* * *
The second point is that the detention and interrogation program was not some rogue CIA operation that might be depicted in a Hollywood movie. CIA proposed the program but undertook it only with the explicit approval of the White House.
In a conversation with Senator Feinstein after her staff completed its report on the program, she was surprised when Director Brennan and I told her that President Bush had been aware of the program. After the Senate committee spent tens of millions of dollars and four years on its investigation, its leader was unaware that the president of the United States had signed off on the program. Her staff had gone through millions of documents, but somehow no one had thought to read President Bush’s memoirs, where he states clearly that he approved the detention and interrogation program.
CIA also briefed Congress on the program—initially only the leadership of the intelligence committees and then later the entire committees. There were roughly forty separate briefings with Congress. When the leadership was briefed (eight different members over time), there was no opposition to the program (one member wanted to make sure that the White House had indeed approved the program). There was either approval or in some cases concern that CIA was not going far enough in trying to obtain information from detainees. When CIA in early 2004 temporarily stopped the use of EITs because it wanted to ensure that the program was still legal in the face of changes in the law (which the Agency did several times), Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, scolded the Agency for being risk averse.
I believe the reason members of Congress reacted the way they did was because they understood the threat picture. They were briefed on it regularly. They felt the threat from al Qa‘ida as acutely as did the Bush administration. Senator Rockefeller told Wolf Blitzer on CNN following the capture of KSM, “He’ll be grilled by us… I’m sure we’ll be very very tough with him… He does have the information. Getting that information will save American lives. We have no business not getting that information.”
And Senator Feinstein herself, who was not one of the members of Congress initially briefed on the program, said in 2002, “I have no doubt that had it not been for 9/11… that it would have been business as usual. It took that real attack, I think, to kind of shiver our timbers enough to let us know that the threat is profound, that we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.”
The third point is about the legality of the program. Were EITs legal? As the review by DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility showed, whether the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (which is charged with providing legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies) made the right legal call at the time is open to debate. It is hard to know with any certainty what the Supreme Court would have said if the matter had come before it. But what is very important to remember is that, at the time the EITs were being used, the Department of Justice told CIA that they were legal. Period. Full stop. The techniques, including waterboarding, were deemed by the Department of Justice not to be a violation of domestic law or US treaty obligations. They were deemed NOT to be torture. So, from a legal perspective, to call what CIA officers did at the time “torture” is wrong and does those officers a great disservice.
And the legal judgment by the Department of Justice was not just a one-time decision. This judgment was reinforced again and again through multiple legal opinions—many of them sought by the Agency as the legislative landscape changed and senior CIA leaders worked to assure that the Department of Justice and White House agreed that CIA and its officers were operating within the law.
The fourth point is about effectiveness. There is no doubt in my mind that the enhanced techniques were effective. Why do I believe this? Because of the SSCI report and the Agency’s response to it, my last months as deputy director involved my studying this issue in great detail. I read case study after case study in which detainees, before being subjected to EITs, provided limited, vague, and general information, and after being subjected to EITs became cooperative, providing much more specific and detailed information.
The best example is that of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. KSM’s demeanor and cooperativeness before and after enhanced interrogation techniques could not have been greater. Before EITs, he was fiercely defiant and unwilling to talk. After the techniques, he was cooperative and willing to talk truthfully and answer almost any question asked of him.
The result was a treasure trove of critically important information. KSM provided information regarding a number of plots he had been working on prior to his capture. One was a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. After he became cooperative, KSM revealed al Qa‘ida’s longstanding interest in bringing down suspension bridges in the United States. He specified the methods of destroying such bridges that al Qa‘ida taught its recruits. And, most important, he said he had instructed Iyman Faris, a naturalized American citizen from Kashmir, to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. As a result of KSM’s information, Faris was confronted by the FBI. He was eventually arrested, indicted, and convicted on terrorism charges. He is serving a twenty-year sentence.
KSM also told us about his close associate Ammar al-Baluchi, who had been working with KSM on a number of attacks before KSM’s capture. After KSM’s capture, Baluchi assumed responsibility for a planned attack on Heathrow Airport and for multiple attacks in Karachi. He was within days of completing preparations for the Karachi attacks when he was captured by Pakistani authorities. I am convinced that KSM never would have told us about these plots without the use of harsh techniques.
Then there is the Bin Ladin operation. The first person to tell us about Abu Ahmed, the person who harbored Bin Ladin at Abbottabad, was a terrorist who was being detained by another country. This led us to ask our detainees about Abu Ahmed, and both CIA detainees subjected to EITs and those not subjected to EITs talked about him. But there is no doubt in my mind that information generated by EITs led us to push Abu Ahmed to the top of the list of leads we were pursuing on Bin Ladin. The most specific information on Abu Ahmed came from a detainee after he was subjected to EITs. And it was KSM and Abu Faraj’s dissembling about Abu Ahmed—after they were compliant as a result of EITs and during a time when they were honestly answering literally hundreds of other questions—that really put the spotlight on Abu Ahmed. If they were telling the truth about so many other matters but going out of their way to lie about Abu Ahmed, he must be really important, we figured.
To put it bluntly: without the overall detention program, we would not have caught Bin Ladin the way we did. The detention program was a necessary condition for the success of the Bin Ladin operation. And the enhanced interrogation program resulted in our putting more resources on the lead than we would have otherwise. Whether EITs were essential or not, I do not know. But they certainly helped focus attention on the man who would eventually take us to Bin Ladin’s doorstep.
In addition to information that disrupted specific plots and brought many senior al Qa‘ida operatives to justice, detainees—particularly KSM—also provided a large amount of information on the organization itself—allowing analysts to better understand al Qa‘ida, and giving our operatives clues to what would undermine the group and its capabilities. Indeed, more than 70 percent of the human intelligence information in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on al Qa‘ida was obtained from detainees. And nearly half the footnotes in the 9/11 Commission Report indicate that specific information had come from CIA detainees.
The fifth point is about necessity. While effective, were EITs necessary to get this critically important information or were there other, perhaps less harsh, ways to do so? Although the CIA officers on the front lines in this program believe that EITs were absolutely necessary, the Agency, including when I was acting director, has repeatedly said that this is something we will never know for sure. In retrospect, I believe this refrain is too cute by half. Yes, of course, necessi
ty is an unknowable thing. But it is, I think, almost an irrelevant point as necessity is almost always unknowable, including with regard to tough national security decisions. Was detonating atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary to force Japan’s timely surrender in World War II? We will never know for sure. Was Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus necessary for the North to win the Civil War? We will never know for sure. As with these issues, historians will debate the necessity of EITs for quite a long time, and they should indeed do so.
This brings us to the last point. While the techniques were legal, effective, and at least thought to be necessary, were they the right thing to do? Was it moral to subject another human being to harsh interrogation techniques—even though they were considered not to be torture by the Department of Justice? This is a question on which reasonable people can disagree.
The Senate report on EITs gives the reader the impression that no one in the Bush administration ever considered this difficult question. That is wrong; it was considered. Senior CIA officials at the time knew, with certainty, for example, that they would face tough criticism someday because of the harshness of the techniques but they thought them necessary to protect the country. And, at one meeting of the president’s national security team in early 2003, the Agency’s senior lawyer, Scott Muller, raised the question of whether people were comfortable with EITs given the administration’s public statements that the United States was treating detainees humanely. After the meeting, Muller wrote, “Everyone in the room evinced understanding of the issue. CIA’s past and ongoing use of enhanced interrogation techniques was reaffirmed and in no way drawn into question.”
When it comes to EITs, there are two key aspects to the morality question. Is it moral to subject other human beings, no matter how evil they are, to harsh interrogation techniques, particularly when done by the country that stands for human dignity and human rights in the world? At the same time, what is the morality of not doing so? What is the morality of believing that, if you do not use the harsh techniques, you may well be making a decision that leads to the death of Americans in a terrorist attack that you could have otherwise prevented? These are complicated and extremely tough difficult questions. Some people make them sound easy. They are wrong. The Senate report did not, in any way, address this most difficult of issues.
* * *
People frequently ask me what I would have done had I been the decision-maker, had I been the director of CIA at the time. The honest answer is that I do not know. And I don’t believe those who say that they know with certainty that they would have said no. I think it is very difficult for those who were not in the situation at that time to know what they would have done when confronted by the same set of facts with which President Bush, Condi Rice, and George Tenet were presented—because the situation was so unusual. I think that people who say that they know exactly what they would have done are not being honest with themselves.
Shortly after leaving government, I gave an interview to the television news show 60 Minutes in which my views on this complex subject were boiled down to a couple of sentences. I said in the interview that the EITs were not torture but that the techniques were inconsistent with American values and that for that reason I didn’t think they should have been done. As is often the case with television, a simple sound bite cannot convey a highly nuanced view.
In the interview I was referring to one specific technique—waterboarding. I was not referring to the entire suite of techniques. I believe that one has to have the morality discussion about each individual technique, and that is exactly what the Bush administration did. After CIA presented a range of possible techniques to the White House, National Security Advisor Rice told us one of the techniques crossed the White House’s moral line and it was not to be used. The judgments on the morality of individual techniques will, of course, vary from person to person.
I am personally troubled by waterboarding. When I served as acting director and deputy director, I made decisions about right and wrong in a very simple way. I would say yes to a CIA operation only if I believed I could, as an American, be proud that CIA had conducted the operation if it leaked and was on the front page of the Washington Post. With this litmus test, I believe the less severe techniques were perfectly appropriate. For example, I could in good conscience tell the American people that grabbing senior al Qa‘ida terrorists by the collar when they were not paying attention during an interrogation session, or even denying them sleep for prolonged periods, were the right things to do. At the same time, I have doubts that I could in good conscience tell the American people that waterboarding someone was the right thing to do. So in terms of the techniques, I believe—but again I cannot say for sure—that I would have drawn the line in a different place, all the time knowing that others, using the same litmus test, might draw it in yet another place.
But here is my moral dilemma. Based on my review of the program—done as I oversaw the Agency’s response to the Senate report—I believe that waterboarding was one of the two most effective of the all the harsh techniques (the other being sleep deprivation). That complicates things. Doesn’t it?
* * *
After months of wrangling among the White House, CIA, and the Senate Intelligence Committee over how much of the committee’s executive summary could be released without putting national security at risk, the report was finally made public on December 9, 2014.
The press coverage was as ugly as it was predictable. Most of the attention was devoted to the most graphic descriptions of activities at some of the secret prisons. Little notice was given to the fact that most of the examples of mistreatment were those few cases where CIA officers had gone beyond what the Justice Department had authorized. In all these cases, CIA reported the mistreatment to its own inspector general, to the Department of Justice, and to Congress a decade before. Each had been investigated by DOJ—twice. The Senate report gave the impression that such mistreatment was widespread, occurred throughout the eight years of the program, and had been uncovered by Senate investigators. All of these impressions are wrong.
What was especially troublesome to me was the fact that most new organizations paid scant attention, if any, to either the report of the SSCI minority or to the CIA report—both of which debunked much of what the SSCI majority staff had written, most important its judgments about the efficacy of the program and the honesty with which CIA spoke about the program to the rest of the executive branch and to Congress. In short, most of the media, including reporters, commentators, and editorial writers, accepted the Senate’s findings as the truth—without any questioning. It was not the fourth estate’s finest hour.
In addition, there was little interest on the part of the media in two key issues that were not discussed in the Senate report—the circumstances that led the Bush administration and CIA to believe that harsh techniques were necessary or the lengthy paper trail that showed that the White House, Justice Department, and Congress were fully briefed on it. A history of CIA’s interactions with the rest of the executive branch and with Congress on the issue of EITs that was released by the CIA at the same time as the committee’s report was completely ignored by the media.
A number of senior CIA alumni—notably former director Mike Hayden, former deputy director John McLaughlin, former senior attorney John Rizzo, and former clandestine service chief Jose Rodriguez were active in the media trying to set the record straight against a narrative that Senate staffers had been preparing the press to hear for months (the committee staff actually provided the report to reporters several days before its release so that the reporters could have their first pieces ready to go following Senator’s press conference on the issue). Other former officials, led by George Tenet, created a highly trafficked website called CIASAVEDLIVES.com that brought together in one place key documents about the program. They continue to add materials to the website.
For their part, the American people shrugged the whole thing off. In polls
taken after the Senate report was released and after days of the media hyping its findings, the majority of Americans said that they supported the use of harsh interrogation techniques in order to protect the lives of their fellow citizens. This view was consistent across a number of polls that were conducted.
* * *
The sun was setting on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It was late afternoon, and I was at a beach party in Naples, Florida, where my in-laws live. It was my first Christmas holiday after retiring from CIA. It was my first family trip in years without a team of security officers and communications officers. I was not thinking about CIA, national security, or any aspect of my past life.
I tend not to like parties because I do not enjoy reception-style small talk. But on this particular evening, I was introduced to someone quite interesting. One of the guests at the party was a longtime constitutional law professor from one of nation’s most elite law schools. He had taught constitutional law for decades. Knowing that I had recently participated in President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, the professor asked me a number of questions. He was very interested in the National Security Agency’s telephone metadata program and our group’s recommendations regarding it.
But I was interested in his views on enhanced interrogation techniques, which were also in the news as a result of the brewing controversy over the SSCI report. In one of the most interesting conversations I have ever had on the issue, the professor told me that he thought some of the techniques were indeed unlawful and that the Department of Justice had erred in its judgment. He also told me that he thought that many of the techniques were inconsistent with America’s support for human dignity and America’s leadership role in the world. And so, he concluded, he was opposed to the use of the techniques. Then came the punch line. He said “Opposed, that is, unless I were the president of the United States, and someone walked into my office and said this is the only way to prevent a massive terrorist attack that might kill hundreds or thousands of Americans. In that case, if the decision were placed on my shoulders, I would say go for it. And then I would stand up and tell the American people the decision I had made and why I made it and accept the consequences.”
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 28
