Spooks of the Senate The Report on CIA Interrogations is a Collection of Partisan Second-Guessing.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/spooks-of-the-senate-1418170941?mod=hp_opinion
The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogations is a moment for reflection, but not for the reasons you’re hearing. The outrage at this or that ugly detail is politically convenient. The report is more important for illustrating how fickle Americans are about their security, and so unfair to those who provide it.
After the trauma of 9/11 and amid the anthrax letters in 2001, Americans wanted protection from another terror attack. The political class fired up a commission to examine what went wrong so it “would never happen again.” So the CIA, blamed for not stopping 9/11, tried to oblige. It captured the plotters, detained and interrogated them—sometimes harshly. There hasn’t been another successful al Qaeda plot on the homeland.
But political memories are short. As the Iraq war became unpopular, the anti-antiterror left fought back. Democrats who sensed a political opening began to fault the details of how the CIA and Bush Administration had protected the country—on surveillance, detention and interrogation. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, the lead Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, unleashed their staff to second-guess the CIA.
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That’s the context in which to understand the Senate report, which reads like a prosecutor’s brief. It devotes 6,000 pages to marshalling evidence to indict the CIA program, and nothing was going to interfere with its appointed verdict.
Not former CIA directors, who weren’t even interviewed (see the op-ed nearby). Not the virtues of bipartisanship, as the GOP minority staff were reduced to bystanders (see the minority report). And not the requirements of future security, which have been sacrificed to the immediate need to embarrass the agency to prove that Democrats were right.
The worst CIA failing in the report is poor management and a lack of adequate oversight. Junior officials were put in charge of detainees when wiser hands were needed, and in one case a detainee died from hypothermia. This may have resulted from the rapid CIA recruitment after 9/11, but it is a major failing, especially given the political backlash that CIA leaders knew was inevitable.
The report also uncovers rough methods that are now barred, though how shocking those are may depend on how you view the terrorist threat. The executive summary scores the CIA for using “in many cases the most aggressive techniques” immediately, in combination and nonstop.
“Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in painful stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to one detainee that he would only leave in a coffin-shaped box,” the report summary says.
You would not want this done in a Chicago police precinct, or by a first lieutenant to a battlefield prisoner. But for the men who had killed 3,000 Americans and who the CIA knew were plotting to kill thousands more, the line of interrogation excess is not so clear.
This moral ambiguity may explain why the report is at such pains to argue that “coercive interrogation techniques were not effective,” though it does a laughable job of making the case. The report claims that coercive interrogation “regularly resulted in fabricated information.” You mean detainees lie? Heaven forfend. Suspects lie every day no matter how they’re interrogated.
The report also claims that information gathered from harsh interrogation yielded no critical information and foiled no plots. This is refuted by agency officials, notably concerning the failed Hambali plot to attack the U.S. West coast.
Debatable cases aside, the Senate’s choir boys are pretending that the business of intelligence is like a TV court drama with an “aha” moment of admission. If only life were so easy. Intelligence work is about combining information from multiple sources, human and technical, to build a mosaic from which terrorist habits can be discerned and perhaps plots discovered. That the interrogations yielded such crucial information is beyond dispute.
The report’s greatest offense is its dishonest treatment of political accountability. The authors portray a rogue CIA operating without legal authority and hiding information from Congress, the public and even President Bush. This charge is rebutted even by current CIA director John Brennan , who otherwise dries his predecessors out to hang.
As for legal authority, no less than Attorney General Eric Holder hired a special prosecutor, who investigated interrogations and filed no charges. That suggests the practices were legally vetted, as the former CIA officials claim. As for Congress, its top officials—the Gang of Eight—were briefed from the very beginning. That included Nancy Pelosi.
If they didn’t know as much as this report discloses, then they are at fault for not digging deeply enough. They may not have asked about what they didn’t want to hear. But more likely they liked what they heard and wanted it to continue as long as the public mood demanded it.
Ms. Feinstein has had an admirable career, so it is a shame to see her mar her legacy with this one-sided report. Mr. Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper are also not profiles in courage, issuing everyone-has-a-point statements while endorsing release of the report. Better leaders would have resigned for the morale of their agencies, and both should be held responsible for any future attack that can be tied to this report.
Then there is President Obama, who issued his own have-it-both-ways statement that condemned the Bush-era practices but extolled our intelligence services. He could have taken executive responsibility by having Mr. Brennan issue his own report or release the one done by former CIA director Leon Panetta , but that would have meant more personal political risk. Better to leave the public wet work to Senate staff.
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So once again our politicians whipsaw the CIA, asking it to protect us from relentless killers only later to object when the political mood shifts. Frank Church and the left did this in the 1970s, and CIA needed years to recover. Now it’s the Obama Democrats. The CIA isn’t above accountability, but it deserves better than the partisan hindsight of this Senate report.
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