Whose Fault Is It CIA Weren’t Interviewed for Torture Report?

Part of the CIA’s response to today’s Senate

torture report is to claim that none of them were interviewed
for the study. Former CIA officials George Tenet, Porter Goss,
Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin and Albert McCalland teamed up to
claim that the CIA’s interrogation methods save lives in an op-ed
piece at The Wall Street Journal.
Here’s how they describe what went down, or failed to go
down:

Astonishingly, the staff avoided interviewing any of us who had
been involved in establishing or running the program, the first
time a supposedly comprehensive Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence study has been carried out in this way.

The excuse given by majority senators is that CIA officers were
under investigation by the Justice Department and therefore could
not be made available. This is nonsense. The investigations
referred to were completed in 2011 and 2012 and applied only to
certain officers. They never applied to six former CIA directors
and deputy directors, all of whom could have added firsthand truth
to the study. Yet a press account indicates that the committee
staff did see fit to interview at least one attorney for a
terrorist at Guantanamo Bay.

We can only conclude that the committee members or staff did not
want to risk having to deal with data that did not fit their
construct. Which is another reason why the study is so flawed.

But what the report actually says in a footnote is very
different. The report claims that the CIA told them they
would not “compel” CIA employees to cooperate with interviews due
to the Department of Justice investigations. Here’s the footnote
below:

So who to believe, here? It’s helpful to look at a previous spat
between the CIA and Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein
for some guidance. Way back in the spring there was a
big fight between the two of them where Feinstein accused the
CIA of snooping on Senate staffers who were preparing this report.
Though the CIA denied it, they eventually had to eat their words.

It turned out to be true. They had secretly searched the
computers the Senate staffers were using to prepare the report and
removed many documents.

According to Feinstein, the big point of conflict was that the
Senate staff had somehow gotten access to the CIA’s own internal
evaluation of its interrogation practices. Known as the Panetta
Review (after then CIA Director Leon Panetta), the report came to
some critical conclusions that matched the Senate’s conclusions.
The CIA did not want the Senate to have access to the report, which
Feinstein claims contradicts some of their defenses of their
interrogation. The surveillance scandal revolved around access to
this internal report.

So if the CIA engaged in secret surveillance against the Senate
staff because it didn’t want them to have access to its own
interviews with its own employees and its own analysis, perhaps we
should greet with skepticism any claims that they would have been
more than happy to sit down for a chat for this report.

The site former CIA officials set up to defend their
interrogation practices is now live. Behold CIASavedLives.com.