The Legal Principles Document and OLC’s Leaky SCIF

The Legal Principles Document and OLC’s Leaky SCIF
By emptywheel | FireDogLake

I’m sure I’ll find several more copies of this in CIA Vaughn Indices, but what we’ve got are two versions that were held at CIA’s OIG, which have been withheld (one with the anticipation of legal proceedings). Then we’ve got four copies that were at OLC, just one of which (the one including hand-written notations from someone at the CIA) we don’t get.

Sorry to get so deep in the weeds on the missing OLC documents, but I wanted to show why this matters, using the example of the Legal Principles (AKA the Bullet Points) documents. As I’ll show below, one of the most sensitive documents involved in the controversy between CIA and OLC on the Legal Principles is one of the documents over which there are discrepancies between the Vaughn Indices and the actual document.

I explained the Legal Principles document in detail in this post, but here’s the short version. When CIA started the Inspector General investigation, it had a meeting with DOJ people including Michael Chertoff and then a phone conversation with John Yoo. Both times, DOJ told CIA that it (DOJ) would hold off on any criminal investigations or prosecutions until CIA’s IG first collected information and then presented that along with the legal guidelines CIA had been working under. DOJ basically told CIA, “You tell us if you broke the law.” So CIA got together with John Yoo (though he denies being involved) and Jennifer Koester, who were both apparently free-lancing with no official OLC involvement, and developed a document–alternately called the Legal Principles or the Bullet Points document. The document interpreted the law and previously OLC opinions as the CIA would like them to be to make sure as much of the torture as possible was “legal.” Read more.