Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  In 2002 alone, Cheney personally made approximately ten visits to the CIA. His top aide, Libby, made repeated trips, as did former House speaker Newt Gingrich, at the time a Pentagon “consultant.” William Luti, Feith’s deputy for the Near East and South Asia, would also go to the Agency. Some analysts said they felt pressured to conform their assessments with Cheney and company’s political agenda and that Libby had inundated the CIA with requests for hundreds of documents that the analysts said would have taken a year to produce. Cheney would arrive at Langley and then commandeer a conference room on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters, to which he would summon various analysts and senior CIA officials. Cheney’s staff, in particular, was “hell-bent on connecting Saddam and his regime to al Qaeda,” recalled Jose Rodriguez, who was running the high-value interrogation program and the black sites at the time. The “connections between Iraq and AQ were remarkably thin,” he conceded. “I could have given you a list of a half-dozen countries that had more substantial ties to bin Laden’s organization than did Iraq.”

  It was not unheard of for a vice president to visit the CIA, but according to former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern—who served as the national security briefer for Vice President George H. W. Bush in the 1980s—Cheney’s “multiple visits” were “unprecedented,” adding that Cheney was putting “unrelenting pressure” on analysts to produce the intelligence he wanted. “This is like inviting money changers into the temple. It’s the inner sanctum,” McGovern asserted. “You don’t have policy makers sitting at the table, helping us come up with the correct conclusions, and that is the only explanation as to why Dick Cheney would be making multiple visits out there.”

  An investigative report prepared by Senator Carl Levin of the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that Feith’s office “developed and disseminated an ‘alternative’ assessment of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda that went beyond the judgments of intelligence professionals in the IC [Intelligence Community], and which resulted in providing unreliable intelligence information about the Iraq–al Qaeda relationship to policymakers through both direct and indirect means.” Feith edited his reports depending on whom he was briefing. Cheney’s office received all access briefings, but Feith’s presentations to CIA director Tenet omitted PowerPoint slides critical of the Agency. The presentations to Cheney’s staff, according to Levin’s report, “conveyed a perception that the U.S. had firm evidence of a relationship between the Hussein regime and al Qaeda when it did not.” Tenet was unaware that Feith’s office was briefing the president and vice president behind his back and did not find out until a year after Iraq had already been invaded. “The nation’s foremost intelligence experts, and the President’s chief intelligence officer, were deprived of the opportunity...to correct inaccuracies” in Feith’s briefings, Levin’s report asserted. More important, the CIA was “deprived of the opportunity to inform the White House of significant concerns about the reliability of some of the reporting upon which Under Secretary Feith’s White House briefing was based.”

  In August 2002, Feith’s staff showed up at an Intelligence Community meeting at which a final draft of the US intelligence on Iraq was to be nailed down. Professional intelligence analysts who attended the meeting said that it was “unusual” because “members of an intelligence consumer organization” such as Feith’s office “normally do not participate in the creation of intelligence products.” At the meeting, Feith’s staff complained that the report was not direct enough and contained too many caveats. They also pressured the analysts to include discredited intelligence that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague before the attacks. Feith’s staff wrote a memo to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz after the meeting. They alleged that the “CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade” the information Feith wanted included in the final report resulted in “inconsistent conclusions in many instances.” They concluded: “Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only—and CIA’s interpretation ought to be ignored.”

  In the end, under great pressure from Cheney’s team and Feith’s office, the US Intelligence Community’s final Iraq report included “questionable intelligence reports,” according to a US Senate investigation, that fit the administration’s predetermined policy of invading Iraq. Feith later presented a classified report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Weekly Standard obtained the memo and held it up as evidence of a rock-solid connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. Feith’s memo, author Stephen Hayes alleged, proved that “Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003,” stating bluntly that “there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.” Cheney’s targeted pressure campaign at the CIA and other intelligence agencies, along with Feith’s briefings, would form the basis for the dubious claims that would ultimately make the Iraq invasion a reality.

  Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape

  WASHINGTON, DC, 2002–2003 —The November 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the opening salvo in the Bush administration’s drive to expand US military action beyond the stated battlefield of Afghanistan. Although much of the media focus at the time was on the Bush administration’s campaign to justify the invasion of Iraq, in secret the CIA was building up a black-site archipelago to deal with the rest of the world. Prisoners who had been snatched from various countries across the globe were being held in the gulags of foreign intelligence services, where they were interrogated and often tortured under the direction of US intelligence agents. CIA black sites were being constructed and “high value” detainees were being interrogated.

  But infighting between the FBI and the CIA was becoming untenable. Some FBI personnel were disgusted with what they believed were extreme tactics being employed by the Agency’s interrogators. Others, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, believed the CIA was not going far enough and was too restrained by its requirements to keep congressional committees abreast of its operations. By December 2002, CIA director George Tenet would boast that the United States and its allies had already detained more than 3,000 suspected al Qaeda operatives and associates, in more than one hundred countries. But despite such proclamations, the game was only just beginning. The post-9/11 fervor that had allowed Cheney’s “dark side” operations to flow largely unabated and unchallenged by Congress and the media was fading. Journalists and lawyers were poking around. A few members of Congress were starting to ask questions. There were rumblings about “secret prisons.”

  Cheney and Rumsfeld were not content with the intelligence they were receiving from the CIA or the military’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) interrogators. “We have to start pushing on intel,” Rumsfeld had noted in an internal memo in March 2002. “It is not going right.” Rumsfeld asserted, “We are faced with the job of trying to find individual terrorists. That never used to be a DoD job. But terrorists today are well-organized and well-financed, they are trying to get weapons of mass destruction and can impose enormous damage on the United States. So finding them has become a Defense Department task.” Rumsfeld and his deputies began seeking assistance from a secretive military program. The Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) was responsible for coordinating the rescue of US military personnel trapped in enemy territory, including in “denied areas,” where their very presence—if exposed—could cause a major international crisis or scandal. But of particular relevance to Rumsfeld was JPRA’s other work: preparing US forces for resisting enemy attempts to extract information from captured US personnel. All US special operators went through JPRA’s horrid torture mill, a program known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

  The SERE program was created to introduce US soldiers, sailors and airmen to the full spectrum of torture that “a totalitarian evil nation with a complete disregard for human rights and the Geneva Convention” could use on them if
captured. At SERE training, soldiers would be subjected to a hellish regimen of torture tactics drawn from the techniques of vicious dictatorships and terrorists. During training, soldiers could be kidnapped from their quarters, beaten, hooded, shackled and stuffed into vans, flown in helicopters. They could be waterboarded, beaten with canes, have their heads slammed against walls. They would often be deprived of food and sleep and subjected to psychological torture. “At SERE school, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ are enemy torture methods,” said Malcolm Nance, who worked on the SERE program from 1997 to 2001 and helped develop and modernize its curriculum. Nance and other SERE instructors studied the debriefings of US prisoners of war throughout history. They dissected the interrogation tactics of Communist China, North Korea, the Vietcong, Nazi Germany and scores of other regimes and terror groups. The institutional knowledge at SERE was “built in blood. They are written in blood. Everything we use at SERE, a US service member—or thousands of them in some instances—died from.” SERE, Nance said, “was a repository of every known [torture tactic] out there. We had debriefs that went back—literally, the original debriefs—that went back to the Civil War.” SERE’s intended purpose was to prepare US military personnel to face the tactics of lawless foes. But Rumsfeld and his allies saw a different value for the program.

  In the early stages of the High Value Detainee program, the CIA and the DIA were running the interrogation show, but personnel from JSOC were watching closely. Internally, JSOC had concluded that the methods being used by the US interrogators in Afghanistan were not producing results—not because they were too harsh but because they were not harsh enough. “From the beginning, there was incredible pressure on interrogators to elicit actionable intelligence from practically every individual we took into custody. Some of these detainees were complicit, others innocent; some were knowledgeable, some truly clueless,” recalled Colonel Steven Kleinman, who spent twenty-seven years working in US intelligence and was one of the most experienced interrogators in modern US history. Among his positions was director of intelligence at JPRA’s Personnel Recovery Academy. “In far too many cases, we simply erred in pressing interrogation and interrogators beyond the edge of the envelope. As a result, interrogation was no longer an intelligence collection method; rather, it had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn’t cooperate.” Kleinman added that when the torture tactics “proved ineffective in producing the type of actionable intelligence required by senior leaders,” veteran US interrogators, including some from the FBI and US military, suggested using alternative, noncoercive, nonviolent tactics. Top White House officials “ignored or rejected” those tactics as “irrelevant.” “We instead opted for more of the same, except the pressure would be ratcheted up...in some cases to an alarming degree,” Kleinman said. “When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter.”

  To develop new tactics, Rumsfeld and his team looked inward at the very program used to train US forces in how to resist enemy torture. As JSOC reviewed the “failures” of the interrogation program the CIA and DIA were running at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld and his team soon began reviewing the possibility of taking interrogation of enemy combatants captured on the battlefield to the next level. The SERE program, they believed, could be reverse-engineered. The medieval tactics they had studied from history’s greatest torturers would be their new interrogation manual. “We are at war with an enemy that has flagrantly violated the laws of war,” Rumsfeld had declared in late 2001. “They do not wear uniforms. They hide in caves abroad, and among us here at home.” While denouncing the “enemy’s” disregard for the laws of war, Rumsfeld and his team were preparing to follow suit. As early as December 2001, Rumsfeld’s office began asking JPRA for assistance in detainee “exploitation.”

  Initially, the leadership at JPRA headquarters pushed back on Rumsfeld’s requests to export their training tactics into the interrogation chambers of the war on terror. In a two-page memo to the Pentagon’s general counsel, JPRA warned against using SERE’s “torture” tactics on enemy prisoners. “The requirement to obtain information from an uncooperative source as quickly as possible—in time to prevent, for example, an impending terrorist attack that could result in loss of life—has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture.... In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time-consuming conventional interrogation process,” JPRA’s command asserted. “The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate intelligence. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption.” JPRA noted that “upwards of 90 percent of interrogations have been successful” by developing a rapport with the detainee, and warned that after being subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, a prisoner’s resolve to resist cooperation is strengthened. JPRA’s memo noted that eventually, if tortured enough, prisoners “will provide answers that they feel the interrogator is seeking. In this instance, the information is neither reliable nor accurate.”

  But Rumsfeld and his team forged ahead. Feith and other Defense officials instructed JPRA to begin providing detailed information on the SERE program to US interrogators. By early 2002, JPRA began briefing DIA personnel on “detainee resistance, techniques, and information on detainee exploitation.” Meanwhile, the senior SERE psychologist, Dr. Bruce Jessen, who was also a CIA contractor, began developing an “exploitation plan” for the Agency’s interrogators to receive instructions on how to use SERE tactics on detainees. In early July 2002, CIA interrogators began receiving training from SERE instructors and psychologists on extreme interrogation tactics. Later that month, Rumsfeld’s office requested documents from JPRA, “including excerpts from SERE instructor lesson plans, a list of physical and psychological pressures used in SERE resistance training, and a memo from a SERE psychologist assessing the long-term psychological effects of SERE resistance training on students and the effects of waterboarding,” according to a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation. “The list of SERE techniques included such methods as sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding, and slapping. It also made reference to a section of the JPRA instructor manual that discusses ‘coercive pressures,’ such as keeping the lights on at all times, and treating a person like an animal.” The Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, Richard Shiffrin, acknowledged that the Pentagon wanted the documents in order to “reverse-engineer” SERE’s knowledge of enemy torture tactics for use against US detainees. He also described how JPRA provided interrogators with documents about “mind-control experiments” used on US prisoners by North Korean agents. “It was real ‘Manchurian Candidate’ stuff,” Shiffrin said. JPRA’s commander also sent the same information to the CIA.

  The use of these new techniques was discussed at the National Security Council, including at meetings attended by Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. By the summer of 2002, the War Council legal team, led by Cheney’s consigliere, David Addington, had developed a legal rationale for redefining torture so narrowly that virtually any tactic that did not result in death was fair game. “For an act to constitute torture as defined in [the federal torture statute], it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee asserted in what would become an infamous legal memo rationalizing the torture of US prisoners. “For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture under [the federal torture statute], it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.” A second memo signed by Bybee gave legal justification for using a specific series of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding. “There was n
ot gonna be any deniability,” said the CIA’s Rodriguez, who was coordinating the interrogation of prisoners at the black sites. “In August of 2002, I felt I had all the authorities that I needed, all the approvals that I needed. The atmosphere in the country was different. Everybody wanted us to save American lives.” He added, “We went to the border of legality. We went to the border, but that was within legal bounds.”

  In September 2002, the congressional leadership was briefed on these specific interrogation techniques. Some Democrats, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, would later say that they were never briefed on the use of waterboarding. The CIA briefers and her Republican colleagues claimed otherwise, adding that none of the House and Senate leaders briefed on the method raised any objections to it. Pelosi later clarified that, at the time, she had been briefed on the tactic of waterboarding, but not its active use in interrogations. Whatever the truth, the torture program was now operating at full speed and, as far as the White House was concerned, with the legal backing of the US government. “Instead of co-opting these [al Qaeda] operatives and bringing them to our side, we used SERE methodologies, which are purely enemy methodologies,” recalled Nance. “Taking those and inverting them and then taking them way past the safety margins...completely breaks the moral fiber of anyone who raises their hand in oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States.”