WASHINGTON: Condoleezza Rice, John D. Ashcroft and other top Bush administration officials approved the CIA’s use at secret prisons of harsh interrogation methods as early as the summer of 2002 after a series of secret meetings that apparently excluded the departments of State and Defense.
The approved methods included waterboarding — which simulates drowning — a technique that President Barack Obama and his new Attorney General Eric Holder have described as torture, according to a chronology prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee and declassified by Holder on Wednesday.
In listing the senior Bush administration officials intimately involved in the early deliberations on CIA interrogations, the report underscored how any effort to hold architects of the program accountable was likely to extend beyond Justice Department legal advisers and into the highest reaches of the government.
It also raised questions about whether the Bush administration sought to keep details of the CIA program away from high-level officials — particularly Secretary of State Colin Powell — who were perceived as potential opponents of the use of harsh interrogation techniques.
The CIA did not brief Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the interrogation program until September 2003, the Senate report said, even though Powell was in charge of US diplomatic relations with countries including Thailand and Romania, later identified in news reports as locations of secret CIA detention facilities.
Obama said Tuesday that his attorney general would ultimately decide whether to proceed with prosecutions of those in the Bush administration who drew up the legal basis for aggressive interrogation techniques.
Commenting publicly on the issue Wednesday, the attorney general responded to questions briefly and cautiously. Holder said he would “follow the law” as he weighs potential prosecutions of Bush administration officials who authorized controversial harsh interrogation techniques.
“We are going to follow the evidence, follow the law and take that where it leads,” he said. “No one is above the law.”
Some human rights groups have demanded that Holder appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter, but the attorney general appears to be taking his time before deciding how to proceed. The release of the report details and declassifies the advice given to the CIA regarding its interrogation techniques and provides the most detailed timeline yet of the conception and top-level approval of the violent “enhanced interrogation” techniques employed by American officials.
The report says Rice gave a key early green light when, as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, she met on July 17, 2002, with the CIA’s then-director, George J. Tenet, and “advised that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of (Al-Qaeda suspect) Abu Zubaida.”
That legal sign-off came one week later, the report said, when the CIA was verbally informed that Ashcroft and the Office of Legal Counsel had concluded the agency’s proposed techniques — including waterboarding — were lawful.
For both the Obama and the Bush administrations, the political stakes are high as proposals for a national commission to investigate the interrogation issue appear to be gaining momentum.
Obama and his allies need to discredit the techniques he has banned. Otherwise, in the event of a future terrorist attack, critics may blame his decision to rein in CIA interrogators.
The New York Times wrote yesterday that “even the most exacting truth commission may have a hard time determining for certain whether brutal interrogations conducted by the CIA helped keep the country safe.
“But if a strong case emerges that the Bush administration authorized torture and got nothing but prisoners’ desperate fabrications in return, that will tarnish what Bush and Cheney have claimed as their greatest achievement: preventing new attacks after Sept. 11, 2001.”
Cheney added fuel to the fire when he recently told reporters that some people are more interested in reading terrorists their rights than protecting the United States, a jab at the Obama administration.
