[The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a
C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within
days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner,
Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to
the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be
transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.]
 |
| The Senate Committee’s Report on the C.I.A.’s Use ofTorture |
WASHINGTON — A scathing report released
by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday found that the Central Intelligence Agency routinely
misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the
detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were
more brutal than the C.I.A. acknowledged either to Bush administration
officials or to the public.
The long-delayed report, which took five years to produce and is
based on more than six million internal agency documents, is a sweeping
indictment of the C.I.A.'s operation and oversight of a program carried out by
agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the
years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It also provides a macabre
accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture
and imprison terrorism suspects.
Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were
sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the
approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to
medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that
the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control
over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series
of near drownings.”
The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to
waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The
committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water
at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where
the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine
officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some
prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”
During his administration, President George W. Bush repeatedly
said that the detention and interrogation program, which President Obama
dismantled when he succeeded him, was humane and legal. The intelligence
gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting
terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda.
Mr. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of
former C.I.A. officials have said more recently that the program was essential
for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy
SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The Intelligence Committee’s report tries to refute each of
these claims, using the C.I.A.'s internal records to present 20 case studies
that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played
no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders — even
finding Bin Laden.
The report said that senior officials — including the former
C.I.A. directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden —
repeatedly inflated the value of the program in secret briefings both at the
White House and on Capitol Hill, and in public speeches.
In the report’s foreword, Senator Dianne
Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Intelligence
Committee, said that she “could understand the C.I.A.'s impulse to consider the
use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from
the battlefield, and C.I.A. was encouraged by political leaders and the public
to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.”
“Nevertheless,” she continued, “such pressure, fear and expectation
of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions
taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security. The
major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to
act, the intelligence community’s actions must always reflect who we are as a
nation, and adhere to our laws and standards.”
Ms. Feinstein is expected to speak about the report in the
Senate on Tuesday.
The C.I.A. issued an angry response to the report, saying in a
statement that it “tells part of the story,” but that “there are too many flaws
for it to stand as the official record of the program.”
The response acknowledged mistakes in the detention and
interrogation program and in the agency’s analysis of the information gathered
in interrogations. But, the agency said, “we still must question a report that
impugns the integrity of so many C.I.A. officers when it implies — as it does
clearly through the conclusions — that the agency’s assessments were willfully
misrepresented in a calculated effort to manipulate.”
The entire report is more than 6,000 pages long, but the
committee voted in April to declassify only its 524-page executive summary and
a rebuttal by Republican members of the committee. The investigation was conducted
by staff members working for Democratic senators on the committee.
The New York Times and other news organizations received an
advance copy of the report and agreed not to publish any of its findings until
the Senate Intelligence Committee made them public. The Times did not receive
an advance copy of the Republican rebuttal.
Many of the most extreme interrogation methods — including
waterboarding — were authorized by Justice Department lawyers during the Bush
administration. But the report also found evidence that a number of detainees
had been subjected to other, unapproved methods while in C.I.A. custody.
The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some
C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior
agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.
The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a
C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within
days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner,
Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to
the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be
transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.
During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah became
“completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The
interrogations lasted for weeks, and some C.I.A. officers began sending
messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and
the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected.
“Strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality
of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality
vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at
the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic
(email or cable traffic),” wrote Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the
C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.
“Such language is not helpful.”
The Senate report found that the detention and interrogation of
Mr. Zubaydah and dozens of other prisoners were ineffective in giving the
government “unique” intelligence information that the C.I.A. or other
intelligence agencies could not get from other means.
The report also said that the C.I.A.'s leadership for years gave
false information about the total number of prisoners held by the C.I.A.,
saying there had been 98 prisoners when C.I.A. records showed that 119 men had
been held. In late 2008, according to one internal email, a C.I.A. official
giving a briefing expressed concern about the discrepancy and was told by Mr.
Hayden, then the agency’s director, “to keep the number at 98” and not to count
any additional detainees.
The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at
least 26 were wrongfully held.”
“These included an ‘intellectually challenged’ man whose C.I.A.
detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide
information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign liaison
services and were former C.I.A. sources, and two individuals whom the C.I.A.
assessed to be connected to Al Qaeda based solely on information fabricated by
a C.I.A. detainee subjected to the C.I.A.'s enhanced interrogation techniques,”
the report said.
Many Republicans have said that the report is an attempt to
smear both the C.I.A. and the Bush White House, and that the report
cherry-picked information to support a claim that the C.I.A.'s detention
program yielded no valuable information. Former C.I.A. officials have already
begun a vigorous public campaign to dispute the report’s findings.
In its response to the Senate report, the C.I.A. said that to
accept the Intelligence Committee’s conclusions, “there would have had to have
been a yearslong conspiracy among C.I.A. leaders at all levels, supported by a
large number of analysts and other line officers.
“This conspiracy would have had to include three former C.I.A.
directors, including one who led the agency after the program had largely wound
down,” it added.
“We cannot vouch for every individual statement that was made
over the years of the program, and we acknowledge that some of those statements
were wrong. But the image portrayed in the study of an organization that — on
an institutional scale — intentionally misled and routinely resisted oversight
from the White House, the Congress, the Department of Justice and its own
O.I.G. simply does not comport with the record,” the statement said. O.I.G.
stands for Office of Inspector General.
The battle over the report’s conclusions has been waged behind
closed doors for years, and provided the backdrop to the more recent fight over
the C.I.A.'s penetration of a computer network used by committee staff members
working on the investigation. C.I.A. officers came to suspect that the staff
members had improperly obtained an internal agency review of the detention
program over the course of their investigation, and that they broke into the
network that had been designated for the committee’s use.
Most of the detention program’s architects have left the C.I.A.,
but their legacy endures inside the agency. The chief of the agency’s
Counterterrorism Center said during a meeting with John O. Brennan, the current
C.I.A. director, in April that more than 200 people working for him had at one
point participated in the program.
According to the Senate report, even before the agency captured
its first prisoner, C.I.A. lawyers began thinking about how to get approval for
interrogation methods that might normally be considered torture. Such methods
might gain wider approval, the lawyers figured, if they were proved to have
saved lives.
“A policy decision must be made with regard to U.S. use of
torture,” C.I.A. lawyers wrote in November 2001, in a previously undisclosed
memo titled “Hostile Interrogations: Legal Considerations for C.I.A. Officers.”
The lawyers argued that “states may be very unwilling to call
the U.S. to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”
The Intelligence Committee report describes repeated efforts by
the C.I.A. to make that case, even when the facts did not support it. For
example, the C.I.A. helped edit a speech by Mr. Bush in 2006 to make it seem as
if key intelligence was obtained through the most brutal interrogation tactics,
even when C.I.A. records suggested otherwise.
In 2002, the C.I.A. took custody of Abu Zubaydah, who was
brought to Thailand. There, two C.I.A. contractors named James E. Mitchell and
Bruce Jessen were in charge of the interrogation sessions, using methods that
had been authorized by Justice Department lawyers. The two contractors, both
psychologists, are identified in the Senate report under the pseudonyms Grayson
Swigert and Hammond Dunbar.
The program expanded, with dozens of detainees taken to secret
prisons in Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other countries. In September 2006,
Mr. Bush ordered all of the detainees in C.I.A. custody to be transferred to
the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after that the C.I.A. held a small
number of detainees in secret at a different facility for several months at a
time — before they were also moved to Guantánamo Bay.
Mr. Obama spoke expansively about the Senate report in August,
saying that any “fair minded” person would believe that some of the methods
that the C.I.A. used against prisoners amounted to torture. He said he hoped
that the report reminded people that the “character of our country has to be
measured in part not by what we do when things are easy but what we do when things
are hard.”
At the same time, Mr. Obama said that he understood the pressure
that the C.I.A. was under after the Sept. 11 attacks, and that “it is important
for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that
those folks had.”
Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency
that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators —
but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of
dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign
officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.
Cables from C.I.A. headquarters to field offices said that
overseas officers should put together “wish lists” speculating about what foreign
governments might want in exchange for bringing C.I.A. prisoners onto their
soil.
As one 2003 cable put it, “Think big.”
Matt Apuzzo contributed reporting.
