive treatment should never be permissible in any interrogations or detainee procedure as well as to underscore the ethical obligations and science that support that position. APA also submitted testimony on psychology and interrogation for a hearing before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. That testimony addressed psychologists’ contributions to eliciting information; the need for strict ethical guidelines within interrogation policy; and the need for further research in this area.
APA says (web site: Media information) that psychologists, by staying engaged in military interrogations, “have a vital role to play in promoting the use of ethical interrogations to safeguard the welfare of detainees and facilitate communication with them”. During the last 5 years, psychologists have not, it would seem, been able to stop mistreatment of detainees to any large extent. The American Medical Association does not permit their members to remain involved in these types of interrogations. Have you considered their standpoint for APA´s members: No psychologists involved - no risk to legitimize torture and abuse?
There has been a considerable amount of study and dialogue about APA’s position, yes. The APA Council of Representatives (the Association’s policy making body) has considered the issue at each of its last four meetings. Council has passed numerous resolutions enunciating it’s no torture policy including one adopted this past summer which enumerated 19 interrogation techniques as torture and was hailed by the Washington Post as a “rebuke of Bush Administration policy”. We also had a series of sessions at APA’s 2007 convention devoted to debate and dialogue on the issue. Furthermore, the process begun by the 2005 APA PENS Task Force continues as the APA Ethics Committee works on a casebook and commentary designed to speak to any areas of ambiguity as to a psychologist’s role and ethical obligations vis-Ã -vis
detainee interrogations and/or treatment.
It is fair to note that while prisoner mistreatment has surely and regrettably taken place, we also know of instances of psychologists stepping in to prevent prisoner abuse or being sent into situations where abuse had taken place to prevent it from happening again. Dr. Michael Gelles, for example, was hailed by a medical ethicist for his “successful medical protest of prisoner abuse” at Guantanamo Bay. Dr. Larry James is a second example. He was sent to Abu Ghraib to take charge of implementing procedures to prevent further episodes of prisoner maltreatment. Furthermore, APA policy has been incorporated into Department of Defense policy regarding how interrogations are to be conducted. And now, there are human rights groups advocating that the revised Army Field Manual, which binds all Department of Defense interrogations,
be adopted as the uniform standard of interrogation for the entire government
What will be your next step in this question?
The Casebook I mentioned above is an important next step.APA has also written to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to expedite the review of the Office of Legal Counsel documents that have provided the basis for the Bush administration’s “enhanced” interrogation techniques. APA encouraged him to issue a public report of his investigation and findings. It is also likely that members will continue to study the issue and voice their opinions through convention sessions and other types of member communications. Further deliberation by the APA Council could also take place if a member of that body wishes to place the subject on an agenda for a future Council meeting.
Eva Brita Järnefors
An article account of the troubling issues, activities and behaviour of the United States Attorney General Mukasey ..
WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior Justice Department official says laws and other limits enacted since three terrorism suspects were waterboarded has eliminated the technique from what is now legally allowed, going a step beyond what CIA Director Michael Hayden has said.
"The set of interrogation methods authorized for current use is narrower than before, and it does not today include waterboarding," Steven G. Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, says in remarks prepared for his appearance Thursday before the House Judiciary Constitution subcommittee.
"There has been no determination by the Justice Department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law," he said. It is the first time the department has expressed such an opinion publicly.
Bradbury in 2005 signed two secret legal memos that authorized the CIA to use head slaps, freezing temperatures and waterboarding when questioning terror detainees. Because of that, Senate Democrats have opposed his nomination by President Bush to formally head the legal counsel's office.
Bradbury's testimony comes as majority Democrats in Congress try to clamp down on interrogation methods that can be used on terrorism suspects.
Congress on Wednesday moved to prohibit the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh tactics, despite Bush's threat to veto any measure that limits the agency's interrogation techniques.
The prohibition was contained in a bill authorizing intelligence activities for the current year, which the Senate approved on a 51-45 vote. It would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method that makes an interrogation subject feel he is drowning.
The House had approved the measure in December. Wednesday's Senate vote set up a confrontation with the White House, where Bush has promised to veto any bill that restricts CIA questioning.
The legislation bars the CIA from using waterboarding, sensory deprivation or other harsh coercive methods to break a prisoner who refuses to answer questions. Those practices were banned by the military in 2006.
Bradbury's comments go a step further than Hayden's last week. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, the CIA director acknowledged for the first time publicly that the CIA has used waterboarding against three prisoners.
Hayden said current law and court decisions, including the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, cast doubt on whether waterboarding would be legal now. Hayden prohibited its use in CIA interrogations in 2006; it has not been used since 2003, he said.
The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for all detainees in U.S. custody, including CIA prisoners.
Waterboarding is still officially in the CIA tool kit but it requires the consent of the attorney general and president on a case-by-case basis.
