George Tenet Lawyers Up Over CIA Tapes Probe

Newsweek:

Attorney general Michael Mukasey's decision to launch a full-scale FBI probe into the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes has sent several alarmed agency employees scrambling to find lawyers. To lead the probe, the A.G. named John Durham, a hard-nosed veteran prosecutor who is assembling a team of deputies and FBI agents. Some CIA veterans fear the move is tantamount to unleashing an independent coun sel on Langley. "A lot of people are worried," says one former CIA official, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. "Whenever you have the bureau running around the building, it's going to turn up some heads. This could turn into a witch hunt." Justice officials say Durham was assigned to investigate the 2005 decision to destroy the tapes--not the activities recorded on them, including the use of waterboarding on Al Qaeda suspects. But at this point, Durham has no formal mandate on the probe's scope, giving him the freedom to ex pand it if he chooses. "We're going to follow this wherever it leads," says one Justice official, who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing probe.

One key figure, Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA chief of clandestine services who gave the order to destroy the videotapes, has retained Robert Bennett, a renowned defense lawyer who represented Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Another potential witness, George Tenet, who was CIA director when the tapes were made, will be represented by former FBI general counsel Howard Shapiro. Roy Krieger, a Washington lawyer who has repre sented about 100 CIA employees, says that two agency officers have approached him about representation, though neither has retained him yet.

Read the whole story: Newsweek

Comments

[americanwhocares]

11:40 AM on 01/10/2008

Don't you just love all the repug's "lawyering up". Guess this investigation should be called the "Big Pay Day for any Lawyer defending a Repug". Could not happen to a more wicked group of people. Don't you just love Justice?

[ColeenRowleyMN2]

10:28 AM on 01/07/2008

Tenet should have plenty of money to pay his new lawyer Howard Shapiro from all his speaking fees and his $4 million book deal without selling his medal from Bush. I knew Howard Shapiro when he was the FBI's General Counsel, back in the good old days when there was a difference between right and wrong. Shapiro helped Louie Freeh make it a "bright line" rule that FBI agents could not drink and drive FBI cars. Back then the FBI was firmly opposed to torture too. How things change. The conservatives who once warned that moral relativism would bring the country down now can't even tell us if torture is wrong!

Ironically Howard Shapiro also got himself kicked out of the FBI--he was the subject of an investigation by the Department of Justice's Inspector General in the 1990's for having leaked an FBI agent's draft book critical of Bill Clinton to the White House before it was published. The FBI agent who wrote the book critical of Bill Clinton was a right-wing "conservative" so things seem to have come full circle for Shapiro. Morality often takes a back seat to money and power.

[loki]

12:22 AM on 01/07/2008

Well if it does actually get serious for him, you will know when you see a medal of Freedom on Ebay.

[swift goat pet for truth]

12:10 AM on 01/07/2008

Musakey will have the FBI perform a full scale soap opera, at the end of which no one will be found responsible.

[imsosure]

10:22 PM on 01/06/2008

And eventually we'll hear the old Watergate retort of "to the best of my recollection," crap, oh Bush and his cronies, time will tell and hopefully we'll see them behind bars for their crimes against humanity.

Good movie here, free to view but oh what a price we have paid, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173

[geobushono]

09:36 PM on 01/06/2008

....but, but he's a hero and he got a trinket to throw off the scent.

[ashabot]

03:29 PM on 01/06/2008

Time to roto-rooter the sewers.

[gcallaghan]

02:53 PM on 01/06/2008

Raging legal shitstorms like this, ones that will last far beyond the end of the retarded codpiece boy's term and into the next decade, are the reason Gonzales was named Lawyer of the Year. Nobody comes close to generating the number of criminal defendants he did. Admittedly, it's not because he prosecuted them as AG, it's merely that his legal advice to them was completely full of shit.

[BuffNutts]

02:43 PM on 01/06/2008

Tenet, you ought to sell that Freedom Medal on ebay before you're swinging on the short end of the Treason Rope.

[shockmagog]

02:39 PM on 01/06/2008

As Jonathan Turley wrote on December 10, 2007:

'There are at least a dozen individuals who should be retaining private counsel in this matter. However, it is still not clear that either Republicans or Democrats truly want an independent investigation. Notably, Democrats have largely called for investigations by the Justice Department, which guarantees that the investigation would move at a glacial pace and remain under the control of the administration. It is obvious at this point that the Justice Department should not conduct an investigation that could threaten high-ranking officials, including the president himself.'
http://jonathanturley.org/2007/12/10/cia-interrogation-tapes-bad-is-hardly-the-word-call-it-criminal/

All the same, it is a criminal investigation:

'In a nutshell, the mushrooming CIA tapes imbroglio focuses on at least two potential crimes. The first, simply put, is a matter of torture. That is, did CIA interrogators operating in so-called black sites violate American law and international agreements by torturing Al Qaeda detainees through the use of waterboarding and other supposed "enhanced interrogation techniques?" The second, of course, involves the cover-up. Did personnel within the CIA and the Bush administration commit obstruction of justice or other crimes by destroying the video recordings of the interrogations?'
http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/

[biwee]

02:28 PM on 01/06/2008

This is all a scam!! Shrub is supposed to be indignent that the AG will investigate. Of course, the NeoCon AG will NEVER find anything BAD that could lead to Shrub, or a NeoCon. It will be just like the murder of Vince Foster. Just a sham, and a game.

[dryfactoidobotanoid]

01:03 PM on 01/06/2008

cops vs. spooks

[beholder]

12:02 PM on 01/06/2008

Our country will never regain its moral standing in this world if war criminals are not brought to justice.

I have to believe that the content of the torture tapes reveals far more than the use of illegal torture tactics---long denied by the Bush gang. I would be willing to bet that if they had ever been allowed to be viewed they would have revealed that information that convicted other terror suspects was itself suspect.

The CIA took a calculated risk. They had to know that the destruction of this sort of evidence would lead to a full scale investigation. This is damage control and a few lesser players will take the fall, just like Libby, for the big guys, knowing that an end of term pardon is waiting for them.