Former CIA Director Hayden: We Didn't Lie About Interrogation Program. Torture Report: Yeah, You Did. REPEATEDLY.

Failures

from the I-swear-I-thought-you'd-never-find-out! dept

Former CIA director Michael Hayden warned anyone who would listen that the release of the Torture Report would turn our enemies against us… or further against us, or something. He also claimed that he and the CIA had been generally forthright and open about this program over the past several years.

“To say that we relentlessly, over an expanded period of time, lied to everyone about a program that wasn’t doing any good, that beggars the imagination,” Hayden said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Well… Prepare to have your imaginations beggared! Here’s Michael Hayden’s relentless lies, told over an expanded period of time, about a program that wasn’t doing any good, as documented in the Senate Committee’s report. [pdf link]

Briefings to the full Committee beginning on September 6, 2006, also contained numerous inaccuracies, including inaccurate descriptions of how interrogation techniques were applied and what information was obtained from CIA detainees. The CIA misrepresented the views of members of Congress on a number of occasions. After multiple senators had been critical of the program and written letters expressing concerns to CIA Director Michael Hayden, Director Hayden nonetheless told a meeting of foreign ambassadors to the United States that every Committee member was “fully briefed,” and that “[t]his is not CIA’s program. This is not the President’s program. This is America’s program.” The CIA also provided inaccurate information describing the views of U.S. senators about the program to the Department of Justice.

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A February 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which the CIA acting general counsel initially stated “actually does not sound that far removed from the reality” was also criticized. CIA officers prepared documents indicating that “critical portions of the Report are patently false or misleading, especially certain key factual claims. CIA Director Hayden testified to the Committee that “numerous false allegations of physical and threatened abuse and faulty legal assumptions and analysis in the [ICRC] report undermine its overall credibility.'”

Hayden’s claim of “faulty assumptions” sounds familiar. Here’s his opening salvo from a Wall Street Journal editorial in defense of the program.

The committee has given us instead a one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation—essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9/11 attacks.

Nice touch, the “partisan” thing. Distracts people from the real issue. (See also: the abysmal comment section following the editorial.) Back to Hayden’s inaccuracies.

In December 2003, a CIA Station overseeing CIA detention operations in Country [x] informed CIA Headquarters that it had made the “unsettling discovery” that the CIA was “holding a number of detainees about whom” it knew “very little,” Nearly five years later, in late 2008, the CIA attempted to determine how many individuals the CIA had detained. At the completion of the review, CIA leaders, including CIA Director Michael Hayden, were informed that the review found that the CIA had detained at least 112 individuals, and possibly more.

CIA Director Hayden typically described the program as holding “fewer than a hundred” detainees. For example, in testimony before the Committee on February 4, 2008, in response to a question from Chairman Rockefeller during an open hearing, Hayden stated, “[i]n the life of the CIA detention program we have held fewer than a hundred people.” {See DTS #2008-1140.) Specific references to “98” detainees were included in a May 5, 2006, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report on Renditions, Detentions and Interrogations.

To Michael Hayden, this margin of error was acceptable.

According to tlie CIA’s June 2013 Response, “Hayden did not view the discrepancy, if it existed, as particularly significant given that, if true, it would increase the total number by just over 10 percent.”

Even so, he then directed a CIA officer to alter reality to match his well-worn claim of 98 detainees

According to an email summarizing the meeting, CIA Director Hayden instructed a CIA officer to devise a way to keep the number of CIA detainees at the same number the CIA had previously briefed to Congress. The email, which the briefer sent only to himself, stated:

“I briefed the additional CIA detainees that could be included in RDI numbers. DCIA instructed me to keep the detainee number at 98 ~ pick whatever date i [sic] needed to make that happen but the number is 98.”

Moving on…

Contrary to statements later made by CIA Director Michael Hayden and other CIA officials that “[a]ll those involved in the questioning of detainees are carefully chosen and screened for demonstrated professional judgment and maturity, CIA records suggest that the vetting sought by [redacted] did not take place.

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In testimony on April 12, 2007, CIA Director Michael Hayden referenced medical care of detainees in the context of the ICRC report on CIA detentions. Hayden testified to the Committee; “The medical section of the ICRC report concludes that the association of CIA medical officers with the interrogation program is ‘contrary to international standards of medical ethics.’ That is just wrong. The role of CIA medical officers in the detainee program is and always has been and always will be to ensure the safety and the well-being of the detainee. The placement of medical officers during the interrogation techniques represents an extra measure of caution. Our medical officers do not recommend the employment or continuation of any procedures or techniques. The allegation in the report that a CIA medical officer threatened a detainee, stating that medical care was conditional on cooperation is blatantly false. Healthcare has always been administered based upon detainee needs. It’s neither policy nor practice to link medical care to any other aspect of the detainee program.” This testimony was incongruent with CIA records.

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CIA Director Hayden prepared a statement that relayed, “despite what you have heard or read in a variety of public fora, these [enhanced interrogation] techniques and this program did work.” The prepared materials included inaccurate information on the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, as well as the same set of examples of the “effectiveness” of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA had provided to policymakers over several years. The examples provided were nearly entirely inaccurate.

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Similarly, CIA Director Michael Hayden represented to the Committee on April 12, 2007, that “KSM also provided the first lead to an operative known as ‘Issa al-Hindi,’ with other detainees giving additional identifying information.” The CIA provided similar inaccurate representations regarding the thwarting of the United Kingdom Urban Targets Plot and the identification and/or arrest of Dhiren Barot, aka Abu Issa al-Hindi, in 17 of the 20 documents provided to policymakers and the Department of Justice between July 2003 and March 2009.

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The CIA represented that CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah provided “important” and “vital” information by identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) as the mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001 CIA Director Hayden told the Committee on April 12, 2007, that:

“..it was Abu Zubaydah, early in his detention, who identified KSM as the mastermind of 9/11. Until that time, KSM did not even appear in our chart of key al-Qa’ida members and associates.”

On at least two prominent occasions, the CIA represented, inaccurately, that Abu Zubaydah provided this information after the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

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On November 16, 2006, CIA Director Hayden briefed the Committee. The briefing included inaccurate information, including on the CIA’s use of dietary manipulation and nudity, as well as the effects of sleep deprivation.

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Director Hayden testified that detainees were never provided fewer than 1,000 calories a day. This is inaccurate. There were no calorie requirements until May 2004, and draft OMS guidelines from March 2003 indicated that “[b]rief periods in which food is withheld(1-2 days), as an adjunct to interrogations are acceptable.”

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Director Hayden testified that detainees were “not paraded [nude] in front of anyone,” whereas a CIA interrogator told the inspector general that nude detainees were “kept a center area outside the interrogation room,” and were “‘walked around’ by guards.'”

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February 14, 2007, during a hearing on CIA renditions, Director Hayden provided inaccurate information to the Committee, to include inaccurate information on the number of detainees held by the CIA.

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At the April 12, 2007, hearing, Director Hayden verbally provided extensive inaccurate information on, among other topics: (1) the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, (2) the application of Department of Defense survival school practices to the program, (3) detainees’ counter-interrogation training, (4) the backgrounds of CIA interrogators, (5) the role of other members of the interrogation teams, (6) the number of CIA detainees and their intelligence production, (7) the role of CIA detainee reporting in the captures of terrorist suspects, (8) the interrogation process, (9) the use of detainee reporting, (10) the purported relationship between Islam and the need to use the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, (11) threats against detainees’ families, (12) the punching and kicking of detainees, (13) detainee hygiene, (14) denial of medical care, (15) dietary manipulation, (16) the use of waterboarding and its effectiveness, and (17) the injury and death of detainees.

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At the CIA briefing to the Committee on December 11, 2007, Director Hayden testified about: (1) the information provided to the White House regarding the videotapes, (2) what the tapes revealed, (3) what was not on the tapes, (4) the reasons for their destruction, (5) the legal basis for the use of the waterboard, and (6) the effectiveness of the CIA’s waterboard interrogation technique. Much of this testimony was inaccurate or incomplete.

This certainly seems like the record of relentless lying over a period of several years, contrary to Hayden’s assertions. There are a few ways of viewing this, none of which cast Hayden in a flattering light. Given the comprehensive detailing of his inaccurate statements delivered as the director of the CIA, you have to assume he’s either a) a liar or b) incompetent. Even if he lied to (in his mind) protect America, he still lied. Given other statements he’s made about the supposed value of the program, the pendulum swings towards “liar.”

He lied to protect a program he thought was valuable, even when the CIA’s own documents and findings contradicted this belief. The pendulum swings toward “incompetent,” but doesn’t quite make it that far. There’s far too much calculation lying below the obfuscation to believe Hayden didn’t know exactly what he was doing when he spent briefing after briefing and hearing after hearing lying to his overseers about the extent of the program and the hideous details he was actively hiding from them.

It would almost seem as though Hayden’s concerns about the safety of the country are simply a projection of his concerns about what the report reveals about him. This is the guy who wants the public to believe the CIA was screwed by a partisan hatchet job and that domestic surveillance programs are every bit as necessary as torture when it comes to hunting down terrorists. But his own words and actions show he shouldn’t be trusted with an op-ed, much less the safety of American people.

Filed Under: cia, cia torture, lies, michael hayden, torture report