Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee's Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program
    Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee's Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program
    Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee's Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program
    Ebook377 pages1 hour

    Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee's Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program

    By Naval Institute Press

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In December 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released a 500+ page executive summary of a 6,000 page study of the CIA's detention and interrogation of al Qa'ida terrorists. In early 2015 publishers released the study in book form and called it "the report" on "torture." Rebuttal presents the "rest of the story." In addition to reprinting the official responses from the SSCI minority and CIA, this publication also includes eight essays from senior former CIA officials who all are deeply knowledgeable about the program —and yet none of whom were interviewed by the SSCI staff during the more than four years the report was in preparation. These authors of the eight essays are George Tenet, Porter Goss, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, USAF (Ret.), John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, J. Philip Mudd, John Rizzo, and Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaval Institute Press
    Release dateSep 9, 2015
    ISBN9781591145882
    Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee's Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program

    Related to Rebuttal

    Related ebooks

    Politics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Reviews for Rebuttal

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Rebuttal - Naval Institute Press

      INTRODUCTION

      CIA Interrogation of al Qa’ida Terrorists—The Rest of the Story

      George J. Tenet

      There is a biblical quotation engraved on the marble walls of the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters. It says: And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.

      Those who work within the walls of the CIA know better than most people, however, the difficulty of actually learning the truth. It is not a matter of simply amassing mountains of data. Finding it does not rely on stitching together allegations to create a mosaic of what you want to see. And you cannot scrutinize the past with eyeglasses ground with tomorrow’s prescription.

      Unfortunately, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s majority report regarding CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program failed to seek the truth or honestly portray events in the months and years following 9/11 in a manner that bears any resemblance to what my colleagues and I at CIA experienced. Their report was far from the truth and certainly set no one free.

      Critical, yet totally absent from the Senate majority’s deliberations, are the testimony and recollections of officials at CIA, the White House, the National Security Council, the Department of Justice, and even Members of Congress themselves. They certainly would have provided a totally different perspective. Yet the Senate majority conducted no hearings and interviewed no one with direct knowledge, preferring to issue a report that validated what its members wanted to find.

      The history of the post-9/11 period and actions taken by the United States deserved much better. It deserved the kind of tough and critical nonpartisan analysis done by the 9/11 Commission, which made serious recommendations after interviewing all the principals and giving them opportunities to make statements for the record.

      What would the majority have learned if they had taken the time to speak with those in positions of responsibility during the months and years after 9/11? Context. They would have learned that on the basis of credible intelligence the country’s top officials had a genuine, palpable fear of second-wave attacks on the United States, including the possible use of weapons of mass destruction. It was in many ways a living hell—a race against time in which we often wondered whether today was the day the country would be attacked again.

      Nightly meetings in the CIA Director’s conference room presented threat reporting of a quantity and quality that led us to believe that the world was in great danger.

      To make matters worse, our homeland was unprotected. Borders and visa policies were porous, key transportation and infrastructure nodes vulnerable. There was little or no information on what was happening inside the United States, who might be crossing our border, or whether sleeper cells were poised to conduct another devastating set of attacks—that we simply could not allow to occur. We were at the very low end of our knowledge about al Qa’ida

      Decisive action against al Qa’ida’s Afghan sanctuary would allow us to learn more about attack plans. Our intelligence partners around the world—some of whom, prior to 9/11, had been dismissive of our warnings about al Qa’ida—took decisive actions to break up cells and to collect data. These actions were critical to getting us to an inflection point, years later, when we could breathe again and, with the benefit of deep knowledge, protect the country against further attack. But in those early days we did not have the luxury of time. This period of sustained vulnerability and threat reporting did not go on for days or weeks, it went on for years.

      But that was not all. Just prior to 9/11, as I have noted in my memoir, we learned that Umma Tameer-e-Nau (UTN), a Pakistani nongovernmental organization led by former Palestinian nuclear scientists, hoped to lend the expertise of the Pakistani scientific establishment to help build chemical, biological, and nuclear programs for al Qa’ida. We learned after 9/11 that, just prior to the attacks, officials of UTN had met with Usama Bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

      There, around a campfire, they assessed how al Qa’ida should go about building a nuclear device. After President George W. Bush sent me to Pakistan to secure President Pervez Musharraf’s cooperation to learn more about UTN’s activities with al Qa’ida, we learned a great deal more about the UTN leadership’s meeting with Bin Ladin and al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan just a month before 9/11. Upon debriefing in Pakistan, a UTN leader told Pakistani authorities that they had discussed the practicalities of building a nuclear weapon. The most difficult part of the process, he told Bin Ladin, is obtaining the necessary fissile material. Bin Ladin asked, What if we already have the material?

      Around the time of this trip to Pakistan we briefed the President of reporting that indicated a nuclear weapon had been smuggled into the United States destined for New York City.

      Our fears of imminent attack did not fade as we slid into 2002 and 2003. In 2003, Ayman al-Zawahiri called off an attack on the New York City subways in favor of something better. For the rest of my time as Director I often wondered, as I have over the years that followed, whether something better would in fact have been the detonation of a weapon of mass destruction on American soil.

      This represents a small glimpse into our context during those years. Yet, you will find none of it in the Senate majority report. This context was our reality when we first captured top al Qa’ida operatives and had to decide how best to learn what they might know of plans to attack our homeland.

      And yet this terribly flawed report issued by the Senate majority staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee failed to provide any context of either the times or their own acquiescence in a program of detention and interrogation. Back in the day they had clearly understood the danger. They exhorted us to avoid being risk averse. They asked us whether we had enough authorities to get the job done.

      An honest report, one worthy of history, teaching, and reflection, would have sought out senior intelligence and policy officials directly to capture their frames of mind, the actions they took, and the trade-offs they made. This did not happen.

      An honest report would have detailed the yearly deliberations, done at the insistence of the CIA to ensure that the program was being implemented in a manner consistent with the U.S. laws, the Constitution, and international treaty obligations.

      An honest report would have asked why I suspended every aspect of the program in the spring of 2004. I did so during

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1