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Ex-FBI Chief Louis Freeh: 9/11 Put US, and CIA, on 'War Footing'
Thursday, December 11, 2014 06:42 AM
By: Elliot Jager
A main problem with the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program is that it lacks context, writes former FBI Director Louis Freeh in The Wall Street Journal.
The Sept. 11, 2001, the al-Qaida attacks on the U.S. homeland were the equivalent to the Dec 7, 1941, strike on Pearl Harbor. "President George W. Bush and Congress put America on a war footing," writes Freeh.
Congress passed and Bush signed into law an Authorization for Use of Military Force that granted Bush the power to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States."
The CIA's interrogation methods flowed directly from this resolution.
It "was not some rogue operation" but an "initiative approved by the president, the national security adviser and the U.S. attorney general, backed by a legal opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel."
Moreover, senior members of the Senate and House intelligence committees were fully briefed. There is no indication to the contrary. There can be no claim that lawmakers only belatedly heard about the program, writes Freeh.
The report also lacks context because no senior official of the CIA was interviewed and the reasons given for this omission are not credible.
It is legitimate to debate whether the program was effective from an intelligence point of view and whether similar measures should be employed in the future. "What is decidedly unfair is to belatedly attack the brave and dedicated men and women and their leaders at the CIA who had the nation's highest political and legal authorizations for this program," Freeh concludes.
Freeh headed the FBI from September 1993 to June 2001.
In a 2005 Wall Street Journal op-ed, he argued that the 9/11 Commission should have investigated whether Mohamed Atta could have been stopped from carrying out the World Trade Center attack had U.S. military intelligence been permitted to share what it knew about him — in January-February of 2000 — with the FBI.
