In My Time - Dick Cheney [191]
Congress passed the Military Commissions Act in October 2006 and several months later, in July 2007, the president signed an executive order establishing guidelines for the CIA interrogation program. In 2007 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, General Hayden explained why it would be so damaging to limit CIA interrogations to the methods in the Army Field Manual:
We have severely restricted our attempts to obtain timely information from HVDs [high-value detainees] who possess information that will help us save lives and disrupt operations. Limiting our interrogation tools to those detailed in the field manual will increase the probability that a determined, resilient HVD will be able to withhold critical, time-sensitive, actionable intelligence that could prevent an imminent, catastrophic attack.
“In essence,” Hayden concluded, “we would be back to a pre-9/11 posture.”
In October 2007 the president spoke about enhanced interrogation at the National Defense University. “This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us stop a number of attacks,” he said, “including a plot to strike the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, California, and a plot to fly passenger planes into Heathrow Airport and buildings in downtown London.” Then the president said that critics of the program should be asked: “Which of the attacks I have just described would they prefer we had not stopped?”
WITHIN TWO DAYS OF his inauguration, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that limited interrogations to the Army Field Manual, thus putting us back into the pre-9/11 mode. That decision could be reversed, but within three months of taking office, President Obama also released publicly the legal memos detailing the techniques that had been used in the enhanced interrogation program, meaning that if it ever were reinstated, its effectiveness would be diminished by our having told the world—including our enemies—methods we were likely to use. He released the memos over the objection of his current CIA director and the four previous CIA directors. He also did so despite apparently having been told directly by members of the CIA’s clandestine service that the release of this information could endanger our CIA operatives.
President Obama claimed that he wasn’t reducing America’s tools in fighting the War on Terror because he was setting up a replacement interrogation program: the “High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group,” or “HIG.” When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was apprehended on Christmas Day of 2009 while trying to ignite a bomb he had carried in his underwear onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, was asked whether Abdulmutallab had been questioned by the HIG. It turned out he hadn’t. Eleven months after the president had shut down the enhanced interrogation program and revealed the techniques in the program publicly, the replacement did not exist. Abdulmutallab was read a Miranda warning.
While the administration moved slowly to establish an interrogation program for terrorists, they were quick to reopen an investigation of the CIA personnel who carried out our enhanced interrogation program. Despite the fact that these officers had already been investigated and cleared by career Justice Department lawyers, Attorney General Eric Holder began threatening them with prosecution. In May 2011, after the U.S. located and killed Osama bin Laden, we learned that intelligence gained by these interrogators through the enhanced interrogation program had helped lead us to him.
AS WE FACED A new kind of enemy in the first war of the twenty-first century, the Bush administration put in place programs that were critical to securing the nation. We went after terrorists in safe havens in Afghanistan and took down the Taliban regime that had sponsored