ADVERTISEMENT Isikoff: Discrepancies in CIA tapes story David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster

Published: Tuesday March 3, 2009





Print This Email This Reporter: John Yoo apparently offered Bush justification to overrule the First Amendment

Following Monday's revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed 92 tapes of suspects, some allegedly undergoing harsh interrogations, the ACLU was quick to pounce, calling on a judge to issue a "prompt finding of contempt" against the CIA for disobeying an order to preserve evidence.



Monday night, Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff highlighted a years-old CIA explanation as to why the tapes could not be released, which appears to contradict the agency's current effort to explain away the destruction of the videos. In his primer, Isikoff also explained how Bush attorney John Yoo offered the former administration a route around the Fourth and First Amendments to the Constitution.



Speaking with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Isikoff began by addressing the Obama administration's recent release of a series of Bush Justice Department memos.



"We have known for quite some time that the Justice Department during this period was giving the green light for a whole wide range of activities, warrantless surveillance, harsh interrogations of suspects, citing broad, expansive powers that they claimed the president had in light of the 9/11 attacks.



"But, every time we get one of these memos, we discover new claims and new assertions that were being made ..."



Among the legal claims were assertions that the president could ignore treaties and International law, along with the Fourth and First Amendments.



"This October 23, 2001 memo, written by John Yoo, who was the intellectual author of the legal philosophy that the Bush administration was relying on, saying that if the Fourth Amendment didn't apply during the War on Terror, there's no reason the First Amendment guarantees a freedom of the press, a freedom of speech, shouldn't apply either," said Isikoff.



"We're at war. The president, in wartime, has unlimited, unfettered executive power to defend the country and the Justice Department was essentially giving the green light to that."



"The Bush administration repealed these memos as one of their very last acts," said Maddow. "They said they had not relied on these memos for quite some time. Why then repeal these memos right before Bush leaves office?"



"Actually, that was one of the most interesting revelations today," said Isikoff. "That with five days left in Bush's presidency, Steve Bradbury, who was chief of the office of legal counsel, suddenly reviews these memos and says that they shouldn't be relied on, that the legal reasoning on these was poor and not authoritative.



"We know a couple of things are going on. Obviously, the Obama Justice Department was going to be able to get into these files, review them and release them and a lot of people would get egg on their face.



"We also know, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago on this show, that there is this ethics review. A report by the Office of Professional Responsibility inside the Justice Department, into the authors of these memos. Steve Bradbury was one of the people being investigated as part of that review and Bradbury may have been trying to cover himself a little big. Trying to show, 'Hey, I didn't sign off on these really wild-eyed John Yoo memos. I actually rescinded them.'



"The problem he's got is the timing and why he waited so long to pull these memos back."



Asked for more details about the CIA's tapes, Isikoff laughed.



"What the CIA is saying is that that these 92 tapes were tapes of two suspects," he explained. "They never said there were two tapes. They said there were tapes of interrogations of two suspects.



"So, when I put to them today, 92 interrogations of two suspects, they said 'Well, they're not all interrogations. Some of these are just of the suspects themselves.'"



The CIA said many of the videos weren't interrogations, but merely the suspects "sitting around in their black, secret sites somewhere," claimed Isikoff.



He insisted that story does not sync with "the CIA's original explanation that they had to protect the identities of the CIA interrogators."



"If it's just the suspects, then whose identity are you protecting by destroying the tapes?"



This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Mar. 2, 2009.









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