A Tortured ReportStephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn
December 22, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 15
For most of last week, the report on enhanced interrogations produced by Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence dominated headlines. To the extent that there was a debate at all, it was one-sided. News coverage routinely described the findings as the “Senate torture report,” often failing even to note that it was written exclusively by Democratic staff or account for the differences between techniques used as part of the CIA program and abuses committed outside of that program.
We have no doubts that there were abuses. And some of those abuses, if they happened as the report describes, are horrifying and inexcusable. There is no justification, ever, for pureeing the meal of a detainee and inserting the liquefied results in his anus. This isn’t interrogation, it’s torture.
But approved techniques, including some that test the limits of what ought to be morally permissible, were effective. The report’s attempt to demonstrate otherwise is entirely unpersuasive, and its case is marked by the kind of breathtaking intellectual dishonesty that should make us all wary of trusting its conclusions.
Consider the case of Abu Zubaydah. The Feinstein report claims that Zubaydah’s identification of Jose Padilla, the “dirty bomb” plotter: (1) was of little value, (2) came before he was subjected to enhanced interrogation, and (3) helps prove that EITs were ineffective. Only one of those claims is true, and even that’s true only on a technicality.
The Feinstein report says “there was significant intelligence in CIA databases acquired prior to—and independ-ently of—the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program to fully identify Jose Padilla as a terrorist threat and to disrupt any terrorist plotting associated with him.”
In support of this claim, it relies on an email from February 10, 2004, from the chief of the Abu Zubaydah Task Force. The report quotes this language from the email: “AZ [Zubaydah] never really gave ‘this is the plot’ type of information. He claimed every plot/operation he had knowledge of and/or was working on was only preliminary. (Padilla and the dirty bomb plot was prior to enhanced and he never really gave us actionable intel to get them).” The “them” referenced in the email are Padilla and his accomplice, the ex-Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.
As presented, the email bolsters the case the authors of the report want to make. But they don’t quote the entire email. And the rest of the email Democrats cite in support of their argument actually invalidates it.
The CIA’s response to the Feinstein report tells us the former head of the Abu Zubaydah Task Force went on to write that Padilla’s “identification would not have been made without the lead from Abu Zubaydah.” The CIA response also notes that the CIA officer explained in the same email that after Zubaydah had been subjected to EITs, he “became one of our most valuable sources on [sic] information on al Qa’ida players.” The CIA summarizes the rest of the officer’s email, saying the officer “backs up that assertion” regarding Zubaydah’s importance “with a detailed recitation of concrete ways in which Zubaydah facilitated interrogations of other detainees by providing specific information concerning their identities and plans.”
Why, if the authors of the Feinstein report wanted a serious examination of the value of Abu Zubaydah and the effectiveness of EITs, would they quote only the part of the email that supports their case? The question answers itself.
More to the point, how many times in the 500-page executive summary released to the public did they engage in such sleight-of-hand? We did not keep a running tally, but the answer is clear: many.
Was the CIA playing games, too? That’s not only possible, but likely. There’s little doubt that the agency sometimes exaggerated the results of its interrogations and, in the case of the “dirty bomb” plot, used old information for too long. (Padilla’s “dirty bomb” plotting, for instance, was aspirational, and he’d moved on to more realistic targeting.)
But the way to resolve those conflicts is to be more transparent, not less. Once the decision was made to release details of the program—something that deserved more debate than it received—it was incumbent upon the committee to provide as much information as possible to the public.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the authors cherry-picked information to make their case and set aside virtually everything that complicated it.
The Feinstein report goes to great lengths to distance top Democrats in both houses of Congress from the interrogation techniques and any knowledge of them. And while the report makes public reams of internal CIA documents that the authors believe help their case, the records of congressional briefings—CIA records and committee accounts—are largely withheld. Why is that? If Republicans and the CIA are to be believed, it’s because those Democrats were informed about and supportive of the EIT program, in some cases enthusiastically supportive, until it was made public.
During a press conference on April 23, 2009, Nancy Pelosi claimed that she had not been briefed about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. “We were not, I repeat, were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used,” she insisted.
Pelosi’s claim has been the source of much contention over the years, with the CIA releasing a detailed timeline based on what it says were contemporaneous notes indicating that Pelosi’s claims were false. And Porter Goss, who at the time of the briefing was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and later served as CIA director, directly challenged Pelosi’s account. “The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four (including Pelosi), were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists; we understood what the CIA was doing; we gave the CIA our bipartisan support; we gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.”
The Feinstein report refers to the CIA memorandum about what was briefed, but only to point out that CIA leadership cut a sentence from the draft memorandum about the meeting indicating that House leaders present had asked about the legality of the programs. Fair criticism. But why not release the entire memo? And other memos—from both the congressional oversight committees and the CIA—detailing what was briefed and when? The full memorandum about the briefing for Pelosi makes clear that her protests seven years later were false. No wonder it wasn’t made public.
Similarly, we understand that retiring senator Jay Rockefeller, who served as chairman of the intelligence committee, repeatedly voiced his backing of enhanced interrogations when he was briefed. And his public statements would seem to support those claims. In an interview with CNN on March 2, 2003, shortly after the apprehension of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Rockefeller said KSM would be “grilled by us. I’m sure we’ll be proper with him, but I’m sure we’ll be very, very tough with him.” Rockefeller noted that “there are presidential memorandums that prescribe and allow certain measures to be taken, but we have to be careful.” He added that getting information from KSM “will save American lives” and warned “we have no business not getting that information.” When Wolf Blitzer asked him directly if the United States could outsource the interrogation to an ally that permits torture, Rockefeller said: “I wouldn’t take anything off the table where he is concerned, because this is the man who has killed hundreds and hundreds of Americans over the last 10 years.”
Would Rockefeller have answered this way if he had been either unaware of the EITs or opposed to them? Unlikely. But releasing the congressional briefing records would provide additional clarity.
Surely the committee, having just made public hundreds of pages of details of one of the most sensitive CIA programs in U.S. history, cannot argue that doing so would jeopardize national security. So what are they hiding?
The Obama administration’s response to all of this has been disappointing but hardly surprising. Obama has abandoned his pre-presidential claims that EITs never produced valuable intelligence. And in persistent questioning from the press corps on the effectiveness of EITs, White House spokesmen clearly sought to allow for the possibility that the techniques yielded valuable information.
CIA director John Brennan, during a question-and-answer session following a nationally televised speech on EITs at CIA headquarters on December 11, was ambivalent. He listed areas in which the CIA and the Feinstein report “part ways” and included the effectiveness of EITs. “Our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. But let me be clear: We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.”
One cheer for that, we suppose. We remain convinced that the CIA’s detention and interrogation program produced valuable information, and we have little doubt about the cause and effect relationship between the use of authorized techniques and the provision of that information. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a sociopathic genius, gave CIA analysts hours and hours of tutorials on al Qaeda. Analysts found these sessions essential to understanding the group and its methods and objectives. That is indisputable. Neither the facts nor common sense suggests that he would have done this voluntarily. Other detainees provided critical information on the identities and whereabouts of senior al Qaeda leaders—refusing to cooperate before EITs and choosing to do so afterwards. Brennan would have us believe this was coincidence. We believe it was not.
We recognize that people of good will have strong differences about the detention and interrogation program authorized under the previous administration. But there shouldn’t be much disagreement that the U.S. government needs a robust detention and interrogation program.
We no longer have one.
The Obama administration has decided it’s easier to kill suspected terrorists than it is to capture and interrogate them. And that’s probably true. It is easier. But there are many costs to such a policy.
The U.S. intelligence community has huge gaps in its knowledge of al Qaeda and its branches—gaps that are wider today than they were five years ago because we are not learning directly from the enemy. And that’s dangerous.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/tortured-report_821202.html
