The former State Department adviser to Condoleezza Rice and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, disclosed at Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government yesterday that he offered a dissenting view to the torture memos and policies of the Bush Administration. (Ernie Canning discussed those memos and policies in detail here this morning.)
Zelikow not only dissented from the party line, admirably, but he also learned at one point that while the administration disagreed with his opinion, they were taking it a step further by actually going out of their way to destroy all copies of his memo. As he explained at FP yesterday:
While it’s admirable, I suppose, that he’s finally speaking up to reveal that at least someone in the Bush Administration dissented from their tortured legal justifications for war crimes, the question must be raised as to why Zelikow didn’t simply resign when it became clear that the administration was going far beyond simply disagreeing with him. They were stepping over what would seem to clearly be the line of legality, by actually destroying (or attempting to), all copies of his opinion.
Surely that was a red flag that something was gravely amiss there, no?
Zelikow was on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show last night (complete video and transcript below), and she asked directly if he’d considered resigning at that point. But I find his answer rather unsatisfying, in my opinion…
He claimed he never even considered resigning, because, he claims, he was busy working from the inside to “achieving major changes in what the standards would be that would govern what we were doing” in regard to torture, etc. at secret prisons, and that, in any case, “They weren’t committing an act of obstruction of justice by trying to destroy copies of the memos.”
They weren’t? Well, what were they trying to do, in that case? These were already “Top Secret” memos, so why the need to go out of the way to actually destroy all copies of his opinion? Zelikow’s further rationalization to Maddow that “they did not succeed in destroying all the copies of these memos” is hardly justification either for not taking some sort of public action to blow the whistle about what seems such an obvious red flag waving as the administration was attempting to destroy all copies of a dissenting view point.
Maybe it’s just me, but that sure doesn’t seem to wash.
And while I’m asking, remember, Zelikow was working for Condoleezza Rice at the time as her legal counselor, so surely she knew about all of this. So while we know she was little more than a Bush Administration sycophant, the question is still worth asking as to why she similarly didn’t resign, or otherwise find it her duty to take some kind of action in the face of something so blatantly out of line as destroying all copies of an already-Top Secret dissenting legal opinion on torture by her own administration.
The video of Maddow’s interview with Zelikow — very much worth watching in any case — and it’s text transcript, all follow below…
The complete text transcript of Maddow’s interview with Zelikow, from her 4/21/09 show follows below. (Hat-tip Steve Benen at Washington Monthly)…
ZELIKOW: Glad to be here.
MADDOW: First of all, let me give you the opportunity to correct me if I have mischaracterized anything. Is what I have said about your involvement in this issue thus far… have I accurately characterized it?
ZELIKOW: Yes.
MADDOW: OK. So you first saw these office of legal counsel memos in 2005. What was your reaction to the legal reasoning in those memos?
ZELIKOW: Many years earlier, when I had been a law student and had been a practicing lawyer, I worked, actually, on issues of treatment of prisoners and that whole body of constitutional law. So when I saw the memoranda, I was struck by the fact that even aside from the policy problems, the legal reasoning seemed deeply unsound to me. And I wasn’t sure that the president and his advisors understood just how potentially questionable and unreasonable many lawyers and judges would find this reasoning. And so I thought it was important to just say hey, there’s another view here of this law. And a lot of people would regard the views in these memos as, to say the least, outliers.
MADDOW: You suggest judges are one of the audiences that might not be persuaded by the reasoning in these memos. Were you thinking ahead to the purpose for which these memos were drafted, which was essentially—I mean it’s hard for those of us outside of government to understand what the purpose of an OLC memo is—but essentially to provide a defense in case people were accused of acting illegally in ways that were described in those memos.. Is that what you were thinking of?
ZELIKOW: Yeah. Rachel, perhaps, just a little bit of background to put this in context for your viewers. America has fought a number of wars in our history, including against unconventional enemies. This was an interrogation program, however, for which there is no precedent in the history of the United States. We’ve never done a program like this before. So, where the administration is moving into uncharted waters, they’re clearly doing things that folks know are as legally questionable. That’s why these opinions were requested. Because there were questions about whether this sort of conduct was lawful because it was unprecedented. So here the Justice Department is coming down and saying “look, this is a murky area of the law, but here’s what we think you’re allowed to do.” Now whether it’s a good idea to do it is another question. Whether it’s moral is another question. The question before them was, “Is it lawful to do this?” And the justifce department has the job of giving authoritative guidance for the executive branch on how the U.S. law should be interpreted in the conduct of our actions.
MADDOW: In the memo that you wrote, the document that you wrote, that you described today on the website of Foreign Policy magazine, essentially said that they got it wrong when they described what you are allowed to do under U.S. law. That their reasoning was flawed. It didn’t take account of the relevant case law, for example, that they should have called on to prove their point. Is that accurate?
ZELIKOW: Yes that’s accurate. Now look, I’m just one point of view. I looked at their point of view and it didn’t strike me as a mainstream or reasonable way of construing the relevant standards of treatment, of the definition of terms like cruel or human or degrading. They were using an interpretation of how to comply with that standard that I didn’t think any judges or lawyers outside of the administration would find plausible. And I wasn’t sure other folks realized just how implausible it was. Now, of course, I’m just offering my opinion. Now I was there as part of a team representing the state department, acting as an agent of Secretary Rice who had grave concerns about all this. But others in the administration were perfectly entitled to say “No, we looked at the law,” [inaudible] Justice Department — they know a lot more about this than you do. But, look, they were entitled to hear an alterative point of view and figure out whether or not they wanted to reevaluate their opinion.
MADDOW: Rather than just disagreeing with you, or saying that you were wrong and the office of legal counsel memos that you were rebutting were correct, why do you think they tried to destroy every copy of the memo that they knew existed? And how did you find out that they did try to destroy copies of the memo?
ZELIKOW: Well I found out because I was told, “We’re trying to collect these and destroy them. And you have a copy don’t you?” I know that copies were obtained in my building. And as I mentioned, Secretary Rice understood what I was doing on her behalf. I was her agent in these matters. So I think copies still exist. Why would they destroy them? That’s a question they’ll have to answer. Obviously you want to eliminate records because you don’t want people to find them.
MADDOW: Am I right in thinking that they would want to erase any evidence of the existence of a dissenting view within the administration because it would undercut the legal authority of the advice in those memos? The advice that those techniques would be legal?
ZELIKOW: That’s what I thought at the time. I had the same reaction you did. But I don’t know why they wanted to do it.
MADDOW: In thinking about accountability for official actions here, it seems to me that the authors of the OLC memos may find themselves in some trouble, either professionally or I guess potentially criminally, if they wrote opinions to order, if they came up with legal reasoning to support a preordained conclusion. It also seems that government officials could find themselves in trouble if they knowingly used these memos as a tool to get a policy implemented to do things that they knew to be illegal. Could the existence of your dissenting memo be evidence that government officials did know that these things that they were authorizing really were, at least possibly, illegal?
ZELIKOW: All it shows is that they were presented with an argument that says your interpretation of the law adheres to this one fellow to be unsound. Of course, lawyers disagree all the time about how to interpret the law. And it’s now up to our institutions and the Justice Department to sort out whether or not their rejection of these views was just another disagreement among people interpreting tough law or was something more than that. The Justice Department is already looking into how these lawyers did their job. I’m happy to wait and read their report and find out what they’ve learned.
MADDOW: I have to ask, given your description about you felt about these memos and the actions that you took, some of the other reporting that other people have said about you in terms of your role in the administration at this time, I have to ask if you ever contemplated resigning over this issue, if you felt quite strongly about it.
ZELIKOW: No. You have to understand, this is a battle that had been going on for months beforehand and went on for months afterward. This is chapter 9 of 32 chapters. And actually, by the end of 2005, and on into 2006, we were achieving major changes. We were achieving major changes in what the standards would be that would govern what we were doing. Major changes in what the CIA was actually doing on the sites. And important changes in the way we were beginning to talk to our allies about these problems and move towards bringing these people out of the black sites and into the light, where they would see lawyers, the Red Cross, all of that. That’s a decision that we achieved in 2006 that was made by President Bush in 2006. So we were in a process of working this from the inside, while people like Senator McCain were doing really important work on this issue on Capitol Hill. The Supreme Court delivered a very important decision on this, Hamden v. Rumsfeld, during 2006. So we were part of a combination of forces that was trying to move our government in a different direction, to turn the page and get this moving in a healthier direction. And I believe we began turning that corner in 2006.
MADDOW: I feel like I’m starting to understand your reasoning and the way that you approached this, just from talking to you know and from what I know about your actions, there is one thing that just doesn’t resonate for me. And that is, in 2005, when you found out that this memo that you wrote which said this Office of Legal Counsel attempt to say that things like hanging people from ceilings and sleep deprivation is illegal, it’s wrongly reasoned, there’s them saying this is legal under U.S. law is an inappropriate legal understand, it’s an inappropriate understanding of U.S. law—when you found out that they were collecting your memo with that criticism in it and destroying it so there would be no evidence of it, at a time when you knew they were going to carry out those techniques, which you must have believed were not legal since you had seen the legal rationalization for it, it’s hard for me to believe that you would not think about resigning or blowing the whistle or saying publicly what was going on at that time?
ZELIKOW: It was my job to fight this with every ounce of energy at my disposal using the legal means in front of me. And frankly that’s the same way they should have approached their job, is work within the institutions you’ve got, institutions our country gives you. They weren’t committing an act of obstruction of justice by trying to destroy copies of the memos and they did not succeed in destroying all the copies of these memos. Just because they disagree with an alternative view doesn’t mean my view was right. But it was important to register the fact that hey, folks need to understand, if they didn’t already, a lot of lawyers might believe that this is a radical, indefensible, unreasonable interpretation of the relevant law. They heard that argument. They chose to move on. We can continue to fight to change the policy and ultimately did change the policy with help from Congress and the courts.
MADDOW: One last question for you. If members of the National Security Council Principals Committee or Deputy’s Committee did say thumbs up to specific techniques like water boarding or like hanging people from the ceiling that were mentioned in those Office of Legal Counsel memos, and they said thumbs up to that on the basis of their being a legal authorization in those memos, do you think those officials committed a crime when they Oked it?
ZELIKOW: I’m going to obey the same advice I would give to President Obama, which is that when people argue that crimes have been committed, our country has institutions to sort this out. One of those institutions is the Department of Justice and the Attorney General. President Obama ran on the platform that we’re going to depoliticize the Department of Justice. Well let’s do that. Let’s refer all those questions to the Department of Justice. If you have a question about whether these people will be prosecuted, the Department of Justice is looking into the matter. The Attorney General is looking into the matter. They’ll sort this out the way they sort out other allegations of crime. And let’s just see where it goes. And that’s my approach too, is I’m not going to rush to judgment, I’m not going to try to prejudge or politicize the issue. It’s important folks understand that there’s another point of view and was another point of view on some of these matters. Now let’s let our institutions do their job.
MADDOW: Philip Zelikow, former State Department counselor, Deputy for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s invaluable to have your perspective and to hear how thing went from your point of view in the administration. Thank you sir.
ZELIKOW: Thank you.
- Filed in Categories: Bush LegacyRachel MaddowTorture
10 Comments on “Why Didn’t Zelikow Resign When Bush Admin ‘Attempted to Destroy All Copies’ of His Opinion on Torture?”
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Wilburrr… ~ Since condi approved torture as far back as 2002 … I wasn’t too far off comparing her to idi amin(with a hooch) . . .
They can’t let this go on, expect the neo-cons to launch another terror attack to kill this story.
Since Zelikow was the one with final veto power on the “9-11 commission’s” findings, and all findings needed “unanimous consensus”, and he specifically killed information from being put in, seemingly to protect the Admin, I find it near impossible to believe his “I did the right thing” claim, especially since there is no proof to his claims, only the assertions from a highly partisan jackass who is likely trying to save his ass.
I believe nothing anyone from the Shrub Admin says, they have proven to be liars over and over. If I’m to believe anything spewed from their gutters of a mouth, I have to see “proof”.
Occam’s Razor.. This liar is trying to protect his rep.
i saw the interview on rachel and thought,this guy is just covering his butt and trying to cover rices too
the idea that he should of resigned does not go far enough,he should of whistle blown the * admin
it makes me sick that my tax money has been used for this evil and perverted bs
Back peddling. However, resigning is a fast trip to obscurity. Most people don’t have the courage, strength, or perhaps the imagination, to attack after leaving. Life is just to damn hard.
The problem with resigning is after everyone with integrity resigns, what kind of people are running every position of government?
The problem with not resigning, is after you’ve let dozens of issues slide that you know are wrong, what kind of people are running every position of government (yourself included)?
There’s no easy answer to the resign vs not resign argument, imo.
Resigning [with LOTS of public discussion at that time] reassures those that are fighting to do the right thing that they are not alone. It also brings light to the issue (if done properly) and will cause more uproar by the people, that causes the bad guys to scurry.
Once you resign and cause a huge stink and the bad guys run for the shadows again, the “good guys” that take over will simply re-hire you (if they are smart).
The reason there is no “easy” answer, just as why “life is hard” (re: 72dawg) is because those looking to control you (us) have made it that way, then intentionally give the appearance of “no good answers” while they live like kings at our expense.
This is all by design; the ruling elite don’t have these problems because they create them FOR us, to be used AGAINST us, and the sheeple are content to not think for themselves, which allows the ruling elite to succeed in destroying the country and world.
Are we kidding ourselves? This guy is a criminal and what makes this sick is that NBC is part of the game. Letting this criminal on without a police escort is like letting Charles Manson watch your kids. He is the whitewasher in charge. Covering up the Diabolical truths of 911. We are now in a civil war of the minds in this country. We are in endless wars. We are financial and morally bankrupt. Our economy is pushing downward and the news will wait until the boat is half sunk before warning us. The news and the elite are the same. The Pentagon is a corporate army. The government knows that we are suspicious and they will watch our every move. We are in the beginings of fascism. Only the technocrats and elites run the country and we are watching the end of this system. Zelikow is an apologist who is part of the machine designed to create a hate for Muslims so that we can steal oil, which is what our economy is based on. When the oil runs out how will we buy solar panels for houses we don’t have. I can’t even find a job in my area. The lazy elite don’t want real jobs. They want us to fight their wars. There is alot of rich lazy and overweight people in this country and I believe they will be getting pretty skinny real soon. It’s not fair that a handful of elites are running the standard of living into a hole. I can’t even donate money to poor countries because I cant even pay my own bills. This party thing is not helping. Our entire government, save a few is completely corrupt. We have a police state and prison state for poor people. While the rich and the corporations tell us that we are scum and should go to jail or be indebted by the credit controllers, we watch the elite quibble over left and right issues. HA HA, they are watching their populations starve while the lazy people buy their starbucks and buy their ipods. There is a class war that is coming and all the people who are soft are going to pay more for more thugs to protect their lives. The french revolution stopped the oligarch as a normal business cycle. We have been dumbed down to the point that we trust the government to make the right decisions. The government is only worried about themselves and their own friends and family. There is only so much time before people are revolting. The revolts never care about the right or left. They aim high and deliberately. Those who rode on their laurels too long are going to be hit hard. I am for a 5 million man march to the white house.mlk style. Some people might resort to some more insane style(not me). Zelikow is a war criminal because he was part of the bush crime family. 911 was an inside job. Zelikow is just coming out on corporate TV and painting a fairytale for all to see. He wants the patch some holes in his boat. The boat is the old regime of america where the rich rule everything. This immoral system is no longer vailed but, in plain sight in the light of day. It is time for the sleepers to awaken.
One word: COWARDICE. The military leaders who KNEW this was wrong, who did not stop this or resign. The so-called “leaders” in Congress. The Pentagon. The DOJ. The CIA. EVERYONE IN THE WORLD KNOWS THIS WAS WRONG. If enough people had talked to each other and stood up and resigned en masse, this would never have been allowed. I am SO ASHAMED of my country. We have lost our way, and avoiding prosecution to protect the Demoncrat’s butts (no, that was not a typo) is just WRONG. Holder – GET CRACKIN’ it’s time to pay the piper or we are DONE.
Please,guys don’t get too excited here there will be no real investigation into this case.Zelikow is simply covering his ass and condi rice’s as well.