Waterboarding worked, former CIA leaders contend
“I really do respect her passion for national security and her passion for intelligence,” former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told me during a tour to push his book, The Great War of Our Time:
The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism From al Qa’ida to ISIS, co-written with former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow.
[...] in December 2012, when Morell was acting director, Feinstein gave him the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, which denied that the interrogation methods produced valuable intelligence.
Former CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss contend that harsh techniques helped deliver valuable intelligence.
The GOP minority report countered that the Democrats’ staff never interviewed CIA officials, even after a federal probe had been closed.
Yet, if committee staffers couldn’t find any evidence that the enhanced techniques produced unique intelligence after reviewing 6.3 million documents, they must not have wanted to find it.
[...] without a congressional investigation, the CIA stopped waterboarding in March 2003, well before Obama banned all 10 harsh interrogation techniques in his first week in office.
Agents employed waterboarding on three detainees over a period of eight months, and many in the agency opposed the practice from the start.
The expense and stress of legal investigations, even into practices approved by the Department of Justice, discouraged any believers in the methods.
Feinstein’s view of the CIA did not improve when she “reluctantly” accused the CIA of snooping through her committee’s computers, which she considered an act of intimidation.
CIA staffers will be kicking themselves for missing any warning signs and desperate to make sure another large attack does not happen again.
Maybe members of the intelligence community will be too fearful of a Senate investigation to do whatever they think they need to do to prevent another terrorist attack.
The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism from al Qa’ida to ISIS, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell wrote that, during a briefing before the successful mission to get Osama bin Laden, he told President Obama he thought “the circumstantial case that Iraq had WMD in 2002 was stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.”
In the run-up to the war against Iraq, Morell writes, CIA analysts engaged in a number of exercises to see where information might lead.
When staff in Vice President Dick Cheney’s team tried to pressure analysts to go with the purposefully skewed report, analysts fought back.