THE MEDIA AND THE LATEST 'TORTURE' REVELATIONS Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2007 14:33:22 -0500 (CDT) three items -- think about archiving them M. ############## http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003654922 THE MEDIA AND THE LATEST 'TORTURE' REVELATIONS By Greg Mitchell Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor. EDITOR&PUBLISHER -- October 7 The latest "torture" revelations from The New York Times this week seemed to shock many in the media, which also says a lot. That the U.S. has been torturing prisoners has been known for years, producing only measured outrage from most editorialists and pundits. Now how will they respond? (October 06, 2007) -- Those who recall the indignity of President Richard Nixon having to declare, in response to a question from the press, "I am not a crook," must have winced yesterday when President George W. Bush, also talking to the press, was forced to avow, "This government does not torture people." That the questions had to be asked speaks volumes in itself. That the answers from both presidents were thoroughly unconvincing says just as much. Or perhaps Bush was only suggesting that our military and our private contractors may torture people but "this government" does not. In a dead giveaway, he added, "We stick to U.S. law and our international obligations." This reference to "international obligations" rather than "international law" was a veiled admission that we have been violating the Geneva accords. The latest "torture" revelations from The New York Times this week seemed to shock many in the media, which also says a lot. That the U.S. has been torturing prisoners has been known for years, producing only measured outrage from editorialists and pundits. Even in the news pages, reporters and editors have rarely used the 'torture" word, caving to the administration's insistence that these were merely "enhanced interrogation" measures (a term which could also have applied to, say, the time-honored cutting off of fingers). If you want to believe that torture is justified in the war on terror, fine -- but just call it what it is. Don't make jokes about it, like David Brooks did on the PBS NewsHour last night, when he said listening to Fred Thompson on the stump might violate the Geneva Conventions. Perhaps the most amazing statement of the week came from White House spokeswoman Dana Perino at a press briefing on Thursday, when she observed that six years after the 9/11 attacks "we are still having a debate to talk about how we should make sure that we treat people, and that we don't torture them. That is quite a testament to this country." So it's a good thing that the country still has to debate whether or not we torture people? The Times article that blew this wide open held this key paragraph: "Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on `combined effects' over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion's overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be `ashamed' when the world eventually learned of it." So far the "shame" has not emerged from many editorial pages but perhaps that will change this weekend. For now we have a pair blistering blog critiques from two of the most popular members of that breed, one long seen as on the right and the other on the left. Andrew Sullivan, who now blogs for The Atlantic, and a onetime Bush-backer and war supporter, heads his latest posting with a photo of the president and the title: "War Criminal." Referring at least partly to the media, Sullivan declares, "A couple of things need to be stressed, because I've learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering." What does he mean? He quotes from the Times story: "Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics." He closes with this: "There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear, when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. ...We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?" Over at Salon.com, meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald focuses more on the muted press reaction over the past couple of years: "All of the solemn 'debates' and hand-wringing and anti-torture laws that were passed have changed very little, because the administration knows that there is no political will ever to enforce any of that. They know that the political and media institutions intended to impose checks on their behavior will never take any meaningful stand against what they do, no matter how blatantly extreme or illegal." He then quotes a recent posting by media critic and New York University professor Jay Rosen suggesting that the media's acquiescence to the administration's lawbreaking is due to their inability to comprehend just how extreme it all has been. Rosen wrote: "The most important of these is that journalists and their methods were overwhelmed by what the Bush White House did -- by its radicalism. There is simply nothing in the Beltway journalist's rule book about what to do, how to act, when a group of people comes to power willing to go as far as this group has in expanding executive power, eluding oversight, steamrolling critics (even when they are allies) politicizing the government, re-working the Constitution, rolling back the press, making secrecy and opacity standard operating procedure, and repealing the very principle of empiricism in matters of state. "The press tends to behave because it does not know how to act, in the sense of striking out in a new direction when confronted with a new fact pattern." Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, concurs: "One does not expect an administration to imprison U.S. citizens with no process, or to proclaim explicitly the right to break the law, or to systematically adopt policies of torture. For that reason, it is not surprising that it would take some time for the reaction to catch up to the full extent of the wrongdoing." But then he adds: "But we are now way past the point where that excuse is plausible. Anyone paying even minimal attention is well aware of exactly how radical and corrupt and lawless this administration is. We all know what has happened to our standing in the world, to our national character and our core political values, as a result of the previously unthinkable policies the Bush administration has relentlessly pursued. Ignorance or incredulity can no longer explain our acquiescence. Accommodating and protecting the lawbreaking of high Bush officials is widely seen by our Beltway elite as a duty of bipartisanship, a hallmark of Seriousness. "It isn't surprising or particularly revealing that there were not immediate consequences for these revelations. Our political system, by design, works slowly and methodically. The Founders purposely imposed significant hurdles to undertaking the most significant steps (such as criminal investigations of high Executive officials or impeachment) precisely to ensure that such actions were taken deliberatively, not impetuously. It took two-and-a-half years for the much simpler Watergate scandal to lead to what would have been the impeachment of Richard Nixon. The failure to impose immediate or even rapid consequences, while frustrating to many, would not really be a cause for legitimate complaint. "But when it comes to Bush's extremism and lawbreaking, we're not imposing consequences slowly. We're not imposing consequences at all. Quite the contrary, we're moving in the opposite direction -- when we're not affirmatively endorsing and providing protection for that conduct, we're choosing not to know about it, or simply allowing it to fester. And the more that happens, the less that behavior becomes the exclusive province of the Bush administration and the more it becomes our country's defining behavior. "This could still all be reversed....The Congress could aggressively investigate. Criminal prosecutions could be commenced. Our opinion-making elite could sound the alarm. New laws could be passed, reversing the prior endorsements and imposing new restrictions, along with the will to enforce those laws. We still have the ability to vindicate the rule of law and enforce our basic constitutional framework. "But does anyone actually believe any of that will be the result of these new revelations?" ########### For comments on this item see e.g. See also NYTIMES - Editorial plus original piece. ########### Here's today's NY Times Editorial http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07sun1.html Editorial -- ON TORTURE AND AMERICAN VALUES Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values. The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspapers front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies. After the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Some of their methods simulated drownings, extreme ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The administration clearly knew this; the CIA modeled its techniques on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union. The White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted documents that redefined torture to neatly exclude the things American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the American people. Under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush's loyal enabler, the Justice Department even declared that those acts did not violate the lower standard of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. That allowed the White House to claim that it did not condone torture, and to stampede Congress into passing laws that shielded the interrogators who abused prisoners, and the men who ordered them to do it, from any kind of legal accountability. Mr. Bush and his aides were still clinging to their rationalizations at the end of last week. The president declared that Americans do not torture prisoners and that Congress had been fully briefed on his detention policies. Neither statement was true at least in what the White House once scorned as the reality-based community and Senator John Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was right to be furious. He demanded all of the opinions of the Justice Department analyzing the legality of detention and interrogation policies. Lawmakers, who for too long have been bullied and intimidated by the White House, should rewrite the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act to conform with actual American laws and values. For the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this really who we are? Is this the country whose president declared, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters? Truly banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions. Restoring the rule of law to Guantanamo Bay would not set terrorists free; the truly guilty could be tried for their crimes in a way that does not mock American values. Clinging to the administrations policies will only cause further harm to Americas global image and to our legal system. It also will add immeasurably to the risk facing any man or woman captured while wearing Americas uniform or serving in its intelligence forces. This is an easy choice. ######## SECRET U.S. ENDORSEMENT OF SEVERE INTERROGATIONS - New York Times October 4, 2007 Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations By SCOTT SHANE, DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 When the Justice Department publicly declared torture abhorrent in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations. But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency. The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures. Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on combined effects over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinions overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be ashamed when the world eventually learned of it. Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the CIA interrogation methods violated that standard. The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush's second term and Mr. Gonzales's tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil. Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics. A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law and international agreements. More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the CIA detention operations they govern. When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was a place of inspiration that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law. Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney's counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the departments independence. The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the offices tradition of avoiding political advocacy. Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the governments most authoritative interpreter of the law. In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out, he said in an interview. The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn't like the advice being given. The debate over how terrorist suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees. The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House. After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the CIA's secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The CIA halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoners cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation. But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls enhanced interrogation techniques the details remain secret and officials say the CIA again is holding prisoners in black sites overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel. Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the offices proper role. The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate, said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, lost its ability to say no. The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror, Mr. Kmiec said. The office became an advocate for the presidents policies. From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where CIA teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at CIA headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture? The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding. Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and CIA officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective. With virtually no experience in interrogations, the CIA had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away. We were getting asked about combinations Can we do this and this at the same time? recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003. Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature can they be combined? Or Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme? The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a CIA inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran CIA officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills. That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. You think you're making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you, he recalled. We couldn't tell them, Do the best you can, because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury. Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics. That opinion, which would become infamous as the torture memo after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice presidents adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled. Mr. Yoo's memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or even death. A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used. Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the CIA caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A CIA spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review and has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives. The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists, Mr. Little added. Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed's statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the CIA's initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed's background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many CIA professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure. Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda's structure and plans. We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M., Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. We were getting good information, and then they were told: Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification. The doubts at the CIA proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency's surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney generals hospital bedside. Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith, who left the Justice Department soon afterward, first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted on its Web site a new legal opinion that appeared to end any flirtation with torture, starting with its clarionlike opening: Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms. A single footnote added to reassure the CIA suggested that the Justice Department was not declaring the agency's previous actions illegal. But the opinion was unmistakably a retreat. Some White House officials had opposed publicizing the document, but acquiesced to Justice Department officials who argued that doing so would help clear the way for Mr. Gonzales's confirmation as attorney general. If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the presidents prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post. Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmiths dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him. Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmiths rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial, one Justice Department official recalled. Mr. Bradbury's biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury's father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor. Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy. We all grew up together, said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there. But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps. Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world. As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems, said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. At O.L.C., you're not writing law review articles and you're not theorizing. Youre giving a client practical advice on a real problem. As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice presidents lawyer. Mr. Bradbury appeared to be fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the CIA wanted to do, recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times vituperative, said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was professional and collegial. While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances. Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was very troubled at the notion of a probationary period. If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it, Mr. Cooper said. Youre implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job. Mr. Bradbury said he made no such concessions. No one ever suggested to me that my nomination depended on how I ruled on any opinion, he said. Every opinion Ive signed at the Office of Legal Counsel represents my best judgment of what the law requires. Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground. For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste extremely hazardous to their health, Mr. Horton said. If you give the administration what it wants, you'll lose credibility in the academic community, he said. But if you hold back, you'll be vilified by conservatives and the administration. In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury's approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques. Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist. Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey's opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that no lawyer would endorse Mr. Yoos justification for the NSA program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: No good lawyer, according to someone present. But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on NSA and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House. On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal, said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington. Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the NSA's Fort Meade campus on Law Day a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the NSA program Mr. Comey spoke of the agonizing collisions of the law and the desire to protect Americans. We are likely to hear the words: If we don't do this, people will die, Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions. It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say no when it matters most, he said. It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country. Mr. Gonzales's aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test. Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the CIA's methods. The administration had always asserted that the CIA's pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture the prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment. At the administrations request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any CIA methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department. At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of cruel, inhuman or degrading would permit the most extreme CIA methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy. If Justice says some practices are in violation of the CID standard, Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, then they are now saying that officials broke current law. In the end, Mr. Bradbury's opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain's Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the CIA's practices, according to officials familiar with the memo. Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that shocks the conscience was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said. In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several CIA techniques. Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administrations defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the NSA surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an Ask the White House feature on a Web site. Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury's public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role. A senior administration official called Mr. Bradbury's active role in shaping legislation and speaking to Congress and the press entirely appropriate and consistent with past practice. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bradbury has played a critical role in achieving greater transparency on the legal basis for detention and surveillance programs. Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsels assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury's role in interrogation policy. There are fundamental questions about whether Mr. Bradbury approved interrogation methods that are clearly unacceptable, Mr. Durbin said. John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners. I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country's good, some people will do a lot of it for the country's better, Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future. The problem is, once you've got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then? he asked.