Replies to post #78441 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[sideeki]

That was a spectacular story and very appropriate to our times.

[woofer]

EDIT I loved your post, F6. There are so many good parts to Major Sherwood F. Moran's SUGGESTIONS FOR JAPANESE INTERPRETERS BASED ON WORK IN THE FIELD, but I'll just post one of my favorites here:

It may be advisable to give one illustration of how, concretely, to question, according to my point of view. Take a question such as this, "Why did you lose this battle?" (a question we asked on more than one occasion regarding some definite battle on Guadalcanal). A question presented in this bare way is a most wooden and uninteresting affair. The interpreter should be given leeway to phrase his own questions, and to elaborate them as he sees fit, as he sizes up the situation and the particular prisoner he may be interviewing. His superior officer should merely give him a statement of the information he wants. A man who is simply a word for word interpreter (in the literal sense) of a superior officer's questions, is, after all, nothing but a verbal cuspidor; the whole proceeding is a rather dreary affair for all concerned, including the prisoner. The conversation, the phrasing of the questions, should be interesting and should capture the prisoner's imagination. To come back to the question above, "Why did you lose this battle?" That was the question put to me to interpret (in the broad sense) to a prisoner who had been captured the day after one of the terrific defeats of the Japanese in the earlier days of the fighting on Guadalcanal. Here is the way I put the question: "We all know how brave the Japanese soldier is. All the world knows and has been startled at the remarkable progress of the Japanese armies in the Far East. Their fortitude, their skill, their bravery are famous all over the world. You captured the Philippines; you captured Hong Kong, you ran right through Malaya and captured the so-called impregnable Singapore; you took Java, and many other places. The success of the Imperial armies has been stupendous and remarkable. But you come to Guadalcanal and run into a stone wall, and are not only defeated but practically annihilated. Why is it?" You see that this is a really built-up question. I wish you could see the interest on the prisoner's face as I am dramatically asking such a question as that. It's like telling a story, and at the end he is interested in telling his part of it.

Brilliant.

EDIT here: I have to add this one too:

On another occasion a soldier was brought in. A considerable chunk of his shinbone had been shot away. In such bad shape was he that we broke off in the middle of the interview to have his leg redressed. We were all interested in the redressing, in his leg, it was almost a social affair! And the point to note is that we really were interested, and not pretending to be interested in order to get information out of him.

[F6]

Statement of Philip Zelikow

United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary,
Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts

May 13, 2009

Mr. Chairman, Senator Sessions, thank you for giving me the
opportunity to appear before you today. The declassification of Justice
Department legal opinions on the legality of an interrogation program
operated by the CIA has reopened an important public debate. The
debate is on how the United States should get intelligence from captives
taken in the global armed conflict against the violent Islamist extremist
organization, al Qaeda, its allies, and its affiliates, as these organizations
wage war against our country, and our people.

The Committee has my c.v. so I won’t detail my experience or
scholarship. I will concentrate in this statement on my involvement in
debates on the treatment of enemy captives in order to discuss the
effectiveness of such methods and the legal reasoning employed to
judge this and future intelligence programs.

At the outset, I will address a few frequently asked questions:

-- I have no view on whether former officials should be prosecuted.
We have institutions to make those judgments. The factual and
legal story is complicated, more complicated than is generally
recognized. We should let our institutions do their job.

-- There should be a thorough inquiry, yielding a public report, to:

- comprehend how the United States came to operate such an
unprecedented program so that we can learn from that; and

- evaluate whether the more constrained intelligence
program we have been operating against al Qaeda in Iraq
for at least four and a half years and against al Qaeda
worldwide for at least three and a half years is adequate to
protect the country. I think it is. But important people have
challenged that view. Since the issue is so important, our
current approach should be validated, or it should be
changed.

-- I have no view on whether Justice Department lawyers acted
unethically or improperly. I believed at least some of their legal
opinions on this subject were unsound, even unreasonable. But I
don’t know how they did their work. Others should judge.

In 2003, while serving as executive director of the 9/11 Commission,
some of my staff colleagues and I were concerned because the CIA was
unwilling to disclose information about the conduct of the
interrogations of key detainees and would not allow access to the
detainees or the interrogators.1 The Commission’s concerns deepened
as press reports in 2004 indicated that detainees might have been
abused. Therefore, in its July 2004 report, the Commission formally
recommended that the United States “engage its friends to develop a
common coalition approach toward the detention and humane
treatment of captured terrorists” drawing “upon Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions on the law of armed conflict,” an article “specifically
designed for those cases in which the usual laws of war did not apply.”

This article, common to all four of the Geneva Conventions on armed
conflict, was meant to provide a ‘floor’ to handle situations where usual
POW status does not apply. It prohibits “cruel treatment” under any
circumstances and bans “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular
humiliating and degrading treatment.” In its recommendation, the 9/11
Commission noted that these “minimum standards are generally
accepted throughout the world as customary international law.”

Although the Bush administration accepted most of the Commission’s
recommendations, this was one of the few it did not accept. That refusal
plainly signaled that the administration was reserving the right to inflict
treatment that might violate the so-called “CID” standard. “CID” stands
for “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” – a standard expressed, in slightly
varying terms, in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that I
just mentioned, in the Convention Against Torture, another signed and
ratified treaty obligation, and is a standard also found in a Protocol to
the Geneva Conventions that had been accepted by most countries and
by the United States during the Reagan administration. The
administration’s initial rejection of the 9/11 Commission
recommendation on this point was therefore both revealing and
troubling.

As 2004 turned to 2005, the controversy about the treatment of
captives intensified. There were the revelations of detainee abuse in
military facilities in Iraq, and reports of alleged murders. There were
reports of past abuses at the Guantanamo facility. There were growing
rumors and reports about other sites run by the CIA. I later learned
that, in 2004, the CIA Inspector General, John Helgerson, had prepared a
secret report that was plainly skeptical and worried about the Agency’s
treatment of captives. I was acquainted with Helgerson and respected
his judgment; I also later talked to CIA officials who worked on this
study. An important critique, the IG report was also another reminder
about the outstanding professionalism that can always be found in the
Agency’s ranks.

In 2005, I became Counselor of the Department of State. This should not
be confused with the duties of the State Department’s Legal Adviser.
The “Counselor” is an old office at State, a place where the Secretary
puts someone who serves as a kind of deputy on miscellaneous issues.
Among my duties, I was to be the subcabinet “deputy” for the
Department on issues of intelligence policy or counterterrorism.

By June 2005, President Bush wanted to reconsider the current
approach. He asked his advisers to develop real options for the future of
the Guantanamo facility, for the eventual disposition of detainees held
by CIA, and to look at the standards governing the treatment of enemy
captives.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in favor of change. Also
supporting change was her Legal Adviser, John Bellinger, who had held
the same job for her on the NSC staff. Bellinger was already deeply
concerned about detainee policies and carried scars from earlier
bureaucratic battles on the topic.

Subcabinet deputies began meeting regularly in highly sensitive
meetings to consider these issues. I represented the Department at
these meetings, along with Mr. Bellinger. I was thus ‘read in’ to the
details of this particular CIA program for the first time.

Why was such a program adopted? I do not yet adequately understand
how and why this happened. But four points stand out:

First, the atmosphere after 9/11. The country had suffered the most
devastating single attack in its history. Attitudes toward those behind
this mass murder were understandably merciless. The feeling of being
at war was real, at least in the White House. Almost every morning,
President Bush himself received nerve-jangling briefings just on the
latest threats. Almost every afternoon, usually at 5 p.m., George Tenet
would review the latest engagements as a de facto Combatant
Commander in a global war. Some of the threat reports were
apocalyptic, some scares have never become public. I saw many such
reports when serving on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board.

One result was that the tough, gritty world of ‘the field’ worked its way
into the consciousness of the nation’s leaders to a degree rarely seen
before, or since. A large cultural divide shadowed these judgments, a
divide between the world of secretive, bearded operators in the field
coming from their 3 a.m. meetings at safe houses, and the world of
Washington policymakers in their wood-paneled suites. As the
policymakers sense this divide, they often and naturally become more
deferential – especially in a time of seemingly endless alarms. What
policymakers can sometimes miss, though, is that the world of the field
has many countries and cultures of its own. Seasoned operators often
disagree about what the government should do, and did in this case, but
policymakers were rarely aware of these arguments.

Second, the CIA – an agency that had no significant institutional
capability to question enemy captives – improvised an unprecedented,
elaborate, systematic program of medically monitored physical torment
to break prisoners and make them talk. This program was apparently
based on the SERE program familiar to civilian and military intelligence
officials from their training. The program was reportedly reverseengineered
and then sold to policymakers as being no more than “what
we do to our own trainees.” Much about this policy development
process is still unclear, though press reports have already discussed
some of the fallacies and omissions in the reverse‐engineering
approach.

There have also been conflicting accounts about the role of “supply” and
“demand”: CIA policy entrepreneurs and officials in the White House or
in the Office of the Vice President who were pushing for better
intelligence. Nor is it clear just how the program evolved. It would be
important to grasp how the program was understood and sold at each
stage in this evolution. But the program would not have come into
being unless an executive department or agency of the government was
willing to develop it and defend it.

Third, the leaders of the CIA evidently believed, and told the
government’s leaders, that their program would be uniquely effective in
getting information from high-value captives. “Uniquely” is the key
word. After all, other kinds of interrogation programs were well known
to experts in law enforcement and the U.S. armed forces. The Director
of the CIA, the de facto combatant commander in an ongoing fight,
apparently emphasized that there were no good alternatives to
adoption of this proposal.

Fourth, Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Department of Justice,
along with the White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, assured the
government’s leaders that the proposed program was lawful. Those
assurances were renewed by Ashcroft’s successor, Mr. Gonzales, and by
Gonzales’ successor as White House Counsel, Harriet Miers.

I will discuss the legal issues in more detail in a moment. For now, I
wish to return to the issue of unique “effectiveness” and the supposed
absence of alternatives.

There is quite a bit of empirical and historical information available
about interrogation experience in this country, in its past wars, and in
the experiences of other democracies facing terrifying threats. I have
done some work on the British, French, and Israeli experiences. These
experiences and others are highly instructive. They show the damage
that these programs can do to the counterterror effort, the process of
trial and error as alternatives emerged, and the proven effectiveness of
some of these alternatives. America has had extensive experience with
interrogation of high-value detainees, especially in World War II when
special facilities were created for this purpose. The national policy then
was to treat the detainees humanely, even though thousands of lives
were potentially at stake in the midst of a brutal, total war. It is not
clear how much, if any, of this knowledge was canvassed and analyzed
when the critical arguments over adoption of this unprecedented
program were occurring in 2002 and 2003.

By the time I began engaging in these arguments, in the spring and
summer of 2005, another important source of data had emerged. This
was the American intelligence and interrogation effort against al Qaeda
in Iraq. This was an interagency effort, including CIA and FBI experts,
organized by the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. By 2005,
if not earlier, this program was complying with basic international
standards in its interrogation of captives. The program was high-tempo
and time-urgent. The officers running the interrogation program
considered it effective and, at least by mid-2005, the government’s
leaders were aware of their positive assessment.

Nonetheless, the intelligence community’s position in 2005, and later,
was that a substantial program of intense physical coercion was
uniquely necessary to protect the nation. The arguments that have
appeared recently in the press are the same arguments, even using
some of the same examples, used to defend the program against its
internal critics four years ago.

Examples of success cite plots thwarted or terrorists captured. Some of
these examples may not be accurate. Others may be exaggerated, or
they may mask murky, internal arguments among operatives and
analysts about whose source proved out, or which lead was key. Rival
claims of credit that often accompany successful cases. But getting into
a debate about whether the CIA program produced useful intelligence
misses the point.

The point is not whether the CIA program produced useful intelligence.
Of course it did. Quite a lot. The CIA had exclusive custody of a number
of the most important al Qaeda captives in the world, for years. Any
good interrogation effort would produce an important flow of
information from these captives.

Complicating the story, the CIA did not just rely on physical coercion. A
long-term interrogation program was also being employed, mustering a
number of experts using growing skill in patiently mining for more
information and assimilating it. Indeed, one of the tragedies of this
program is that the association with physical coercion detracts attention
away from some of the very high quality work the CIA did do for the
country, quality work that has continued in recent years even after this
program was substantially dismantled.

So the issue is not whether the CIA program of extreme physical
coercion produced useful intelligence; it is about its net value when
compared to the alternatives.2 And, even though the program may have
some value against some prisoners, it has serious drawbacks just in the
intelligence calculus, such as:

-- constraints in getting the optimal team of interrogators, since law
enforcement and military experts could not take part;

-- whether the program actually produces much of the timesensitive
current intelligence that is one of its unique
justifications;

-- loss of intelligence from allies who fear becoming complicit in a
program they abhor and a whole set of fresh problems with
coalition cooperation on intelligence operations;

-- poorer reliability of information obtained through torment;

-- possible loss of opportunities to turn some captives into more
effective and even cooperative informants; and

-- problems in devising an end-game for the eventual trial or longterm
disposition of the captives.

This skepticism about effectiveness links to wider concerns about how
the United States should treat captured terrorists or terrorist suspects.
By 2005, the raging controversy over “Abu Ghraib” or “Guantanamo” or
“torture” was hurting the United States position in the world more than
any other problem in our foreign policy.

As Secretary of State, Dr. Rice placed a high priority on changing the
national approach to the treatment of detainees. Therefore, once the
President indicated his readiness to hear alternatives, we first
attempted to develop a ‘big bang’ approach, a presidential initiative that
might take on the whole cluster of issues in a single announcement.

To show what such an initiative might look like and how it could be
presented, and with help from Mr. Bellinger, I worked with the deputy
secretary of defense, Gordon England, on a joint paper, a notional draft
of the building blocks of such an initiative. Deputy Secretary England
was aided by DOD’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for detainee affairs, Matt
Waxman, and other staff. Our (unclassified) joint paper outlining the
elements of a presidential initiative was distributed in June 2005. (As
an aid to the committee a copy of it is attached at Annex A.3)

However the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, indicated that this
paper did not represent his Department’s views. He designated a
different official as his deputy for these issues. The NSC staff then felt it
was more appropriate for the interagency process to address the
specific issues incrementally, rather than take up discussion of this
broad paper.

At State we then focused much of our effort on recommending a
different legal framework for evaluating the treatment of enemy
captives. We felt it was very important to focus on the “CID” -- cruel,
inhuman, and degrading -- standard.

The administration had always conceded the applicability of the federal
anti-torture statute and had repeatedly held that the CIA program did
not violate it. The Justice Department’s view was authoritative for the
executive branch and was immovable. The anti-torture language, as
interpreted by Justice, also turned on medical assessments by CIA
doctors, assessments we could not challenge. Taking these facts into
account, plus the fact that “CID” was actually a stronger standard
codified in three relevant treaties, we concentrated our advocacy on
adoption of the “CID” guideline.

The “CID” standard was critical for two other reasons.

-- It was the standard that had been proposed by Senator John
McCain and his allies, including Senator Lindsey Graham, in the
“McCain Amendment.”

-- The “CID” standard, as codified in Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions, is also the relevant standard in the federal war
crimes law (18 U.S.C. section 2441) which then stated (it was later
amended) that any conduct constituting a violation of Article 3
was a war crime, a felony punishable by up to life imprisonment.

The administration position on all these “CID” arguments had been this:
We do not have to measure our conduct against this standard because
none of these treaties apply. If the standard did apply, the CIA program
did not violate it. The outer defenses, a series of technical, jurisdictional
arguments, had received the most attention. Samples can be seen in the
OLC opinion of May 30, 2005.

Also, OLC’s view was that Geneva Common Article 3 did not apply
because it was meant for civil conflict, not an international war (Article
3 was written that way because its drafters thought international wars
would be covered by fuller Geneva protections; they thought civil war
was the loophole they were closing with the minimum standard of
Article 3.) And, although the federal war crimes statute’s reference to
“conduct constituting” could be construed as stating a substantive
compliance standard, the OLC did not share that view.

In 2005 State worked to persuade the rest of the government to join in
developing an option that would abandon these technical defenses and
accept the “CID” standard. An illustration of these arguments, as made
at the time, is in an unclassified paper prepared with Mr. Bellinger’s
help and circulated in July 2005. It is attached at Annex B.

Both deputies and principals battled over these topics on into the fall of
2005, including the issue of how the administration should deal with
Senator McCain’s proposed amendment. New press reports, by Dana
Priest in the Washington Post, fueled further controversy – especially in
Europe.

By the end of 2005 these debates in both the executive and legislative
branches did lead to real change. On December 5, as Secretary Rice left
on a European trip, she formally announced on behalf of the President
that the “CID” standard would govern U.S. conduct by any agency,
anywhere in the world.4 On December 30 the McCain amendment (to a
defense appropriations bill) was signed into law as well, as the Detainee
Treatment Act of 2005.

Thus by early 2006 there was no way for the administration to avoid the
need to reevaluate the CIA program against a “CID” standard. The work
of the NSC deputies intensified, working to develop a comprehensive set
of proposals for presidential decision about the future of the CIA
program and the future of Guantanamo.

The OLC had guarded against the contingency of a substantive “CID”
review in its May 30, 2005 opinion. OLC had held that, even if the
standard did apply, the full CIA program -- including waterboarding --
complied with it. This OLC view also meant, in effect, that the McCain
amendment was a nullity; it would not prohibit the very program and
procedures Senator McCain and his supporters thought they had
targeted.

So, with the battle to apply the standard having been won, State then
had to fight another battle over how to define its meaning. That meant
coming to grips with OLC’s substantive analysis.

OLC contended that these subjective terms -- like “cruel” or “humane” --
should be interpreted in light of the well developed and analogous
restrictions found in American constitutional law, specifically through
the interaction of the 5th, 8th, and 14th amendments to the U.S.
Constitution. As OLC observed in its May 30 opinion, the Congress had
conditioned its ratification of one of the “CID”-type standards, the one
found in the Convention Against Torture, on its being interpreted in just
this way.

Therefore, to challenge OLC’s interpretation, it was necessary to
challenge the Justice Department’s interpretation of U.S. constitutional
law. This was not easy, since OLC is the authoritative interpreter of
such law for the executive branch of the government. Many years
earlier I had worked in this area of American constitutional law. The
OLC interpretation of U.S. constitutional law in this area seemed
strained and indefensible. It relied on a “shocks the conscience”
standard in judging interrogations but did not seem to present a fair
reading of the caselaw under that standard. The OLC analysis also
neglected another important line of caselaw, on conditions of
confinement.

While OLC’s interpretations of other areas of law were well known to be
controversial, I did not believe my colleagues had heard arguments
challenging the way OLC had analyzed these constitutional rights. With
the issue of “CID” definition now raised so squarely, and so important to
the options being developed for the President, it seemed necessary to
put that legal challenge in front of my government colleagues, citing
relevant caselaw.

Further, the OLC position had implications beyond the interpretation of
international treaties. If the CIA program passed muster under an
American constitutional compliance analysis, then -- at least in principle
-- a program of this kind would pass American constitutional muster
even if employed anywhere in the United States, on American citizens.
Reflect on that for a moment.

I distributed my memo analyzing these legal issues to other deputies at
one of our meetings, probably in February 2006. I later heard the memo
was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of
my memo should be collected and destroyed. That particular request,
passed along informally, did not seem proper and I ignored it. This
particular legal memo has evidently been located in State’s files. It is
currently being reviewed for possible declassification.

The broader arguments over the future of the CIA program went on for
months, even though the old program had effectively been discontinued.
There were continuing issues over whether or how to maintain a
different kind of CIA program. Both principals and deputies examined
proposals to bring the high-value detainees out of the ‘black sites’ and to
Guantanamo where they could be brought to justice (and would give
accounts of their treatment to lawyers and the Red Cross); seek
legislation that would close Guantanamo; accept fully the application of
Common Article 3; and find some way of maintaining a standby CIA
program that would comply with legal standards. A new OLC opinion
was also being developed in the spring of 2006 to deal with the different
circumstances, including the McCain amendment. We at State were
concerned about this development, unless OLC had reconsidered how to
interpret the “CID” standard.

We nonetheless believed these issues were moving in an encouraging
direction, though the administration certainly remained divided.
Options for action on all the major issues had been developed for
possible presidential decision and had already been discussed
repeatedly by the principal officers of the government.

Then, on June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
That decision held that Geneva Common Article 3 applied to the U.S.
government’s treatment of these captives as a matter of law.
Immediately, the potential exposure to criminal liability in the federal
war crimes act became real.

Internal debate continued into July, culminating in several decisions by
President Bush. Accepting positions that Secretary Rice had urged again
and again, the President set the goal of closing the Guantanamo facility,
decided to bring all the high-value detainees out of the ‘black sites’ and
move them toward trial, sought legislation from the Congress that
would address these developments (which became the Military
Commissions Act) and defended the need for some continuing CIA
program that would comply with relevant law. President Bush
announced these decisions on September 6.

I left the government at the end of 2006 and returned to the University
of Virginia. Both Secretary Rice and Mr. Bellinger remained deeply
involved in these issues for the following two years, working for
constructive change. Mr. Bellinger, in particular, also deserves credit for
exhausting, patient diplomacy to carry forward the idea of working with
our key allies to build common, coalition approaches on these tough
problems. He has conducted several international conferences that
have successfully advanced this effort.

The U.S. government adopted an unprecedented program of coolly
calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment to extract
information. This was a mistake, perhaps a disastrous one. It was a
collective failure, in which a number of officials and members of
Congress (and staffers), of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA
program of physical coercion even after the McCain amendment was
passed and after the Hamdan decision. Precisely because this was a
collective failure it is all the more important to comprehend it, and learn
from it.

For several years our government has been fighting terrorism without
using these extreme methods. We face some serious obstacles in
defeating al Qaeda and its allies. We could be hit again, hit hard. But
our decision to respect basic international standards does not appear to
be a big hindrance us in the fight. In fact, if the U.S. regains some higher
ground in the wider struggle of ideas, our prospects in a long conflict
will be better.

Others may disagree. They may believe that recent history, even since
2005, shows that America needs an elaborate program of indefinite
secret detention and physical coercion in order to protect the nation.
The government, and the country, needs to decide whether they are
right. If they are right, our laws must change and our country must
change. I think they are wrong.

---

Attachments:

Annex A: ”Elements of Possible Initiative” (June 2005)

Annex B: “Detainees - The Need for a Stronger Legal Framework” (July
2005)

Annex C: Zelikow c.v.

---

Footnotes:

1 After the 2007 disclosure that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of interrogations,
the Commission’s efforts to learn more about the circumstances surrounding
interrogations were summarized in a report that I prepared with our former deputy
general counsel, Steve Dunne. That unclassified report has been made public. A
federal special prosecutor, John Durham, is currently investigating the destruction
of the videotapes.

2 While in government, I joined in encouraging the Intelligence Science Board, a
federal advisory group, and its chairman, Robert Fein, to pursue a professional
examination of the empirical data, science, and pseudo-science surrounding the
topic of interrogation. The Board ultimately produced a valuable report with papers
from a variety of experts.

A representative conclusion, from a veteran interrogator and former director
of the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course, was that “the scientific community
has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of
obtaining reliable intelligence information.” The author added that, “Claims from
some members of the operational community as to the alleged effectiveness of
coercive methods in educing meaningful information from resistant sources are, at
best, anecdotal in nature and would be, in the author’s view, unlikely to withstand
the rigors of sound scientific inquiry.” Col. Steven Kleinman, “KUBARK Counter-
Intelligence Interrogation Review: Observations of an Interrogator - Lessons
Learned and Avenues for Further Research,” in Intelligence Science Board, Educing
Information – Interrogation: Science and Art – Foundations for the Future
(Washington, D.C.: National Defense Intelligence College Press, December 2006), p.
130 and note 91.

3 A copy was provided to the press more than a year later, apparently by a Defense
Department source. See Tim Golden, “Detainee Memo Created Divide in White
House,” New York Times, October 1, 2006. The paper was thereafter made available
to other reporters.

4 Perhaps coincidentally, CIA officials destroyed existing videotapes of its coercive
interrogations in this same time period, in November 2005.

---

http://judiciary.senate.gov/pdf/09-05-13ZelikowTestimony.pdf (via http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=3842&wit_id=7907 ) (emphasis in original)


----------


and just to note - (emphasis in original) in the post to which this post is a reply -- forgot to note that there

[chunga1]

A man who is simply a word for word interpreter (in the literal sense) of a superior officer's questions, is, after all, nothing but a verbal cuspidor

sweet...