Ex-CIA Official: Agency Brass Lied To Congress About Interrogations

"A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that 'CIA people had lied' in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading," the Washington Post reported in May 2006.

At The Public Record, Jason Leopold writes:

Last week, former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey sharply criticized President Obama’s decision to release four “torture” memos writing in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal that the “disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption.”

Buried in their column was the claim that the methods the CIA used against “high-value” detainees, such as waterboarding, beatings, and stress positions, “were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006.”


“Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense,” the former Bush officials wrote.

Several prominent Republicans, including Rep. John Boehner, (R- Ohio), and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, have echoed Hayden’s claims, in an attempt to show Democrats were complicit because they did not protest when they were briefed about the “enhanced interrogation” program and the techniques CIA interrogators intended to use.

“It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002,” Hoekstra wrote in an op-ed also published in the Wall Street Journal Thursday. “We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.”

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had been the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, vehemently denied that she was told the CIA planned on waterboarding detainees or intended to use other brutal techniques to try and extract information from “war on terror” prisoners.

"My colleague [Porter Goss], the chairman of the committee, has said 'if they say that it's legal you have to know they are going to use them,'" Pelosi said Thursday. "Well, his experience is that he was a member of the CIA, later went on to head the CIA and maybe his experience is that if they tell you one thing they may mean something else. My experience is that they did not tell us they were using that. Flat out. And any -- any contention to the contrary is simply not true.

“They told us they had opinions from the [Justice Department’s] Office of Legal Counsel that they could, but not that they were' using enhanced techniques, 'and that if and when they were used, they would brief Congress at that time. As a member of Intelligence, I thought I was being briefed. I realized that was not true when I became ranking member.”

Questions about what the Democrats knew about the CIA’s torture program were raised two years ago when it was revealed that the CIA had destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes in November 2005 and that the agency had informed Democratic lawmakers about its plans.

Following that disclosure, Rep. Harman’s office released a February 2003 letter she wrote to the CIA advising the agency against destroying the videotapes. The CIA declassified Harman's letter at the congresswoman's request.

“You discussed the fact that there is videotape of [high-level al-Qaeda operative] Abu Zubaydah following his capture that will be destroyed after the Inspector General finishes his inquiry,” Harman wrote. “I would urge the Agency to reconsider that plan. Even if the videotape does not constitute an official record that must be preserved under the law, the videotape would be the best proof that the written record is accurate, if such record is called into question in the future. The fact of destruction would reflect badly on the Agency.”

Harman's letter did not raise concerns or express disapproval about the CIA's use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Instead, her letter advised the agency against destroying the videotapes were made out of concern the footage CIA agents captured "would be the best proof that the written record is accurate, if such record is called into question in the future.”

Still, claims that Democrats were fully briefed on the Bush administration’s torture program have been leveled as recently as last December by Vice President Dick Cheney and in books by former Bush officials such as John Yoo, the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the OLC who helped draft one of the four memos released last week.

But the veracity of those assertions have been called into question by former CIA official Mary O. McCarthy, who said senior agency officials lied to members of Congress during an intelligence briefing in 2005 when they said the agency did not violate treaties that bar, cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment of detainees during interrogations, according to a May 14, 2006, front-page story in The Washington Post.

"A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that 'CIA people had lied' in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading," the Washington Post reported.

"In addition to CIA misrepresentations at the session last summer, McCarthy told the friends, a senior agency official failed to provide a full account of the CIA's detainee-treatment policy at a closed hearing of the House intelligence committee in February 2005, under questioning by Rep. Jane Harman (California), the senior Democrat," The Washington Post reported.

"McCarthy also told others she was offended that the CIA's general counsel had worked to secure a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the agency's creation of "ghost detainees" - prisoners removed from Iraq for secret interrogations without notice to the International Committee of the Red Cross - because the Geneva Conventions prohibit such practices."

In 2004, McCarthy was tapped by the CIA's Inspector General John Helgerson to assist him with internal investigations about the agency’s interrogation methods. The report Helgerson prepared remains classified, but the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to have it released publicly.

"McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt that the Bush administration's venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted US counterterrorism policy. After seeing - in e-mails, cable traffic, interview transcripts and field reports - some of the secret fruits of the Iraq intervention, McCarthy became disenchanted, three of her friends say," the Post reported.

In May 2005, just a few months after the CIA briefed Congress on interrogation methods, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, requested “to see over a hundred documents referred to in [Helgerson’s] report on detention inside the black prison sites," New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote in her book, The Dark Side. "Among the items Rockefeller specifically sought was a legal analysis of the CIA's interrogation videotapes.

"Rockefeller wanted to know if the intelligence agency's top lawyer believed that the waterboarding of [alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu] Zubaydah and [alleged 9/11 mastermind] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as captured on the secret videotapes, was entirely legal. The CIA refused to provide the requested documents to Rockefeller.

"But the Democratic senator's mention of the videotapes undoubtedly sent a shiver through the Agency, as did a second request he made for these documents to [former CIA Director Porter] Goss in September 2005."

The May 2005 request from Rockefeller took place during the same month that Steven Bradbury, the former head of the OLC, wrote three legal opinions reinstating the torture techniques his predecessor, Jack Goldsmith, had withdrawn.

Bradbury’s memos, released last Thursday, include several footnotes to Helgerson’s report one of which states that the CIA used waterboarding “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” and used “large volumes of water” as opposed to the smaller amount the CIA said it intended to use. In fact, Bradbury's memos, while authorizing brutal techniques, also disputes the conclusions of Helgerson's still classified report that the interrogation techniques violated the Convention Against Torture.

According to a November 9, 2005 story in the New York Times published the same month 92 interrogation videotapes were destroyed, Helgerson’s report “raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability.”

"They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to CIA interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States," the Times reported. "The officials who described the report said it discussed particular techniques used by the CIA against particular prisoners, including about three dozen terror suspects being held by the agency in secret locations around the world.”

Mayer reported that Helgerson’s report “known as a 'special review,' was tens of thousands of pages long and as thick as two Manhattan phone books. It contained information, according to one source, that was simply 'sickening.'"

“The behavior it described, another knowledgeable source said, raised concerns not just about the detainees but also about the Americans who had inflicted the abuse, one of whom seemed to have become frighteningly dehumanized. The source said, ‘You couldn't read the documents without wondering, 'Why didn't someone say, "Stop!'""

Mayer wrote that Vice President Dick Cheney stopped Helgerson from fully completing his investigation. That proves, Mayer contends, that as early as 2004 "the Vice President's office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in The [interrogation] Program."

"Helgerson was summoned repeatedly to meet privately with Vice President Cheney" before his investigation was "stopped in its tracks." Mayer said that Cheney's interaction with Helgerson was "highly unusual."

As a result, McCarthy "worried that neither Helgerson nor the [CIA’s] Congressional overseers would fully examine what happened or why," according to the Post report.

McCarthy told a friend, according to the Post’s account: "She had the impression that this stuff has been pretty well buried. In McCarthy's view and that of many colleagues, friends say, torture was not only wrong but also misguided, because it rarely produced useful results."

In April 2006, 10 days before she was due to retire, McCarthy was fired from the CIA for allegedly leaking classified information to the media, a CIA spokeswoman told reporters at the time.

In October 2007, Hayden ordered an investigation into Helgerson’s office, focusing on internal complaints that the inspector general was on “a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs.”

The CIA said McCarthy had spoken with numerous journalists, including The Washington Post's Dana Priest, who in November 2005 exposed the CIA's secret prison sites, where in 2002 the CIA videotaped its agents interrogating a so-called high-level detainee, Abu Zubaydah.

Following news reports of her dismissal from the CIA, McCarthy, through her attorney Ty Cobb, vehemently denied leaking classified information to the media. McCarthy, who is now in private practice as an attorney, did not return calls for comment.

The CIA said she failed a polygraph test after the agency launched an internal investigation in late 2005. The agency said the investigation was an attempt to find out who provided The Washington Post and The New York Times with information about its covert activities, including domestic surveillance, and it promptly fired her.

After Hayden ordered launched an investigation into Helgerson’s work, the Washington Post reported, citing unnamed sources, that in 2002 Pelosi, Sen. Bob Graham, D-FL, and Rep. Jane Harman, D-CA, and a handful of Republican lawmakers, were “given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make the prisoners talk.”

“Among the techniques described [to the lawmakers], said two officials present, was water-boarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill,” the Post reported. “But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two US officials said.”

The Post story also made identical claims that Hayden and Mukasey leveled in their Wall Street Journal column last week: that Pelosi and other Democratic leaders were privately briefed at least 30 times. Those briefings, according to the Post, “included descriptions of [water-boarding] and other harsh interrogations methods.”

But Graham disputed claims that he and other members of Congress were briefed about the interrogation program.

“Speaking for myself as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee from mid-2001 to the end of 2002, I was not briefed on these interrogation techniques,” Graham told National Public Radio Thursday . “[I] am frankly very frustrated that there are these allegations made that everybody knew about it. I think the policy of the Bush administration was to try to bring as many people into the net when they were going to engage in some questionable activity in order to give them cover. In this case, I was not in the net.”

A declassified narrative released Wednesday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says about the politics of the Bush administration’s torture program says Intelligence Committee chairs in both Houses were briefed about the interrogation program in 2002 and 2003. What they were told, however, remains a mystery.

In an interview with Newsweek last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who now chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and has launched a “review” and “study” of the CIA’s interrogation methods, said, “"I now know we were not fully and completely briefed on the CIA program.”

Feinstein was reacting to a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that was leaked, which described, in shocking detail, the techniques used to interrogate 14 “high-value” detainees.

Interestingly, the magazine quoted an unnamed “U.S. Official” who disputed the charge, and claimed, in language nearly identical to what Hayden wrote in the Wall Street Journal and what was leaked to the Washington Post, “that members of Congress received more than 30 briefings over the life of the CIA program and that Congressional intel panels had seen the Red Cross report.”

Whether that unnamed official was Hayden is unknown. A representative for the former CIA chief did not return calls for comment.

Intelligence Officials On Both Sides Of The Atlantic Question Al Qaeda Role in Bhutto Killing

Scotland Yard Says They’re Not Investigating Assassination

Detailed Timeline of the Assassination

Raw Story reports:

The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto last December may never be solved, because Pakistani officials refused to demand an autopsy and hosed away evidence at the scene of her killing.

Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, President Bush, CIA Director Michael Hayden, and news reports have all claimed that al Qaeda was responsible. However, some current and former US and British intelligence officials now say the evidence points instead to Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), the country’s security services.

Moreover, both Scotland Yard and a spokesman for MI6 told RAW STORY this week that British investigators are not examining the question of who killed Benazir Bhutto. They were only charged with identifying the cause of her death.

“The investigation is primarily a matter for the Pakistan authorities,” said Nev Johnson, the Press Officer for the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, which oversees security and the MI6 intelligence service.

Bhutto, the leader of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party, was shot in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on Dec. 27, 2007. Following her death, a bomb detonated, killing 25 people.

Almost immediately, differences emerged in the official story of her death, with a Musharraf spokesman saying she had been killed as a result of hitting her head against a lever on the sunroof of her bulletproof LandRover.

In a 45-minute interview given exclusively to the Washington Post Friday, CIA Director Hayden blamed members of al Qaeda and Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani tribal leader.

However, when asked about the allegations that Mehsud, and thus al Qaeda, is behind the assassination, one former high-ranking CIA case officer replied, “That is total bullshit.”

“Mehsud is an ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] asset. It is ridiculous to think he acted unilaterally. What [the Pakistanis] have [as evidence] is an intercepted conversation, but it is not conclusive that Mehsud is speaking or that he is admitting a role in the assassination. There is some sort of congratulations, but that call could have been made at any time about any topic.”

Another US intelligence source said that it would be impossible to determine who was behind the attacks because the crime scene was “hosed down and there was no autopsy.”

The role of Scotland Yard

Pakistani President Musharraf initially declined the services of the famed Metropolitan Police Services (MPS) – or, as they are more commonly known, Scotland Yard – when they were offered by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown However, with public pressure mounting, Musharraf agreed. The MPS team, which arrived in Pakistan Jan. 3, concluded Thursday that Bhutto was killed by a bullet wound to the head.

US intelligence officials were concerned from the outset that the MPS investigation would be limited and kept in line with the official Musharraf position, because of the delicate diplomatic relationship that both Britain and the US have with Pakistan. Musharraf has publicly stated that Taliban tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud was the mastermind of the attack and that Mehsud's close relationship to al Qaeda implicates the terrorist group.

A current US official, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the subject, told RAW STORY Wednesday that “[Mehsud] is not formally part of the Taliban or al Qaeda, but he’s linked to both, and it is, at times, difficult to say where one organization ends and the other begins.”

Sources close to Scotland Yard say their role is not to identify who killed Mrs. Bhutto, but only to determine how she was killed. According to British intelligence, they are not directing their investigation to point to any single group or person.

Reached early Thursday, a Scotland Yard spokeswoman said that the role of MPS investigators is to “assist the local authorities” in Pakistan.

"At the request of the Pakistan Government, New Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) [has deployed] a team of investigators to support the Pakistan Law Enforcement Agencies responsible for investigating the death of Benazir Bhutto,” the spokeswoman said.

“The principal purpose of the SO15 deployment is to assist the local authorities in providing clarity regarding the precise cause of Ms Bhutto's death… The primacy and responsibility for the investigation remains with the Pakistan authorities.”

Asked about recent news reports that Scotland Yard investigators have concluded al Qaeda was behind the murder of Mrs. Bhutto, Nev Johnson, the Press Officer for the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office said that “as the investigation is still underway, it would not be appropriate for the Metropolitan Police to comment. The same thing applies to the FCO.”

“The investigation is primarily a matter for the Pakistan authorities,” he added.

While neither the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office nor Scotland Yard is publicly discussing the investigation, someone appears to be leaking information suggesting that al Qaeda is behind the assassination of Mrs. Bhutto. A recent article, “Scotland Yard believes al Qaeda assassinated Benazir Bhutto,” claims that Mehsud had associations with al Qaeda but quotes no one from the service actually fingering al Qaeda in the attack.

US intelligence officials and some foreign intelligence officers are concerned that leaking anything about the case could ignite a firestorm in the region. Some privately take issue with Scotland Yard’s decision to be part of the investigation to begin with, as it puts the British in an untenable position.

Shootings atypical for al Qaeda

US intelligence officials believe that the use of guns against multiple targets distinctly points away from al Qaeda, whose standard methods of operation are designed to minimize the cost to the organization by causing the most damage possible from a single resource. Typically, that would mean either a suicide bomber or multiple bombings at the same time, using single assets for each attack.

Although there have been several attempts on Mrs. Bhutto’s life, the most recent prior to the fatal shooting was on December 8, 2007, when gunmen attacked a PPP office and killed three Bhutto supporters.

Late on the morning of Dec. 27, 2007, just hours before Mrs. Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, snipers attacked the followers of another opposition leader – former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) party, who was also scheduled to speak in Rawalpindi – injuring 16 and killing 4.

The use of snipers and gunmen as assassins, say intelligence sources, does not support the theory that al Qaeda was behind the attacks. These sources added that if Mehsud was involved, it could have only been on contract through the ISI.

One US official concluded that if “Mehsud is in fact behind this, then it would be more of an indictment against the ISI than against al Qaeda.”

The ISI, the Taliban, and al Qaeda all have strong ties to one another. It is this complex relationship that confuses the players and the issues and prevents what many professional intelligence officers believe to be a much needed public understanding of what is terrorism and what is not.

In the case of the Bhutto assassination, these sources view the shooting as an act of murder, not an act of terrorism. As previously reported by Raw Story, they believe that the bombing that followed the shooting was aimed at eliminating the shooter and removing evidence of the assassination.

According to a former high ranking US intelligence official, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the delicate nature of the information, the US intelligence community understands the gunman to have been killed in the blast following Mrs. Bhutto's assassination.

“He was killed, probably not knowing that the suicide bomber was there,” said this source. “We don't know for sure if the two men arrived together. We do know that the assassin died in the explosion, and was probably meant to.”

Several other US intelligence officials concur that the bomber was likely “inserted” to “clean up” evidence of the shooting, including eliminating the gunman.
The real question for most of these sources is not “who,” but rather “how.” All of them are inclined to believe that factions of the ISI, either with or without the knowledge and backing of Musharraf, were involved in the assassination at the management level. It is those people who pose a continued danger, say US intelligence officials, to the Pakistani people and to nations in the region, as well as to the US.

A state within a state

The Pakistan Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence has been described as the shadow government of Pakistan or as “a state within a state.”

Although the ISI has existed since the 1940s, it became truly a world player during the Afghan-Soviet war, when many groups of foreign fighters – the Mujahedeen – worked as proxy warriors for Western nations against the Russians and were managed through the ISI. The ISI recruited, trained, and even housed many of these young fighters as they were readied for battle. For its efforts, the ISI was paid by the West as well, as by other nations in the region, including Saudi Arabia and Israel.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, some of the Mujahedeen went home, some were absorbed into the ISI, and others splintered off to become al Qaeda and the Taliban, with the direct help of both elements within the ISI and Saudi Arabia. Although it remains a matter of debate just how much influence the ISI continues to exert over its al Qaeda and Taliban offspring, there is no question that there are certain individuals – and even small but powerful factions – within the ISI that have a very close relationship with terrorists and militants.

The Story Behind CIA Tapes' Destruction

Official Had Implicit Approval, Lawyer Says

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a key figure in the CIA tape case. (AP)

The Washington Post reports:

In late 2005, the retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his superiors in Langley asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda members.

The tapes had been sitting in the station chief's safe, in the U.S. Embassy compound, for nearly three years. Although those involved in the interrogations had pushed for the tapes' destruction in those years and a secret debate about it had twice reached the White House, CIA officials had not acted on those requests. This time was different.

The CIA had a new director and an acting general counsel, neither of whom sought to block the destruction of the tapes, according to agency officials. The station chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the matter before he left, the officials said. And in November 2005, a published report that detailed a secret CIA prison system provoked an international outcry.

Those three circumstances pushed the CIA's then-director of clandestine operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved. Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.

In a classified response to the station chief, Rodriguez ordered the tapes' destruction, CIA officials say. The Justice Department and the House intelligence committee are now investigating whether that deed constituted a violation of law or an obstruction of justice. John A. Rizzo, the CIA's acting general counsel, is scheduled to discuss the matter in a closed House intelligence committee hearing scheduled for today.

According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials familiar with the debate, the taping was conducted from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee's death.

The principal motive for the tapes' destruction was the clandestine operations division's worry that the tapes' fate could be snatched out of their hands, the officials said. They feared that the agency could be publicly shamed and that those involved in waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques would be hauled before a grand jury or a congressional inquiry -- a circumstance now partly unfolding anyway.

"The professionals said that we must destroy the tapes because they didn't want to see the pictures all over television, and they knew they eventually would leak," said a former agency official who took part in the discussions before the tapes were pulverized. The presence of the tapes in Bangkok and the CIA's communications with the station chief there were described by current and former officials.

Congressional investigators have turned up no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration openly advocated the tapes' destruction, according to officials familiar with a set of classified documents forwarded to Capitol Hill. "It was an agency decision -- you can take it to the bank," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview on Friday. "Other speculations that it may have been made in other compounds, in other parts of the capital region, are simply wrong."

Many of those involved recalled conversations in which senior CIA and White House officials advised against destroying the tapes, but without expressly prohibiting it, leaving an odd vacuum of specific instructions on a such a politically sensitive matter. They said that Rodriguez then interpreted this silence -- the absence of a decision to order the tapes' preservation -- as a tacit approval of their destruction.

"Jose could not get any specific direction out of his leadership" in 2005, one senior official said. Word of the resulting destruction, one former official said, was greeted by widespread relief among clandestine officers, and Rodriguez was neither penalized nor reprimanded, publicly or privately, by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, according to two officials briefed on exchanges between the two men.

"Frankly, there were more important issues that needed to be focused on, such as trying to preserve a critical [interrogation] program and salvage relationships that had been damaged because of the leaks" about the existence of the secret prisons, said a former agency official familiar with Goss's position at the time.

Rodriguez, whom the CIA honored with a medal in August for "Extraordinary Fidelity and Essential Service," declined requests for an interview. But his attorney said he acted in the belief that he was carrying out the agency's stated intention for nearly three years. "Since 2002, the CIA wanted to destroy the tapes to protect the identity and lives of its officers and for other counterintelligence reasons," Bennett said in a written response to questions from The Washington Post.

"In 2003 the leadership of intelligence committees were told about the CIA's intent to destroy the tapes. In 2005, CIA lawyers again advised the National Clandestine Service that they had the authority to destroy the tapes and it was legal to do so. It is unfortunate," Bennett continued, "that under the pressure of a Congressional and criminal investigation, history is now being revised, and some people are running for cover."

Recorded on the tapes was the coercive questioning of two senior al-Qaeda suspects: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were captured by U.S. forces in 2002. They show Zubaida undergoing waterboarding, which involved strapping him to a board and pouring water over his nose and mouth, creating the sensation of imminent drowning. Nashiri later also underwent the same treatment.

Some CIA officials say the agency's use of waterboarding helped extract information that led to the capture of other key al-Qaeda members and prevented attacks. But others, including former CIA, FBI and military officials, say the practice constitutes torture.

The destruction of the tapes was not the first occasion in which Rodriguez got in trouble for taking a provocative action to help a colleague. While serving as the CIA's Latin America division chief in 1996, he appealed to local Dominican Republic authorities to prevent a childhood friend, and CIA contractor, who had been arrested in a drug investigation, from being beaten up, according to a former CIA official familiar with the episode.

Such an intervention was forbidden by CIA rules, and so Rodriguez was stripped of his management post and reprimanded in an inspector general's report. But shortly after the reprimand, he was named station chief in Mexico City and, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was promoted to deputy director of the fast-expanding counterterrorism center. He served under the center's director then, J. Cofer Black, who had been his subordinate in the Latin America division.

When Black -- who played a key role in setting up the secret prisons and instituting the interrogation policy -- left the CIA in December 2002, Rodriguez took his place. Colleagues recall that even in the deputy's slot, Rodriguez was aware of the videotaping of Zubaida, and that he later told several it was necessary so that experts, such as psychologists not present during interrogations, could view Zubaida's physical reactions to questions.

By December 2002, the taping was no longer needed, according to three former intelligence officials. "Zubaida's health was better, and he was providing information that we could check out," one said.

An internal probe of the interrogations by the CIA's inspector general began in early 2003 for reasons that have not been disclosed. In February of that year, then-CIA General Counsel Scott W. Muller told lawmakers that the agency planned to destroy the tapes after the completion of the investigation. That year, all waterboarding was halted; and at an undisclosed time, several of the inspector general's deputies traveled to Bangkok to view the tapes, officials said.

In May 2004, CIA operatives became concerned when a Washington Post article disclosed that the CIA had conducted its interrogations under a new, looser Bush administration definition of what legally constituted torture, several former CIA officials said. The disclosure sparked an internal Justice Department review of that definition and led to a suspension of the CIA's harsh interrogation program.

The tapes were discussed with White House lawyers twice, according to a senior U.S. official. The first occasion was a meeting convened by Muller and senior lawyers of the White House and the Justice Department specifically to discuss their fate. The other discussion was described by one participant as "fleeting," when the existence of the tapes came up during a spring 2004 meeting to discuss the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the official said.

Those known to have counseled against the tapes' destruction include John B. Bellinger III, while serving as the National Security Council's top legal adviser; Harriet E. Miers, while serving as the top White House counsel; George J. Tenet, while serving as CIA director; Muller, while serving as the CIA's general counsel; and John D. Negroponte, while serving as director of national intelligence.

Hayden, in an interview, said the advice expressed by administration lawyers was consistent. "To the degree this was discussed outside the agency, everyone counseled caution," he said. But he said that, in 2005, it was "the agency's view that there were no legal impediments" to the tapes' destruction. There also was "genuine concern about agency people being identified," were the tapes ever to be made public.

Hayden, who became CIA director last year, acknowledged that the questions raised about the tapes' destruction, then and now, are legitimate. "One can ask if it was a good idea, or if there was a better way to do it," he said. "We are very happy to let the facts take us where they will."

CIA Watchdog Subject of CIA Inquiry

The NY Times reports:

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.

A small team working for General Hayden is looking into the conduct of the agency’s watchdog office, which is led by Inspector General John L. Helgerson. Current and former government officials said the review had caused anxiety and anger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hill that it posed a conflict of interest.

The review is particularly focused on complaints that Mr. Helgerson’s office has not acted as a fair and impartial judge of agency operations but instead has begun a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs.

Any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would be unusual, if not unprecedented, and would threaten to undermine the independence of the office, some current and former officials say.

Frederick P. Hitz, who served as C.I.A. inspector general from 1990 to 1998, said he had no first-hand information about current conflicts inside the agency. But Mr. Hitz said any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would “not be proper.”

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Mr. Hitz, who now teaches at the University of Virginia. “Under the statute, the inspector general has the right to investigate the director. How can you do that and have the director turn around and investigate the I.G.?”

A C.I.A. spokesman strongly defended the inquiry on Thursday, saying General Hayden supported the work of the inspector general’s office and had “accepted the vast majority of its findings.”

“His only goal is to help this office, like any office at the agency, do its vital work even better,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Current and former intelligence officials said the inquiry had involved formal interviews with at least some of the inspector general’s staff and was perceived by some agency employees as an “investigation,” a label Mr. Gimigliano rejected.

Several current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the inquiry.

The officials said the inquiry was being overseen by Robert L. Deitz, a trusted aide to the C.I.A. director and a lawyer who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency when General Hayden ran it. Michael Morrell, the agency’s associate deputy director, is another member of the group, officials said.

Reached by phone Thursday, both Mr. Helgerson and Mr. Dietz declined to comment.

In his role as the agency’s inspector general since 2002, Mr. Helgerson has investigated some of the most controversial programs the C.I.A. has begun since the Sept. 11 attacks, including its secret program to detain and interrogate high value terrorist suspects.

Under federal procedures, agency heads who are unhappy with the conduct of their inspectors general have at least two places to file complaints. One is the Integrity Committee of the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which oversees all the inspectors general. The aggrieved agency head can also go directly to the White House.

If serious accusations against an inspector general are sustained by evidence, the president can dismiss him.

Both those routes avoid the awkward situation officials describe at the C.I.A. and preserve the independence of the inspector general.

But one intelligence official who supports General Hayden’s decision to begin an internal inquiry said that going outside the agency would “blow things way out of proportion.”

A report by Mr. Helgerson’s office completed in the spring of 2004 warned that some C.I.A.-approved interrogation procedures appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as defined by the international Convention Against Torture.

Some of the inspector general’s work on detention issues was conducted by Mary O. McCarthy, who was fired from the agency last year after being accused of leaking classified information. Officials said Mr. Helgerson’s office was nearing completion on a number of inquiries into C.I.A. detention, interrogation, and “renditions” — the practice of seizing suspects and delivering them to the authorities in other nations.

The inspector general’s office also rankled agency officials when it completed a withering report about the C.I.A’s missteps before the Sept. 11 attack — a report that recommended “accountability boards” to consider disciplinary action against a handful of senior officials.

When the report was made public in August, General Hayden took the rare step of pointing up criticisms of the report by the former intelligence director, George J. Tenet and his senior aides, saying many officials “took strong exception to its focus, methodology and conclusions.”

Some agency officers believe the aggressive investigations by Mr. Helgerson amount to unfair second guessing of intelligence officers who are often risking their lives in the field.

“These are good people who thought they were doing the right thing,” said one former agency official. “And now they are getting beat up pretty bad and they have to go out an hire a lawyer.”

Agency officials have also criticized the length of the inspector general’s investigations, some lasting more than five years, which have derailed careers and generated steep legal bills for officers under scrutiny.

The former agency official called General Hayden’s review of the inspector general “a smart move.”

Since taking over at the C.I.A. in 2006, General Hayden has taken several steps to soothe anger within the agency’s clandestine service, which has been buffeted in recent years by a string of prolonged investigations.

He has brought back two veteran agency operatives, Steven R. Kappes and Michael J. Sulick, both of whom angrily left during the tenure of Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, to assume top posts at the spy agency. He also supported the president’s nomination of John A. Rizzo, a career agency lawyer and someone well-respected by covert operatives, to become the C.I.A’s general counsel.

Mr. Rizzo withdrew his nomination to the post last month in the midst of intense opposition from Senate Democrats.

“Director Hayden has done a lot of things to convince the operators that he’s looking out for them, and putting the I.G. back in its place is part of this,” said John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law.

Mr. Hitz and other former C.I.A. officials said tensions between the inspector general and the rest of the agency were natural. Conflicts most often arise when the inspector general reviews the actions of the agency’s directorate of operations, now known as the National Clandestine Service, which recruits agents and hunts terrorists overseas.

“The perception is like in a police department between street cops and internal affairs,” said A. B. Krongard, the agency’s executive director from 2001 to 2004.

Resentment of the inspector general’s work has also at times extended to the agency’s general counsel’s office, whose legal judgment is sometimes second-guessed by after-the-fact investigations. “In some of our reports, we were quite critical of the advice given by the general counsel,” Mr. Hitz said.

The C.I.A., created in 1947, had an in-house inspector general selected by the director starting in 1952 who investigated failed operations like the Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba in 1961.

But that position was viewed as lacking clout and independence, and in 1989, partly in response to the Iran-contra affair, Congress created an independent inspector general at the agency, appointed by the president and reporting to both the director and to Congress.

Hayden: "Media Should Leave CIA Oversight to Congress"

At the Center for Foreign Relations:

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said in a September 7 speech at CFR that among the myriad security threats faced by his agency, “none commands more attention than terrorism.”

Hayden, an Air Force general who ran the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005, has led the CIA for sixteen months. During that time he has overseen the release of several national intelligence estimates offering cautionary accounts of the “war on terror,” including one describing the Iraq war as “the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists.”

Speaking at CFR’s New York headquarters, Hayden described two parallel tracks in the “war on terror”: a “close fight” and a “deep fight.” The former, he said, consists of efforts to destroy an enemy that is “easy to kill, but hard to find and quick to regenerate.” The deep fight “requires winning the war of ideas” by reducing the appeal of jihad ideology to disenchanted young Muslims. Hayden was careful to add, “The war of ideas is not about Islam. It’s about fanatics whose victims most often have been Muslims.”

“This is a form of warfare unlike any other in our country’s history,” he said. “It’s an intelligence war as much as a military one.”

In such a war, Hayden argued, the media and society in general needs to factor the need for secrecy into its view of events.

“A free press is critical to good government,” Hayden said, but he argued that the media should not act as a watchdog over the government’s clandestine services. That role, he said, belongs to Congress. “It’s important to bear in mind that my agency is subject to another oversight mechanism that has full access to our operations and takes our security requirements into account: It’s the people’s representatives in Congress.”

Hayden spoke at length about the often tenuous relationship between his agency and the media. “The duty of a free press is to report the facts as they are found. By sticking to that principle, journalists accomplish a great deal in exposing al-Qaeda and its adherents for what they are.” Hayden decried what he considers poor judgment by journalists seeking to expose CIA practices. “In a war that largely depends on our success in collecting intelligence on the enemy, publishing information on our sources and methods can be just as damaging as revelations of troop or ship movements were in the past.” Furthermore, he complained, such exposure has scared away vital sources and even created rifts between the CIA and other nations’ intelligence services.

Hayden cast his agency as adhering to strict boundaries, emphasizing that all detentions, renditions, and interrogations conducted by the CIA have been lawful and infrequent. “Since [the CIA’s detention and interrogation program] began with the capture of Abu Zubaydah in 2002, fewer than one hundred people have been detained at CIA’s facilities. And the number of renditions, apart from the fewer than one hundred detainees, is an even smaller number.”

Members of the audience pressed the director to defend efforts to legalize “enhanced interrogation techniques,” such as waterboarding. They also asked him to explain CIA policy on renditions and the extradition of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere to nations with poor human rights records.

Hayden explained that detainees are only extradited to nations where they are citizens or against which they have committed a crime. For instance, the Pentagon announced this week the extradition of sixteen Saudis held at Guantanamo Bay back to their homeland.

“We do not do it to circumvent restrictions on ourselves.” Further, he added, an extradition will only occur if it is deemed to lower the likelihood that a detainee will endure mistreatment: “We have to believe that it is less, rather than more likely that the individual will be tortured.”

Nevertheless, he said, the CIA will transfer custody of a suspect to nations with poor track records of prisoner treatment, provided it received assurances of proper treatment. He depicted the CIA’s appeal for “enhanced interrogation techniques” as simply an effort to clarify boundaries and “exhaust the universe of interrogation techniques allowed under common article three” of the Geneva Conventions.
In explaining the absence of a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, Hayden credited “exceptionally intelligent, creative officers. We haven’t just been lucky, and it isn’t as if the terrorists have been lazy…. We bear responsibility for standing watch on this threat.”

CIA To Release Documents on Decades-Old Misdeeds

On Jan. 3, 1975, William E. Colby, right, the director of central intelligence, met with President Gerald R. Ford and advisers to discuss findings of past domestic spying and other transgressions by the C.I.A.
_{[David Hume Kennerly/Ford Library/Getty Images]}

The NYTimes reports:

The Central Intelligence Agency will make public next week a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detail domestic spying, assassination plots and other C.I.A. misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s, the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said yesterday.

In an address to a group of historians who have long pressed for greater disclosure of C.I.A. archives, General Hayden described the documents, known as the “family jewels,” as “a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.” He also directed the release of 11,000 pages of cold-war documents on the Soviet Union and China, which were handed out on compact discs at the meeting, in Chantilly, Va.

In a defense of openness unusual in an administration that has vigorously defended government secrecy, General Hayden said that when government withholds information, myth and misinformation often “fill the vacuum like a gas.” He noted a European Parliament report of 1,245 secret C.I.A. flights over Europe, a number interpreted in some news articles as the number of cases of “extraordinary rendition,” in which terrorism suspects were flown to prison in other countries.

In fact, General Hayden said, the agency has detained fewer than 100 people in its secret overseas detention program since the 2001 terrorist attacks. He said the questioning of those detainees, which in some cases has involved harsh physical treatment, had produced valuable information, contributing to more than 8,000 intelligence reports.

“C.I.A. recognizes the very real benefits that flow from greater public understanding of our work,” General Hayden said at yesterday’s meeting, a gathering of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. But he also complained about “an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room.”

Though the 1974 documents will not be released until Monday at the earliest, a research group in Washington posted related documents on the Web yesterday, including a 1975 Justice Department summary of domestic break-ins and wiretaps by the C.I.A. that may have violated American law. Also included were transcripts of three conversations in which President Gerald R. Ford was informed by aides of those activities by the agency.

In one of the conversations, Henry A. Kissinger, then serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser, denounced the efforts of William E. Colby, director of central intelligence, to push an aggressive investigation of the agency’s past transgressions.

Mr. Kissinger said the accusations then appearing daily about agency misconduct were “worse than in the days of McCarthy,” and expressed concern that they would intimidate C.I.A. officers, so that “you’ll end up with an agency that does only reporting and not operations.”

“What Colby has done is a disgrace,” Mr. Kissinger said, according to the transcript, posted along with the others by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (nsarchive.org).

“Should we suspend him?” Mr. Ford asked.

“No,” Mr. Kissinger replied, “but after the investigation is over you could move him and put in someone of towering integrity.”

A year later, Mr. Ford replaced Mr. Colby as director with George Bush.

In the 33 years since the nearly 700 pages of “family jewel” documents were compiled at the orders of Mr. Colby’s predecessor, James R. Schlesinger, much of their content has become known through leaks, testimony or partial disclosure. Most notably, the documents were described by government officials to Seymour M. Hersh, who reported on them in articles in The New York Times beginning on Dec. 22, 1974. The first article described “a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation” that had produced C.I.A. files on some 10,000 Americans.

But the documents’ release next week may offer new details of a period of aggressive, and sometimes illegal, C.I.A. activities, directed particularly at American journalists who published leaked government secrets and activists who opposed the Vietnam War. The release also appears to signify a shift in attitude at the agency in the year that it has been led by General Hayden, a history buff who holds two degrees in the field from Duquesne University, where he wrote a thesis on the Marshall Plan.

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, which obtains and publishes collections of once-secret government records, said the step announced yesterday might be the most important since at least 1998, when George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, reversed a decision to release information on cold-war covert actions. “Applause is due,” Mr. Blanton said.

But Mr. Blanton took issue with General Hayden’s assurance that the current C.I.A. was utterly different from the pre-1975 institution. “There are uncanny parallels,” he said, “between events today and the stories in the family jewels about warrantless wiretapping and concern about violation of the kidnapping laws.”

The six-page 1975 Justice Department summary, of C.I.A. actions that some officers of the agency had reported as possible illegalities, included the 1963 wiretapping of two newspaper columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, who had written a column including “certain national security information.”

The document said those wiretaps had been approved after “discussions” with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. A C.I.A. report described them as “very productive,” picking up calls of 12 senators and 6 members of the House, among others.