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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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April 26th,
2009 - CIA Reportedly Declined to Closely Evaluate Harsh Interrogations |
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CIA Reportedly
Declined to Closely Evaluate Harsh Interrogations Current and former U.S. officials say the failure to carefully examine
the value of ‘enhanced’ methods such as waterboarding - despite calls to do
so as early as 2003 - was part of a broader trend. By Greg Miller Los Angeles Times April 26, 2009 Reporting from Washington -
The CIA used an arsenal of severe interrogation techniques on imprisoned Al
Qaeda suspects for nearly seven years without seeking a rigorous assessment
of whether the methods were effective or necessary, according to current and
former U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The failure to conduct a
comprehensive examination occurred despite calls to do so as early as 2003.
That year, the agency's inspector general circulated drafts of a report that
raised deep concerns about waterboarding and other methods, and recommended a
study by outside experts on whether they worked. That inspector general report
described in broad terms the volume of intelligence that the interrogation
program was producing, a point echoed in smaller studies later commissioned
by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss. But neither the inspector
general's report nor the other audits examined the effectiveness of
interrogation techniques in detail or sought to scrutinize the assertions of
CIA counter-terrorism officials that so-called enhanced methods were
essential to the program's results. One report by a former government official
- not an interrogation expert - was about 10 pages long and amounted to a
glowing review of interrogation efforts. "Nobody with expertise
or experience in interrogation ever took a rigorous, systematic review of the
various techniques - enhanced or otherwise - to see what resulted in the best
information," said a senior U.S. intelligence official involved in
overseeing the interrogation program. As a result, there was never
a determination of "what you could do without the use of enhanced
techniques," said the official, who like others described internal
discussions on condition of anonymity. Former Bush administration
officials said the failure to conduct such an examination was part of a
broader reluctance to reassess decisions made shortly after the Sept. 11
attacks. The Defense Department,
Justice Department and CIA "all insisted on sticking with their original
policies and were not open to revisiting them, even as the damage of these
policies became apparent," said John B. Bellinger III, who was legal
advisor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, referring to
burgeoning international outrage. "We had gridlock,"
Bellinger said, calling the failure to consider other approaches "the
greatest tragedy of the Bush administration's handling of detainee
matters." The limited resources spent
examining whether the interrogation measures worked were in stark contrast to
the energy the CIA devoted to collecting memos declaring the program legal. Justice Department memos
released this month show that the CIA repeatedly sought new opinions on the
legality of depriving prisoners of sleep for up to seven days, throwing them
against walls, forcing them into tiny boxes and subjecting them to the
simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Whether those methods worked
is facing independent scrutiny for the first time only now, three months
after President Obama banned the CIA from using them. As part of an executive
order shutting down the CIA's secret prisons, the White House has set up a
task force to examine the effectiveness of various interrogation approaches. The Senate Intelligence
Committee launched a similar review, and began combing through classified CIA
cables that describe daily developments in the agency's interrogations of
prisoners suspected of ties to Al Qaeda. "To the best of our
knowledge, such a review has not been done before," said a Senate aide
involved in the investigation. CIA spokesman Paul
Gimigliano declined to comment on the reviews, saying their contents remained
classified. A U.S. intelligence official
who defended CIA interrogation practices said that "productivity was an
obvious and important measure of the program's effectiveness. The techniques
themselves were not designed to elicit specific pieces of information, but to
condition hardened terrorists to answer questions about Al Qaeda's plans and
intentions. "By that yardstick -
the generation of reporting that was true and useful, that led even to other
captures - it worked," the official said. Obama has described the
agency's activities as "a dark and painful chapter in our history,"
and senior members of his administration, including Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder
Jr., have called the techniques torture. Defenders of the program,
including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have accused Obama of
dismantling a capability that was crucial to keeping the country safe. Cheney
also has called for the release of classified documents that he said would
show how effective the program was. Officials said that Cheney
was probably referring to memos drafted by leaders of the CIA's
counter-terrorism center to serve as talking points on the program to use in
briefings for members of Congress and White House officials. Many of those talking points
have been cited publicly in recent years by senior government officials,
starting with President Bush when he disclosed the CIA's secret prison system
in September 2006. At the time, Bush said that
"alternative" interrogation methods had been crucial to getting Al
Qaeda operatives, including Abu Zubaydah and self-professed Sept. 11
mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to talk. "I cannot describe the
specific methods used," Bush said. "But I can say the procedures
were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary." By then, Bush administration
officials had become concerned with a shifting legal landscape. Congress had
passed new laws on the treatment of detainees, and the Supreme Court issued a
ruling that undercut the administration's claim that detained terrorism
suspects were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. But officials said that the
first high-level concern about the direction of the CIA's interrogation
program had come in 2003, when then-CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson
began distributing draft copies of his report on the program across the
executive branch. The document triggered
alarms about waterboarding, documenting that it had been employed far more
frequently - including 263 times against two Al Qaeda suspects - than had
been widely believed. The report also faulted how
agency operatives applied the method, dumping large quantities of water on
prisoners' faces, apparently violating the agency manual and its agreements
with the Justice Department. Nervous about the report's implications,
then-CIA Director George J. Tenet suspended the use of waterboarding in 2003. The document also was
critical of other approaches, including sleep deprivation. But for all of its
criticism of the program, the 200-plus-page document also included passages
that have been cited by some as evidence that the interrogation operation was
effective. A May 2005 Justice
Department memo noted that the inspector general's report described an
"increase in intelligence reports attributable to the use of enhanced
techniques." A U.S. intelligence official
familiar with its contents confirmed that the inspector general's report
contains language that is consistent with the assertions by former CIA
Director Michael V. Hayden and others that the interrogation program
accounted for more than half of the intelligence community's reports on Al
Qaeda. But officials said the
document did not assess the quality of those reports. It also did not attempt
to determine which methods were yielding the best information, or explore
whether the agency's understanding of Al Qaeda would have suffered
significantly without the use of coercive techniques. "Certainly you got
additional considerable volume of reporting when you started up with anything
enhanced," the U.S. intelligence official said. "But nobody went
back to say exactly what were the conditions under which we learned that
which was the most useful." In fact, Helgerson's team
had steered away from that question by design, the official said, hoping that
agency leaders would turn to interrogation experts for a thorough study on
which methods were working and which should be discarded. White House National
Security Council officials who saw the inspector general's report became
concerned with its conclusions, current and former officials said. Stephen
Hadley, then the deputy national security advisor, was particularly
persistent on pushing the CIA director to follow up on the inspector
general's recommendation. Goss, who had taken the helm
at the CIA four months after the inspector general's report was filed,
eventually complied. But Helgerson had envisioned a group of experts, perhaps
including specialists from the FBI; Goss turned instead to two former
government officials with little background in interrogation. Gardner Peckham, a national
security advisor to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, produced the
approximately 10-page document that praised the program. It concluded that
the program was "very structured and very disciplined," said a
former official familiar with its contents, but did not assess the
effectiveness of various methods. A separate report, submitted
by John Hamre, a former deputy Defense secretary, was similar in scope and
led to no significant alterations of the program. Hamre and Peckham both
declined to comment. Despite the high-level
attention, former Bush administration officials said they never saw the results
of the audits that Goss had commissioned. "They never came and
presented anything to the White House that said in response to the I.G.
report they have commissioned a review," said one such official.
"They essentially came back with the recommendations that this was the
program and it couldn't be changed." Julian E. Barnes in
Washington and Doyle McManus in Los Angeles contributed to this report. External link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-interrogate26-2009apr26,0,5771981.story |