John Yoo told Justice Department ethics investigators he forgot he had approved waterboarding as a CIA interrogation technique.

Yoo was the principal author of the legal memo that authorized waterboarding and other coercive techniques, such as cramped confinement. In an interview with Justice Department lawyers investigating him for possible professional misconduct, Yoo revealed that he “had actually thought that we prohibited waterboarding,” according to the report by the Office of Professional Responsibility released on Friday. (OPR Final Report, PDF pgs. 59-60)

Yoo, now a law professor, was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel when the memo was issued to the CIA in August 2002. A month before, Yoo had given the CIA license to use six other techniques — attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement and wall standing — on Abu Zubaydah.

He told investigators that those techniques ”did not even come close to the [legal] standard [of torture],” but that “waterboarding did.” (Another technique, which is blacked out in the OPR report, also gave the Justice Department pause. In an earlier version of the OPR report, Yoo is said to have told the CIA that the department would need more time to discern whether “mock burial” violated the torture statute. The tactic was not approved; Yoo told investigators he had concluded that it was illegal before he asked for more time. First Draft Report, PDF pg. 178)

Waterboarding was apparently close enough to the line that Yoo’s memory was murky. “I didn’t recollect that we had actually said that you could do it,” he told OPR investigators.

The difference between the clinical description of waterboarding and the press description of the method appears to have been a source of confusion.

“[T]he waterboarding as it’s described in the memo is very different than the waterboarding that was described in the press. And so when I read the description of what waterboarding is, I was like, oh, well obviously that would be prohibited by the statute,” Yoo said.

In other words, waterboarding sounds much worse in plain English.

Alberto Gonzales (DOJ)

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday said he supports U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to probe possible CIA interrogation abuses, Reuters reported.

Gonzales’ comments came during an interview with The Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio show. He said the Bush administration ”worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists,” and “if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror. ”

“I’ve talked to friends of mine in the CIA, and there is a great deal of concern,” Gonzales said, adding, “People are scared about taking actions that might be legal but in any way controversial. They’re just not going to do it.” Read The Times’ article here.

Eric Holder (DOJ)

He added the possible offenses should be investigated despite the potential “chilling effect” the probe could have on future CIA interrogation sessions, Reuters reported. Gonzales said he believes Holder is only concerned about investigating officials who went beyond approved techniques.

Holder has come under fire from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservatives for re-opening an investigation that has been closed by the Bush administration. Some liberals, meantime, have also complained that Holder’s focus on CIA interrogators doesn’t hold accountable the Bush administration  officials who authorized brutal techniques such as waterboarding, which Holder and Obama have both called torture.

Cheney on Sunday said President Obama should be calling the shots on the interrogation matter and not leave the decision to a “political appointee” such as Holder. Click here to read our previous report.

But Gonzales, who resigned amid criticism he wasn’t independent enough of the Bush White House, endorsed Holder’s authority.  ”As chief prosecutor of the United States, he should make the decision on his own, based on the facts, then inform the White House,”  Gonzales said, according to Reuters. Gonzeles didn’t head the DOJ at the time the interrogation methods were authorized and the original CIA probe closed, but he was privvy to information about the methods as White House counsel.

Gonzales also said Holder appears concerned with the “one percent of actors” who went beyond Department of Justice guidelines, The Times reported. He added that the other 99 percent “are heroes and should be treated like heroes for the most part, not criminals.”

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has strongly defended waterboarding as an interrogation tactic, was informed of and condoned its repeated use on a suspected terrorists, according to a report released Monday.

John Ashcroft

The 2004 report, by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, found that CIA officers “used the waterboard on [Khalid Shaikh Mohammed] in a manner inconsistent” with special training endured by military personnel and a Justice Department legal memorandum blessing its application in detainee interrogations. The latter use of the technique evolved from the former, a survival training program known as SERE.

According the report (as well as a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum declassified in April), KSM, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. Ashcroft ”was informed the waterboard had been used 119 times on a single individual,” according to the report.

CIA investigators said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than permitted by a 2002 Justice Department legal memorandum. It was previously known that Ashcroft and other high-ranking Bush administration officials were briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques, some as early as 2002, but the report describes in fuller detail what CIA officials disclosed and what Ashcroft consented to.

The report goes on:

According to the General Counsel, the Attorney General acknowledged he is fully aware of the repetitive use of the waterboard and that the CIA is well within the scope of the DOJ opinion and the authority given to CIA by that opinion.

The report returns to Ashcroft in near the end (pg. 100). In July 2003, George Tenet, then director of Central Intelligence, and the general counsel of the CIA briefed senior administration officials on the expanded use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

“At the time, the Attorney General affirmed that the Agency’s conduct remained well within the scope of the 1 August 2002 DOJ legal opinion,” the report says.

After the Justice Department reviewed the report in 2004, Jack Goldsmith, then-assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a letter to the CIA inspector general, taking issue with some of the language used to characterize Ashcroft’s positions. The letter and the report were released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

To clarify, Goldsmith suggested, the report’s authors should state:

The Attorney General expressed the view that the legal principles reflected in DOJ’s specific original advice could appropriately be extended to allow use of the same approved techniques (under the same conditions and subject to the same safeguards) to other individuals besides the subject of DOJ’s specific original advice. The Attorney General also expressed the view that, while appropriate caution should be exercised in the number of times the waterboard was administered, the repetitions described did not contravene the principles underlying DOJ’s August 2002 opinion.

The CIA IG never adopted the language.

This post has been updated.

In her news-making press conference yesterday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) laid out a timeline of what she knew and when she knew it.  According to Pelosi, the one CIA briefing that she did receive in September 2002 specifically noted that waterboarding was not being used.  Pelosi said that CIA reports indicating otherwise were untrue, and that she had been lied to in 2002.

REPORTER: So Madame Speaker, just to be clear, you’re accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?

PELOSI: Yes. Misleading the Congress of the United States.

Pelosi said that she wants the CIA to release detailed reports on her September 2002 briefing so that she can be vindicated.  Dick Cheney is also requesting documents that apparently prove his truthfulness.  In order to bolster her accusation that the CIA lied to her about waterboarding, Pelosi connected the CIA to Iraq:

at exactly the same time [as the September CIA briefing] the Bush adminstration was misleading the American people about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

She did admit, however, that in February 2003, she was told by an aide that top members of the House Intelligence Committee had been briefed on interrogation methods being used, including waterboarding.  Technically, she couldn’t really do anything about it.  So, the ranking Democratic member on the Intelligence Committee Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) ended up sending a letter to the CIA general counsel Scott Muller questioning the interrogation methods.  ”That is the proper person to send the letter,” Pelosi said at the press conference. “My job (as minority leader) was to change the majority in Congress.”

In defending her good friend Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said: “The CIA on this issue is in a defensive mode. Who knows whether what they’re saying is right or wrong? The CIA is not an agency that is above not telling the truth”

Another interesting quote from Pelosi that may offer a glimpse into the future:

Congress and the Administration must review the National Security Act of 1947 to determine if a larger number of Members of Congress should receive classified briefings so that information can be utilized for proper oversight and legislative activity without violating oaths of secrecy.

Shortly after Pelosi’s presser, John Boehner (R-OH) gave a response:

It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone in our intelligence area would ever mislead a member of Congress. They come to the Hill to brief us because they’re required to under the law, and I don’t know what motivation they would have to mislead anyone. And I don’t believe, and don’t feel, that in the briefings I’ve had that I’ve been mislead at any one point in time.

UPDATE: CIA Director Leon Panetta says Pelosi was told the truth.