Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks
President Says He Knew His Senior Advisers Discussed Tough Interrogation
Methods
By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE
April 11, 2008 ABC News
<http://abcnews.
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed
and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects
would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to
an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.
"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American
people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz.
"And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I
approved."
As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush
administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific
details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be
interrogated by the CIA.
The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation
techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the
interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number
of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al
Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of
sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources
told ABC news.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals
Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to
advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Dick
Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well
as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took
place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by
most of the principals or their deputies.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved
the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different
techniques during interrogations instead of using one method at a time
-- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Contacted by ABC News, spokesmen for Tenet and Rumsfeld declined to
comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in
Principals meetings. The White House also declined comment on behalf of
Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached.
ABC News' Diane Sawyer sat down with Powell this week for a previously
scheduled interview and asked him about the ABC News report.
Powell said that he didn't have "sufficient memory recall" about the
meetings and that he had participated in "many meetings on how to deal
with detainees."
Powell said, "I'm not aware of anything that we discussed in any of
those meetings that was not considered legal."
In his interview with ABC News, Bush said the ABC report about the
Principals' involvement was not so "startling." The president had
earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the
CIA in a speech in 2006. But before Wednesday's report, the
extraordinary level of involvement by the most senior advisers in
repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans -- down to the number
of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda
prisoner -- had never been disclosed.
Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation
program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say,
condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the
program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture.
In interview with ABC's Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said: "It was
authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the
United States."
The discussions and meetings occurred in an atmosphere of great concern
that another terror attack on the nation was imminent. Sources said the
extraordinary involvement of the senior advisers in the grim details of
exactly how individual interrogations would be conducted showed how
seriously officials took the al Qaeda threat.
It started after the CIA captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in
spring 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. When his safe house was raided by
Pakistani security forces along with FBI and CIA agents, Zubaydah was
shot three times during the gun battle.
At a time when virtually all counterterrorist professionals viewed
another attack as imminent -- and with information on al Qaeda scarce --
the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a potentially critical
breakthrough.
Zubaydah was taken to the local hospital, where CIA agent John Kiriakou,
who helped coordinate Zubaydah's capture, was ordered to remain at the
wounded captive's side at all times. "I ripped up a sheet and tied him
to the bed," Kiriakou said.
But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA prison in
Thailand, he was uncooperative. "I told him I had heard he was being a
jerk," Kiriakou recalled. "I said, 'These guys can make it easy on you
or they can make it hard.' It was after that he became defiant."
The CIA wanted to use more aggressive -- and physical -- methods to get
information. The agency briefed high- level officials in the National
Security Council's Principals Committee, led by then-National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice and including then-Attorney General John
Ashcroft, which then signed off on the plan, sources said. It is unclear
whether anyone on the committee objected to the CIA's plans for
Zubaydah.
The CIA has confirmed Zubaydah was one of three al Qaeda suspects
subjected to waterboarding. After he was waterboarded, officials say
Zubaydah gave up valuable information that led to the capture of 9/11
mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin
al-Shibh.
Mohammad, who is known as KSM, was also subjected to waterboarding by
the CIA.
In the interview with ABC News Friday, Bush defended the waterboarding
technique used against KSM.
"We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it," Bush said. "And no, I
didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed knew."
The president said, "I think it's very important for the American people
to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was. He was the person who
ordered the suicide attack -- I mean, the 9/11 attacks."
At a hearing before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay March 10,
2007, KSM, as he is known, said he broke under the harsh interrogation.
COURT: Were any statements you made as the result of any of the
treatment that you received during that time frame from 2003 to 2006?
Did you make those statements because of the treatment you receive from
these people?
KSM: Statement for whom??
COURT: To any of these interrogators. ?
KSM: CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning, when they transferred me...?
Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified memo, which
was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal authority to government
interrogators to use the "enhanced" questioning tactics on suspected
terrorist prisoners. The August 2002 memo, signed by then head of the
Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the so-called
"Golden Shield" for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable if
the harsh interrogations became public.
Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly how past
covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era "Phoenix Program" of
assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra arms sales of the 1980s
were painted as the work of a "rogue agency" out of control.
But even after the "Golden Shield" was in place, briefings and meetings
in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued,
sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought
confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans
were legal.
According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA
headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking
for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about
overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly
complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources
said.
Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss
along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney,
Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.
"It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,"
said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. "They'd
say, 'We've got so and so. This is the plan.'"
Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present
approved. "These discussions weren't adding value," a source said. "Once
you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude
it's legal, [you should] just tell them to implement it."
Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general
policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised
that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers
should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources
said.
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting:
"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not
judge this kindly."
The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different
methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice
Department's own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC
News.
At one meeting in the summer of 2003 -- attended by Cheney, among others
-- Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several
different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method
at a time, according to a highly placed administration source.
A year later, amid the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners
at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal
legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al
Qaeda suspects that was leaked to the press. A new senior official in
the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the
Golden Shield -- that authorized the program.
But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said
CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for
approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation
techniques."
Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns --
shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United
States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This
is your baby. Go do it."
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
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