In My Time (58 page)

In an effort to reach an agreement with Senator McCain and explain to him how damaging his proposed amendment would be, CIA Director Porter Goss and I met with him in a secure conference room at the Capitol and tried to brief him about the program and the critical intelligence we had gained. But John didn’t want to hear what we had to say. We had hardly started when he lost his temper and stormed out of the meeting. His opinion carried a good deal of weight because he had been a prisoner of war, but his view of the program was certainly not unanimous among his fellow former POWs.

Air Force Colonel Leo Thorsness found out he had been awarded the Medal of Honor while he was a prisoner in Vietnam. The news that he had received the nation’s highest award for valor came to him through tapping on the prison wall. On Memorial Day 2009, Thorsness, who was tortured severely by the North Vietnamese, wrote that waterboarding
was “harsh treatment but not torture.” Although a supporter of Senator McCain, he disagrees with him on using enhanced techniques: “I would not hesitate for a second to use enhanced interrogation, including water boarding, if it would save the
lives of innocent people
.”

Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Bud Day was shot down over North Vietnam, then interrogated and tortured. He managed to escape his prison camp and made it to the Demilitarized Zone, only to be captured again and tortured again. For a time Day shared a cell with McCain, whom he admires, but asked by author Marc Thiessen if he believed waterboarding to be torture, Day replied, “I am a supporter of water boarding. It is not torture. Torture is really hurting someone.” Asked what he would say to the CIA officer who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Day replied, “You did
the right thing
.”

Since the beginning of the enhanced interrogation program, the CIA had briefed key members of Congress on the interrogations and on
what they were learning
. I do not recall in any of the briefings I attended a single member objecting to the program or urging that we stop using these authorized, legal methods. Nonetheless, in the fall of 2005, congressional opinion was not on our side. At one of the weekly Senate Republican policy lunches I regularly attended, I spoke about the importance of the program. I could not reveal much about it. I could not talk about the specific interrogation techniques. I could only urge my colleagues to accept how critically important the program was to our national security. The McCain Amendment passed 90–9. At the president’s request, Steve Hadley had tried to negotiate enough flexibility in the language of the amendment to allow the CIA program to continue in a pared-down way. He had secured language he thought the CIA could live with, but after the legislation passed, Porter Goss told Steve that he’d checked with those running the program, and it would have to be shut down.

When former NSA Director Mike Hayden became head of the CIA in May 2006, he reviewed the program and determined that some version of it had to be restarted in order to protect the country. But in June 2006 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
The decision held that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits any behavior that is “humiliating and degrading” and bans “outrages upon personal dignity,” applied to the detainees. The decision seemed to ignore the plain language of Common Article 3, which makes clear that it applies to “armed conflict not of an international character.” The War on Terror could hardly be more international, having occurred across countries and continents, but once the Supreme Court handed down its decision, the CIA interrogation program clearly needed new legal underpinning to continue.

The president decided to make aspects of the program public in order to save it. He announced he would bring the terrorists currently in CIA custody to Guantanamo for trial, and he submitted legislation that would provide congressional approval for military commissions and clarify the kinds of questioning that would be allowed under the Detainee Treatment Act.

Congress passed the Military Commissions Act in October 2006 and several months later, in July 2007, the president signed an executive order establishing guidelines for the CIA interrogation program. In 2007 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, General Hayden explained why it would be so damaging to limit CIA interrogations to the methods in the Army Field Manual:

We have severely restricted our attempts to obtain timely information from HVDs [high-value detainees] who possess information that will help us save lives and disrupt operations. Limiting our interrogation tools to those detailed in the field manual will increase the probability that a determined, resilient HVD will be able to withhold critical, time-sensitive, actionable intelligence that could prevent an imminent, catastrophic attack.

“In essence,” Hayden concluded, “we would be back to a pre-9/11 posture.”

In October 2007 the president spoke about enhanced interrogation at the National Defense University. “This program has produced critical
intelligence that has helped us stop a number of attacks,” he said, “including a plot to strike the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, California, and a plot to fly passenger planes into Heathrow Airport and buildings in downtown London.” Then the president said that critics of the program should be asked: “Which of the attacks I have just described would they prefer we had not stopped?”

WITHIN TWO DAYS OF his inauguration, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that limited interrogations to the Army Field Manual, thus putting us back into the pre-9/11 mode. That decision could be reversed, but within three months of taking office, President Obama also released publicly the legal memos detailing the techniques that had been used in the enhanced interrogation program, meaning that if it ever were reinstated, its effectiveness would be diminished by our having told the world—including our enemies—methods we were likely to use. He released the memos over the objection of his current CIA director and the four previous CIA directors. He also did so despite apparently having been told directly by members of the CIA’s clandestine service that the release of this information could
endanger our CIA operatives
.

President Obama claimed that he wasn’t reducing America’s tools in fighting the War on Terror because he was setting up a replacement interrogation program: the “High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group,” or “HIG.” When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was apprehended on Christmas Day of 2009 while trying to ignite a bomb he had carried in his underwear onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, was asked whether Abdulmutallab had been questioned by the HIG. It turned out he hadn’t. Eleven months after the president had shut down the enhanced interrogation program and revealed the techniques in the program publicly, the replacement did not exist. Abdulmutallab was read a Miranda warning.

While the administration moved slowly to establish an interrogation
program for terrorists, they were quick to reopen an investigation of the CIA personnel who carried out our enhanced interrogation program. Despite the fact that these officers had already been investigated and cleared by career Justice Department lawyers, Attorney General Eric Holder began threatening them with prosecution. In May 2011, after the U.S. located and killed Osama bin Laden, we learned that intelligence gained by these interrogators through the enhanced interrogation program had helped lead us to him.

AS WE FACED A new kind of enemy in the first war of the twenty-first century, the Bush administration put in place programs that were critical to securing the nation. We went after terrorists in safe havens in Afghanistan and took down the Taliban regime that had sponsored them. We enhanced our ability to intercept terrorist communications and track the money that financed them. And we developed a program to gain intelligence from detained terrorists that saved lives and prevented future attacks. As time passed after the 9/11 attacks and the threat of another attack seemed to recede in people’s minds, criticism of what we had done mounted, and no program was more bitterly condemned than the CIA’s procedures for interrogating high-value detainees. Amid the heated rhetoric some basic points tended to be ignored. The program was safe, legal, and effective. It provided intelligence that enabled us to prevent attacks and save American lives. Above all else, it was part of a broad effort that enabled us, for seven and a half years, to prevent any further mass casualty attacks against the United States.

S
addam Hussein’s willingness to use weapons of mass destruction was well-known to the world. He had used chemical weapons not only against his enemies, but against his own people. In 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War, he attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with mustard gas and nerve gas, killing thousands of innocents. Villagers died as they were going about their daily tasks. Mothers died, holding their children.

Saddam was determined to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, and after the 1991 Gulf War, we learned that his program to develop them was far more advanced than we had thought. The judgment of an International Atomic Energy Agency report was that Saddam could have had a nuclear device by late 1992, had his efforts not been
derailed by Desert Storm
.

After the Gulf War the United Nations Security Council demanded that Iraq declare and give up the components of its nuclear program as well as chemical and biological weapons and the capacity to produce them. UN Resolution 687 further required that Saddam destroy any
ballistic missiles with a range greater than one hundred fifty miles and permit a regime of on-site inspections aimed at making sure he carried through. It also extended a program of tough and comprehensive sanctions.

But Security Council resolutions had little impact on Saddam. A 1993 National Intelligence Estimate assessed that international support for sanctions was eroding, but judged that even if they remained in place, Saddam Hussein would “continue reconstituting Iraq’s conventional military forces” and “will take steps to
reestablish Iraq’s WMD programs
.” In a 1994 Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee report, the intelligence community agreed “that the Iraqi government is determined to covertly reconstitute
its nuclear weapons program
.”

In 1995 Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel al-Majid, his brother Saddam, and their families defected to Jordan. Hussein Kamel had been in charge of portions of Iraq’s WMD programs, and the revelations that followed his defection led inspectors to realize that Saddam was deceiving them, particularly when it came to his biological and nuclear efforts. Saddam lured Hussein Kamel, his brother, and their families back to Iraq and then had Kamel and his brother murdered, along with their father, their sister, and her children, not long
after their return
.

In 1998 Saddam Hussein insisted that international weapons inspectors stop work and leave Iraq. In response, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act, making regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States government and approving nearly $100 million to fund Iraqi opposition groups working for Saddam’s ouster.

That December, President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day air strike campaign meant to diminish Saddam’s weapons capabilities. “If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future,” Clinton said. “Mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.”

There was bipartisan support for the operation. Among the Democrats who spoke out was Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, then a member
of the House Intelligence Committee. “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region,” she said, “and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspections process.” A number of senators, including Democrats John Kerry, Carl Levin, and Tom Daschle, wrote to President Clinton urging that he “take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.” Senator Joe Biden, writing in the
Washington Post
two months before the strikes, noted the limitation of any policy that left Saddam in power. “Ultimately, as long as Saddam Hussein is at the helm, no inspectors can guarantee that they have rooted out the entirety of Saddam Hussein’s weapons program,” he wrote, and he observed that “the only way to remove Saddam is a massive military effort, led by the United States.”

Saddam Hussein did not find Desert Fox persuasive. In 1999 he began firing on U.S. and British planes that were enforcing the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. The United States together with the United Kingdom and France had established the zones to prevent Saddam from oppressing the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south. Meanwhile, as we would later learn, Saddam was using the oil-for-food program, intended for the people of Iraq, to enrich himself, bribe others, and purchase improvements for facilities that had the potential to be used
for WMD development
.