The CIA and several of its former directors are stepping up a campaign to discredit a five-year US Senate investigation into the agency’s harrowing interrogation practices after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US, over concerns that the historical record may define them as torturers instead of patriots and expose them to legal action worldwide.
The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report does not urge prosecution for wrongdoing and the US Department of Justice has no interest in reopening a criminal probe into the interrogations. However, the threat to former interrogators and their superiors was underlined after a UN special investigator demanded that those responsible for “systematic crimes” be brought to justice, and when human rights groups pushed for the arrest of key CIA and former US president George W. Bush administration figures if they travel overseas.
Current and former CIA officials hit back on Wednesday, set on painting the Senate report as a political stunt by Senate Democrats tarnishing a program that saved US lives.
The report is a “one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation — essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America,” former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
Hayden was singled out by Senate investigators for what they said was a string of misleading or outright false statements he gave in 2007 about the importance of the CIA’s brutal treatment of detainees in thwarting terrorist attacks.
Hayden described the focus on him as “ironic on so many levels” since any wrongdoing predated his arrival at the CIA, adding in an e-mail to reporters: “They were far too interested in yelling at me.”
The intelligence committee’s 500-page release concluded that the CIA inflicted suffering on al-Qaeda prisoners beyond its legal authority and that none of the agency’s “enhanced interrogations” provided critical, life-saving intelligence. It cited the CIA’s records, documenting in detail how waterboarding and lesser-known techniques such as “rectal feeding” were actually employed.
The CIA is now in the uncomfortable position of defending itself publicly, given its basic mission to protect the US secretly. Its 136-page rebuttal suggests Senate Democrats searched through millions of documents to pull only the evidence backing up predetermined conclusions.
Challenging one of the report’s most explosive arguments — that harsh interrogation techniques did not lead to Osama bin Laden — the CIA pointed to questioning of Ammar al-Baluchi, who revealed how an al-Qaeda operative relayed messages to and from bin Laden after he departed Afghanistan. Before then, the CIA said it only knew that courier Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti interacted with bin Laden in 2001 when the al-Qaeda leader was accessible to many of his followers. Al-Kuwaiti eventually led the US to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
Poring over the same body of evidence as the investigators, the CIA insisted that most of the 20 case studies cited in the Senate report actually illustrated how enhanced interrogations helped disrupt plots, capture terrorists and prevent another Sept. 11-type attack. The agency said it obtained legal authority for its actions from the US Department of Justice and the White House, and made “good faith” efforts to keep Congress informed.
Former CIA officials responsible for the program echoed these points in interviews.
Former director John McLaughlin said waterboarding and other tactics made alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into a US “consultant” on al-Qaeda.
Tenet, the CIA’s director on Sept. 11, 2001, said the interrogation program “saved thousands of Americans lives” while the country faced a “ticking time bomb every day.”
Former US vice president Dick Cheney also pushed back, saying in a Fox News interview that the Senate report “is full of crap.”
“We asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it didn’t happen again, and that’s exactly what they did, and they deserve a lot of credit,” he said.
The Committee’s Republicans issued a 167-page “minority” report and said the Democratic analysis was flawed, dishonest and, at US$40 million, a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Feinstein’s office said on Wednesday most of the cost was incurred by the CIA in trying to hide its records.
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