Dick Cheney and his lawyer, David Addington, pressured the Justice Department in 2005 to quickly approve a torture memo that authorized CIA interrogators to use a combination of barbaric techniques during interrogations of "high-value" detainees, despite objections from senior officials in the Department of Justice, according to e-mails written by James Comey, the DOJ's former Deputy Attorney General.

In the emails, Comey also wrote that then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was "weak" and had essentially allowed Cheney and Addington to politicize the Justice Department. [The emails can be found here: Documents: Justice Department Communication on Interrogation Opinions].

"The AG explained that he was under great pressure from the Vice President to complete both memos, and that the President had even raised it last week, apparently at the VP's request and the AG had promised they would be ready early this week," Comey wrote. Gonzales added that the VP kept telling him 'we are getting killed on the Hill.'" 

"It leaves me feeling sad for the Department and the AG"--I just hope that when this all comes out, this institution doesn't take the hit, but rather the hit is taken by those individuals who occupied positions at [Office of Legal Counsel and [Office of the Attorney General] and were too weak to stand up for the principles that undergird the rest of this great institution."

The New York Times obtained the e-mails, but the newspaper appears to have seriously mischaracterized some of the content of the communications in a story published Saturday.

The Times reported that Comey "went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful."

But Comey's 2005 e-mails tell a far more disturbing story and shows that the Justice Department's former No. 2 had objected to torture on moral and ethical grounds and predicted that the matter would become the focus of a congressional hearing "three years from now."

In April 2005, several weeks before OLC issued the first of three torture memos, Comey sent an e-mail to his Chief of Staff Chuck Rosenberg stating that he had met privately with Gonzales after reading the legal opinion that allowed CIA interrogators to employ a combination of torture techniques against detainees.

"In our private meeting yesterday afternoon, I told [Gonzales] I was here to urge him not to allow the '-combined effects' memo to be finalized,"- Comey wrote on April 27, 2005. "I told him it would come back to haunt him and the Department. I told him the first opinion was ready to go out and I concurred. I told him I did not concur with the second and asked him to stop it."

Surprisingly, Gonzales said he agreed with Comey and instructed him to tell OLC to finalize the first opinion but not the second, according to Comey's e-mail.

Gonzales said, "He would speak with [White House Counsel] Harriet Miers and share the concerns."

"He also directed me to call John Rizzo and the CIA and give him some comfort by saying the first [torture memo] would be done and that we would need to do additional work on the second," Comey added in his e-mail to Rosenberg.

Comey was not the only one concerned with the authorization to the CIA to use "combined effects"- during interrogations. Patrick Philbin, the OLC's deputy assistant attorney general, also raised red flags.

"Pat alerted me to his serious concerns about the adequacy of the 'combined effects' analysis, particularly as it related to the category of 'severe physical suffering,'" Comey wrote.

Gonzales, after sharing Comey's concerns with the Principals, who included then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, Addington and others, told Comey it didn't matter. Cheney and Addington were pressuring him to have the memo finalized and signed immediately. The opinion was approved on May 10, 2005.

"I told [Gonzales] the people who were applying pressure now would not be there when the [shit] hit the fan," Comey wrote in an April 28, 2005 e-mail. "It would be Alberto Gonzales in the bull's-eye. I told him it was my job to protect the department and the AG and that I could not agree to this because it was wrong. I told him it could be made right in a week, which was a blink of an eye, and that nobody would understand at a hearing three years from now why we didn't take that week."

In the April 28, 2005 e-mail, Comey appears to suggest that he was told the legal opinion needed to be drafted quickly to provide retroactive cover for torture that already occurred.

Gonzales's Chief of Staff Ted Ullyot "mentioned at one point that OLC didn't feel like it could accede to my request to make the opinion focused on one person because they don't give retrospective advice," Comey wrote to his then Chief of Staff Chuck Rosenberg. "I said I understood that, but that the treatment of that person had been the subject of oral advice, which OLC would simply be confirming in writing, something they do quite often."

The identity of the detainee Comey had referred to is unknown.

Steven Bradbury, who was the acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during Bush's second term, signed the May 2005 memos to reverse efforts led by former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith in 2003 and 2004 to scrap earlier OLC memos asserting Bush's powers.

Senior Bush administration officials, including Addington and Cheney, were furious at the attempts by Goldsmith, with Comey's and Philbin's support, knocked down memos by previous OLC lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

Yoo and Bybee had worked closely with the White House to create legal arguments for Bush to claim his Commander-in-Chief power essentially let him operate beyond the law.

In the May 2005 memos, Bradbury reinstated key elements of the Yoo-Bybee memos clearing the way for additional use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" against detainees.

In another email, Comey wrote that Bradbury had clearly succumbed to pressure from Cheney and Addington because he wanted to be nominated for the job as head of OLC.

"I have previously expressed my worry that having Steve as 'Acting'--and wanting the job--would make him susceptible to just this kind of pressure," Comey wrote in his e-mail to Rosenberg.

In her book, The Dark Side, author and New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, recounted the episode Comey had described in his emails and wrote, "the White House was so pleased with Bradbury's work that the day after he completed his opinion legalizing the cruelest treatment of U.S.-held in history, President Bush sent his name forewarned to the FBI to begin work on a background check, so that Bradbury could be formally nominated to run the OLC. Evidently, the White House had received the 'work product' it wanted; Bradbury had passed his probation."

One day after Bradbury signed the last of three torture memos issued in May 2005, copies of which were declassified and released in April, Comey sent another e-mail to Rosenberg.

"In stark terms I explained to him what this would look like some day and what it would mean for the president and the government," says Comey's May 31, 2005, e-mail to Rosenberg.

In that same e-mail, Comey said that he and Philbin and Bradbury met with Gonzales that morning to prepare him for his meeting with the Principals Committee, which was chaired by Rice.

Gonzales "began by saying that Dr. Rice was not interested in discussing details [of the list of torture techniques] and that her attitude was that if DOJ said it was legal and CIA said it was effective, then that ended it, without a need for detailed policy discussion.

"Pat [Philbin] and I urged [Gonzales] in the strongest possible terms to drive a full policy discussion of all techniques. I said I was not going to rehash my concerns about the legal opinion, but it was simply not acceptable for Principles [sic] to say that everything that may be 'legal'  is also appropriate. In stark terms, I explained to him what this would look like some day and what it would look like for the President and the government--I told him it would all come out some day and be presentedin the way I was presenting it."

Author's Website: http://www.pubrecord.org

Author's Bio: Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org, and the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.

www.opednews.com/articles/Newly-Released-E-Mails-Rev-by-Jason-Leopold-090608-727.html