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At This Hour
Sen. Dianne Feinstein Details Torture Report
Aired December 09, 2014 - 11:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA), CHAIRWOMAN, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: The Senate Intelligence Committee's five and a half year review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, which was conducted between 2002 and 2009, is being released publicly. The executive summary, which is going out today, is backed by a 6,700 page classified and unredacted report with 38,000 footnotes which can be released, if necessary, at a later time.
The report released today examines the CIA's secret overseas detention of at least 119 individuals and the use of coercive interrogation techniques, in some cases amounting to torture. Over the past couple of weeks, I've gone through a great deal of introspection about whether to delay the release of this report to a later time. This clearly is a period of turmoil and instability in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, that's going to continue for the foreseeable future, whether this report is released or not.
There are those who seize upon the report and say, "See what the Americans did?" And they will try to use it to justify evil actions or incite more violence. We can't prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say, "Never again."
There may never be the right time to release this report. The instability we see today won't be resolved in months or years but this report is too important to shelve indefinitely.
My determination to release it has also increased due to a campaign of mistaken statements and press articles launched against the report before anyone has had the chance to read it. As a matter of fact, the report is just now, as I speak, being released. This is what it looks like. Senator Chambliss asked me if we could have the minority report bound with the majority report. For draft, that is not possible, but in the final draft it will be bound together. But this is what the summary of the 6,000 pages look like.
My words give me no pleasure. I'm releasing this report because I know there are thousands of employees at the CIA who do not condone what I will speak about this morning, and who worked day and night long hours, within the law, for America's security in what is certainly a difficult world. My colleagues on the Intelligence Committee and I am proud of them, just as everyone in this chamber is. And we will always support them.
In reviewing this study this in the past few days, with a decision looming over the public release, I was struck by a quote found on page 126 of the executive summary. It cites the former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, who, in 2005, wrote the following to the then- director of the CIA, which clearly states the situation with respect to this report years later as well. And I quote, "We have found that the agency over the decades has continued to get itself into messes related to interrogation programs for one overriding reason, we do not document and learn from our experience. Each generation of officers is left to improvise anew with problematic results for our officers as individuals and for our agency."
I believe that to be true. I agree with Mr. Helgerson. His comments are true today, but this must change.
On March 11, 2009, the committee voted 14-1 to begin a review of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program. Over the past five years, a small team of committee investigators pored over the more than 6.3 million pages of CIA records the leader spoke about to complete this report or what we call the study. It shows that the CIA's actions a decade ago are a stain on our value and on our history. The release of this 500-page summary cannot remove that stain. But it can and does say to our people and the world that America is big enough to admit when it's wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes. Releasing this report is an important step to restore our values and show the world that we are, in fact, a just and lawful society.
Over the next hour, I'd like to lay out for Senators and the American public the report's key findings and conclusions. And I ask that when I complete this, Senator McCain be recognized.
Before I get to the substance of the report, I'd like to make a few comments about why it's so important that we make this study public. All of us have vivid memories of that Tuesday morning when terror struck New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Make no mistake, September 11, 2011, war was declared on the United States. Terrorists struck our financial center. They struck our military center. And they tried to strike our political center, and would have, had brave and courageous passengers not brought down the plane. We still vividly remember the mix of outrage and deep despair and sadness as we watched from Washington, smoke rising from the Pentagon, the passenger plane lying in a Pennsylvania field, the sound of bodies hitting canopies at ground level as innocents jumped from the World Trade Center. Mass terror that we often see abroad had struck us directly in our front yard, killing 3,000 innocent men, women, and children. What happened? We came together as a nation with one singular mission -- bring those who committed these rackets to justice.
But it's at this point where the values of America come into play, where the rule of law and the fundamental principles of right and wrong become important. In 1990, the United States Senate ratified the Convention against Torture. The convention makes clear that this ban against torture is absolute. It says, and I quote, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever," including what I just read. "Whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification for torture," end quote.
Nonetheless, it was argued that the need for information on possible additional terrorist plots after 9/11 made extraordinary interrogation techniques necessary. Even if one were to set aside all of the moral arguments, our review was a meticulous and detailed examination of records. It finds that coercive interrogation techniques did not produce the vital otherwise unavailable intelligence the CIA has claimed. I will go into further detail on this issue in a moment.
But let me make clear, these comments are not a condemnation of the CIA as a whole. The CIA plays an incredibly important part in our nation's security and has thousands of dedicated and talented employees. What we have found is that a surprisingly few people were responsible for designing, carrying out and managing this program. Two contractors led the interrogations. There was little effective oversight. Analysts, on occasion, gave operational orders that interrogations and CIA management of the program was weak and diffused.
Our final report was approved by a bipartisan vote of 9-6 in December, 2012, and exposes brutality in stark contrast to our values as a nation. This effort was focused on the actions of the CIA from late 2001 to January of 2009. The report does not include considerable detail on the CIA's interactions with the White House, the -- excuse me -- it does include considerable detail on the CIA's interactions with the White House, the Departments of Justice, State, Defense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. The review is based on contemporaneous records and documents during the time the program was in place and active. Now, these documents are important because they aren't based on recollection. They aren't based on revision. And they aren't a rationalization a decade later. It's these documents, referenced repeatedly in thousands of footnotes that provide the factual basis for the study's conclusions.
The committee's majority staff reviewed more than 6.3 million pages of these documents provided by the CIA, as well as records from other departments and agencies. These records include finished intelligence assessments, CIA operational and intelligence cables, memoranda, e- mails, real-time chat sessions, inspector general reports, testimony before Congress, pictures, and other internal records.
It's true we didn't conduct our own interviews. And let me tell you why that was the case. In 2009, there was an ongoing review by Department of Justice Special Prosecutor John Durham. On August 24, Attorney General Holder expanded that review. This occurred six months after our study had begun. Durham's original investigation of the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes was broadened to include possible criminal actions of CIA employees in the course of CIA detention and interrogation activities. At the time, the committee's vice chairman, Kit Bond, withdrew the minority's participation in the study, citing the attorney general's expanded investigation as the reason. The Department of Justice refused to coordinate its investigation with the Intelligence Committee's review. As a result, possible interviewees could be subject to additional liability if they were interviewed. And the CIA, citing the attorney general's investigation, would not instruct its employees to participate in interviews.
Notwithstanding this, I am really confident of the factual accuracy and comprehensive nature of this report for three reasons. First, it's the 6.3 million pages of documents reviewed. And they reveal records of actions as those actions took place, not through recollections more than a decade later. Second, the CIA and CIA's senior officers have taken the opportunity to explain their views on CIA detention and interrogation operations. They have done this in on-the-record statements, in classified committee hearings, written testimony and answer to questions, and through the formal response to the committee in June, 2013, after reading the study. And, third, the committee had access to and utilized an extensive set of reports of interviews conducted by the CIA inspector general and the CIA's oral history program. So while we could not conduct new interviews of individuals, we did utilize transcripts or summaries of interviews of those directly engaged in detention and interrogation operations. These interviews occurred at the time the program was operation and covered the exact topics we would have asked about had we conducted interviews ourselves.
These interview reports and transcripts included, but were not limited to the following: George Tenant, director of the CIA when the agency took custody and interrogated the majority of detainees; Jose Rodriguez, direct of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, a key player in the program; CIA general council, Scott Muller; CIA deputy director of operations, James Patter (ph); CIA acting general council, John Rizzo (ph); and CIA deputy director, John McLaughlin; and a variety of interrogators, lawyers, medical personnel, senior counterterrorism analysts, and managers of the Detention and Interrogation Program.
The best place to start about how we got into this -- and I'm delighted that Senator Rockefeller is on the floor -- is a little more than eight years ago, on September 6, 2006, when the committee met to be briefed by then-Director Michael Hayden. At that 2006 meeting, the full committee meeting learned for the first time of the use of so- called enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. It was a short meeting, in part, because President Bush was making a public speech later that day disclosing officially for the first time the existence of CIA black sites and announcing the transfer of 14 detainees from CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was the first time the interrogation program was explained to the full committee, as details had previously been limited to the chairman and vice chairman.
Then, on September -- December 7, 2007, "The New York Times" reported that CIA personnel, in 2005, had destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of two CIA detainees, the CIA's first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, as well Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. The committee had not been informed of the destruction of the tapes. Days later, on December 11, 2007, the committee held a hearing on the destruction of the videotapes. Director Hayden, the primary witness, testified that the CIA had concluded that the destruction of videotapes was acceptable, in part, because Congress had not yet requested to see them. My source is our committee's transcript, December 11, 2007.
Director Hayden stated that if the committee had asked for the videotapes they would have been provided by but, of course, the committee had not known the videotapes existed. And we now know from CIA e-mails and records that the videotapes were destroyed shortly after CIA attorneys raised concerns that Congress might find out about the tapes.
In any case, at that same, December 11 committee hearing, Director Hayden told the commit teal that CIA cables related to the interrogation sessions depicted in the videotapes were, and I quote, "A more than adequate representation of the tapes and therefore if you want them, we'll give you access to them." That's our transcript, December 11, 2007 hearing.
Senator Rockefeller, then chairman of the committee, designated two members of the committee staff to review the cables describing the interrogation sessions of Abu Zubaydah and al Nashiri. Senator Bond, then vice chairman, similarly directed two of his staffers to review the cables. The designated staff members completed their review and compiled a summary of the content of the CIA cables by early 2009, by which time I had become chairman. The description in the cables of CIA's interrogations and the treatment of detainees pressed a starkly different picture from Director Hayden's testimony before the committee. They described brutal around-the-clock interrogations, especially of Abu Zubaydah, in which multiple coercive techniques were used in combination and with substantial reputation. It was an ugly, visceral description. The summary also indicated that Abu Zubaydah did not, as a result of the use of these so-called EITs, provide the kind of intelligence that led the CIA to stop terrorist plots or arrest additional suspects. As a result, I think it's fair to say the entire committee was concerned and it approved the scope of an investigation by a vote of 14-1 and the work began.
In my March 11, 2014, floor speech about the study, I described how, in 2009, the committee came to an agreement with the new CIA director, Leon Panetta, for access to documents and other records about the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, so I won't repeat that here. From 2009 to 2012, our staff conducted a massive and unprecedented review of CIA records. Draft sections of the report were produced by late 2011 and shared with the full committee. The final report was completed in December 2012 and approved by the committee by a bipartisan vote of 9-6. After that vote, I sent the full report to the president and asked the administration to provide comments on it before it was released.
Six months later, in June of 2013, the CIA responded. I directed them that if the CIA pointed out any error in our report, we would fix it. And we did fix one bullet point that did not impact our findings and conclusions. If the CIA came to a different conclusion than the report did, we would note that in the report and explain our reasons for disagreeing, if we disagree. And you will see some of that documented in the footnotes of that executive summary, as well as in the 6,000 pages.
In April 2014, the committee prepared an updated version of the full study and voted 12-3 to declassify and release the executive summary, findings and conclusions and minority and additional views.
On August 1, we received a declassified version from the executive branch. It was immediately apparent that the redactions to our report prevented a clear and understandable reading of the study and prevented us from substantiating the findings and conclusions, so we obviously objected.
For the past four months, the committee and the CIA, the director of National Intelligence, and the White House have engaged in a lengthy negotiation over the redactions to the report. We have been able to include some more information in the report today without sacrificing sources and methods of our -- or our national security.
I'd like to ask, following my remarks, that a letter from the White House, dated yesterday, conveying the report, also points out that the report is 93 percent complete, that the redactions amount to 7 percent of the bulk of the report.
UNIDENTIFIED SENATE CHAIRMAN: Without objection.
FEINSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. President, this has been a long process. The work began seven years ago when Senator Rockefeller directed the committee staff to review the CIA cables describing the cables of Abu Zubaydah and al Nashiri. It's been very difficult but I believe the documentation and the findings inclusions will make clear how this program was morally, legally and administratively misguided, and that this nation should never again engage in these tactics.
Let me now turn to the contents of the study. As I noted, we have 20 findings and conclusions which fall into four general categories. First, the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques were not an effective way to gather intelligence information. Second, the CIA provided extensive amounts of inaccurate information about the operation of the program and its effectiveness to the White House, the Department of Justice, Congress, the CIA inspector general, the media, and the American public. Third, the CIA's management of the program was inadequate and deeply flawed. And fourth, the CIA program was far more brutal than people were led to believe.
Let me describe each category in more detail. The first set of findings and conclusions concern the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of the interrogation program. The committee found that the CIA's coercion techniques were not an effective means of acquiring accurate intelligence or gaining detainee cooperation. The CIA and other defenders of the program have repeatedly claimed that the use of so- called interrogation techniques was necessary to get detainees to provide critical information and to bring detainees to a, quote, "state of compliance," end quote, in which they would cooperate and provide information. The study concludes that both claims are inaccurate.
The report is very specific in how it evaluates the CIA's claims on the effectiveness and necessity of its enhanced interrogation techniques. Specifically, we used the CIA's own definition of "effectiveness" as ratified and approved by the Department of Justice's Office of the Legal Counsel. The CIA's claim that the EITS were necessary to obtain, quote, "otherwise available," end quote, information that could not be obtained from any other source to stop terrorist attacks and save American lives. That's a claim we conclude is inaccurate. We took 20 examples that the CIA itself claimed to show the success of
these interrogations. These include cases of terrorist plots stopped or terrorist captured. The CIA used these examples in presentations to the White House, in testimony to Congress, in submissions to the Department of Justice, and ultimately to the American people.
Some of the claims are well known, the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the prevention of attacks against the Library Tower (ph) of Los Angeles, and the takedown of Osama bin Laden. Other claims were made only in classified settings, to the White House, Congress and the Department of Justice. In each case, the CIA claimed that critical and unique information came from one or more detainees in its custody after they were subjected to the CIA's coercive techniques and that information led to specific counterterrorism success.
Our staff reviewed every one of the 20 cases and not a single case holds up. In every single one of these cases, at least one of the following was true. One, the intelligence community had information separate from the use of EITs that led to the terrorist disruption or capture. Two, information from a detainee subjected to EITs played no role in the claimed disruption or capture. And, three, the purported terrorist plot either did not exist or posed no real threat to Americans or United States interests.
Some critics have suggested the study concludes that no intelligence was ever provided from any detainee the CIA held. That is false. And the study makes no such claim. What is true is that actionable intelligence that was, quote, "otherwise unavailable, otherwise unavailable," was not obtained using these coercive interrogation techniques.
The report also chronicles where the use of techniques that do not involve physical force were effective. Specifically, the report provides examples where interrogators had sufficient information to confront detainees with facts, know when they were lying. And where they applied rapport-building techniques that were developed and honed by the United States military, the FBI, and more recently, the Interagency High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, called the Head (ph), that these techniques produced good intelligence.
Let me make a few other comments on the claimed effectiveness of CIA interrogations. At no time did the CIA coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of intelligence on an imminent threat that many believe was the justification for these techniques. The committee never found an example of this hypothetical ticking-time bomb scenario. The use of coercive technique methods regularly resulted in fabricated information. Sometimes the CIA actually knew detainees were lying. Other times, the CIA acted on false information, diverting resources and leading officers or contractors to falsely believe they were acquiring unique or actionable intelligence, and that its interrogations were working when they were not.
Internally, CIA officers often called into question the effectiveness of the CIA's interrogation techniques, noting how the techniques failed to illicit detainee cooperation or produce accurate information. The report includes numerous examples of CIA officers questioning the agency's claims, but these contradictions were marginalized and not presented externally.
