THE WALL STREET JOURNALBY SIOBHAN GORMAN and EVAN PEREZ
MARCH 3, 2009
WASHINGTON -- The Central Intelligence Agency destroyed 92 videotapes from the agency's detainee interrogation program, a far larger number than previously believed, the Justice Department said in a court filing Monday.
The disclosures in a New York federal court case marked the first major step by President Barack Obama's administration to reveal details of the controversial detention program approved by the Bush White House after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Obama administration is still uncertain about how to pursue allegations of wrongdoing against officials in the Bush administration. CIA Director Leon Panetta said last week he opposed prosecuting CIA officers who followed legal advice in putting suspects through such tactics as waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that the Obama administration labeled torture.
At the same time, Mr. Obama is making significant breaks with the past, including the move Monday to disclose long-secret information. The government made the disclosures in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking details of the CIA program.
"We want to give the people that work in the CIA the tools they need to keep us safe, but do so in a way that also protects our values," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.
The Justice Department on Monday released memorandums that had laid the groundwork for the Bush administration's broad assertion of presidential power, overriding congressional oversight, international treaties and constitutional freedoms.
In one memo, Department of Justice lawyers said the president could order the U.S. military to mobilize domestically to combat terrorism, in contravention of laws that generally prohibit such use of the military on U.S. soil. Other memos described the president's power to conduct surveillance without court warrants.
Many of the legal opinions were written by John C. Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The Obama administration is defending Mr. Yoo and other former Bush officials who are being sued over their national-security legal work. In an October 2001 memo, Mr. Yoo asserted that "the president has both the constitutional and statutory authority to use the armed forces in military operations, against terrorists within the United States." He added that such a move wouldn't be subject to Fourth Amendment restrictions on unreasonable searches and seizures so long as they are acting in a military, not law-enforcement, function.
The government also released memos from the final months of the Bush administration that renounced the legal reasoning of the early post-9/11 period. In one October 2008 memo, a top Justice official called earlier opinions "either incorrect or highly questionable."
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