DEVELOPMENTS
• Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said Wednesday that he was astounded by the new revelations of CIA torture in his country and elsewhere. At a news conference in Kabul, he said he had demanded more information on precisely how many Afghans had been victims. He said the abuses, described in the report, had “violated all accepted norms of human rights in the world.”
• United Nations human rights commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said CIA torturers and their superiors must be held accountable, but praised the United States for releasing the report. “Few countries will admit that their state apparatus has been practicing torture, and many continue shamelessly to deny it,” he said in a statement.
• Poland’s former president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, who led the country from 1995 to 2005 and was a close American ally, broke with years of denial on Wednesday and acknowledged that he had permitted the CIA to operate a clandestine interrogation center in Poland. Kwasniewski said the Polish parliament that U.S. intelligence agents had been permitted use of a site to question “people who had expressed willingness to cooperate with the Americans.” But he said he had not been aware of what, precisely, had taken place inside the site, news agencies reported.
— From news services
The Senate intelligence committee’s report doesn’t urge prosecution for wrongdoing, and the Justice Department has no interest in reopening a criminal probe. But the threat to former interrogators and their superiors was underlined as a U.N. special investigator demanded those responsible for “systematic crimes” be brought to justice, and human rights groups pushed for the arrest of key CIA and Bush administration figures if they travel overseas.
Current and former CIA officials pushed back, determined to paint the report as a political stunt by Senate Democrats tarnishing a program that saved American lives.
It 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.
Senate investigators singled out Hayden 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. He described the focus on him as “ironic on so many levels” because any wrongdoing predated his arrival at the CIA.
“They were far too interested in yelling at me,” Hayden wrote in an email.
The intelligence committee’s 500-page release concluded that the CIA inflicted suffering on al-Qaida prisoners beyond its legal authority and that none of the agency’s “enhanced interrogations” provided critical, life-saving intelligence.
The CIA is now in the uncomfortable position of defending itself publicly, given its basic mission to protect the country secretly. Its 136-page rebuttal suggests Senate Democrats searched through millions of documents to pull out only the evidence backing pre-determined conclusions.
Challenging one of the report’s most explosive arguments — that harsh interrogation techniques didn’t lead to the killing of Osama bin Laden — the CIA pointed to questioning of Ammar al-Baluchi, who revealed how an al-Qaida operative relayed messages to and from bin Laden after the al-Qaida leader departed Afghanistan. Before then, the CIA said, it only knew that courier Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti interacted with bin Laden in 2001 when bin Laden was accessible to many of his followers. Al-Kuwaiti eventually led the U.S. to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
Poring over the same body of evidence as the investigators, the CIA insisted most of the 20 case studies cited in the Senate report actually illustrated how enhanced interrogations helped disrupt plots, capture terrorists and prevent another 9/11-type attack. The agency said it obtained legal authority for its actions from the Justice Department and White House, and made “good faith” efforts to keep congressional leaders informed.
Former CIA officials responsible for the program echoed those points in interviews.
John McLaughlin, then deputy CIA director, said waterboarding and other tactics transformed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into a U.S. “consultant” on al-Qaida.
Tenet, the director on Sept. 11, 2001, said the interrogation program “saved thousands of Americans lives” while the country faced a “ticking time bomb every day.”
Vice President Dick Cheney also pushed back. And former top CIA officials launched a website — ciasavedlives.com — pointing out decade-old statements from Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller in apparent support of agency efforts. The two Democrats spearheaded the Senate investigation.
The intelligence committee’s Republicans issued their own 167-page “minority” report and said the Democratic analysis was flawed, dishonest and, at $40 million, a waste of taxpayer money. Feinstein’s office said Wednesday most of the cost was incurred by the CIA in trying to hide its record.
If the sides agreed on one thing, it was that the CIA suffered from significant mismanagement problems early on. The agency and its Republican supporters said those failings were corrected.
“We have learned from these mistakes,” current CIA Director John Brennan said.
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