The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (35 page)

I believe that the SSCI staff that produced the committee’s study did a great disservice to the committee, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the country. It appears to me that the staffers wrote the report that they thought their political masters wanted to see. Their prosecutor’s brief was intended to figuratively go for the death penalty. I believe they fell in love with material that appeared to confirm what they wanted to see and found ways of explaining away facts that did not fit their narrative.

Senator Feinstein also bears significant responsibility for the many flaws in the report. She made her very strong views on the appropriateness of CIA’s program known to her staff—a step that undoubtedly made it difficult for those writing a report to be objective. This is an error that even the most junior of managers
of analysis at CIA would never make. And Senator Feinstein was told on numerous occasions about the serious flaws in the report—including by me several times. At one meeting, I walked her through specific examples in the report of errors of fact, errors of logic, and errors of context (the latter situation is where the presented facts are accurate but other missing facts are necessary to understand the issue). And I pointed out that the examples were just the tip of the iceberg. I told her the report was riddled with such mistakes.

Errors of fact: Page six of the report’s Findings and Conclusions reads “The CIA restricted access to information about the program from members of the Committee beyond the chairman and vice chairman until September 6, 2006…” Wrong. The CIA did not restrict access; the White House did. There is also an error of context here: Nowhere does the report state that some of the committee leaders who were briefed, including SSCI Chairman Pat Roberts and HPSCI Chairman Porter Goss, supported limiting knowledge of the program only to the leadership. They did not want their members briefed either.

Errors of logic: The report’s very first finding reads: “The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” Here is the first fact provided to support that judgment: “… seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA custody.” Hmm. Does that mean that thirty-two of thirty-nine did produce intelligence? Sounds like an argument that EITs worked, not the other way around.

Errors of context: In arguing that the CIA impeded congressional oversight of the program, the report states “The CIA did not brief the leadership of the Senate Select Committee on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques until September 2002, after the techniques had been approved and used.” That is true, and it sounds
bad. But the report conveniently left out some other interesting facts that shed a different light on this issue. The report does not say that EITs were first used on Abu Zubaydah in August 2002,
while the Congress was on summer recess
. The HPSCI leadership was briefed on September 4, and the SSCI leadership was briefed on September 27. Hardly withholding information from Congress.

These multiple types of errors occur throughout the report’s thousands of pages. Most of the errors are ones that even a smart high school student would not make. Many, including me, have said publicly that the report is deeply flawed. These are the reasons why. The report is not
the
history of the program the Senator Feinstein has said it is; it is one of the worst pieces of analysis that this thirty-three-year veteran of analysis at CIA has ever seen.

* * *

Never has a program generated such controversy and debate. Was it legal or was it torture? Was it effective or not? Was it necessary or not? Was it the right thing to do or not? Given that the program was one of the CIA’s main responses to 9/11 and to the further threat posed by Bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida, I would like to weigh in on the subject.

The first point to make is that we are actually talking about two different programs. One is the detainee program—CIA’s establishment of secret prisons around the world where we held high-value detainees. And the second is the use of enhanced interrogation techniques—harsh measures—to extract information that detainees were otherwise unwilling to provide. This is an important distinction because you can have the detention program without the EIT program. To merge the two programs in a report is doing history a disservice. Each needs to be addressed separately.

The second point is that context is everything. In order to thoughtfully consider the program, it is very important to understand what the key decision-makers at the time—President Bush,
National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and Director Tenet—were facing every day.

My last official action aboard Air Force One on 9/11 was to brief President Bush regarding an intelligence report that George Tenet’s staff at CIA had just sent me. While the credibility of the source was unknown, the information itself was stunning but believable given what had occurred fewer than twelve hours earlier. The report, provided to us by one of the many foreign intelligence services with which we work closely, indicated that al Qa‘ida had prepared a second wave of attacks. This possibility was already in everyone’s mind, but here it was in black and white. The president read the report very closely, handed it back to me, and simply said, “Thank you, Michael.”

This report began what became an avalanche—literally thousands—of intelligence reports in the months following 9/11 that strongly indicated that al Qa‘ida would hit us again in the homeland.

Some of these reports talked about the possible use of weapons of mass destruction by al Qa‘ida—chemical weapons, biological weapons, and even crude nuclear devices. This too was believable, as it matched pre-9/11 reporting on the group’s interest in such weapons and was consistent with post-9/11 reporting about Bin Ladin meeting with Pakistani nuclear scientists, and with what we were learning from now having access to al Qa‘ida’s former training camps in Afghanistan. What we were finding there included hands-on research into poisons and crude chemical weapons and, most worrisome, work on producing anthrax, a deadly biological weapon. Just a small amount of anthrax—a single gram—contains a hundred million lethal doses. If produced and disseminated effectively, a small amount of anthrax released in the fast-moving air of a subway system could kill hundreds of thousands of people.

It was the longest sustained period of significant threat reporting
that I experienced in my fifteen years of working the al Qa‘ida issue. We were certain we were going to be attacked again. During the five-minute walk from Tenet’s “downtown” office in the Old Executive Office Building to the West Wing of the White House, Tenet and I, aware of all the intelligence, would routinely ask each other, “Is today the day we get hit again?” I seriously thought a nuclear detonation in New York or Washington was a possibility—to the point of telling my wife (we were living near Dulles Airport at the time, some thirty miles west of D.C.) that if such an attack were to happen in Washington to put the kids in the car and start driving west and not stop. It was surreal.

This reporting—reinforced by Richard Reid’s attempt to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in late December 2001—put tremendous pressure on the White House in general and on CIA in particular to prevent another attack. Most important, it was impossible to forget for an instant that three thousand people had been killed in a little over an hour by only nineteen terrorists. And now we had reporting that another such tragedy, or even worse, might be right around the corner.

This deluge of threat reporting coincided with the capture of senior al Qa‘ida operative Abu Zubaydah in March 2002. Zubaydah had extensive knowledge of al Qa‘ida personnel and operations. While briefly cooperative, Zubaydah, under standard interrogation techniques, later became defiant and evasive. It was clear that he was holding back information—information that could foil attacks and possibly save lives.

It was in this context that professional intelligence officers in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center came to the leadership of the Agency and recommended using a set of harsh interrogation techniques. In short, they walked into the director’s office and said, “If we do not use these techniques, Americans are going to die.” This statement was not hyperbole. It was exactly what our officers thought, and
there was good reason to think it. Once convinced, George Tenet had a similar conversation with the White House, and the interrogation program was born.

Where did the idea originate for using the particular set of techniques that was the program—attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, insects, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding? They came from two psychologists—contractors working for the Agency—who helped train US servicemen to resist harsh interrogations if captured on the battlefield and who, in providing such training, learned that certain techniques were effective in getting people to a state of compliance in responding to questions. These were the techniques that the contractors suggested to CIA when it became clear that the most hardened and ideologically committed al Qa‘ida operatives would not cooperate.

* * *

The CIA detention program—the creation of our own prisons, known as “black sites”—came somewhat earlier. We and our allies were capturing individuals we believed were aware of future plots, as well as the whereabouts of other senior leaders who were plotting against America. The Department of Defense refused to take them—so we had only two options at the time: bring them to the United States and put them into a judicial process, or turn them over to their countries of origin. In neither case could we guarantee that we would get intelligence from them. So we proposed a new option: create our own detention system, where we could ask them any question we wanted at any time. We could also monitor them continuously to acquire any intelligence they might disclose in conversations with other detainees. The sites were set up with the knowledge and cooperation of the host governments, who wanted our thanks, some financial support, and our silence. While we delivered
on the first two promises, we, as a country, were not able to deliver on the third.

* * *

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.