WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- In the year since it was publicly acknowledged by President Bush, the CIA’s controversial program of detaining suspected terrorist leaders, and subjecting some of them to interrogation techniques critics say constitute torture, has been overhauled by the agency’s new director.
In a wide-ranging TV interview Monday, Gen. Michael Hayden declined to give any details of the changes made to the program but said they had followed a “rich dialogue” with the agency’s overseers on the congressional intelligence committees.
“I can't describe that (new) program to you,” he told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose, “but I would suggest to you that it would be wrong to assume that the program of the past is necessarily the program moving forward into the future.”
Hayden insisted the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, even as it was run under his predecessors, had been “appropriate, lawful and effective” but said the legal territory on which it was run had shifted over the years since it was set up in March 2002, when senior al-Qaida commander Abu Zubaydah became the first of what Hayden said were less than 100 prisoners who had passed through the system.
In the last 2 1/2 years alone, Hayden said, “We had the Detainee Treatment Act in December of 2005, we had the Hamdan decision (by the U.S. Supreme Court) in the summer of 2006, we had the Military Commissions Act in the fall of 2006. They have all changed the legal landscape under which the CIA's program is operated.”
But beyond just ensuring the program was legal, Hayden said, he made changes because he wanted buy-in for what the agency was doing, above all from Congress.
“We made a conscious decision inside CIA … that this program, if it were to go forward, had to go forward on something more than just a definition of its lawfulness.”
Hayden said the program needed “what I'd call both policy and political legs. So that this was not the CIA's program, this was America's program.”
Following the president’s acknowledgement of the program in September last year, Hayden said, “I began to dialogue with Congress. I briefed all members of both of our oversight committees on all aspects of the detention and interrogation program, (and) sought their thoughts on techniques that we may want to use going forward.”
Eventually, earlier this year, the agency “went forward to the president, to the Department of Justice, with a program.” Officials said later the program had been publicly codified by President Bush’s executive order of July 20, which had determined that it met the requirements of Common Article Three of the Geneva Convention, which the Supreme Court had ruled in the Hamdan case applied to “unlawful enemy combatants” as the U.S. government defines al-Qaida.
Critics said they were disappointed in Hayden’s support for what they called an illegal program. “His hands were clean” when he arrived at the agency in May 2006, said John Sifton, a counter-terrorism specialist with Human Rights Watch. “He’s dirtied them justifying an illegal program.”
“He drank the Kool-Aid,” said Sifton. “This is a hollow program: the legal arguments are hollow; the scientific basis is hollow, even the argument about intelligence gathering is hollow.”
“They are shooting in the dark,” continued Sifton. “There’s no data to suggest that these methods actually get you accurate information from detainees.”
“I don’t know why Hayden, who seems like a smart guy with a good career, would try to defend” the program, Sifton said. “When history judges … it’s going to find that this program harmed our national security.”
Sifton said global public opinion had shifted as a result of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program and the agency’s separate practice of rendition -- seizing terror suspects and delivering them to third countries notorious for brutal interrogation methods.
In the eyes of the world, he said, those policies “have turned the accused perpetrators of terrorist attacks into victims and the real victims, the American people, into perpetrators.”
Hayden said he was happy about the ethics, as well as the legality, of the policies. “The actions I've asked our officers to do, in my time as director, my personal conscience is very content with what it is I've asked them to do,” he said.
Hayden said the CIA had rendered “mid-range, two figures” -- i.e. about 40-60 -- suspected terrorists to third countries since Sept. 11, 2001, which he said was “a pace somewhat behind the number of renditions conducted in the 1990s.”
Current and former intelligence officials say that, even before the Sept. 11 attacks, rendition -- mainly of terror suspects who were wanted by authorities in their native countries -- was routine CIA policy.
On Feb. 2, 2000, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that "working with foreign governments worldwide, we have helped to render more than two dozen terrorists to justice" since July 1998. More than half, he added, were members of al-Qaida.
Former officials with knowledge of the program say the majority of those he was speaking about were sent to Egypt, where -- for suspected terrorists at least -- torture was, and remains, commonplace.
Egypt continued to be a major destination for U.S. rendition after Sept. 11, and in May 2005 an Egyptian official gave a number seemingly at odds with the one cited by Hayden Monday.
"I don't know the exact number," Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif told NBC's "Meet the Press." “The numbers vary -- there have been over 60 or 70."
It was unclear whether or not he was referring only to the period since Sept. 11, 2001.
"The numbers are not important. It is a crime. That is like saying I only killed one guy. It is still murder," said Sifton, who said that sending a suspected terrorist to a country like Egypt violates international and U.S. law. "If it was legal, why would they care so much about how 'limited ' it is. ... The only reason is they know it is wrong."
Hayden said that the test in U.S. law was whether the person transferred was "more likely than not" to be tortured.
"The overall history of the receiving government is obviously something that we have to take into account. But the law requires us to make an independent judgment on this individual. And the criteria that exists in the legislative history of our treaty ratification that creates this requirement for us is less rather than more likely," he said. But he added, "We're not looking to do this 49/51. When we seek assurances from the receiving nation, we want assurances, we want them to mean those assurances and we have a responsibility, we, plural -- the United States government, including its intelligence services -- ... to do our very best to ensure that the receiving government lives up to those promises."
