|
History > 2014 > USA > C.I.A. (I)
Key Moments in the Torture Debate | The New
York Times 10 December 2014
The release of the Senate Intelligence
Committee report
on C.I.A. interrogation tactics
added a new chapter to the national
conversation
on the government’s use of torture.
Produced by:
Emily B. Hager, Adam
Freelander, Quynhanh Do and Mona El-Naggar
Read the story here: http://nyti.ms/1vLetkm
Watch more videos at:
http://nytimes.com/video
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP1WaW7YK2s&list=UUqnbDFdCpuN8CMEg0VuEBqA&index=23
John McCain Responds to Torture Report | The
New York Times 9 December 2014
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona,
commended the release of the Senate torture
report,
saying “the truth is sometimes a hard pill
to swallow,”
but the American people are “entitled” to
it.
Produced by: AP
Read the story here:
http://nyti.ms/1vLetkm
Watch more videos at:
http://nytimes.com/video
YouTube > NYT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUVmilYp3Ec&list=UUqnbDFdCpuN8CMEg0VuEBqA&index=27
Prosecute
Torturers and Their Bosses
DEC. 21, 2014
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring
to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an
official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of
videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture
techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not
lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not
filed.
Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to
looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The
nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms,
legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false
patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest
levels of government on down.
Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page
executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any
lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new
revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were
waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived,
threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was
chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”
These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines
torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or
suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the
international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires
prosecution of any acts of torture.
So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these
acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these
claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what
they intended to do was illegal.
In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed
to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be
prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to
prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they
shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically
driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a
legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as
proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the
report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good
faith.
No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the
report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held
accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and
independent criminal investigation.
The American Civil Liberties Union is to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a
letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate
what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law,
to commit torture and other serious crimes.”
The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held
accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it
is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new
investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a
former president.
But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney;
Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George
Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who
drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that
could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who
ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the
torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s
executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one
notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or
actively defended the indefensible. They cannot even point to any results:
Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no
time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror
attack. And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully
held.”
Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring
that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke
torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the
distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the
crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by
and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their
actions.
A version of this editorial appears in print on December 22,
2014, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Prosecute Torturers
and Their Bosses.
Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses, NYT,
21.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/
prosecute-torturers-and-their-bosses.html
Panel to
Advise Against Penalty
for
C.I.A.’s Computer Search
DEC. 19, 2014
The New York
Times
By MATT APUZZO
and MARK
MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — A
panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer
network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were
looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone
involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials.
The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were
singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering
and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying
that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan,
the C.I.A. director.
While effectively rejecting the most significant conclusions of the inspector
general’s report, the panel, appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three
C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency, is still expected to
criticize agency missteps that contributed to the fight with Congress.
But its decision not to recommend anyone for disciplinary action is likely to
anger members of the Intelligence Committee, who have accused the C.I.A. of
trampling on the independence of Congress and interfering with its investigation
of agency wrongdoing. The computer searches occurred late last year while the
committee was finishing an excoriating report on the agency’s detention and
interrogation program.
The computer search raised questions about the separation of powers and caused
one of the most public rifts in years between the nation’s intelligence agencies
and the Senate oversight panel, which conducts most of its business in secret.
It led to an unusually heated and public rebuke by Senator Dianne Feinstein, the
California Democrat who is the committee’s chairwoman.
Three C.I.A. technology officers and two lawyers had faced possible punishment.
In their defense, some pointed to documents — including notes of a phone call
with Mr. Brennan — that they said indicated that the director supported their
actions, according to interviews with a half dozen current and former government
officials and others briefed on the case.
The panel’s chairman is Evan Bayh, a Democratic former senator from Indiana who
served on the Intelligence Committee. Its other outside member is Robert F.
Bauer, who served as White House counsel during President Obama’s first term.
The panel’s specific conclusions are still being finalized, and it could be
weeks before they present a report to the C.I.A. But officials said that the
five agency employees had been informed that the panel would recommend that they
not be disciplined.
The results of such investigations, known as accountability boards, are not
normally released. But given the public nature of the dispute, it is expected
that some of the conclusions will eventually become public.
“The process is ongoing,” said Dean Boyd, the C.I.A. spokesman. “We haven’t seen
what it says, so it’s impossible to comment on it.”
When the controversy over the search erupted, Mr. Brennan offered a vigorous
defense of his agency. He later apologized after the C.I.A.’s inspector general
concluded that the agency had improperly monitored the committee’s activities.
The inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers had read the emails of
agency investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department
based on false information.
Mr. Brennan has enraged senators by refusing to answer questions posed by the
Intelligence Committee about who at the C.I.A. authorized the computer
intrusion. Doing so, he said, could compromise the accountability board’s
investigation.
“What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” said Senator Carl
Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, said
in an interview last week. “They haven’t answered those basic questions.”
The computer controversy erupted last December amid a dispute between the C.I.A.
and committee Democrats and staff members over the conclusions of the torture
report, which was released last week. As it does today, the C.I.A. disputed the
report’s findings that brutal interrogation tactics yielded no crucial
intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks. During a committee hearing, Senator
Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, revealed the existence of a previously unknown
internal C.I.A. report that he said backed up the committee’s findings.
“If this is true,” Mr. Udall said, “this raises fundamental questions about why
a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the
committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee
study.”
By then, agency officials had already suspected that committee investigators had
found the internal review, which was ordered in 2009 by Leon E. Panetta, then
the C.I.A. director, and has come to be known as the “Panetta review.” Working
for years from the basement of a C.I.A. facility in North Virginia, Senate
investigators reviewed millions of digital files related to the interrogation
program. But the Panetta review was not supposed to be one of them, and agency
officials suspected that Senate investigators had somehow gained access to parts
of the C.I.A.’s computer network they had been prohibited from searching.
C.I.A. officers searched their logs to see if they had inadvertently given the
Panetta review to the Senate. When they determined they had not, officials
brought the matter to Mr. Brennan, who authorized what he has called “a limited
review” to figure out if Senate staff members had obtained the documents.
The inspector general’s report included details of a conversation last December,
when Mr. Brennan called the home of one of the C.I.A. lawyers under
investigation. According to two people with knowledge of the inspector general’s
findings, the lawyer wrote a memorandum about the conversation that said Mr.
Brennan told him he needed to get to the bottom of the matter.
Much of the dispute between the Senate and the C.I.A. revolves around what rules
governed the computer system used by Senate investigators as they wrote their
report. The C.I.A. made the documents available to the investigators and created
a search function that allowed them to locate documents based on key words. The
rules for accessing the network were established in a series of memos and
letters, not one formal document.
A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Panel to Advise Against Penalty for
C.I.A.’s Computer Search.
Panel to Advise Against Penalty for C.I.A.’s Computer Search,
NYT, 19.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/us/politics/
panel-to-advise-against-penalty-for-cia-computer-search.html
Brennan
Draws on Bond With Obama
in Backing C.I.A.
DEC. 14, 2014
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — Just hours before he publicly responded last week to
the Senate Intelligence Committee report accusing the Central Intelligence
Agency of torture and deceit, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A.’s director, stopped by
the White House to meet with President Obama.
Ostensibly, he was there for an intelligence briefing. But the messages
delivered later that day by the White House and Mr. Brennan were synchronized,
even down to similar wording, and the larger import of the well-timed visit was
hardly a classified secret: After six years of partnership, the president was
standing by the embattled spy chief even as fellow Democrats called for his
resignation.
That’s not to say there was no friction between the West Wing and the C.I.A.’s
Langley, Va., headquarters after the release of the scorching report. Irritated
advisers to Mr. Obama believe Mr. Brennan made a bad situation worse by battling
Democrats on the committee over the report during the past year. Some who
considered Mr. Brennan the president’s heat shield against the agency when he
worked in the White House now worry that since being appointed director, he has
“gone native,” as they put it.
But in the 67 years since the C.I.A. was founded, few presidents have had as
close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama has forged with Mr.
Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the
debate over the nation’s war with terrorist organizations, as well as the
agency’s own struggle to balance security and liberty. And the result is a
president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it.
“The quandary that Brennan faces is similar to the quandary that Obama faces,”
said David Cole, a national security scholar and law professor at Georgetown
University. “Both are personally opposed to what went on and deeply troubled by
what went on and agree that it should never happen again. And both are
ultimately dependent on the C.I.A. for important national security services.”
Indeed, rather than give his own speech on the report’s accusations against the
C.I.A., Mr. Obama left it to Mr. Brennan to be the administration’s public face.
“It is fairly remarkable that the lead responder here is the director of the
C.I.A.,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s top counterterrorism
official during Mr. Obama’s first term and now at Dartmouth. “But that may be a
reflection of the administration’s original decision to cordon off the issue and
not have a broader partisan blood bath over the Bush White House’s involvement
in torture.”
In responding to the report, Mr. Brennan walked a line between his president and
his agency. He again embraced Mr. Obama’s decision after taking office to ban
interrogation techniques like waterboarding, nudity and sleep deprivation. But
he criticized only the “limited number” of C.I.A. officers who exceeded broad
Justice Department rules governing interrogations.
And he flatly rejected the committee’s contentions that the interrogation
program was not central to thwarting terror plots and that the agency had misled
the public about its effectiveness, although he said it was unknowable whether
detainees talked specifically because of the brutal methods.
Continue reading the main story
Current and former colleagues said Mr. Brennan had an institutional
responsibility to guard his building. “If John were retired and had a few drinks
in him, he might have a different tone to him,” said William M. Daley, Mr.
Obama’s former chief of staff. “But he can’t, nor should he, do anything other
than what he’s done.”
Changing Roles
But guarding the building is a markedly different role than Mr. Brennan played
as Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser in the first term, when he helped
recalibrate the terror war by trying to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba, and by reining in perceived excesses. “On all of the debates, he was on
our side on almost all of them,” said a former White House official, who like
others did not want to be named describing internal deliberations.
Mr. Brennan, 59, who spent much of his career as an Arabic-speaking C.I.A.
officer, has been a central figure in Mr. Obama’s world since the beginning of
his presidency. Built like a linebacker, with a hardened face, close-cropped
retreating hair and an intense gaze, Mr. Brennan looks the part of a grim
counterterrorism agent. More than one Obama aide compared him to a grizzled city
cop, and all of them testified to his herculean work ethic.
A native of North Bergen, N.J., Mr. Brennan attended Fordham University, spent
time in Indonesia and Egypt and earned a master’s degree in Middle East studies
at the University of Texas at Austin before answering a newspaper ad for the
C.I.A. He rose through the ranks to become station chief in Saudi Arabia and a
favorite of George J. Tenet, then the C.I.A. director, who made him his chief of
staff and later the agency’s deputy executive director.
“He was a pretty good analyst. He was a bright guy,” said Melvin A. Goodman, a
former C.I.A. officer who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International
Policy and a sharp critic of the agency. “But he always had a reputation of
sucking up to power and moving in the direction of power and not being able to
exercise any independence.”
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Brennan helped set up the Terrorist
Threat Integration Center, later reorganized as the National Counterterrorism
Center. But he was not made its permanent director and, disaffected with
President George W. Bush’s administration, he retired from the C.I.A. in 2005
and became a public critic.
Brought into Mr. Obama’s orbit, Mr. Brennan was the new president’s first choice
to become C.I.A. director, but that unraveled when Democrats protested his
association with Mr. Tenet’s leadership. Mr. Brennan has said he opposed
waterboarding during Mr. Bush’s tenure, but not every brutal interrogation
method. In 2007, he told The New Yorker that the United States would “be
handicapped if the C.I.A. was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of
detention and debriefing activities.”
After Mr. Obama’s election, Mr. Brennan argued that he had not been part of the
interrogation program and “opposed different aspects” of it while concurring
with others. He acknowledged that he had once argued for keeping open the secret
C.I.A. prisons but that conditions had changed and “I’ve changed my views.”
A Relationship Deepens
In the end, he had to settle for the White House job, but that may have worked
out better for him because it sealed his relationship with Mr. Obama, a former
law school instructor with little national security background. “Somebody like
the president, who doesn’t have that background, will end up gravitating to
someone who does,” Mr. Daley said.
Whether it was a would-be underwear bomber or shootings at Fort Hood, Mr.
Brennan exuded a confident competence that reassured a new president and his
staff. “I slept better knowing that John Brennan never does,” recalled David
Axelrod, then Mr. Obama’s senior adviser. Another former aide described Mr.
Obama and Mr. Brennan as “kindred spirits.”
In a low-ceilinged, windowless basement office next door to Denis R. McDonough,
who would later become White House chief of staff, Mr. Brennan was entrusted
with an outsized role running the war on terrorist groups. He managed “kill
lists” for drone strikes and could order air attacks in Yemen without getting
further approval from the president. “Brennan’s control over his area was as
complete as anyone’s control over anything in the White House,” another former
senior official said.
He came to be identified with the escalation of America’s secret war in Yemen
and the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was also an ally of
those resisting more hawkish policies in Afghanistan and Libya, and advocated
freeing wrongly held detainees at Guantánamo.
He also made it easier for the president to restrain C.I.A. adventures; he could
grill the agency as no other Obama adviser could. “He understands them
intimately and was constantly raising hard and tough questions,” said Harold
Koh, then the State Department’s legal adviser and now a Yale Law School
professor.
But neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Brennan was eager to take on the C.I.A. too often.
“The C.I.A. gets what it needs,” Mr. Obama declared at one early meeting,
according to people there. “He didn’t want them to feel like he was an enemy,”
said a former aide.
Fighting an Inquiry
Mr. Brennan likewise was protective of C.I.A. interests. He tried to excise the
word “torture” from White House documents, only to be overruled. And when Leon
E. Panetta, who became Mr. Obama’s C.I.A. director, negotiated an agreement with
the Senate Intelligence Committee for an inquiry into torture, Mr. Brennan
erupted. “It did not take long to get ugly,” Mr. Panetta recalled in his memoir.
“Brennan and I even exchanged sharp words.”
Mr. Brennan could not reverse the deal, but since becoming C.I.A. director last
year he has fought constantly with Democrats on the committee over the torture
report. During one meeting, Mr. Brennan grew red-faced and pounded his fist on a
table. “The C.I.A. is not a rogue organization,” he declared.
Relations worsened when senators accused the C.I.A. of penetrating a computer
network designated for the committee’s use and reading staff emails to find out
how the committee might have obtained an internal C.I.A. study of interrogations
ordered by Mr. Panetta when he was director. The C.I.A. inspector general
admonished five agency officers and Mr. Brennan apologized, but relations
remained raw.
Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat on the committee, said on Saturday that
he had yet to receive answers about Mr. Brennan’s exact role in the episode.
“To stonewall about getting information about what he knew and when he knew it
is really unacceptable,” he said. “Brennan has gotten away with frustrating
congressional oversight. He shouldn’t have gotten away with it, but so far he
has.”
Several Obama advisers said privately that Mr. Brennan made a mistake by letting
the situation grow so toxic. In October, Mr. McDonough flew to California to
smooth things over with Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee
chairwoman, and negotiate redactions to the torture report.
Last week Mr. Brennan became the agency’s prime defender, much to the chagrin of
some of the president’s allies.
“There’s a difference between loyalty and leadership,” said Elisa Massimino,
president of Human Rights First, an advocacy group. “Brennan may be showing
loyalty to the agency by trying to make sure none of his people are in legal
peril. Leadership would be if he used this crisis as an opportunity to make
clear what the standards are going forward.”
As for Mr. Obama, advisers said they doubted he believed the interrogation
program yielded useful intelligence but that he was unwilling to publicly
contradict Mr. Brennan. Instead, the president made sure the C.I.A. got what it
needed: cover against its critics.
Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director who has led the public defense
against the Senate report, said he “deeply appreciated” Mr. Obama’s measured
words about the tough choices his predecessor faced after Sept. 11 and his
praise for the “patriots” of the C.I.A.
“Given what he’s said in the past,” Mr. Hayden said, “this is about the best we
could have hoped for.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 15, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: C.I.A. Chief and President Walk Fine
Line.
Brennan Draws on Bond With Obama in Backing
C.I.A., NYT, 14.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/us/politics/
cia-chief-and-president-walk-fine-line-.html
Backing C.I.A.,
Cheney Revisits Torture Debate
From Bush Era
DEC. 14, 2014
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
As vice president, Dick Cheney was the most enthusiastic sponsor
for the brutal C.I.A. interrogation program used on Al Qaeda suspects,
protesting when President George W. Bush scaled it back in his second term. Now
that a Senate Intelligence Committee report has declared that the C.I.A.’s
methods, later prohibited, violated American values and produced little or no
useful intelligence, Mr. Cheney is fiercely defending not just the agency’s
record, but his own as well.
“I would do it again in a minute,” Mr. Cheney said in a spirited, emotional
appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He denied that waterboarding and
related interrogation tactics were torture, noting that three of the last four
attorneys general have agreed with his view.
“Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” Mr.
Cheney said in his latest interview defending the C.I.A. program. “There is no
comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.”
The report says the agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about
the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism
suspects.
The NBC host, Chuck Todd, pressed Mr. Cheney on what might constitute torture,
reading actual episodes from the Senate report: Holding a prisoner in a
coffin-sized box for 11 days? Handcuffing a prisoner’s wrists to an overhead bar
for 22 hours a day? But Mr. Cheney gave no ground.
“I can’t tell from that specifically whether it was or not,” he replied.
He even declined to criticize C.I.A. practices used on prisoners called “rectal
feeding” and “rectal rehydration,” though he noted that “it was not one of the
techniques approved” by the Justice Department. “I believe it was done for
medical reasons,” he said. The Senate report suggests that it was largely used
without medical orders to punish prisoners who refused water or food.
In a sense, Mr. Cheney is continuing a fight that began inside the Bush
administration, defending his own role in the first Bush term against the
retreat from the most aggressive methods in the second term.
At 73, nearly three years after a heart transplant, Mr. Cheney clearly feels his
own legacy is at stake.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Intelligence Committee’s Democratic chairwoman,
defended the release of the torture report, saying, “this report is too
important to shelve.”
Video by Associated Press on Publish Date December 9, 2014. Photo by Stephen
Crowley/The New York Times.
In the early months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President
Bush delegated the detailed oversight of the campaign against Al Qaeda to his
vice president, who embraced the task and urged the harshest measures. Mr.
Cheney had long believed that restrictions placed on the intelligence agencies
after scandals in the late 1970s were ill-advised, and he relished the chance to
take the restraints off the C.I.A.
Mr. Cheney may be running some political risk. For some viewers, his gloves-off
comments on “Meet the Press” may recall his many appearances being interviewed
on Sunday morning television shows in late 2002 and early 2003 before the
invasion of Iraq.
At that time, he repeatedly asserted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, claims that turned out to be false. He also
made a famously inaccurate prediction on the same show, “Meet the Press,” on
March 16, 2003, that American troops would be “greeted as liberators.”
Continue reading the main story
But that experience has not deterred him. In the wake of the Senate report, he
has only stepped up his defense of the C.I.A., deciding that the best defense is
a relentless offense.
Mr. Cheney was also asked on Sunday to answer questions about detainees who had
faced lengthy incarceration, and sometimes harsh treatment, even though the
C.I.A. concluded they posed no terrorist threat or had been imprisoned by
mistake. The Senate report counts at least 26 such “wrongfully detained”
prisoners among the 119 detainees who passed through the C.I.A. secret overseas
jails.
The Central Intelligence Agency used waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other
techniques on dozens of the men it detained in secret prisons between 2002 and
2008.
OPEN Graphic
The former vice president responded that, in his mind, the greater problem was
“with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield.”
Asked again whether he was satisfied with a program that erroneously locked up
detainees, he replied, “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.”
The Senate committee’s report makes the case that the wrongful detentions and
use of torture were actually counterproductive, citing C.I.A. officers’ own
views that harsh tactics had “poisoned the well” in questioning some prisoners.
The 6,000-page Senate study, based on a review of more than six million pages of
C.I.A. records, is by far the most ambitious look at the program to date. Its
damning conclusions are based strictly on what C.I.A. officers were themselves
reporting inside the agency at the time.
The portrait it paints of a program that was not just brutal but incompetent has
drawn global comment, most of it highly critical of the C.I.A.’s former tactics.
The report has been hailed by the United Nations and human rights groups as a
long-delayed step toward accountability, though they say the people who approved
and conducted the program must be held responsible for grave violations of law
and morality.
The report’s conclusions might have been expected to offer vindication to
another Republican stalwart, Senator John McCain, who has long been the leading
voice denouncing torture and countering Mr. Cheney on the interrogation
question.
But the torture issue has split Congress and the country largely on partisan
lines, and Mr. McCain’s commentary on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, where
he was asked about Mr. Cheney’s remarks, underscored how lonely his position has
become in the Republican Party.
The Senate report was produced solely by the intelligence committee’s Democratic
staff members, after the Republicans decided to stop participating, and
Republicans have almost universally panned it as a biased and flawed study,
noting that its authors relied exclusively on documents and did not interview
C.I.A. officials.
Unlike nearly every other politician in the debate, Mr. McCain has personal
experience with the topic: as a downed Navy pilot, he was tortured by his North
Vietnamese captors as a prisoner of war, an experience that left him with the
deep conviction that the United States should never use such tactics. Mr.
Cheney, by contrast, received four deferments as a student and a fifth as a new
father and never served.
Mr. McCain said some defenders of the C.I.A. program are engaging in a
“rewriting of history” and are whitewashing torture. “You can’t claim that tying
someone to the floor and having them freeze to death is not torture,” he said.
He noted that waterboarding had a gruesome pre-C.I.A. history dating back to the
Spanish Inquisition, and that the United States “tried and hung Japanese war
criminals for waterboarding Americans in World War II.”
“What we need to do is come clean, we move forward and we vow never to do it
again,” Mr. McCain said. “I urge everyone to just read the report.”
Mr. Cheney said he had read “parts” of the report. But the former vice president
responded to Mr. Todd, “Go read what the directors of the agency said about the
report.”
Indeed, Mr. Cheney’s latest remarks were part of a barrage of commentary
attempting to undercut the Senate’s blistering report on the C.I.A. program.
Defenders of the program, including a former C.I.A. director, Michael V. Hayden,
and the official who actually ran the program, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.,
outnumbered those criticizing its methods on Sunday morning’s political shows.
Waterboarding was never used, at least with official approval, after 2003. In
2006, against the vice president’s advice, Mr. Bush moved the accused 9/11
conspirators to an American detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The
secret prisons housed only a handful of additional prisoners before President
Obama ordered them closed on his first full day in office in 2009.
A version of this article appears in print on December 15, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Defending C.I.A., Cheney Revisits
Bush-Era Debate.
Backing C.I.A., Cheney Revisits Torture Debate
From Bush Era,
NYT, 14.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/us/politics/
cheney-senate-report-on-torture.html
Stop the C.I.A. Spin
on the Senate Torture Report
AUG. 5, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion pages
By ANTONIO M. TAGUBA
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — THE Senate Intelligence Committee will soon
release key sections of its report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s
detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects after 9/11. In remarks on
Friday anticipating the report’s release, which he has publicly supported,
President Obama acknowledged that “we tortured some folks.”
In fact, from leaks to the press and the statements of those familiar with the
report, we know the committee has determined that C.I.A. torture was more
widespread and brutal than Americans were led to believe. The committee
reportedly has also found that the C.I.A. misled Bush administration officials
and Congress about the extent and nature of the torture, and that torture was
ineffective for intelligence gathering.
Even though a bipartisan majority of the committee voted to declassify the
report, there is a concerted effort to discredit it by depicting it as partisan
and unfair. The report’s detractors include the C.I.A. itself: The agency’s
rebuttal will be released alongside the report’s key sections. While the C.I.A.
is under no obligation to stay silent in the face of criticism, it seems that
between its apparently excessive redactions and its spying on the committee’s
computers, the agency is determined to resist oversight.
Yet I know from experience that oversight will help the C.I.A. — as it helped
the United States military. Ten years ago, I was directed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S.
Sanchez, the senior officer in Iraq, to investigate allegations of detainee
abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. My report’s findings, which prompted
a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, documented a systemic problem:
military personnel had perpetrated “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and
wanton criminal abuses.”
The findings, along with what became infamous images of abuse, caused a stir and
led to prosecutions. The inquiry shed light on our country’s trip to the dark
side, in which the United States government engaged in an assault on American
ideals, broke the law and in so doing strengthened our enemies.
What I found in my investigation offended my sense of decency as a human being,
and my sense of honor as a soldier. I’d learned early about the necessity of
treating prisoners humanely. My father, Tomas B. Taguba, a member of the joint
American-Filipino force during World War II, was captured by the Japanese and
endured the Bataan Death March.
It was clear to me in 2004 that the United States military could not be the
institution it needed to be as long as it engaged in and tolerated abuse.
But the military’s path to accountability was a long one, and its leaders hardly
welcomed oversight. A few months after I completed the investigation, I was
reassigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where I could be closely
monitored. Then, in early 2006, I received a telephone call from Gen. Richard A.
Cody, then the Army’s vice chief of staff, who said, “I need you to retire by
January of 2007.” No explanation was given. But none was needed.
I remain certain that by investigating inhumane treatment of detainees, I did my
duty as a soldier, and that my inquiry — along with one in 2008 by the Senate
Armed Services Committee — made the military a stronger, more trustworthy
institution. As a result, interrogation and detention regulations were reformed
and training programs were revised to comply with the Geneva Conventions.
Equally important, the military changed its command structures for detainee
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while accountability for the architects
of the torture has proved elusive, more than 200 members of the armed forces
have been punished for their involvement in abuse.
Ultimately, as we learned with Abu Ghraib, the best way of guarding against
torture is an American public well informed about the moral and strategic costs
of such abuse. In the absence of an open accounting, polls show that support for
torture among Americans has increased over recent years as proponents sow doubt
about whether abusive interrogation is, in fact, illegitimate. So I am very
concerned by the pre-emptive efforts of the C.I.A. to derail what we know to be
strong criticism of the agency’s conduct during the “war on terror.”
Agency officials, past and current, surely believe that by seeking to undermine
the credibility of the report, they are acting in the best interests of the
agency. But when the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne
Feinstein, has accused you of spying, you may want to reconsider your P.R.
strategy. Yet we learn that the former C.I.A. director George J. Tenet, who
presided over the “enhanced interrogation” program and later claimed that “We
don’t torture people,” is working with the current director, John O. Brennan, to
shape the agency’s response to the report.
One of President Obama’s greatest actions as president and commander in chief
came on his second full day in office, when he signed an executive order banning
torture. But he has allowed the C.I.A. to oversee the redaction process of this
report, and is now apparently allowing Mr. Tenet to run a publicity campaign
against it. The president should make sure that Mr. Brennan — who is, after all,
his employee — spurns Mr. Tenet and accepts oversight.
A failure of leadership took the country to the dark side. A strong presidential
lead can ensure that we don’t go back.
Antonio M. Taguba is a retired major general in the United States Army.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 6, 2014,
on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:
Stop the C.I.A. Spin on Torture.
Stop the C.I.A. Spin on the Senate Torture
Report, NYT, 5.8.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/opinion/
stop-the-cia-spin-on-the-senate-torture-report.html
The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust
JULY 31, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
In March, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was indignant when
Senator Dianne Feinstein charged that the agency had broken into computers used
by staff investigators from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which she leads.
“As far as the allegations of C.I.A. hacking into Senate computers,” he said,
“nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean,
that’s just beyond the scope of reason.”
But reason seems to have little to do with the C.I.A.’s operations, as Mr.
Brennan apparently discovered far too late. On Thursday, the Central
Intelligence Agency admitted that it did, indeed, use a fake online identity to
break into the Senate’s computers, where documents connected to a secret report
on the agency’s detention and torture program were being stored. Mr. Brennan
apologized privately to Ms. Feinstein and to Senator Saxby Chambliss, the vice
chairman of the intelligence committee, and promised to set up an accountability
board to determine who did the hacking and whether and how they should be
punished.
The accountability and the apologies, however, will have to go much further.
It’s not just two senators that the C.I.A. has offended by this shocking action.
It is all of Congress and, by extension, the American public, which is paying
for an intelligence agency that does not seem to understand the most fundamental
concept of separation of powers. That concept means that Congress is supposed to
oversee the intelligence community and rein in its excesses. It cannot possibly
do so effectively if it is being spied on by the spy agency, which is supposed
to be directing its efforts against foreign terrorists and other threats to
national security.
The committee has been working since 2009 on a comprehensive history of the
agency’s antiterror program during the George W. Bush administration, which
involved illegal rendition to other countries, detention, and torture of
suspects, all producing little useful intelligence. It has been frustrated at
many points by stonewalling from the agency, which provided misleading
information, hid important facts inside a blizzard of excess documents, and
forced endless delays in the declassification process. The 6,300-page report
still has not been made public, though parts of it may be released later this
month, and it is expected to undercut the Bush administration’s claims that its
actions were both legal and effective.
Late last year, the agency suspected that Senate investigators had obtained an
internal C.I.A. review of the torture program. Senate officials said the review
was in a database they were allowed to see, but realized that the C.I.A. had
broken into a private Senate computer server and found the review. A summary of
an agency inspector general’s report, released Thursday, said C.I.A. hackers
even read the emails of Senate staffers. Then they exhibited a “lack of candor”
to agency investigators.
In an extraordinary speech on the Senate floor in March, Ms. Feinstein accused
the agency of having “undermined the constitutional framework essential to
effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other
government function.” The institutional affront even drew Republican criticism.
If the charge was true, said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South
Carolina, “heads should roll, and people should go to jail.”
One of those heads may need to be Mr. Brennan’s. If he knew about the break-in,
then he blatantly lied. If he did not, then apparently he was unaware of the
lawless culture that has festered within the C.I.A. since the moment it was
encouraged by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to torture suspects and then lie
about it. That recklessness extended to the point where agency officials thought
nothing of burglarizing their own overseer. Senator Mark Udall of Colorado said
the action was illegal and required the resignation of Mr. Brennan.
The C.I.A. needs far more than a few quiet personnel changes, however. Its very
core, and basic culture, needs a thorough overhaul.
A version of this editorial appears in print on August 1, 2014, on page A22 of
the New York edition with the headline:
The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust.
The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust, NYT,
31.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/opinion/
The-CIAs-Reckless-Breach-of-Trust.html
Let the
Military Run Drone Warfare
MARCH 12,
2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Contributor
By ADAM B. SCHIFF
WASHINGTON
— AS night fell on what had been a scorching August day in Hadhramaut, Yemen, in
2012, four large explosions shattered the quiet. When the smoke cleared a few
minutes later, Sheik Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, a respected and openly
anti-extremist cleric, his cousin, a young local police officer named Waleed
Abdullah bin Ali Jaber, and three other men, who have been identified in news
reports as likely extremists, lay dead — reportedly by an American drone strike.
Late last year I met Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni civil engineer, and came
face to face with the very real consequences of drone warfare. Faisal’s
brother-in-law Salem Jaber and nephew Waleed Jaber were two of the five people
killed in the strike. Neither had any terrorist ties. It appears they were
simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Faisal’s journey to the United
States Capitol was a remarkable pilgrimage to share his family’s anguish and to
remind us of the human toll of the drone campaign that has been a feature of the
war on Al Qaeda since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In a fight against a hidden enemy who operates in lawless safe havens, drones
offer many obvious advantages and have taken many dangerous adversaries off the
battlefield. But the idea that warfare can be precise, distant or sterile is
also dangerous. It can easily blind us to the human cost of those inadvertently
killed. And it can cause us to lose sight of the strategic imperative that we
not multiply our enemies by causing the inadvertent loss of innocent lives.
There was precious little I could say to Faisal. What I did tell him was that,
unlike the terrorists we target, America places a high value on the lives of
innocent civilians. I also told him that our personnel make extraordinary
efforts to ensure that civilians will not be killed or harmed by any strike. But
I could not say whether anyone from the United States government would ever be
able to tell him just what had happened, or why.
It has been widely reported that the C.I.A. has been responsible for unmanned
drone attacks. Last May, President Obama spoke at the National Defense
University to articulate the legal and policy basis of the government’s drone
program, promising transparency and reform. But the single biggest reform —
ensuring that only the Department of Defense carries out lethal strikes —
remains stalled by Congressional opposition and bureaucratic inertia.
Those roadblocks must no longer stand in the way of reforms to increase the
transparency, accountability and legitimacy of our drone program.
First, Congress needs to get out of the way and allow the president to move the
drone program to the Joint Special Operations Command (J.S.O.C.) at the
Pentagon. Though it may appear that we’d just be shuffling the chairs, this
change would have two benefits: It would allow our other agencies to focus on
their core mission of intelligence gathering, rather than paramilitary
activities, and it would enable us to be more public about the successes and
failures of the drone program, since such operations would no longer be covert.
Some Republicans and Democrats on both the House and Senate intelligence
committees argue that the J.S.O.C. lacks expertise in targeting and may cause
more collateral damage. But these claims are more anecdotal than evidentiary,
and the intelligence committees have yet to be presented with the facts to back
them up. They also ignore the joint role that Defense Department and
intelligence agency personnel play in identifying and locating targets. These
combined efforts would continue, even if the agency pulling the trigger changed.
Second, we must hold ourselves accountable by being more open about the effect
of our drone strikes. While there may still be a need for covert drone
operations in some parts of the world, greater disclosure would be in our
interest. In the absence of official accounts, inflated and often wildly
inaccurate assertions of the number of civilian casualties — generally advanced
by our enemies — fill the informational vacuum. I’ve proposed legislation, along
with my fellow California Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, to require an
annual report of the number of civilian and combatant casualties caused by drone
strikes, including an explanation of how we define those terms.
Finally, with regard to the uniquely difficult situation of an American citizen
who has taken up arms against his own nation and who cannot feasibly be
arrested, the Obama administration must go further to explain what protections
are in place to ensure due process for any American who may be targeted. A 2011
strike targeted and killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric and top
operative of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, and other Americans may be targeted in
the future. I’ve put forward a proposal to require an independent review of any
decision to target an American with lethal force. These reports should be
declassified after 10 years. Knowing that they’ll be made public will help
ensure that the task is approached with the appropriate rigor.
The United States is the only country with a significant armed drone capability,
but that distinction will not last forever. As other nations develop and deploy
these technologies, we will be better positioned to urge their responsible and
transparent use if we have set an example ourselves. We must hold ourselves to a
high standard and do it in public, not behind closed doors.
That is the commitment the president has made, and it’s a promise worth keeping.
Adam B.
Schiff, Democrat of California,
is a member of
the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 13, 2014,
on page A27 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Let the
Military Run Drone Warfare.
Let the Military Run Drone Warfare, NYT, 12.3.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/opinion/let-the-military-run-drone-warfare.html
The
C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up
MARCH 11,
2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
It was
outrageous enough when two successive presidents papered over the Central
Intelligence Agency’s history of illegal detention, rendition, torture and
fruitless harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects. Now the leader of the
Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, has provided stark and
convincing evidence that the C.I.A. may have committed crimes to prevent the
exposure of interrogations that she said were “far different and far more harsh”
than anything the agency had described to Congress.
Ms. Feinstein delivered an extraordinary speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday
in which she said the C.I.A. improperly searched the computers used by committee
staff members who were investigating the interrogation program as recently as
January.
Beyond the power of her office and long experience, Ms. Feinstein’s accusations
carry an additional weight and credibility because she has been a reliable
supporter of the intelligence agencies and their expanded powers since the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (sometimes too reliable).
On Tuesday, the C.I.A. director, John Brennan, denied hacking into the
committee’s computers. But Ms. Feinstein said that in January, Mr. Brennan
acknowledged that the agency had conducted a “search” of the computers. She said
the C.I.A.’s inspector general had referred the matter to the Justice Department
for possible criminal prosecution. “Besides the constitutional implications,” of
separation of powers, she said, “the C.I.A.’s search may also have violated the
Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order
12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or
surveillance.”
Ms. Feinstein’s speech detailed the lengths to which the C.I.A. had gone to
hinder the committee’s investigation, which it began in 2009 after senators
learned the agency had destroyed videotapes of the interrogations under
President George W. Bush. Under President Obama, prosecutors exonerated the
officials who ordered those tapes destroyed.
Ms. Feinstein said that when Senate staff members reviewed thousands of
documents describing those interrogations in 2009, they found that the C.I.A.’s
leadership seriously misled the committee when it described the interrogations
program to the panel in 2006, “only hours before President Bush disclosed the
program to the public.”
The interrogations included a variety of brutal methods, some of which —
waterboarding in particular — were unequivocally torture.
When the Senate staff compiled a still undisclosed 6,300-page report, it
described these acts and also concluded that the C.I.A. had falsely claimed that
torture and other brutality produced useful intelligence. The report has been
going through the snail’s pace review and declassification process since
December 2012. The C.I.A. disputed some of its findings. But Ms. Feinstein
publicly confirmed on Tuesday that an internal review by the C.I.A. had reached
conclusions similar to those in the Senate staff report.
It was the committee staff’s possession of that internal review — which the
C.I.A. has refused to give to the Senate — that spurred what Ms. Feinstein said
was an illegal search of computers (provided to the Senate staff by the C.I.A.)
that contained drafts of the internal review.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Ms. Feinstein said that staff members found the drafts among the documents that
the C.I.A. had made available to the committee. She said she did not know
whether the drafts were put there inadvertently, or by a whistle-blower. The
Senate’s possession of the documents was entirely legal, she said.
She dismissed the acting C.I.A. general counsel’s claim that the Senate staffers
had hacked agency computers as intimidation. The counsel, she noted, was a
lawyer and then chief lawyer for the interrogations division and is “mentioned
by name more than 1,600 times in our study.”
The Justice Department now has a criminal investigation to conduct, but the
C.I.A. internal review and the Senate report must be released. Ms. Feinstein
called on President Obama to make public the Senate report, which he has
supported doing in the past. She said that this would “ensure that an
un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be
considered or permitted.”
The lingering fog about the C.I.A. detentions is a result of Mr. Obama’s
decision when he took office to conduct no investigation of them. We can only
hope he knows that when he has lost Dianne Feinstein, he has no choice but to
act in favor of disclosure and accountability.
Correction:
March 11, 2014
An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that Senator Diane
Feinstein had referred the matter of the C.I.A.’s search of the Senate computers
to the Justice Department. The referral was made by the C.I.A.’s inspector
general.
A version of this editorial appears in print on March 12, 2014, on page A26 of
the New York edition with the headline: The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up.
The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up, NYT, 11.3.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/opinion/the-cia-torture-cover-up.html
|
