In My Time - Dick Cheney [190]
In an effort to reach an agreement with Senator McCain and explain to him how damaging his proposed amendment would be, CIA Director Porter Goss and I met with him in a secure conference room at the Capitol and tried to brief him about the program and the critical intelligence we had gained. But John didn’t want to hear what we had to say. We had hardly started when he lost his temper and stormed out of the meeting. His opinion carried a good deal of weight because he had been a prisoner of war, but his view of the program was certainly not unanimous among his fellow former POWs.
Air Force Colonel Leo Thorsness found out he had been awarded the Medal of Honor while he was a prisoner in Vietnam. The news that he had received the nation’s highest award for valor came to him through tapping on the prison wall. On Memorial Day 2009, Thorsness, who was tortured severely by the North Vietnamese, wrote that waterboarding was “harsh treatment but not torture.” Although a supporter of Senator McCain, he disagrees with him on using enhanced techniques: “I would not hesitate for a second to use enhanced interrogation, including water boarding, if it would save the lives of innocent people.”
Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Bud Day was shot down over North Vietnam, then interrogated and tortured. He managed to escape his prison camp and made it to the Demilitarized Zone, only to be captured again and tortured again. For a time Day shared a cell with McCain, whom he admires, but asked by author Marc Thiessen if he believed waterboarding to be torture, Day replied, “I am a supporter of water boarding. It is not torture. Torture is really hurting someone.” Asked what he would say to the CIA officer who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Day replied, “You did the right thing.”
Since the beginning of the enhanced interrogation program, the CIA had briefed key members of Congress on the interrogations and on what they were learning. I do not recall in any of the briefings I attended a single member objecting to the program or urging that we stop using these authorized, legal methods. Nonetheless, in the fall of 2005, congressional opinion was not on our side. At one of the weekly Senate Republican policy lunches I regularly attended, I spoke about the importance of the program. I could not reveal much about it. I could not talk about the specific interrogation techniques. I could only urge my colleagues to accept how critically important the program was to our national security. The McCain Amendment passed 90–9. At the president’s request, Steve Hadley had tried to negotiate enough flexibility in the language of the amendment to allow the CIA program to continue in a pared-down way. He had secured language he thought the CIA could live with, but after the legislation passed, Porter Goss told Steve that he’d checked with those running the program, and it would have to be shut down.
When former NSA Director Mike Hayden became head of the CIA in May 2006, he reviewed the program and determined that some version of it had to be restarted in order to protect the country. But in June 2006 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The decision held that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits any behavior that is “humiliating and degrading” and bans “outrages upon personal dignity,” applied to the detainees. The decision seemed to ignore the plain language of Common Article 3, which makes clear that it applies to “armed conflict not of an international character.” The War on Terror could hardly be more international, having occurred across countries and continents, but once the Supreme Court handed down its decision, the CIA interrogation program clearly needed new legal underpinning to continue.
The president decided to make aspects of the program public in order to save it. He announced he would bring the terrorists currently in CIA custody to Guantanamo for trial, and he submitted legislation that would provide congressional approval for military commissions and