ACLU: "Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration"

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2. Flashback: What the new Jim Comey torture emails actually reveal

What the new Jim Comey torture emails actually reveal

Just as they did with CIA reports on WMDs, Bush officials pressured DOJ lawyers to issue torture-authorizing memos.

By Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times was provided 3 extremely important internal Justice Department emails from April, 2005 (.pdf) – all written by then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey — which highlight how the Bush administration’s torture techniques became legally authorized by Bush lawyers. As Marcy Wheeler documents, the leak to the NYT was clearly from someone eager to defend Bush officials by suggesting that Comey’s emails prove that all DOJ lawyers — even those opposed to torture on policy grounds — agreed these techniques were legal, and the NYT reporters, Scott Shane and David Johnston, dutifully do the leakers’ bidding by misleadingly depicting the Comey emails as vindication for Bush/Cheney (Headline: ”U.S. Lawyers Agreed on the Legality of Brutal Tactic”; First Paragraph: ”When Justice Department lawyers engaged in a sharp internal debate in 2005 over brutal interrogation techniques, even some who believed that using tough tactics was a serious mistake agreed on a basic point: the methods themselves were legal”).

I defy anyone to read Comey’s 3 emails and walk away with that conclusion. Marcy has detailed many of the reasons the NYT article is so misleading, so I want to focus on what the Comey emails actually demonstrate about what these DOJ torture memos really are. The primary argument against prosecutions for Bush officials who ordered torture is that DOJ lawyers told the White House that these tactics were legal, and White House officials therefore had the right to rely on those legal opinions. The premise is that White House officials inquired in good faith with the DOJ about what they could and could not do under the law, and only ordered those tactics which the DOJ lawyers told them were legal. As these Comey emails prove, that simply is not what happened.

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What’s most ironic about what the NYT did here is that on the very same day this article appears, there is a column from the NYT Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, excoriating the paper for having published a deeply misleading front page story by Elizabeth Bumiller, that claimed that 1 out of 7 Guantanamo detainees returned to “jihad” once they are released. That happened because Bumiller followed the most common method of modern establishment reporting: she mindlessly repeated what her government sources told her to say. As Hoyt put it:

But the article on which he based that statement was seriously flawed and greatly overplayed. It demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war.

That is exactly what Shane and Johnston did with these Comey emails. Just as Bumiller did, they included some contrary facts buried deep in the article about Comey’s objections, but the headline and the way the entire article was framed will create the impression — as intended — that there was unanimity among DOJ lawyers regarding the legality of the Bush interrogation program. Other journalists, too slothful to read the Comey emails themselves, will get the message and go forth and repeat it, and it will soon be conventional wisdom that “everyone” at the DOJ agreed these torture techniques were legal. Already this morning, here is George Stephanopolous’ Twitter reaction to the NYT story:



http://www.salon.com/2009/06/07/torture_memos/

This just goes to show how opinions can differ. I never trusted Comey.