Return to Transcripts main page
Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield
Coverage of CIA Torture Report Release
Aired December 09, 2014 - 12:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SEN. DIANE FEINSTEIN (D), CHAIRWOMAN, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: 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.
The second set of findings and conclusions is that the CIA provided extensive, inaccurate information about the program and its effectiveness to the White House, the Department of Justice, Congress, the CIA inspector general, the media and the American public. This conclusion is somewhat personal for me. I remember clearly when Director Hayden briefed the Intelligence Committee for the first time on the so-called EITs at that September 2006 committee meeting. He referred specifically to a, quote, "tummy slap," end quote, among other techniques and presented the entire set of techniques as minimally harmful and implied in a highly clinical and professional manner. They were not.
The committee's report demonstrates that these techniques were physically very harmful and that the constraints that existed on paper in Washington did not match the way techniques were used at CIA sites around the world. A particular note was the treatment of Abu Zubaydah over a span of 17 days in August of 2002. This involved nonstop interrogation and abuse, 24/7, from August 4th to August 21st and included multiple forms of deprivation and physical assault. The description of this period, first written up by our staff in early 2009 while Senator Rockefeller was chairman, is what prompted this full review.
But the inaccurate and incomplete descriptions go far beyond that. The CIA provided inaccurate memoranda and explanations to the Department of Justice while its legal counsel was considering the legality of the coercive techniques. In those communications to the Department of Justice, the CIA claimed the following. The coercive techniques would not be used with excessive repetition. Detainees would always have an opportunity to provide information prior to the use of the techniques. The techniques were to be used in progression, starting with the least aggressive and proceeding only if need. Medical personnel would make sure that interrogations wouldn't cause serious harm and they could interrogations at any time to stop interrogations. Investigations interrogators were carefully vetted and highly trained and each technique was to be used in a specific way without deviation and only with specific approval for the interrogator and detainee involved. None of these assurances, which the Department of Justice relied on to
form its legal opinions, were consistently or even routinely carried out. In many cases, important information was withheld from policy makers. For example, Foreign Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham asked a number of questions after he was first briefed in September of 2002, but the CIA refused to answer him, effectively stonewalling him until he left the committee at the end of the year. In another example, the CIA, in coordination with White House officials and staff, initially withheld information of the CIA's interrogation techniques from Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There are CIA records stating that Colin Powell wasn't told about the program at first because there were concerns that, and I quote, "Powell would blow his stack if he were briefed," source, e-mail from John Rizo (ph) dated July 31, 2003.
CIA records clearly indicate and definitively that after he was briefed on the CIA's first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, the CIA didn't tell President Bush about the whole nature of the EITs until April 2006. That's what the records indicate.
The CIA similarly withheld information or provided false information to the CIA inspector general during his conduct of a special review by the IG in 2004. Incomplete and inaccurate information from the CIA was used in documents provided to the Department of Justice and as a basis for President Bush's speech on September 6, 2006, in which he publicly acknowledged the CIA's program for the first time.
In all of these cases, other CIA officers acknowledged internally -- they acknowledged internally that information the CIA had provided was wrong. The CIA also misled other CIA White House officials. When Vice President Cheney's counsel, David Abbington, asked CIA Council General Scott Muller in 2003 about the CIA's videotaping of waterboarding detainees, Muller deliberately told him that videotapes, quote, "were not being made," end quote, but did not disclose that videotapes of previous waterboarding sessions had been made and still existed. Source, e-mail from Scott Muller dated June 7, 2003. There are many, many more examples in the committee's report. All are documented.
The third set of findings and conclusions notes the various ways in which CIA management of the detention and interrogation program, from its inception to its formal termination in January of '09, was inadequate and deeply flawed. There is no doubt that the detention and interrogation program was by any major measure a major CIA undertaking. It raised significant legal and policy issues and involved significant resources and funding. It was not, however, managed as a significant CIA program. Instead, it had limited oversight and lacked formal direction and management.
For example, in the six months between being granted detention authority and taking custody of its first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, the CIA had not identified and prepared a suitable detention site. It had not researched effective interrogation techniques or developed a legal basis for the use of interrogation techniques outside of the rapport building techniques that were official CIA policy until that time. In fact, there is no indication the CIA reviewed its own history. That's just what Helgerson was saying in '05 with cohesive interrogation tactics. As the executive summary notes, the CIA had engaged in rough interrogation in the past.
In fact, the CIA had previously sent a letter to the intelligence committee in 1989 and here is the quote, "that inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers," end quote. That was a letter from John Helgerson, CIA director of congressional affairs, dated January 8, 1989.
However, in late 2001 and 2002, rather than research interrogation practices and coordinate with other parts of the government with extensive expertise in detention and interrogation of terrorist attacks, the CIA engaged two contract psychologists who had never conducted interrogations themselves or ever operated detention facilities.
As the CIA captured or received custody of detainees through 2002, it maintained separate lines of management at headquarters for different detention facilities. No individual or office was in charge of the detention and interrogation program until January of 2003, by which point more than one-third of CIA detainees identified in our review had been detained and interrogated.
One clear example of flawed CIA management was the poorly managed detention facility referred to, in our report, by the code name "Cobalt" to hide the actual name of the facility. It began operation in September 2002. The facility knew few formal records of the detainees - excuse me, the facility kept few formal records of the detainees housed there and untrained CIA officers conducted frequent, unauthorized and unsupervised interrogations using techniques that were not and never became part of the CIA's formal enhanced interrogation program. The CIA placed a junior officer, with no relevant experience, in charge of the site.
In November 2002, an otherwise healthy detainee, who was being held mostly nude and chained to a concrete floor, died at the facility from what is believed to have been hypothermia. In interviews conducted in 2003 by the CIA officer of the inspector general, CIA's leadership acknowledge that they had little or no awareness of operations at this specific CIA detention site. And some CIA officials - excuse me, senior officials believed erroneously that enhanced interrogation techniques were not used there. The CIA in its June 2013 response to the committee's report agreed that there were management failures in the program, but asserted that they were corrected by early 2003. While the study found that management failures improved somewhat, we found they persisted until the end of the program.
Among the numerous management shortcomings identified in the report are the following. The CIA used poorly trained and non-vetted personnel. Individuals were deployed, in particular interrogators, without relevant training or experience. Due to the CIA's redactions to the report, there are limits to what I can say in this regard, but it's a clear fact that the CIA deployed officers who had histories of personal, ethical, and professional problems of a serious nature. These included histories of violence and abusive training treatment of others and should have called into question their employment with the United States government, let alone their suitability to participate in a sensitive CIA covert action program.
The two contractors that CIA allowed to develop, operate and assess its interrogation operations conducted numerous inherently governmental functions that never should have been outsourced to contractors. These contractors are referred in the report in special pseudonyms, "Swigert" (ph) and "Dunbar." (ph) They developed the list of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA employed. They personally conducted interrogations of some of the CIA's most significant detainees using the techniques, including the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Al-Nashiri (ph). The contractors provided the official evaluations of whether detainees' psychological states allowed for the continued use of the enhanced techniques, even for some detainees they themselves were interrogating or had interrogated. Evaluating the psychological state of the very detainees they were interrogating is a clear conflict of interest and a violation of professional guidelines. The CIA relied on these two contractors to evaluate the interrogation program they had devised and in which they had obvious financial interests. Again, a clear conflict of interest and an avoidance of responsibility by the CIA.
In 2005, the two contractors formed a company specifically for the purpose of expanding their work with the CIA. From '05 to '08, the CIA outsourced almost all aspects of its detention and interrogation program to this country as part of a contract valued at more than $180 million. Ultimately, not all contract options were exercised. However, the CIA has paid these two contractors and their company more than $80 million.
Of the 119 individuals found to have been detained by the CIA during the life of the program, the committee found that at least 26 were wrongfully held. These are cases where the CIA itself determined that it had not met the standard for detention set out in the 2001 memorandum of notification which governs a covert action. Detainees often remained in custody for months after the CIA determined they should have been released. CIA records provide insufficient information to justify the detention of many other detainees. Due to poor recordkeeping, a full accounting of how many specific detainees were held and how they were specifically treated while in custody may never be known.
Similarly, in specific instances, we found that enhanced interrogation techniques were used without authorization in a manner far different and more brutal than had been authorized by the office of legal counsel and conducted by personnel not approved to use them on detainees. Questions about how and when to apply interrogation techniques were ad hoc and not proposed, evaluated and approved in the manner described by the CIA in written descriptions and testimony about the program. Detainees were often subject to harsh and brutal interrogation and treatment because CIA analysts believe often in error that they knew more information than what they had provided. Sometimes, CIA managers and interrogators in the field were uncomfortable with what they were being asked to do and recommended ending the abuse of a detainee. Repeatedly, in such cases, they were overruled by people at CIA headquarters who thought they knew better, such as by analysts with no line authority. This shows, again, how a relatively small number of CIA personnel, perhaps 40 to 50, were making decisions on detention and interrogation despite the better judgments of other CIA officers.
The fourth and final set of findings and conclusions concern how the interrogation of CIA detainees were absolutely brutal, far worse than the CIA represented them to policy makers and others. Beginning with the first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, and continuing with numerous others, the CIA applied its so-called enhanced interrogation techniques in combination and in near stop fashion for days and even weeks at a time on one detainee. In contrast to CIA representations, detainees were subjected to the most aggressive techniques immediately, stripped naked, diapered, physically struck and put in various painful stress positions for long periods of time. They were deprived of sleep for days. In one case, up to 180 hours, that's seven and a half days over a week with no sleep, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands tied together over their heads, chained to the ceiling.
In the "Cobalt" facility I previously mentioned, interrogators and guards used what they called rough takedowns in which a detainee was grabbed from his cell, clothes cut off, hooded and dragged up and down a dirt hallway while being slapped and punched. The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to Abu Zubaydah that he would only leave in a coffin-shaped box. That's from a CIA cable from August 12, 2002. According to another CIA cable, CIA officers also planned to cremate Zubaydah should he not survive his interrogation. Source, CIA cable, July 15, 2002.
After the news and photographs emerged from the United States military detention of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, the Intelligence Committee held a hearing on the matter on May 12, 2004. Without disclosing any details of its own interrogation program, CIA Director John McLaughlin testified that CIA interrogations were nothing like what was depicted at Abu Ghraib, the United States' prison in Iraq where detainees were abused by American personnel. This, of course, was false.
CIA detainees at one facility, described as a dungeon, were kept in complete darkness, constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons personnel went to that location in November 2002. And according to a contemporaneous internal CIA e-mail, told CIA officers they had, quote, "never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived," end quote. Again, source, CIA e-mail, sender and recipient redacted, December 5, 2002.
Throughout the program, multiple CIA detainees, subject to interrogation, exhibited psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self- harm and self-mutilation. Multiple CIA psychologists identified the lack of human contact experienced by detainees as a cause of psychiatric problems. The executive summary includes far more detail than I'm going to provide here about things that were in these interrogation sessions. And the summary itself includes only a subset of the treatment of the 119 CIA detainees. There is far more detail, all documented, in the full 6,700-page study. This summarizes briefly the committee's findings and conclusions.
Before I wrap up, I'd like to thank the people who made this undertaking possible. First, I thank Senator Jay Rockefeller. He started this project by directing his staff to review the operational cables that describe the first recorded interrogations after we learned that the videotapes of those sessions had been destroyed. And that report was what led to this multi-year investigation. And without it, we wouldn't have really had any sense of what had happened.
I thank other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of whom is on the floor today from the great state of New Mexico, others have been on the floor, who voted to conduct this investigation and to approve its result and make the report public. But most importantly, I want to thank the Intelligence Committee staff who performed this work. They are dedicated and committed public officials who sacrificed and really sacrificed a significant portion of their lives to see this report through to its publication.
ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Ashleigh Banfield. I want to welcome our viewers from the United States and around the world as we continue to listen to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Select Committee, outlining the significant findings of a year's long CIA report into torture conducted at the hands of the American government. Some very new information, some rehashed old information and much of it in a summary that is hundreds of pages in which she has been giving the headlines right there from the Senate floor. Significant findings.
As she wraps that up, she's going to invite John McCain, who is currently the Senate chairman - or he's on the committee for Foreign Relations. So clearly there will be some reverberations. He himself a prisoner of war, subjected to torture at the hands of the Vietnamese for over five years. So you can expect some fiery response to this from the senator himself.
There has been so much to be said regarding the pros and cons of releasing this information now. Much of it, as I said, already known and now new information coming out and little of it appealing information. But in the interests, as the Democratic senator said, of clarity and transparency, this is why this is being released.
And as we await Senator McCain, I want to bring in my colleague Fareed Zakaria, the hose of "Fareed Zakaria GPS," just to go over this significant, new information that we're learning.
Kind of seven key points listed as 20 points in some of the analysis of this. But what stood out for to you as most significant?
FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST, "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS": I think the bombshell for me, the one key point, if you will, is that the CIA appears to have run this almost like a rogue operation, in the sense that it's significantly underplayed the kind of techniques it was using. It - you know, if you look at it, they were more brutal and more extensive than they reported to their superiors at the White House, to their superiors in the intelligence community, and to their overseers in Congress. And, to me, the biggest story here is that Congress was misled, the White House was misled, other senior administration officials appear to have been misled. If that's true, what you are portraying is a CIA that in some sense went rogue on this operation.
BANFIELD: So we're -- we learned just a moment ago that Colin Powell and the president were not briefed for years. I mean, I think it said until 2006 the president, President Bush at the time, did not receive briefings on what was going on, yet in his biography he said he had been fully briefed. Perhaps at the time he didn't realize that he hadn't been fully briefed.
ZAKARIA: And the reference to Powell says he was not briefed on the program because they knew he would of -
BANFIELD: Secretary of state.
ZAKARIA: He -- as secretary of state, he - they knew he would object.
BANFIELD: Let me interrupt you for -- only for the senator. Senator McCain on the floor.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: CIA, they are out there every day defending our nation. I have read the executive summary and I also have been briefed on the entirety of this report. I rise in support of the release, the long delayed release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's summarized, unclassified review of the so-called enhance interrogation techniques that were employed by previous administration to extract information from captured terrorists. It's a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose to secure actionable intelligence, to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies, but actually damaged our security interests as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.
I believe the American people have a right, indeed responsibility, to know what was done in their name, how these practices did or did not serve our interests, and how they comported with our most important values. I commend Chairwoman Feinstein and her staff for their diligence in seeking a truthful accounting of policies I hope we will never resort to again. I thank them for persevering against persistent opposition from many members of the intelligence committee, from officials in two administrations and from some of our colleagues.
The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless. They must know when the values that define our nation are intentionally disregarded by our security policies, even those policies that are conducted in secret, they must be able to make informed judgments about whether those policies and the personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values, whether they served a greater good, or whether as I believe they stained our national honor, give much harm and little practical good. What were the policies? What was their purpose? Did they achieve it? Did they make us safer, less safe or did they make no difference? What did they gain us?
