… I am, however, interested in the question he ends his piece with: why was CIA–and not DOD–tasked with these interrogations?
But what’s really too bad is that Durham hasn’t been tasked with explaining the broader mystery of why, in the first place, the CIA is even interrogating prisoners of war. The 1947 National Security Act established the CIA as a civilian spy agency, not as some Pentagon backroom where you get to do things you don’t want the American people to find out about. But more to the point, the military is much better equipped to interrogate prisoners. It has its own interrogation school at Fort Huachuca, not to mention hundreds of language-qualified and experienced interrogators. It also has the Uniform Code of Military Justice to deal with interrogations that have gone bad… Unlike the CIA, military interrogators have immediate access to legal counsel. It’s not an accident that military misdeeds such as those at Abu Ghraib go right to trial, while CIA investigations drag on for years — and drag down morale.Because that may well have been the point, you know? And it may well have been why the torture tapes were destroyed. The torturers appear to have been more interested in testing the limits of Abu Zubaydah’s human endurance than they were in getting usable intelligence from him. And one of the things those tapes may well have shown was up to 21 hours of human experimentation–potentially pushing techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation beyond all limits, potentially using techniques like mock burial the torturers asked for but didn’t get approved, and potentially using other techniques entirely.
Paper Trail: Who authorized the CIA to destroy interrogation videos?
Newsweek
by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Dec 11, 2007… Throughout the same period, said one of the former officials, a senior CIA lawyer, John Rizzo, now the agency’s acting general counsel, was also conducting discussions on what to do with the tapes with White House lawyer Harriet Miers. Two sources said that Rizzo also discussed the issue with officials at the Justice Department, which had issued classified guidelines outlining how the CIA’s interrogation program should operate.
The reason CIA officials involved the White House and Justice Department in discussions about the disposition of the tapes was that CIA officials viewed the CIA’s terrorist interrogation and detention program — including the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques — as having been imposed on the agency by the White House. "It was a political issue," said the former official, and therefore CIA officials believed that the decision as to what to do with the tapes should be made at a political level, by Miers — a former personal lawyer to President Bush and later White House staff secretary and counsel — or someone else directly representing the president.
The current and former officials said that discussions between Clandestine Service officials and their superiors and between the CIA and White House unfolded in what one source described as "fits and starts" between 2003, when the matter first arose, and late 2005, when Jose Rodriguez Jr., then head of the Clandestine Service and still a CIA officer today, made the final decision that the tapes should be destroyed…
They were onto this prisoner thing pretty quickly – GITMO, Rendition, suspending Geneva, habeas corpus, Military Tribunals. The question being raised here is a good one – Why not let the DoD do what it does, deal with PoWs? After all, we did declare War. Instead, the DoJ, OLC, FBI, CIA were all part of things from the start. It’s even more surprising since the Secretary of Defense and his Deputy were insiders – Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. It doesn’t make sense for the DoD to be squeezed out, at least on the surface.
Immediately after Abu Zubaydah was captured, a fellow FBI agent and I were flown to meet him at an undisclosed location. We were both very familiar with Abu Zubaydah and have successfully interrogated al-Qaeda terrorists. We started interrogating him, supported by CIA officials who were stationed at the location, and within the first hour of the interrogation, using the Informed Interrogation Approach, we gained important actionable intelligence. The information was so important that, as I later learned from open sources, it went to CIA Director George Tennet who was so impressed that he initially ordered us to be congratulated. That was apparently quickly withdrawn as soon as Mr. Tennet was told that it was FBI agents, who were responsible. He then immediately ordered a CIA CTC interrogation team to leave DC and head to the location to take over from us.
When I can escape looking for their hidden motives and just think about the broad style of their governance, they essentially destroyed the effectiveness of many of our impressive institutions by sticking their inexperienced [and not very competent] noses in everybody else’s business. No one was able to function in their area of expertise. The CIA was asked to interrogate prisoners of war, and had to contract a couple of retired military types who were fish out of water and seemed to get inspiration from old war movies and the tv program – 24 Hours. The post-war reconstruction of Iraq was run by a State Department Ambassador reporting to the Department of Defense who essentially shut down the army and government of Iraq. The DoJ became a vehicle for Law evasion rather than enforcement. The State Department, run by a General, was out of the loop altogether. And the center of command was in the Dick Cheney’s OVP coordinated by the most arrogant man in Washington, David Addington.
Dick Cheney was good at politics in the House of Representatives. He ran the country the same way, playing people off against each other, giving out assignments not based on expertise but more on leverage. He trusted no one so he micromanaged everyone. And the War was run by Donald Rumsfeld, a grumpy old man who listened to no one. In that climate, no wonder everything went so badly. As for the tapes, my guess is that Jose Rodriguez realized he was in a power vacuum, and just took matters in his own hands, destroying the tapes to protect his CIA buddies who had been drawn into doing something they didn’t know how to do. When there’s this much chaos in a system, the problem is at the top, and the people downstream act on their own steam.
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