More significant, interrogations of Abu Zubaydah had gotten rougher, with each new tactic approved by cable from headquarters. American officials have said that Abu Zubaydah was the first Qaeda prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner’s mouth and nose to create a feeling of drowning. Officials said they felt they could not risk a public leak of a videotape showing Americans giving such harsh treatment to bound prisoners.

Heightening the worries about the tapes was word of the first deaths of prisoners in American custody. In November 2002, an Afghan man froze to death overnight while chained in a cell at a C.I.A. site in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, the capital. Two more prisoners died in December 2002 in American military custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one C.I.A. officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided that written summaries of prisoners’ answers would suffice.

Still, that decision left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two Qaeda figures locked in an overseas safe.

Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy the tapes. But George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, was wary, in part because the agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, advised against it, current and former officials said.

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill, hoping for political cover. In February 2003, Mr. Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the C.I.A’s interest in destroying the tapes for security reasons.

But both Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat, thought destroying the tapes would be legally and politically risky. C.I.A. officials did not press the matter.

The Detention Program

Scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began investigating the program, and some insiders believed the inquiry might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.

Mr. Helgerson — now conducting the videotapes review with the Justice Department — had already rankled covert officers with an investigation into the 2001 shooting down of a missionary plane by Peruvian military officers advised by the C.I.A. The investigation set off widespread concern within the clandestine branch that a day of reckoning could be coming for officers involved in the agency’s secret prison program. The Peru investigation often pitted Mr. Helgerson against Mr. Muller, who vigorously defended members of the clandestine branch and even lobbied the Justice Department to head off criminal charges in the matter, according to former intelligence officials

“Muller wanted to show the clandestine branch that he was looking out for them,” said John Radsan, who served as an assistant general counsel for the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004. “And his aggressiveness on Peru was meant to prove to the operations people that they were protected on a lot of other programs, too.”

Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation of interrogations in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded that some of the C.I.A.’s techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture. Current and former officials said the report did not explicitly state that the methods were torture.

A month later, as the administration reeled from the Abu Ghraib disclosures, Mr. Muller, the agency general counsel, met to discuss the report with three senior lawyers at the White House: Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel; David S. Addington, legal adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney; and John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council.

The interrogation tapes were discussed at the meeting, and one Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Mr. Bellinger advised the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes. The positions Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Addington took are unknown. One person familiar with the discussion said that in light of concerns raised in the inspector general’s report that agency officers could be legally liable for harsh interrogations, there was a view at the time among some administration lawyers that the tapes should be preserved.

After Mr. Tenet and Mr. Muller left the C.I.A. in mid-2004, Mr. Rodriguez and other officials from the clandestine branch decided again to take up the tapes with the new chief at Langley, Mr. Goss, the former congressman.

Mr. Rodriguez had taken over the clandestine directorate in late 2004, and colleagues say Mr. Goss repeatedly emphasized to Mr. Rodriguez that he was expected to run operations without clearing every decision with superiors.

During a meeting in Mr. Goss’s office with Mr. Rodriguez, John A. Rizzo, who by then had replaced Mr. Muller as the agency’s top lawyer, told the new C.I.A. director that the clandestine branch wanted a firm decision about what to do with the tapes.

According to two people close to Mr. Goss, he advised against destroying the tapes, as he had in Congress, and told Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Rodriguez that he thought the tapes should be preserved at the overseas location. Apparently he did not explicitly prohibit the tapes’ destruction.

Yet in November 2005, Congress already was moving to outlaw “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners, and The Washington Post reported that some C.I.A. prisoners were being held in Eastern Europe. As the agency scrambled to move the prisoners to new locations, Mr. Rodriguez and his aides decided to use their own authority to destroy the tapes, officials said.

One official who has spoken with Mr. Rodriguez said Mr. Rodriguez and his aides were concerned about protection of the C.I.A. officers on the tapes, from Al Qaeda, as the C.I.A. has stated, and from political pressure.

The tapes might visually identify as many as five or six people present for each interrogation — interrogators themselves, whom the agency now prefers to call “debriefers”; doctors or doctor’s assistants who monitored the prisoner’s medical state; and security officers, the official said. Some traveled regularly in and out of areas where Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists are active, he said.

Apart from concerns about physical safety in the event of a leak, the official said, there was concern for the careers of officers shown on the tapes. “We didn’t want them to become political scapegoats,” he said.

According to several current and former officials, lawyers in the agency’s clandestine branch gave Mr. Rodriguez written guidance that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that such a move would not be illegal.

One day in November 2005, Mr. Rodriguez sent a cable ordering the destruction of the recordings. Soon afterward, he notified both Mr. Goss and Mr. Rizzo, taking full responsibility for the decision.

Former intelligence officials said that Mr. Goss was unhappy about the news, in part because it was further evidence that as the C.I.A. director he was so weakened that his subordinates would directly reject his advice. Yet it appears that Mr. Rodriguez was never reprimanded. Nor is there evidence that Mr. Goss promptly notified Congress that the tapes were gone.

The investigations over the tapes frustrate some C.I.A. veterans, who say they believe that the agency is being unfairly blamed for policies of coercive interrogation approved at the top of the Bush administration and by some Congressional leaders. Intelligence officers are divided over the use of such methods as waterboarding. Some say the methods helped get information that prevented terrorist attacks. Others, like John C. Gannon, a former C.I.A. deputy director, say it was a tragic mistake for the administration to approve such methods.

Mr. Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods.

“To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.”

160 Dubious Refunds Made Since 1999

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 2, 2007; Page A01

The D.C. government issued more than $44 million in questionable property tax refunds in the past nine years -- more than double the amount that prosecutors have declared to be missing in a massive theft of city money.

Prosecutors have said that Harriette Walters, a mid-level manager at the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue, approved illegal refunds and shared the wealth with family members and associates. She and five others face federal charges in the case. Meanwhile, the size and duration of the alleged thievery has Congress, council members and many taxpayers questioning why no city officials caught it.

New information from the city's chief financial officer indicates that at least two and as many as four top leaders of the D.C. tax office, including its director, should have personally reviewed the refunds before they were issued. The payments examined by The Post were to fictitious companies or to firms that did not own the properties listed on refund documents.

Federal authorities are examining the same kinds of records scrutinized by The Post and acknowledge they are still trying to determine the depth of the loss. They have publicly flagged 58 checks as fraudulent, totaling $20 million, and warned that losses could mount as the probe continues.

The Post analysis includes the checks identified in the criminal charges and others paid to the same firms described as fronts for the alleged conspiracy. The Post included additional checks that have no required court order and that are tied to false property records. Court orders are required for assessment reduction refunds.

The $44.3 million total is $13 million more than previous Post findings; it covers a longer time frame and includes additional payments.

Most refunds were written to fictitious firms, but some were ostensibly to legitimate companies. The Post has contacted more than 40 representatives of the legitimate companies named on the questionable checks, and they said the firms never got the refunds.

The allegations have threatened the previously sterling reputation of Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi, who had boosted the District's image on Wall Street. The tax office was the largest agency directly under his supervision, and he was its director from 1997 to 2000, when authorities believe the theft began. In the wake of the scandal, Gandhi ousted the head of the office and four other top managers. A total of 15 employees have been dismissed or put on administrative leave.

The financial records reviewed by The Post do not say who cashed the questionable checks or who signed off on paperwork. Only one other employee in the tax office has been charged: tax specialist Diane Gustus, who reported to Walters. An FBI affidavit says that five more low-level employees helped process fraudulent refund paperwork before it got to Walters but does not address what, if anything, they knew about the alleged scheme.

A total of 130 checks -- worth $41.1 million -- should have been reviewed by the director of real property tax administration, a position held in recent months by Thomas Branham, one of those ousted by Gandhi. Branham's attorney has said that Branham played no role in the tax scandal.

Hobbs Newman, who was forced out Nov. 7, the day of Walters's arrest, has issued a statement saying she did nothing wrong. She later testified at a council hearing that Walters did not forward the checks to any higher-ups.

Early this decade, the District's Integrated Tax System was rolled out under Gandhi to modernize financial control over revenue. Officials said they have yet to determine why no one noticed that tens of millions in refunds were issued for locations that were not in the $130 million tax system.

So far, six people have been charged with bank fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy. In addition to Walters and Gustus, they are: Walters's brother Richard J. Walters; her niece Jayrece Turnbull; her nephew Ricardo Walters; and her friend Connie L. Alexander.

The Post's analysis relied upon a database of 9,800 property tax refund checks that the Office of Tax and Revenue has issued since June 1999, the oldest computerized records available.

During this time, Walters, who had been hired for a clerk job in the District government in 1981, was a rising employee in the tax unit. She was well-regarded by her bosses for her ability to get the job done and resolve taxpayers' complaints.

On July 1, 1999, the city issued a $122,413 tax refund to Taliafaro Inc., a Nashville-based property management company. The refund was not authorized by court order, according to D.C. Superior Court records, and Taliafaro didn't own the specific D.C. property listed for the refund check.

The check listed "R.O. Steven" as a co-payee. Robert O. Steven is one of Walters's relatives. Prosecutors recently asked a judge to bar the defendants from contacting Steven, saying that doing so could interfere with the investigation.

On Aug. 20, 1999, the city issued a refund check for $187,167 to Winkler Co., an Alexandria-based firm that owned and managed some apartment buildings in the city. A company official said the firm has no record of receiving the money. The co-payee on the check was "Steven-Campbell."

All told, from 1999 to early 2001, questionable refund checks worth $2.6 million were issued by the city and listed variations of Walters's relatives names as co-payees. Those names were recorded in check registers as "Steven-Campbell, Inc.," "P.A. Steven Associates," and "P.A. Steven, Esq." The average check amount was $156,000.

From March 2000 to November 2001, a series of seemingly legitimate -- but unauthorized -- checks listed "C.L. Alexander" or "C.L. Alexander, Esq." as the co-payee. The average check amount was $180,000.

Connie Alexander, one of those charged in the case, is accused in court papers of creating a phony company to help cash illegal refund checks from 2004 to 2007.

Over time, especially from 2002 to the present, the pattern of suspicious refund payments appeared to grow in bravado and sophistication and grew to include a handful of companies that prosecutors say were shams created by Walters's family members or friends.

Starting then, refund checks were issued, at a rate of one or two a month at first, to a handful of companies named "Legna Home Services" and "Chappa." Prosecutors have identified the companies in court papers as fronts that were created by Turnbull, Walters's niece. Other phony companies created by her brother and nephew were also recipients of numerous refund checks, according to records and charging papers.

The trouble came to light after Turnbull deposited a $410,000 check at a SunTrust Bank branch. The check was issued to First American Home, in care of David Fuss, a D.C. tax attorney. The bank contacted Fuss, who said he had no association with First American or Turnbull and suggested that something was wrong. The FBI then began its investigation.

Staff writer David Nakamura and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

Separately, Turks Report Attack on Kurds

Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 2, 2007; Page A22

BAGHDAD, Dec. 1 -- Dozens of gunmen overran a Shiite village north of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 20 people, police said, the latest in a recent spike in attacks in Diyala province, where the U.S. military is rotating some troops out and moving others in.

All three developments underscored the instability that persists in Iraq even as violence has decreased.

The assault on Duwaili village, 45 miles north of Baghdad, began at 6.30 a.m. with a barrage of mortar shells, police said. Gangs of suspected members of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq entered the village, opening fire on civilians and torching homes, said Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim al-Rubaiee, a police commander in Diyala province. The village, he said, was also attacked several months ago.

Muhammad Salman al-Zaidi, 54, a tribal elder, said his village was struck again because the U.S. military had recently withdrawn soldiers from the nearby town of Muqdadiyah. Iraqi security forces, he added, were not ready to take over responsibility for the area's security.

Last week, a suicide bomber attacked a police checkpoint in Diyala's capital, Baqubah, killing seven people, including five policemen. Another suicide bomber blew herself up near a U.S. patrol, injuring seven U.S. soldiers and five Iraqi civilians. On Nov. 18, a suicide bomber killed three U.S. soldiers.

"I do not know why they withdrew the American brigade at this time," he said. "This showed that Iraqi forces are not ready yet to fight the terrorism alone by themselves."

U.S. military officials said they expect al-Qaeda in Iraq to fight back. "I wouldn't read too much into it yet," cautioned a senior U.S. military official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We know there will be tough days and weeks ahead. Diyala is still a very tough area, so this isn't what anyone here would call a surprise. Attacks and spikes of attacks are going to happen."

But U.S. military officials insisted that the uptick in violence was not related to the U.S. troop shifts in the province. About 5,000 troops in a combat brigade are heading back to the United States and being replaced by another brigade, a process that will actually leave more troops in the province, they said.

"It has nothing to do with troop movements inside or outside Diyala," said Capt. Vic Beck, a military spokesman, referring to the violence. "There are good days and bad days. The fight is far from over."

In Turkey, the military reported on its Web site that its soldiers had crossed into Iraq and conducted an "intensified operation" against guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.

"The terrorist group suffered significant losses as a result of the operation," the statement said. "If necessary, there will be other operations in the region using other means."

U.S. military officials said they were not aware of such a Turkish attack. Col. Hussein Tamor, head of the Iraqi border protection agency in northern Dahuk province, said there were no signs of Turkish troops crossing the border.

"None of the border points at the province of Dahuk have reported any Turkish incursion or military operation," he said.

The reported attack came a day after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the government had given permission for an offensive in northern Iraq against the PKK, which has staged cross-border raids for years into Turkey, seeking more rights for Kurds. Turkey has massed an estimated 100,000 troops along the border and has been shelling the mountains of north Iraq, where PKK fighters have sought sanctuary.

In Baghdad, Dulaimi, a vocal critic of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, alleged that Iraq's Shiite-led government prevented him from leaving his home to attend a session of parliament. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh denied the assertion, but stated that Dulaimi would face Iraq's legal system.

"Everyone is subject to the law, whether he is a lawmaker or not, and the government is adamant to be objective and neutral in dealing with this issue," Dabbagh said on state television.

On Saturday, Dulaimi said the car bomb had been parked near his office, not inside the compound. He promised that if any of his guards were found to be involved in illegal acts, they would be punished.

"We do not support terrorism because we are participating in the political process and we should all work to make the political process succeed," Dulaimi told Iraqi state television.

But in Iraq's parliament on Saturday, Sunni and Shiite lawmakers were trading accusations over Dulaimi. The furor threatened to deepen the sectarian rift at a time when U.S. officials are pressuring Iraqi politicians to seize advantage of the downturn in violence and reach power-sharing agreements.

Staff writer Karen DeYoung and special correspondents Naseer Nouri and Saad al-Izzi in Baghdad and Dlovan Brwari in Mosul contributed to this report.

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: December 2, 2007

Workers who help process millions of visa and citizenship applications for a federal immigration agency are getting pay reductions just as the agency is facing an enormous surge in those applications.

The workers whose wage rate will be cut are contract employees in document processing centers in St. Albans, Vt., and Laguna Niguel, Calif., that are part of Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for deciding visa applications and citizenship petitions. Some 280 of approximately 1,000 contract workers in the two centers will receive lower wages after a new contractor, Stanley Inc. of Arlington, Va., takes over tomorrow.

Immigration officials said the agency granted a contract to Stanley, after competitive bidding last year, to manage mailroom and data entry work at the two centers, in an effort to speed handling of the vast paperwork of the applications.

“The goal is to try to get this work done as efficiently as possible,” said Shawn Saucier, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services. He said the wage dispute was between the contractor and the employees and did not involve the agency.

Dozens of workers have protested the pay cuts to Vermont and California lawmakers. During the past two weeks workers picketed in front of the federal office building in Laguna Niguel.

“If you’re trying to get people motivated to deal with a huge backlog, the last thing you would do is slash pay,” said Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, who received many calls. “It just creates more turnover, more discontent and more demoralization.”

Officials at the immigration agency said last week that they received 2.5 million applications for visas and for naturalization in July and August, more than double the applications in the same period last year. Many immigrants rushed to file applications before large fee increases took effect July 30, officials said.

Stanley announced Sept. 24 that it had won a $225 million, three-year contract for clerical work at the two immigration centers. A previous contract, held by a consortium of companies that did not include Stanley, expired.

The new contract is based on performance and does not specify how many workers Stanley should hire. But Stanley is required to pay according to federal regulations that classify jobs and set their hourly wages.

Eric Wolking, senior vice president at Stanley, said that none of the competing companies received information during the bidding about wage levels of the current employees. Stanley only became aware of the mismatch between its proposal and current wages when managers began interviewing the workers, he said.

“When we submitted our bid, we did not know what they know about the wage scale,” said Mr. Wolking, referring to Citizenship and Immigration Services. “As we have been meeting with employees and we realized the scope of this problem, we have been making adjustments.”

Mr. Wolking said the company would offer bonuses of up to $400 monthly to half of the workers whose wages will decrease, based on their job productivity.

The plan brought little comfort to employees whose weekly income will drop tomorrow by 12 to 20 percent.

“Everybody will be fighting over the ability for half of us to make our rent checks,” said Jeremy Murray, one of those employees, in a telephone interview. He said he had worked at the Vermont center for more than six years sorting incoming applications, making $14.54 an hour. Starting Monday, he said, he will make $12.84 an hour and will no longer be able to work overtime. He will lose as much as $400 a month.

Mr. Murray said he was considering cashing out his savings plan early to avoid missing payments on his truck.

While contract employees at the centers must be American citizens and pass security clearances, they do not handle work that involves legally binding decisions on immigration applications. That work is done by federal employees, who were not affected by the wage changes. The Vermont center employs 590 federal employees and 400 contract workers. There are 570 federal employees and 620 contract workers in Laguna Niguel.

Mr. Murray said some of the guidelines for procedures he performed were 40 pages long. If applications are misfiled, he said, errors can take months or longer to fix.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

By John Curran Associated Press / December 2, 2007