Congress Seeks Justice Department Documents On Torture

The New York Times reports:

The Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees asked the Justice Department today to turn over secret legal opinions issued in 2005 that authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terrorism suspects after the Department publicly repudiated torture as “abhorrent” in a 2004 opinion.

The 2005 legal opinions, disclosed for the first time by The New York Times, remain in effect, according to officials familiar with the Bush administration’s policy on interrogation. One provided legal justification for the use of a battery of aggressive tactics and a second said the techniques did not amount to “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” practices under international agreements.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it appeared that the Justice Department lawyers had “reversed themselves and reinstated a secret regime, in essence reinterpreting the law in secret.” He said his committee had been seeking information about the Justice Department’s legal interpretations of the law for two years without success and urged the administration to cooperate.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, who heads the House Judiciary Committee, requested that the Justice Department’s opinions be turned over to the House panel as well and asked the department to make available for a hearing Steven G. Bradbury, of the department’s office of legal counsel, who signed the 2005 opinions.

Mr. Leahy also said his committee would hold confirmation hearings on the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey to be attorney general on Oct. 17.

Officials at the White House and the Justice Department said the 2005 legal memorandum did not change the administration’s statement in 2004 that publicly renounced torture as “abhorrent.”

“The policy of the United States is not to torture,” said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary. “The president has not authorized it, he will not authorize it.”

“But he had done everything within the corners of the law to make sure that we prevent another attack on this country,” she said at a news briefing today.

“I am not going to comment on any specific alleged techniques,” Ms. Perino said. “It is not appropriate for me to do so. And to do so would provide the enemy with more information for how to train against these techniques.”

Asked whether the disclosure of the 2005 memorandum could harm national security, Ms. Perino said. “You know, it’s secret for a reason. It’s not secret just because we want it to be a secret. It’s secret because it is classified, and classified for the reasons to protect the country from terrorists who are determined to attack us.”

The Justice Department’s spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said in a statement that he could not comment on classified legal advice, but he reiterated that any opinions by the department were consistent with the public 2004 memorandum on interrogations. He said the Bush administration’s “strong opposition to torture” had been consistent.

He expressed the department’s support for Mr. Bradbury, whose nomination to be permanent head of legal counsel’s office has been blocked by Senate Democrats. Mr. Roehrkasse said Mr. Bradbury “has worked diligently to ensure that the authority of the office is employed in a careful and prudent manner.”

In the areas of domestic surveillance and detainee issues, Mr. Roehrkasse said Mr. Bradbury’s “efforts have strengthened cooperation among the branches in these key national security areas.”

A New Old Faberge Egg

The Associated Press reports:

A previously unrecorded Faberge egg valued at up to $18 million is going up for sale next month, Christie's auction house said Thursday.

The pink enamel-and-gold egg is one of only a dozen designed to the highest standards for clients other than Russia's ruling family. It has been in the Rothschild banking family since 1902, when it was given as an engagement present.

The egg contains a diamond-set cockerel which pops up every hour and flaps its wings, nods its head and opens and closes its beak.

It will go on sale Nov. 28 at Christie's in London, where it is expected to fetch $12 million to $18 million. If it reaches the top price, it will break the existing record for a Russian artwork, the US$9.6 million paid for a Faberge egg in New York in April 2002.

"The discovery of this masterpiece is the most exciting of my 40-year career," said Anthony Philips, International Director of Silver and Russian Works of Art at Christie's. "Although few examples exist, The Faberge egg is known around the world as one of the most impressive and exclusive works of art ever made."

Craftsmen Peter Carl Faberge created more than 50 of the eggs for Russia's imperial family, though not all survive. Czar Alexander III commissioned the first as an anniversary present for his wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna, on Easter Day 1885. The Empress was so enamored of the enameled egg, with a golden yoke, golden hen, miniature diamond crown and ruby egg inside, that the czar ordered that a unique egg be made for her every Easter Day after.

After the Czar died unexpectedly in 1894, his son Nicholas continued the tradition until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Nicholas and his family were executed on July 17, 1918.

After the revolution, the communist government sold off many of Faberge's creations, which found their way into Western collections.

The Rothschild egg was presented as an engagement gift to Edouard de Rothschild and Germaine Halphen, who married in 1905, by Edouard's sister Beatrice Ephrussi.

U.S.D.A. Took 18 Days to Recall Meat

The Chicago Tribune reports:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture waited 18 days after learning that millions of pounds of ground beef made by Topps Meat Co. could be contaminated with E. coli bacteria before it concluded that a recall was necessary, an e-mail from an agency inspection official shows.

The Topps hamburger recall, which is now the third largest hamburger recall in USDA history, was first announced Sept. 25. The Elizabeth, N.J., company initially recalled 331,000 pounds of hamburger, but on Saturday expanded the recall to include 21.7 million pounds of frozen hamburger.

The timing of the Topps recall and its rapid expansion are bound to raise more questions about the nation's food safety system. So far, 28 people in eight states -- most in the Northeast -- have fallen ill from eating the hamburger, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Yet at the USDA, tests confirmed the presence of the E. coli bacteria strain O157:H7 in the Topps hamburgers on Sept. 7, according to an e-mail from Kis Robertson, an employee of the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service.

Robertson, who declined comment, sent the e-mail to Scott Schlesinger, an attorney for Samantha Safranek, a Florida teenager who fell ill in August after eating a Topps hamburger.

Robertson's e-mail states: "The patties taken from the Safraneks were confirmed positive for E. coli O157:H7 by FSIS on 9/07/07. The leftover product samples are still at Eastern Laboratory in Athens, GA. The decision to release these has to come from Agency leadership and I don't know what has been decided."

Safranek and her parents, Anna and David, sued Wal-Mart Stores Inc., where they bought the 3-pound box of frozen Topps hamburger patties. In Newark, N.J., a lawyer representing four people who said they ate the Topps meat filed a class-action lawsuit on Wednesday seeking unspecified monetary compensation for anyone who bought or was sickened by the Topps hamburgers and sold by Wal-Mart, Pathmark Stores Inc., ShopRite and Rastelli Fine Foods.

The USDA also announced its recall only as New York state published its own Sept. 25 consumer alert regarding possible E. coli contamination in Topps hamburger. Claudia Hutton, a spokeswoman for the New York Department of Health, said that state investigators confirmed the E. coli in Topps beef on Sept. 24 during tests in its Wadsworth Center Laboratories.

New York state actually issued its Sept. 25 consumer alert before the Topps recall was announced by the company and the USDA, according to Jessica Chittenden, a New York Department of Agriculture and Markets spokewoman. Chittenden said once state tests confirm a single case of food contamination, her department is required to immediately notify the public. It has now found eight instances of contamination in New York.

"We do not have the authority to recall product," Chittenden said, "but we do have the authority to quarantine, seize and embargo a product."

Of those who have fallen ill, the CDC reports that "the first reported illness began on July 5, 2007, and the last began on September 11, 2007. Among fifteen ill persons for whom hospitalization status is known, ten (67%) patients were hospitalized."

The states affected by the E. coli outbreak, according to the CDC, are Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Despite CDC evidence of an E. coli outbreak as early as July, USDA officials said they could not definitively link the illnesses to any one food early on.

The Florida case, however, appeared to do that on Sept. 7.

Yet one top USDA official said that the agency needed more evidence before considering a recall.

'Many steps along they way'

"We gather information from various sources, including our public health partners in the states," said David Goldman, assistant administrator of the Office of Public Health at the USDA's inspection service. "Once we have enough information that we have a basis for taking action, then we convene a group of people here in the agency to consider taking that action -- in this case, take it to the company and request a recall.

"There are many steps along the way to get to that point."

Goldman said that one of those steps is an important test to confirm that the strain of E. coli found in a piece of meat is the same strain that caused a human illness. The test is known as pulsed field gel electrophoresis, and it wasn't initially performed in the Topps meat investigation, he said.

But a Sept. 14 Broward County, Fla., Health Department report states that such a test was performed. The report notes: "Based on the information regarding the indistinguishable PFGE pattern of the clinical and food isolates as well as the information reported in the case investigation, it appears that the Topps Frozen Ground Beef Patties is the most likely source of illness."


The report's text also notes that the Broward report was sent to the USDA.

Amanda Eamich, a USDA spokeswoman, said that the USDA's recall committee first met on Sept. 25 to consider the Topps case, 18 days after E. coli was confirmed in a Topps hamburger, according to Robertson's e-mail, which was provided to the Tribune.

The committee, comprised of department officials, concluded then that it should request a Class I recall of the Topps meat, she said.




Class I is the USDA's most serious. It means that there is "a reasonable probability that eating the food will cause health problems or death."

Company learned in August

Topps first learned from a consumer of an illness that was possibly caused by its meat on Aug. 30, according to Michele Williams, a company spokeswoman. She said the company provided the USDA with meat samples from the same production date and also meat obtained from the customer's freezer.

"We've been cooperating fully with the USDA to make sure we've been doing everything to ensure the safety of our customers," Williams said.

The USDA and Food and Drug Administration have been harshly criticized recently in Congress and by safety groups for their slow responses to food-borne illnesses and recalls.

Neither agency has the legal authority to force makers to recall food, but they can recommend a recall. The USDA has the authority to remove items from store shelves if a company refuses to conduct a recall that the agency deems necessary.

Several members of Congress have offered legislation that would give the USDA and FDA the legal authority to order recalls. One of them, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), introduced a bill on Monday to bolster the USDA's recall ability, saying that, "When something does go wrong, USDA needs to be able to act and act quickly. Neither consumers nor producers are helped by foot-dragging."

The USDA notes in its recall announcements that Topps acted voluntarily. The initial Sept. 25 recall was expanded, however, after USDA inspectors visited the Topps production facility in New Jersey and discovered safety violations.

USDA's Eamich said the agency won't disclose those violations, but it suspended Topps raw ground beef operations because of them.

The safety violations were discovered even though the USDA has previously maintained a meat safety inspector within the Topps plant.

The Florida case began to unfold Aug. 17, when Samantha Safranek made a hamburger for herself and two friends on the family's George Foreman grill, according to the report from the Broward County Department of Public Health.

"According to the patient's mother, the patty consumed by the patient was still pink in the middle upon consumption," the Broward report states. Thoroughly cooking meats kills E. coli bacteria.

While Samantha's friends did not fall ill, she did. Within three days, she was experiencing stomach cramps. When she suffered from bloody diarrhea and urine, she was hospitalized.

Doctors quickly confirmed that Samantha was suffering from E. coli, said Schlesigner, her attorney. She contracted a form of kidney failure known as hemolytic uremic syndrome. Samantha Safranek eventually went through six kidney dialysis sessions before recovering, Schlesinger said.

E. coli poisoning, according to the USDA, is especially hard on children and the elderly and can cause severe kidney damage.

The Sept. 14 Broward County report notes that samples of the meat were taken from the girl's home in Pembroke Pines, near Ft. Lauderdale, for testing by the USDA. They proved positive for E. coli, it states.

The USDA notices explaining the Topps recall, however, do not mention the Florida case. Instead, they state that the recall occurred because of three cases in New York.

Kurds Reach New Oil Deals, Straining Ties With Baghdad

The NY Times:

The Kurdish regional government has reached four new oil-exploration deals, further straining relations with many Iraqi leaders in Baghdad, who want to maintain a more centralized control over the country’s enormous oil reserves.

The new deals are the latest in an effort by the Kurds to build their own oil industry while national oil legislation languishes in Parliament. A similar agreement reached last month with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas was criticized as illegal by the Iraqi oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani.

Kurdish officials, who have said they want to bring about a major increase in oil production, say the deals are consistent with the Iraqi Constitution.

But many in Parliament object to the Kurdish interpretation, and it is unclear how the Kurds’ own regional oil law, passed in August, will conform with whatever might ultimately be approved by the central government.

Many Sunni Arab leaders object to the production-sharing agreements being negotiated by the Kurds, which call for companies to invest large sums for finding and producing oil and to be awarded a portion of the profits generated by the new fields.

Any federal oil law would have to take account of Kurdish and Shiite concerns that provincial governments be given substantial autonomy to carry out their own development plans and of the desire of Sunni Arabs for strong central control to assure that they receive a fair share of the revenues, even though there is little oil in their provinces.

So far, these problems have proved insurmountable, and the oil law, one of President Bush’s benchmarks of progress in Iraq, has stalled.

The Kurds’ new contracts were signed with Heritage Oil Corp., a publicly traded Canadian concern, and Perenco S.A., a privately held French company. Two other deals with “experienced international companies” are to be announced soon. The total initial amount invested is expected to be $500 million, the regional government said.

If the exploration leads to oil production, Kurdish officials said that in rough terms the deals call for the companies to recover their costs and split profits, with 15 percent going to the companies and 85 percent to the government. A Kurdish official said it would take three to five years before any production could start.

In Baghdad, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry denounced the new oil-exploration contracts and warned companies not to sign deals without the blessing of the national government.

“Any contracts signed before the approval of the oil law will be ignored or considered illegal,” said the spokesman, Assim Jihad.

A senior State Department official in Baghdad has also criticized the oil contracts as having “needlessly elevated tensions” between the Kurds and Baghdad.

A Kurdish official defended the deals, saying that the revenue would be shared with all Iraqi regions and that delays in signing exploration pacts only postponed the delivery of much needed cash to the treasury. “We can start now to look for exploration, and by the time we need the money the cash flow will be coming into the country,” the official said.

A Western executive involved in negotiations with the Kurds said the regional government seemed to be trying to “create a fait accompli” by signing so many deals with foreign companies that the central government eventually had to accept the provisions sought by the Kurds in any final version of the oil law.

An official at another oil company said the burst of deals reflected the Kurds’ concerns that their oil development was delayed during the time of Saddam Hussein and that they lagged in production compared with Shiite-dominated southern Iraq.

“I just think they know instinctively that they are behind the curve, and they have to move or they will never get their resources out of the ground,” said this official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “The Kurds might be playing catch-up in the petroleum business, but they are doing a good job.”

Phone-Jamming Scandal May Finally Be Solved

At the Huffington Post, Thomas B. Edsall writes:

One of the long-standing mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether the White House and Justice Department were involved in a 2002 New Hampshire voter suppression scandal that produced three criminal convictions but never touched the administration.

Now, with Democrats back in control of Congress, this mystery may finally get cleared up. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and subcommittee chairs, plan to investigate the controversial role of the Justice Department in the case.

There are two key issues questions involving Justice:

First, whether top officials there blocked a New Hampshire prosecutor from pursuing leads involving the White House and both the Republican National and Senatorial Committees.

Second, whether the Department purposely delayed prosecution of the one defendant with ties to the RNC and NRSC until after the 2004 election. The Department did attempt on October 15, 2004, just over two weeks before the election, to block depositions of key witnesses in a civil suit brought by the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

The vote suppression/phone jamming operation was dreamed up in 2002 by Charles McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, who obtained phone numbers of Democratic support groups offering Election Day rides to the polls, according to McGee's court testimony.

McGee then hired an Idaho telemarketing company to flood those numbers with phony calls, blocking all legitimate requests for help getting rides to the polls.

Initially, McGee's plan worked perfectly. For two hours, the Idaho firm tied up Democratic Party and pro-Democratic union phone lines, preventing seniors and others needing a lift to their voting places from being able to request rides.

"The phones were starting to ring, and as I would pick up one phone, it automatically bumped over to another line," testified Manchester firefighter Jeffery S. Duval, who was working the phones at his union's headquarters. "There was nobody on any of the phones. The phone lines were dead once we went to pick them up... We gave the police department a call."

Realizing there could be criminal implications, Republican leaders quickly ordered the telemarketing company to stop the jamming, according to court testimony. The FBI and the Justice Department were then called in because the allegations involved violations of federal telecommunications law.

The effort helped John E. Sununu (R) beat Jeanne Shaheen (D) in a tight Senate race by 51 to 47 percent, a 19,151-vote margin.

In addition to the questions about the role of the Justice Department, there were strong indications of involvement on the part of the White House and other D.C.-based pro-Republican groups:

* Over the course of 4 hours on Election Day, just as New Hampshire police began investigating the scheme to jam the phones, James Tobin, Northeast Regional Director for the Republican National and Senatorial Committees, made 22 phone calls to the White House political office, according to court records.

* Later, when Tobin was tried, the Republican National Committee paid $2.8 million to cover his legal fees. Tobin was found guilty, but an appeals court threw out the verdict on the grounds that the judge's orders to the jury were inadequate, and ordered a new trial. No date has been set.

* Another defendant in the case testified that when the phone-jamming operation was brought to a halt, an American Gas Association lobbyist, Darrell Henry, said he would get the Chamber of Commerce to take over the effort to disrupt the Democratic get out the vote undertaking. When Henry was deposed, he refused to answer questions, asserting his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.

Danny Diaz, a RNC spokesman, contends a congressional inquiry into the New Hampshire case is unjustified: "The questions regarding the New Hampshire issue have been answered time and again. Additional activity on this front is solely for political purposes and is a questionable usage of taxpayer dollars."

In a letter to Acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler, Conyers and the subcommittee chairs, Robert C. Scott (D-VA), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and Linda Sánchez (D-CA), detailed the Tobin-White House calls, the payment by the RNC of Tobin's legal fees, and then stated:

"Despite this compelling evidence of Washington involvement in the election day jamming of Democratic phone lines, however, the FBI Special Agent working this matter allegedly was instructed not to follow investigative leads back to Washington.

"In addition, the attorney for one of the phone jamming defendants has stated that he was told by a federal prosecutor that 'all decisions in this case had to be made subject to the approval of the Attorney General himself, who had to sign off on all actions in this case,' an unusual state of affairs for a criminal prosecution."

The prime mover behind the congressional inquiry is freshman Representative Paul Hodes (D-NH) who has been pressing both the House and Senate to take action.

Secret Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

The NY Times reports:

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 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.

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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 department’s 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 office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s 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 terrorism 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 C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s 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 C.I.A. 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 office’s 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 president’s policies.”

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A.’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 C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. 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 president’s 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A.’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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 general’s 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 left the Justice Department soon afterward. He first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, and 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 C.I.A. — 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 president’s 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. Goldsmith’s 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. Goldsmith’s 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. You’re 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 president’s lawyer.

Mr. Bradbury appeared to be “fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. 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. “You’re 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 I’ve 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. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. 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 N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. 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 N.S.A.’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 N.S.A. 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 C.I.A.’s methods.

The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.’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 administration’s request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.D. 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 C.I.A.’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 C.I.A. techniques.

Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration’s defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. 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 Counsel’s 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.

U.S. Plans Biggest Terror Drill Ever

Global Research reports:

The nation is preparing for its biggest terrorism exercise ever next week when three fictional "dirty bombs" go off and cripple transportation arteries in two major U.S. cities and Guam, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.

Yet even as this drill begins, details from the previous national exercise held in 2005 have yet to be publicly released - information that's supposed to help officials prepare for the next real attack.

House lawmakers were expected to demand answers Wednesday, including why the "after-action" report from 2005 hasn't been made public. Congress has required the exercise since 2000, but has done little in the way of oversight beyond attending the actual events.

Next week will be the fourth Top Officials exercise - dubbed TOPOFF. The program costs about $25 million a year and involves the federal government's highest officials, such as top people from the Defense and Homeland Security departments.

"The challenge with TOPOFF is not the exercise itself. It's to move as quickly as possible to remedy what perceives to be the problems that are uncovered," former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in an interview with AP this week.

Ridge, who launched his own security consulting company on Monday, said he's a big fan of the TOPOFF exercises. But he said "it's not acceptable" that the review from the 2005 exercise is still not released publicly.

The House Homeland Security emergency communications, preparedness and response subcommittee was holding a hearing Wednesday on the terrorism exercise program.

This year's TOPOFF will build on lessons learned from previous exercises, according to the Homeland Security Department, which runs the program. The agency said the Oct. 15-19 exercise would be "the largest and most comprehensive" to date.

According to an internal department briefing of next week's exercise obtained by AP, a dirty bomb will go off at a Cabras power plant in Guam; another dirty bomb will explode on the Steel Bridge in Portland, Ore., impacting major transportation systems, and a third dirty bomb will explode at the intersection of busy routes 101 and 202 near Phoenix.

Local hospitals and law enforcement agencies will be involved in the "attacks" by the dirty bombs, which are conventional explosives that include some radioactive material that would cause contamination over a limited area but not create actual nuclear explosions.

"Lessons learned from the exercise will provide valuable insights to guide future planning for securing the nation against terrorist attacks, disasters and other emergencies," according to the department's Web site.

The after action report from TOPOFF 3, which deals with issues that came up in the 2005 exercise, is supposed to identify areas for improvement. That report is still going through internal reviews.

According to a brief summary of the 2005 exercise - marked For Official Use Only, but obtained by AP - problems arose when officials realized the federal government's law for providing assistance does not cover biological incidents.

The exercise involved a mustard gas attack from an improvised explosive device in Connecticut and the release of the pneumonic plague in New Jersey. This caused certain federal disaster programs to be unavailable to some residents suffering from the attack, according to the summary.

A 2005 Homeland Security inspector general report suggested the department start tracking the lessons learned from these exercises.

And a 2006 White House report on Hurricane Katrina criticized the department for not having a system to address and fix the problems discovered in the TOPOFF exercises.

"The most recent Top Officials (TOPOFF) exercise in April 2005 revealed the federal government's lack of progress in addressing a number of preparedness deficiencies, many of which had been identified in previous exercises," according to the White House.

Previously, a more detailed version of lessons-learned from TOPOFF 2, held in 2003 was not released to states for security reasons.