CIA's interrogation memos inconclusive

By Greg Miller

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON - For months, former vice president Dick Cheney has argued that the worth of the Bush administration's aggressive interrogation program was proven in two secret CIA memos that he urged be released.

But those documents, and others that were finally unsealed Monday, are at best inconclusive - attesting that captured terrorists provided critical intelligence on al-Qaida and its plans, but offering little to support the argument that harsh or abusive methods were key.

The memos and a long-secret CIA inspector general report released the same day filled in details about the agency's embrace of harsh methods to get prisoners to talk. But they did not resolve a question that now seems likely to follow the Bush administration into the history books: Was it necessary to push moral and legal limits of detainee treatment to safeguard the country?

President Barack Obama this week endorsed a task force recommendation to create a new elite interrogation unit - drawn on experts from across the government, not just the CIA - that will abide by U.S. military guidelines when questioning terrorism suspects.

But Cheney lashed out at the Obama administration again, and refused to back away from his assertion that harsh interrogation methods worked.

The newly released documents "clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided the bulk of the intelligence we gained about al-Qaida," Cheney said Monday night in a statement released by his office.

The CIA inspector general report is likely to provide ammunition to people on both sides of the argument. In one section, it suggests that the number of intelligence reports surged when water-boarding was used on two high-ranking al-Qaida captives, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Mohammed "provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the water-board, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," the report said.

The report goes on to note that Mohammed was then water-boarded 183 times in March, 2003, but the rest of the paragraph, which presumably discusses the results, remained blacked out.

In its top conclusion, the report said the interrogation program had provided intelligence "that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States."

But without being able to isolate the many variables involved in getting information, the report said, the effectiveness of specific techniques "cannot be so easily measured." In an interview Tuesday, the author of the CIA report, former inspector general John L. Helgerson, said: "You could not in good conscience reach a definitive conclusion about whether any specific technique was especially effective, or the enhanced techniques in the aggregate really worked."

The memos that Cheney urged be declassified are similarly inconclusive. The title of one report makes its clear how it caught Cheney's eye: "Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against Al Qaeda."

But the contents say more about the complexity of getting accurate intelligence from prisoners than the reliability of coercion in getting them to talk. A report on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed describes how interrogators took advantage of Mohammed's mistaken belief that others had already spilled important secrets.

Interrogators confirmed some information with data found on computers, and parlayed tips into additional captures that then armed them with new information with which to confront "KSM." Details on the number of reports generated from Mohammed are blacked out. But "it will take years," the document said, "to determine definitively all the plots in which KSM was involved."

Obama's interrogation task force spent seven months looking at the effectiveness of a wide array of approaches to getting prisoners to talk, but did not devote any attention to whether the coercive techniques that had been employed by the CIA actually worked.

An Obama administration official said that was largely because none of the members of the task force -- which included representatives from the FBI and CIA -- proposed that any of the agency's "enhanced" interrogation methods be included in the review.

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"One of the first questions asked was if any agency feels there is a technique outside of the U.S. Army Field Manual that ought to be used," said the Obama administration official involved in the task force. "No agency, including the CIA, requested the study of any technique." Some officials said that was because the preferences of the White House, and the political risks of proposing to go beyond the military manual, were clear.

"The CIA got what it wanted -- a place at the table for its substantive experts -- while avoiding what it didn't want, responsibility for long-term detention," said a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the issue, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. "For this phase of the task force, it was clear that the Army Field Manual would be the standard."

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Staff writer Josh Meyer contributed to this report.