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Wolf

Interview with Rep. Adam Schiff; CIA Director John Brennan Briefs Press on Torture Report

Aired December 11, 2014 - 13:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: I want to bring in Representative Adam Schiff. He's a Democrat from California. He's a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Do you believe, like some of your Democrat colleagues in the Senate, like Mark Udall of Colorado for example, Congressman Schiff, that John Brennan, the CIA director, should go?

REP. ADAM SCHIFF, D-CALIFORNIA: I'm not prepared to go as far as Mark Udall. I think it's going to be the president's decision. If president still has confidence in the director, and I think he does, if the director is going to implement the president's policies against torture, I think the president will keep him as the CIA director.

But I'll tell you what I would like to hear the director say today when he talks to the staff at the agency, and that is, look, these procedures that we did, these enhanced interrogations did amount to torture. We should not have done it. That was a mistake. Even if we were given legal opinions that said it was permitted, that was still a mistake. And what's more, we went beyond what the legal opinions said and that compounded the mistake.

But I think the director also should make a very important point and that is, this conclusion of the Senate that the interrogations did not produce valuable intelligence, that's the least important conclusion of the report. We shouldn't be doing it no matter what the efficacy of it. And that's a point I would like to hear the director make.

BLITZER: What happens if it saves American lives? That's the argument you'll hear. I heard it yesterday from Alberto Gonzales. I heard it from the former CIA director general, Michael Hayden, and so many others who supported these harsh interrogation techniques. They say, remember, the context, this is after 9/11, people were afraid there could be another 9/11 or even worse, a nuclear bomb coming to New York City. And as a result, they justified these harsh techniques.

So let me play a little clip. This is the former CIA director, General Michael Hayden. Listen to this, Congressman.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: There are a lot of things that I wish didn't happen. And fundamentally, Wolf, at the end of the day, I can't in my heart of hearts wish that we didn't have to do this. But we did have a duty.

BLITZER: And you believe that lives were saved as a result of this.

HAYDEN: Look, anybody who has touched this program of either political party under either administration believes that to be true.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: All right. Go ahead, Congressman Schiff. You want to respond to General Hayden?

SCHIFF: Well, look, I think anyone who was involved in this has to believe that's true, but the reality is there's simply no way to prove and there'll never be a way to prove that you can't get the same or better information without the use of those kind of enhanced interrogation procedures or torture. And I would also say that regardless of its efficacy which will never be proven it's just the wrong thing to do. It is contrary to all our values.

And I think it's deeply destructive of our democracy. The most difficult fight we're in with al Qaeda is not the military one, it's the ideological one. And I think this has been a real setback, not the release of the report which I congratulate the courage of our Senator Feinstein, but rather the fax that these events took place at all, is a real body blow in the ideological war that we're in, Wolf.

BLITZER: Congressman Schiff, thanks very much for joining us.

SCHIFF: Thank you.

BLITZER: All right. We're standing by, only moments away, we're going live to Langley, Virginia, that's right outside Washington, D.C. The Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA headquarters, a rare news conference with the CIA director, John Brennan. That's coming up right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington. Once again we want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. We're awaiting an extraordinary news conference at CIA headquarters outside Washington, D.C. The CIA director John Brennan getting ready to make a strong defense of the CIA and then he's going to actually answer reporters' questions during an extensive news conference.

We're standing by for live coverage.

With us in here Washington, Jake Tapper with us, along with our CNN terrorism analyst, Paul Cruikshank, our chief political analyst, Gloria Borger. Also joining us from Colorado, our CNN national security analyst, the former CIA officer Bob Baer. Also "Bloomberg View" columnist, CNN political analyst, Josh Rogin, Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff to the CIA director Leon Panetta, and joining us from London, of course, our chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour. Jeremy Bash, you worked at the CIA when Leon Panetta was the CIA

director. How extraordinary is this kind of news conference, live coverage from CIA headquarters, with the director who's obviously under a lot of criticism right now?

JEREMY BASH, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF FOR CIA DIRECTOR LEON PANETTA: This is very unusual, Wolf, and what I think Director Brennan is going to want to do here today is two things. First, he's going to clearly want to defend the actions of his officers, but second and probably most importantly, he's going to want to say now it's time to move on because the very officers whose conduct is discussed in this report are also responsible today, at this hour, for collecting information about ISIS, about Hezbollah, about the remnants of al Qaeda, and so he wants to say basically to them and to the world, I need you focused on your mission.

We need you on the front lines. We don't want you distracted anymore. Basically, get back to work. And that's a very important message for the work force to hear and for the greater community to hear, to know that the agency is very focused right now on its mission.

BLITZER: Have you heard, like I have, Jeremy, that this is an issue of morale among CIA career analysts and clandestine officers, for example?

BASH: Of course. It's got to be a blow to morale, Wolf, because, of course, it's now out there for everybody to see, for the kids of the women and men who work at the agency, who are undercover, they can't defend themselves. It's out there for their kids to Google and read about what their parents did. It's something that they'll have to shoulder with them everywhere they go, everywhere they travel.

And again, the reason why morale is important is because we need these people, we need these people to get out in the field and to continue to penetrate the plots and disrupt the plots. You know, if we didn't need them, if we didn't want them to do their mission it would be one thing but because we so importantly need them to do their job today, it's -- he's got to get there -- them back in the game. He's got to say now it's time to move on, let's get back to work.

BLITZER: Gloria, you've spent some time trying to study this relationship between President Obama and John Brennan.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.

BLITZER: Jake was talking about it a little bit earlier. We heard the White House, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, just moments ago issue a strong statement, the president still has confidence in John Brennan.

BORGER: He does. And the word he used was unknowable. And that's the word that you -- that you've also -- the message you get from John Brennan, which is in the end do we know whether torture worked? And their conclusion, obviously, is that the truth is unknown and can never be known. So there are two arguments that are going on in the country. One is about the efficacy of the torture and the other is about the morality of the torture.

We heard from Congressman Schiff who really seemed to be talking about whether this is something we should have sanctioned as a country. That was why he was happy this report is finally out there. But the political debate really seems to be focusing less on the morality and more on the question of did it work, does it work? Can we ever know if it worked?

And the answer I think you're going to hear from John Brennan, the answer you're hearing from the White House, is no. And by the way, I would also argue that there is this kind of structural ambivalence that the president has to have and that John Brennan has to have.

To Jeremy Bash's point, you know, Brennan runs the CIA right now. He has to tell his troops, you've got to keep doing your job. We no longer torture. Let's move on, as Jeremy says, and the president of the United States actually cannot throw the CIA under the bus. Some people believe he already did that when he released the original torture memos back in 2009, but as president right now, he's being criticized by his liberal Democrats but I would argue he has no other choice other than to back Brennan and back the CIA.

BLITZER: Let's go to Bob Baer.

Bob, you worked in the CIA, obviously, for a long time. You know what's going on among morale, among these professionals who are there. How big of a problem potentially is this?

ROBERT BAER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Wolf, it's awful. I've talked to the people who are involved in this torture program. A lot of them are retired and they are scared they're going to be indicted. But beyond them, other employees are asking the question, look, we were told this was legal, we told -- it was supported by the White House and the rest of it. We wouldn't have a problem. And now that's turned out not to be true.

So it's really damaged moral. And if this goes farther the investigation it will wreck the CIA in a way we haven't seen since the Pike Committee hearings.

BLITZER: What do you mean, wreck the CIA?

BAER: Wreck the morale. People are going to say why should we stay in here, why should we do this job? It's tough. We are killing people with drones and the rest of it and it turns out to be illegal and we personally have to pay the price people are going to be leaving and they're going to stop doing their jobs.

And this is really hard because the CIA has been under attack for years and most of these programs are driven by the White House who wants -- it turns out they don't work, then sort of abandon the CIA. And that's why Brennan should stay in his job because the president trusts him and it is the last thing we need is a change of leadership at the CIA right now.

BLITZER: You're looking at live pictures of CIA headquarters. The podium there. That's where John Brennan, the CIA director, will be walking up to momentarily with an opening statement, strong statement of support of the record of the CIA. He will acknowledge mistakes were made, as they say, but will also say the CIA has a job to do and it's time to move on.

Paul Cruickshank, you've been monitoring some of these jihadi websites out there. The reaction to Dianne Feinstein and the Senate Intelligence Committee report. What are you picking up over there? What are they saying?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: There's been a pretty muted reaction in the Middle East, a pretty muted reaction on these jihadi websites and social media. There have been some calls from English speaking jihadists for some retaliation. There was a Canadian ISIS fighter who called for the beheading of two of these psychologists allegedly involved in this program, but by and large this has been met with indifference.

This is old news for many of these jihadists, Wolf. And they already have a very dark view of the United States. After all, they believe that the United States is at war with Islam, that they want to exterminate the Muslim religion. So I don't think this is going to move the dial too much.

And I don't think this is going to have the same effect as previous controversies like the cartoons controversy, like that film that came out just before the Benghazi attack, which was promoted by a controversial U.S. pastor which caused riots. Those other controversies touched on deep religious raw nerves. This one doesn't in the same way.

BLITZER: All right. Stand by for a moment. I want to quickly bring in Josh Rogin.

Josh, John Brennan, he was a high-ranking CIA official during the time of these extraordinary interrogation techniques, some call torture, were taking place, and the question a lot of people are asking, how much detail, what did he know at the time about what was going on? Because he has said he was surprised when he learned some of the details.

JOSH ROGIN, BLOOMBERG VIEW COLUMNIST: Exactly. In the committee's 570-page executive summary, John Brennan's name is not mentioned even once. According to my committee sources, there are extensive e-mails involving Brennan in the larger still classified portion of the report. He was the number four at the CIA. He was the head of the National Counterterrorism Center at the White House.

The question will remain until answered, what did he know and when did he know you it. If he claims that he was opposed to these practices, let's see the e-mail, let's see the evidence.

The other thing that reporters and lawmakers will want to know is, what was John Brennan's role in overseeing the response to this report? There was $40 million spent by the CIA. There were allegations by lawmakers, including Dianne Feinstein, that Brennan's CIA spied on the Senate investigators --

BLITZER: Hold on a second, Josh. Hold on. Hold on. John Brennan has just walked up to the microphone. So I'm going to interrupt you. Let's listen in.

JOHN BRENNAN, CIA DIRECTOR: It was 8:46 a.m. on the morning of September 11th, 2001, when the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City was struck by an aircraft commandeered by al Qaeda terrorists. Seventeen minutes later the clear blue skies over Manhattan were pierced yet again by another hijacked aircraft. This one tearing into the adjacent South Tower.

At 9:37, the Pentagon, the proud symbol and heart of the nation's military, suffered a similar attack. And at 10:03, a fourth plane shattered the serene landscape of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as its passengers refused to allow al Qaeda to use one more plane as a missile to strike our homeland.

In the short span of 77 minutes, four terrorist attacks would forever change the history of our country. They would rob us of nearly 3,000 lives. They would ultimately cost us trillions of dollars. And they would plunge us into a seemingly never-ending war against a globally dispersed collection of terrorists with a murderous agenda.

As deputy executive director of CIA on that morning of 9/11, I knew what it was like to belong to an intelligence agency that had been ringing the bell for many months about al Qaeda's plans to attack. All of us at CIA were devastated al Qaeda operatives were able to carry out such horrific attacks in near simultaneous fashion and on American soil.

And while I remember walking the halls of CIA that day to ensure that as many agency officers as possible had left the building, as our headquarters here in Langley, Virginia, was reportedly on al Qaeda's target list, I also remember that the men and women in our counterterrorism center stayed at their posts, despite the danger.

They worked through that day and that night and the following days and the following nights, to piece together the clues as to what plans were under way to carry out yet more attacks. Their CIA brothers and sisters who were dispersed around the globe, many in dangerous environments, did the same thing.

Only 15 days after 9/11, on September 26th, it was CIA that put the first American boots on the ground in Afghanistan. And less than two months after arriving, the United States suffered its first casualty in Afghanistan when a 32-year-old CIA officer named Mike Spann was killed on action on November 25th in Mazar-e Sharif. Since Mike's death, 20 other CIA officers have lost their lives around the world at the hands of terrorists.

The events of 9/11 will be forever seared into the memories of all Americans who bore witness to the single greatest tragedy to our homeland in recent history. Not only were our consciences shocked and our hearts and souls ripped open, so, too, our collective national sense of homeland security was shattered. Much like the steel, concrete, flesh, bone, and lives during those fateful 77 minutes.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, our nation ached, it cried, and it prayed. And in our pain, we pledged to come together as one and to do what we could to prevent Osama bin Laden and his killing machine from ever carrying out another attack against our beautiful country. Never again, we vowed, never again.

But al Qaeda had other ideas. As well as additional operatives and more plans to strike us again and again. With a globally distributed network that had stealthily concealed itself in many countries over many continents, al Qaeda was poised, ready and prepared to pursue its violent agenda.

Our government and our citizens recognized the urgency of the task. To find and stop al Qaeda before it could shed the blood of more innocent men, women and children. Be it in America or be it in any other corner of the world.

And, as has been the case throughout its then 54-year history, CIA was looked to for answers. Not only to the questions on the threats we faced, but also to questions about what we were going to do to stop future attacks.

The CIA's mission in the wake of the 9/11 attacks would be a multidimensional one. Stopping al Qaeda would require the CIA to work closely with its intelligence community, military, homeland security, and law enforcement partners, as well as with numerous intelligence and security services around the globe.

To be successful, CIA officers knew that they needed speed, agility, courage, resources and most important, intelligence. Their mission was to acquire through human and technical operations and then to analyze with deep expertise whatever bits and pieces of information might help fill out the menacing yet incomplete puzzle of al Qaeda's terrorist plans.

Indeed there were numerous, credible and very worrisome reports about a second and third wave of major attacks against the United States. And while we grieved, while we honored our dead, while we tended to our injured and while we embarked on the long process of recovery, we feared more blows from an enemy we couldn't see and an evil we couldn't fathom.

This is the backdrop against which the agency was directed by President Bush to carry out a program to detain terrorist suspects around the world. In many respects, the program was unchartered territory for the CIA and we were not prepared. We had little experience housing detainees and precious few of our officers were trained interrogators. But the president authorized the effort six days after 9/11, and it was our job to carry it out.

Over time, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, EITs, which the Department of Justice determined at the time to be lawful and which were duly authorized by the Bush administration, were introduced as a method of interrogation. As concerns about al Qaeda's terrorist plans endured, a variety of these techniques were employed by CIA officers on several dozen detainees over the course of five years before they ended in December of 2007.

The legal advice under which they were authorized subsequently has been revoked. When the president came into office in January 2009, he took the position that these techniques were contrary to our values and he unequivocally banned their use. He has consistently expressed the view that these techniques did significant damage to America's standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.

Something I have experienced firsthand. But as the president stated this week, the previous administration faced agonizing choices about how to pursue al Qaeda and prevent additional terror attacks against our country while facing fears of further attacks and carrying out the responsibility to prevent more catastrophic loss of life.

There were no easy answers and whatever your views are on EITs, our nation and in particular this agency did a lot of things right during this difficult time to keep this country strong and secure.

The same year that techniques were banned by the president, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the SSCI, initiated an in-depth review of the detention and interrogation program. The CIA's implementation of the detention and interrogation program is a very legitimate oversight issue.

We gave the committee our full support, providing an unprecedented amount of sensitive CIA documents to the committee and dedicated resources to help it with its review. Our hope was that it would offer an impartial and authoritative assessment of the program, help us learn from our mistakes and inform how we conduct sensitive activities in the future. Unfortunately the committee could not agree on a bipartisan way forward and no CIA personnel were interviewed by the committee during the course of the investigation.

This was unusual. In the vast majority of cases, SSCI's congressional reports have been the result of collaborative bipartisan investigations. Over the course of my career, I have seen the value of the committee's reviews. Even on politically sensitive matters such as the SSCI's investigation into the intelligence failures regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The committee succeeded in producing a report that was supported unanimously.

In that case the committee reviewed tens of thousands of documents and conducted interviews with more than 200 officers from the intelligence community. Some of whom were interviewed up to four times.

This week the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the executive summary, findings and conclusions of its study of the agency's former detention and interrogation program. Vice Chairman Chambliss joined by five other senators also released minority views. The authors clearly worked very hard to produce a report of this magnitude. Over several years, they sorted through over a million documents provided by the CIA and their commitment to the task is obvious.

Although we view the process undertaken by the committee when investigating the program as flawed, many aspects of their conclusions are sound and consistent with our own prior findings. Over the years internal agency reviews including numerous investigations by our Office of the Inspector General found fault in CIA's running of the program. We have acknowledged many of these mistakes in our response to the study last year and I will touch on some of them today.

Acknowledging our mistakes and absorbing the lessons of the past is fundamental to our ability to succeed in our mission and it's one of the greatest strengths of this organization. Even today, we know there are further organizational improvements to be made as a result of our review of the study and we are pursuing them.

As I have already noted, the CIA was unprepared to conduct a detention and interrogation program and our officers inadequately developed and monitored its initial activities. The agency failed to establish quickly the operational guidelines needed to govern the entire effort.

In a limited number of cases, agency officers used interrogation techniques that had not been authorized, were abhorrent and rightly should be repudiated by all. And we fell short when it came to holding some officers accountable for their mistakes.

It is vitally important to recognize, however, that the overwhelming majority of officers involved in the program at CIA carried out the responsibilities faithfully and in accordance with the legal and policy guidance they were provided. They did what they were asked to do in the service of our nation.

In fact, some of these officers raised objections and concerns with the program and with its implementation, which is crucial to ensuring that the system works as it should and that we are able to adjust as needed. But CIA officers' actions that did comport with the law and policy should neither be criticized nor conflated with the actions of the few who did not follow the guidance issued.

At the same time, none of these lapses should be excused, downplayed or denied. In some instances we simply failed to live up to the standards that we set for ourselves, that the American people expect for us. To address the concerns identified, the CIA has implemented a number of reforms in an effort to make sure those mistakes never happen again.

For example, as a result of our own investigations and our review of the committee's report, CIA has taken steps to broaden the scope of our accountability reviews, strengthen the planning, management and oversight and evaluation of our covert action programs, systematically reexamine the legal opinions underlying our sensitive programs, and improve our record keeping for interactions with the Congress.

We are also carefully observing the new statutory requirement to provide our oversight committees with notice of any significant legal interpretation of the Constitution or other U.S. law affecting intelligence activities conducted by the CIA.

As to the issues on which we part ways with the committee, I have already stated that our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.

But let me be clear. We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is in my view unknowable.

Irrespective of the role EITs might play in a detainee's provision of useful information, I believe effective non-coercive methods are available to elicit such information. Methods that do not have a counterproductive impact on our national security and on our international standing. It is for these reasons that I fully support the president's decision to prohibit the use of EITs.