Photo (above) credit: CIA
I like to share this POLITICO MAGAZINE exclusive interview with former CIA Director (May 30, 2006 – February 12, 2009) Michael Hayden on the release of the US Senate’s report.
Michael Hayden Is Not Sorry
The Senate report rakes Bush’s former CIA director over the coals. He fires back in an exclusive interview.
By MICHAEL HIRSH
December 09, 2014
Though the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program long predated his takeover of the agency in 2006, former Director Michael Hayden has found himself at the center of the explosive controversy surrounding the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its still-classified report on torture. In a long, impassioned speech on the floor Tuesday, Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein cited Hayden’s testimony repeatedly as evidence that the CIA had not been forthright about a program that the committee majority report called brutal, ineffective, often unauthorized “and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.” She publicly accused Hayden of falsely describing the CIA’s interrogation techniques “as minimally harmful and applied in a highly clinical and professional manner.” In an interview with Politico Magazine National Editor Michael Hirsh, Hayden angrily rebuts many of the report’s findings.
Michael Hirsh: The report concludes, rather shockingly, that Pres. George W. Bush and other senior officials—including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for a time and Secretary of State Colin Powell—were not aware of many details of the interrogation programs for a long period. According to CIA records, it concludes, no CIA officer including Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss briefed the president on the specific enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006. Is that true?
Michael Hayden: It is not. The president personally approved the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah [in 2002]. It’s in his book! What happened here is that the White House refused to give them [the Senate Intelligence Committee] White House documents based upon the separation of powers and executive privilege. That’s not in their report, but all of that proves that there was dialogue was going on with the White House. What I can say is that the president never knew where the [black] sites were. That’s the only fact I’m aware that he didn’t know.
Hirsh: The report directly challenges your truthfulness, repeatedly stating that your testimony on the details of the programs –for example on whether the interrogations could be stopped at any time by any CIA participant who wanted them halted— is “not congruent with CIA records.” Does that mean you weren’t telling the truth?
Hayden: I would never lie to the committee. I did not lie.
Hirsh: Does it mean that you, along with others at senior levels, were misled about what was actually going on in the program?
Hayden: My testimony is consistent with what I was told and what I had read in CIA records. I said what the agency told me, but I didn’t just accept it at face value. I did what research I could on my own, but I had a 10-day window in which to look at this thing [the committee’s request for information]. I was actually in Virginia for about 30 hours and studied the program for about three before I went up to testify. I was trying to describe a program I didn’t run. The points being made against my testimony in many instances appear to be selective reading of isolated incidents designed to prove a point where I was trying to describe the overall tenor of the program. I think the conclusions they drew were analytically offensive and almost street-like in their simplistic language and conclusions. The agency has pushed back rather robustly in its own response.
Hirsh: You seem upset.
Hayden: Yeah, I’m emotional about it. Everything here happened before I got there [to the CIA], and I’m the one she [Sen. Feinstein] condemns on the floor of the Senate? Gee, how’d that happen? I’m the dumb son of a bitch who went down and tried to lay out this program in great detail to them. I’m mentioned twice as much in there as George Tenet—but George and Porter Goss had 97 detainees during their tenure, while I had two.
Hirsh: Is there anything you think the report gets right?
Hayden: All of us are really upset because we could have used a fair and balanced review of what we did. … The agency clearly admits it was fly-by-wire in the beginning. They were making it up as they went along and it should have been more well-prepared. They’ve freely admitted that. They said that early on they lacked the core competencies required to undertake an unprecedented program of detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists around the world. But then what the committee does is to take what I said out of context. They take statements I made about the later days of the program, for example when I said it was well-regulated and there were medical personnel available, etc., and then apply it to the early days of the program, when there were not. It misrepresents what I said.
Hirsh: One of the most stunning and cited conclusions of the report is that interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
Hayden: That is untrue. And let me give you a data point. John Durham, a special independent prosecutor, over a three-year period investigated every known CIA interaction with every CIA detainee. At the end of that the Obama administration declined any prosecution. [In 2012, the Justice Department announced that its investigation into two interrogation deaths that Durham concluded were suspicious out of the 101 he examined—those of Afghan detainee Gul Rahman and Iraqi detainee Manadel al-Jamadi—would be closed with no charges.] So if A is true how does B get to be true? If the CIA routinely did things they weren’t authorized to do, then why is there no follow-up? I have copies of the DOJ reports they’re using today. The question is, is the DoJ going to open any investigation and the DoJ answer is no. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have all this supposed documentary evidence saying the agency mistreated these prisoners and then Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice saying no, you’ve got bupkis here.
Hirsh: What about the report’s overarching conclusion that these enhanced techniques simply were not effective at getting intelligence?
Hayden: My very best argument is that I went to [then-Deputy CIA Director] Mike Morell and I said, ‘Don’t fuck with me. If this story [about the usefulness of intelligence gained from enhanced techniques] isn’t airtight then I’m not saying it to Congress.’ They came back and said our version of the story is correct. Because of this program Zubaydah begat [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed], who begat [others]. We learned a great deal from the detainees.
Hirsh: The report says that even the CIA’s inspector general was not fully informed about the programs—that in fact the CIA impeded oversight by the IG.
Hayden: The IG never told me that. The IG never reported that to Congress. Look, I’m relying on people below me. If they tell you an untruth, you get rid of them. But I never felt I was being misled, certainly not on the important contours of this program. What they [the committee] are doing is grabbing emails out of the ether in a massive fishing expedition. This is a partisan report, as you can see from the minority report out of the committee.
Hirsh: Can you sort out the discrepancy between your testimony that there were only 97 detainees in the history of the program when the report says there 119?
Hayden: We knew there were more. The high-value-target program—they don’t show up on my list if they’re at the [black] sites. And committee knew all about that. They have chapter and verse from [former CIA IG John] Helgerson about it. It’s a question of what criteria you use. When I met with my team about these discrepancies, I said, ‘You tell [incoming CIA director] Leon Panetta he’s got to change the numbers that have been briefed to Congress.’
Hirsh: The report suggests that you misrepresented what you told Congress in the briefings, telling a meeting of foreign ambassadors to the United States in 2006 that every committee member was “fully briefed.”
Hayden: I mean what are they doing—trying to score my public speeches? What’s that about? You want me to go out and score Ron Wyden’s speeches?
Hirsh: You don’t believe you’re in legal jeopardy?
Hayden: No, not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. How could I be in legal jeopardy?
Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.