Today’s Must Read

The gang’s all here!

Really, can you have a botched cover-up without Alberto Gonzales involved? And how can there be a torture scandal without David Addington’s great big mug?

The New York Times reports today that Gonzales and Addington were among the White House lawyers (Harriet Miers was also among them) who advised the CIA on what to do with the torture tapes. What’s not entirely clear, however, is what they advised to the CIA to do.

The story up until now had been at least somewhat simple. White House and Justice Department lawyers had been unanimous in their advice: do not destroy the tapes. But those in the camp of Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA operations chief who gave the order to destroy the tapes, have said that the White House’s advice wasn’t unequivocal (“They never told us ‘Hell, no'”). For lack of any clear directives or advice from on high, Rodriguez had them destroyed.

But now the story gets murkier:

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal.

The Times can’t hope to sort all this out, only reporting that there are “conflicting accounts.” Thankfully, Newsweek has reported that there is “an extensive paper—or e-mail—trail” of all this back and forth. So at least investigators have that going for them (of course, it depends on who’s investigating).

And to add to the murk, ass-saving, and back-biting, the Times reports that the CIA lawyers who gave Rodriguez the legal green light didn’t really mean it to be the green light. After he was given written advice by two lawyers, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger, that “he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that the destruction would violate no laws,” he went ahead. But:

Current and former officials said the two lawyers informed the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, about the legal advice they had provided. But officials said Mr. Rodriguez did not inform either Mr. Rizzo or Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, before he sent the cable to destroy the tapes.

“There was an expectation on the part of those providing legal guidance that additional bases would be touched,” said one government official with knowledge of the matter. “That didn’t happen.”

Robert S. Bennett, a lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez, insisted that his client had done nothing wrong and suggested that Mr. Rodriguez had been authorized to order the destruction of the tapes. “He had a green light to destroy them,” Mr. Bennett said.

So to sum up: after three years of apparently contradictory and equivocal advice from both the CIA and top levels of the government, Rodriguez finally destroyed the tapes after receiving legal advice that he could. But the lawyers who told him that say he should have touched “additional bases” before he did. And none of this explains why the CIA and the administration kept the tapes secret for three years, possibly criminally obstructing multiple investigations.