Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  According to a 2007 International Committee on the Red Cross report, which has been publicly released, Abu Zubaydah said he was subjected to waterboarding “during five sessions of ill-treatment [the ICRC’s word] that took place during an approximately one-week intense period of interrogation allegedly in Afghanistan in 2002. During each session, apart from one, the suffocation technique was applied once or twice, on one occasion it was applied three times.”

  KSM is quoted in the ICRC report as saying that he, too, had been waterboarded only five times. In this instance, KSM was much closer to the truth than the CIA IG. My information is that each session lasted an average of less than 4.5 minutes.

  Keep in mind that captured al-Qa’ida training manuals instruct their operatives to exaggerate any supposed abuse they might suffer at the hands of captors. In this case, the CIA IG did their work for them.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter!” critics often say. “Even if it were only a single occasion, it is a cruel and barbarous act bringing the detainees to the brink of death from drowning or asphyxiation.” Again, not true. The technique gives detainees the sensation of being on the verge of drowning, but they are in no danger of doing so. The exposure to pouring water was almost always brief (most less than ten seconds a pour) and always intensely supervised by a number of Agency people, including at least one with medical training. This last statement often produces another outcry. “What? Medically trained individuals took part? This is a violation of their oaths!” Nonsense. Imagine if one of the three—remember, only three—individuals had suffered some sort of health problem while the procedure was going on, and we did not have medical personnel present. We would have been excoriated for our failure to have someone standing by who could have immediately dealt with any medical crisis, including those that might be entirely unrelated to waterboarding.

  The flip side to the question, why did you waterboard so much, is: “If it worked, why did you stop the practice entirely in 2003?” What people need to remember is that we used waterboarding only in the rarest of circumstances. We used it on senior detainees who had just been captured, who refused to cooperate, and who we had reason to believe were knowledgeable about future al-Qa’ida attacks that might come at any moment. Those circumstances did not repeat themselves in 2004–06. We felt we were able to get the information we needed and the information newly captured detainees had by using lesser techniques.

  It will come as a shock to some of our critics to read this, but I believe we did make some mistakes in coming up with the EITs. One of the biggest errors was in labeling our most aggressive technique “waterboarding.” By doing so, we made it easy for those who find fault with our tactics to allege that what we did for those three al-Qa’ida leaders was the same as the atrocities conducted by Japanese soldiers in World War II, and by others, going back hundreds of years. The goals, techniques, and application of Japanese waterboarding were entirely different from the carefully managed and applied procedures we used with these three terrorists.

  The opponents of the EIT program will say, “We don’t care what you call it. Everyone knows it was torture!” The “everyone” who “know” this are wrong. If it was torture, then was it torture when the tactic was used in training literally thousands of U.S. military personnel? If the CIA’s waterboarding was torture, why weren’t the U.S. military personnel who conducted this training charged with crimes? Because while the procedure is harsh and unpleasant, it does not cross the line into what can legitimately be called torture. Critics will argue that it is all a matter of intent. U.S. military personnel undergoing training presumably know in the back of their minds that they are taking part in an exercise that will end before long. But I am told that those taking part quickly find the technique very real and quickly abandon any thought that it is a game. The reason the U.S. Air Force dropped waterboarding from its repertoire of tactics in training was not that their personnel dismissed it as just a simulation, but that they found it impossible to resist.

  Waterboarding is not a trivial event. It is something that no one would look forward to enduring themselves. Sometime after the use of waterboarding became generally known and when it was subject to intense public debate, one U.S. senator decided that he wanted to find out for himself how it felt. Bill Nelson, the senior senator from Florida, told the Agency that he wanted to be subjected to the tactic so he could decide whether it amounted to torture. While I admire his commitment to fact-finding, the Agency decided it would not be wise to accommodate the senator’s thirst for knowledge. Despite the fact that he appeared to be in great shape, the senator, who had flown on the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1986, was in his mid-sixties at the time of his request. Even though we would have had medical personnel standing by, we wondered what would happen if he suffered a cardiac event during the experiment. Bad enough the CIA might be blamed for killing a U.S. senator, this Democratic senator was from Florida. If he had tragically died, his successor would have been appointed by the Republican governor at the time, Jeb Bush, the president’s brother. The conspiracy theorists would have gone wild.

  There is another group of skeptics who refuse to believe the rationale I give for why I believed the destruction of the interrogation videotapes was urgent and necessary. They won’t accept any answer other than their imagined one: that we were covering up evidence of dastardly deeds. The truth, as I have said over and over again, is that my goal was to protect the identities of my officers.

  Why didn’t you just blur the faces of those shown on the tapes? I am sometimes asked. The answer is simple. While al-Qa’ida may not have the capability in-house, there are countless techies in the world who like nothing better than unraveling secrets, and it wouldn’t have been long before the full, unobscured images of those CIA officers would have been available for anyone with an internet connection.

  Is there any doubt that al-Qa’ida would like to retaliate against CIA personnel? Some of our critics would be happy to take a chance that they wouldn’t, but I would never make that bet with someone else’s safety. This is not just theory.

  In 2008 several news organizations got the name of an outstanding former CIA officer who was involved in the Abu Zubaydah and KSM cases. The officer was not undercover at the time, but connecting him to such significant actions posed considerable risk to him and his family. The New York Times in particular was very aggressive about trying to get this officer to talk to them to describe details of the interrogation of senior al-Qa’ida members. They tracked down his home address and, unannounced, on a Sunday morning, a reporter came knocking on his door. When no one answered, he slipped a note in his door. The reporter then drove down the street and parked and watched the house for a couple of hours. He then contacted the officer’s mother, his sister, and a high school friend. The message left with each of them was, tell him we want to help him tell his story—a story he wasn’t looking to tell. The New York Times said they already knew a lot about this guy and were planning on running a story, with or without his help, describing his activities and naming him.

  He was feeling mightily harassed. So I helped facilitate the support of my lawyer, Bob Bennett, who contacted the Times telling them to back off. The Times wouldn’t hear of it. To them, this was a story about a guy who was very successful at deriving information from what we were learning from KSM after the EITs were applied—suggesting that the EITs had nothing to do with our success. They wanted to make him a hero and couldn’t understand why he would not want to be named. In fact, he is a hero and would tell you that it was only because KSM had become compliant and begun to freely share information that CIA officers were able to connect as many dots as they did.

  CIA director General Mike Hayden took time out from a ceremony marking his retirement from the air force after thirty-nine years of service to call the Times and urge them to keep the name out of the paper. They didn’t think he was serious enough or made a compelling argument and they ran with the name anyway.

  Concerned that the
unwanted publicity might put him and his family in jeopardy, the officer contacted the Agency office of security, which told him they couldn’t do much for him until there was evidence that someone was trying to harm him. If it got to that point, he figured, it might well be too late.

  He ran up substantial legal fees (and keep in mind that no one ever accused him of doing anything wrong). Much later the Agency reimbursed him—but that was never a sure thing.

  A year after the story first appeared in the New York Times, the former officer got a call from the Agency’s Counterintelligence Center. They said, “We need you to come in to headquarters—now!” They told him that the New York Times article naming him had gotten to KSM’s cell in Guantanamo Bay within two weeks of publication. But more recently, and much more troubling, officials in GITMO had found photographs of CIA officers in the possession of detainees at the prison. The photos were clearly taken surreptitiously, and included pictures taken outside their homes and entering their workplaces. Reportedly, the “John Adams Project,” an ACLU-run operation, had been stalking current and former CIA officers and taking pictures of them to show to al-Qa’ida detainees. It would not take much of an imagination to think that those photos might find their way into the hands of nondetained terrorists. So when people ask why I thought it necessary to work so hard to protect the identity of CIA officers, the answer is that it was not just al-Qa’ida I was protecting them from but also from the efforts of the New York Times and the ACLU, which, unwittingly, might aid and abet al-Qa’ida.

  When they tire of arguing that the CIA’s interrogation program was “evil,” our critics resort to the claim that we got nothing of value from it anyway. As former CIA director General Mike Hayden puts it, people have the right to say they don’t want their government using these techniques, they have the right to their views, but claiming that they didn’t work, “That’s mine,” Hayden says. He, his predecessors, and his successors know they did work.

  Almost every critic who dismisses the results of the EIT program is someone who did not then and does not now have access to the full output of the interrogation from the detainees. Even some who would claim they were totally aware of the results of the post-EIT terrorist debriefing, such as some former FBI agents, are lying or deluded.

  What I can swear to you, as head of CTC at the time, and what every one of the people working under me implementing the program would tell you, is that we have never in our careers ever seen such important, critical, and lifesaving intelligence come from any other program.

  “Sure,” some will say, “you guys are just trying to justify your actions, which were nothing less than war crimes.” As I have explained, we very carefully sought and received legal counsel before entering into this program. We don’t need to sugarcoat anything. If the program had been ineffective, we could easily say, “We were grasping at straws in a time of great urgency. We now recognize there are better ways to do things and won’t make the same mistake.” Given the pressure of political correctness, that would be the easiest thing in the world to say. No one likes to be labeled a “torturer” or a potential “war criminal.” It would be easy to cave, to take the position that “mistakes were made.” It would also be easy to point fingers elsewhere, saying, for example, that we were pressured by politicians. It would be easy, and it would be wrong.

  In February 2009, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced plans to conduct a thorough review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Six months later the Republicans on the committee revealed that they would no longer take part in the inquiry because Attorney General Holder had reopened criminal investigation of some people who had been involved in the program. Later, some of the members added to their reasons for not participating the statement that they believed that the investigation was being politicized. At this writing, two and a half years after the investigation was supposedly started, nothing has come of it. I do not know if there ever will be a conclusion to the study, but given the partisan rancor that has enveloped it, I have little hope for the objectivity or accuracy of such a conclusion.

  Honorable people can come to the conclusion that although the EITs were successful, they are not something they want their government to engage in. I totally respect that point of view. But if people want to adopt that stance, they need to complete the thought. They need to articulate that not only do they not want their government to engage in these practices, but they are willing to accept that hundreds, thousands, and perhaps more innocent people might die at the hands of terrorists because their government was directed not to use these controversial techniques, no matter the results. It is because it is so hard to say, “I am willing to let thousands of people die to avoid giving people like KSM a few minutes of discomfort” that so many of our critics work so hard to deny that any useful information comes from the EITs.

  Another frequent argument that we encounter is that by engaging in the EIT program we have somehow legitimized for current and future opponents the right to similarly treat captured U.S. military personnel. “How would you feel,” we are asked, “if some country, such as Iran, were to waterboard U.S. special operations forces troops they somehow got their hands on?” The circumstances are in no way analogous. To start with, legitimate military personnel are covered by the Geneva Conventions, whereas terrorists, such as those al-Qa’ida leaders we held, are not. There is a vast difference between a soldier carrying out the orders of his country and a mass murderer intent on inflicting horrific casualties on members of the public.

  If Iranians were to capture some ununiformed civilian who had already murdered three thousand innocent civilians in their homeland and was intent on murdering thousands more, they might be able to make a case for harsh interrogation. But that is not going to happen. Rogue regimes have never needed an excuse to abuse genuine prisoners of war, and, sadly, they will probably continue to do so in the future without need to rely on the EIT program as a precedent. Beyond legitimate foreign governments, the argument about how the EITs might influence future actions of terrorist groups is an absurdity. The people who happily order colleagues to fly airliners into packed office towers and joyfully cut the heads off American journalists and contractors need no motivation to step up their brutality.

  The final accusation I would like to deal with is the notion that we hid our activities at black sites, aboard clandestine rendition aircraft, and elsewhere because we were ashamed of what we did. On the contrary, the people involved, almost to a man and woman, have told me that they were extraordinarily proud of what we did. They had never before felt such an enormous sense of responsibility, nor had they participated in any other program that contributed so much to protecting the safety of Americans and our allies around the world. We kept the program secret (or more accurately, tried to do so) because it needed to be secret to be effective. Those who worked hard to expose it have made it easier for America’s enemies to succeed.

  Chapter 10

  THE CIA UNDER OBAMA

  After retiring from the Agency in January 2008, and especially after being given the “all clear” sign by the special prosecutor in November 2010, I have tried to get on with my life. But you never completely get past or get over a lifetime spent at the CIA. There are always constant reminders of past successes, failures, and controversies.

  While those reminders are continual, they come with greater frequency during political years. For better or worse, and it is almost always worse, the conduct of U.S. intelligence has become a political football. It was no different in the 2008 presidential campaign when the Republican candidate, John McCain, an outspoken critic of the CIA’s terrorist detention practices, was outdone by his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, who was even more vocal in condemning us.

  Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2007, Obama called for building a “better, freer, world” and said that meant “ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of the night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousan
ds without charge or trial, or maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.”

  Immediately after winning election, Obama appeared on CBS News’ 60 Minutes and said: “I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture. And I’m gonna make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”

  In December 2008, President-elect Obama met with CIA director Mike Hayden, who traveled to Chicago to brief him on the realities of our interrogation program. The program by that time had been vastly scaled back. Hayden carefully explained how extraordinarily productive the EITs had been and gave a demonstration of how mild the remaining interrogation techniques were by having one of his aides stand up to be slapped and held the way an al-Qa’ida operative might be. The impression that Hayden and his group got was that Obama and his transition team were surprised that the techniques still in use were so mild. When the new administration launched, however, one of Obama’s first acts, on January 22, 2009, was to sign a sweeping executive order requiring that only the interrogation guidelines in the Army Field Manual be observed in the interrogation of any detainees in U.S. custody. He ordered the CIA to close all existing detention facilities and prohibited it from operating detention facilities in the future. He signed another executive order mandating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within one year.

  About ten days later, Obama’s nominee to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee for his confirmation hearing and declared that in the past the CIA had sent detainees to other countries to be tortured. When pressed on the matter, Panetta admitted he had not been briefed on such a program. Apparently it was just another one of those things that “everybody knows”—even if they are wrong.