Afterword: Delusions, Consequences, Truth
One step at a time. One day at a time. Speak the truth. Hide nothing. Admit failing and forgive it. Seek help from others. It is good to lean sometimes. Never give up. And then, you can even contend with demons.
—Truths I have learned with my wife
The CAPTUS tale is darker than I have been allowed to tell. Under the guise of “protecting sources and methods,” the CIA has imposed numerous redactions and elliptical phrases on my manuscript. These have eliminated or softened harsh facts about what our government has done in the pursuit of terrorists, rounded edges of wrongdoing, and obscured the corruption of our institutions and of our system of government caused by the rendition, detention, and coercive interrogation of terrorists or terrorist suspects. To oppose these policies risked one’s career. To write about them challenges a governmental omertà.
The Agency initially redacted about 100 pages of the original 250-odd pages of my manuscript. I have written this book literally a dozen times over to meet the professed sources and methods concerns of the CIA. For two years, amidst legitimate issues, I have had to fight redactions of such egregious threats to national security as when I wanted to say that someone spoke “with authority,” or that “the fog was brown.” I quoted T. S. Eliot, and they redacted that. Tastes vary, I know. Perhaps the Agency was striking a blow against obscure snobbery. I could not write “kidnap” in a certain sentence, even though I was quoting a previously published, CIA-approved book. I was not allowed to write that I “assumed” that a certain individual would act “innocent.” I was not allowed to mention—ever the Harvard man—that at one point I discussed “the Bible, the Koran, and heuristics.” In one spot I was not allowed to make the explosive revelation that CIA Headquarters, several colleagues, and I all . . . “disagreed.” The Agency redacted such sensitive national security terms as “rot” and “shit hole.” The Agency and I engaged in months of argument because they repeatedly refused to allow me to mention a U.S. government . . . urinal. The Agency censored passages on seduction—and they the sizzling romantic secrets of a WASP. At one point I was not allowed to note that I “vented my anger.” The Agency censored that I considered someone “a gibbering fool.”
It is clear that various elements of the CIA and executive branch, even after the departure of the Bush administration, are concerned about the implications of drawing a picture of the rendition, detention, and coercive interrogation policies of the United States while waging the Global War on Terror.
I share these concerns, which is why it is my duty to bring to public attention my firsthand knowledge of how these policies and practices debase the men and women and institutions involved with them, fail in their objectives, and even threaten our own freedoms.
Forlorn and narrowly focused as the CAPTUS narrative is, it illustrates broader actions, arguments, and policies of the CIA and the government during the Global War on Terror. Three critical elements emerge.
Delusions
The CAPTUS case depicts that our government has been deluded about the nature and extent of the threat of jihadist terrorism. These delusions guided the policy makers of the Bush administration in waging what it characterized as the Global War on Terror, bounded the Intelligence Community’s assessment of the threat from jihadist terrorism, and shaped a trusting public’s conception of the depth of the dangers of “global jihad” confronting the United States.
I initially shared the Intelligence Community’s, and what after 9/11 came to be the Bush administration’s, standard view of the jihadist threat as coherent, structured, global, imminent, and nearly existential. Frankly, these became largely the views of the Office of the Vice President and his Neocon colleagues in the executive branch. The White House itself appears to have been conceptually inert in elaborating what came to pass for the strategic framework of the Global War on Terror, or overmatched in the policy debates by those advisers who zealously knew their own minds, and who confused nuance and distributed power with weakness.
The CAPTUS case disabused me of the coherent, structured, global, imminent, and nearly existential threat perspective. The facts showed that the Intelligence Community paradigm, and the White House Global War on Terror, were literally delusional.1 I found that CAPTUS was not the critical member of al-Qa’ida we had convinced ourselves he was, and I found something far more important: that the closer one looked at al-Qa’ida, the further it receded and the smaller it was. I learned that we attributed excessive importance to the concrete threats we detected—and there are real threats—and threw a host of unfortunates, zealots, and a few real terrorists into dungeons, for fear that they were demons, and might kill or enslave us all. I found that we chose to sacrifice our own principles in the hunt for the few terrorists threatening us. This was a Faustian bargain; the Devil’s ways could not make us any safer than had we retained our soul.
Analysts within the Intelligence Community (IC) who specialized in terrorism analysis, and the Office of Terrorism Analysis (OTA) of the CIA, tended (with many caveats and exceptions) to present al-Qa’ida and jihadists as coherent, global—“linked” was the operative jargon—growing, and perhaps even an existential threat to the United States and the West. This paradigm took shape in the early 1990s and dominated terrorism analysis. This perspective focused by definition on terrorist reporting,2 which in relative isolation from other factors—economic, social, historical, psychological—tended to present an alarming and coherent narrative of threat. Clearly this perspective comforted and shaped the view of the Neocon strategists in the Bush administration, who once the World Trade Center towers collapsed, finally consented to pay attention to the threat of Islamic terrorism and quickly married this perspective to the Neocons’ geostrategic objectives for the Middle East, which included finishing with Saddam Hussein once and for all.3
Analysts with broader mandates, however, in general what are termed in the IC “regional analysts,” tended to relativize the power and coherence of the various Islamic terrorist groups. Terrorists and terrorist groups were assessed as phenomena within the larger social, economic, technological, cultural, and religious forces affecting individuals and societies. This perspective, by definition, placed their role and importance in a much richer context. “Links” among various Islamic terrorists were not considered prima facie proof that terrorists in Indonesia, Yemen, and Morocco were therefore part of a “global movement.” My experiences provided strong evidence in support of this broader perspective and assessment (while my subsequent work on the National Intelligence Council reinforced and deepened the assessments I had reached during the CAPTUS case).
The OTA perspective was ascendant for many years. When a terrorist incident occurs, or issue arises, logically, OTA (and now the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC) takes the lead. Regional analysts, experts on Islam, and others play secondary roles. By definition and bureaucratic procedure, therefore, policy makers receive reporting and analyses of terrorist incidents that tend to overweigh the incidents’ true position in the larger context of trends and issues in a given country or region.
In addition, after the horror and the “intelligence failure” of the September 11 attacks, the pressure to pass on to policy makers almost all terrorist threat reporting became nearly irresistible. It is safer to warn and have nothing happen than to assess that a report need not be passed on to policy makers, only to learn that another attack actually occurred. Psychologists have demonstrated that the very act of analyzing threats and future scenarios—in this instance the assessment of the terrorist threat and specific kinds of possible terrorist attacks—increases among experts the perceived likelihood that such threats and attacks will occur.4 Of course, policy makers will take the views of experts as more likely to be “right” than the views of non-experts, thus validating the biases developed by the experts in the act of analysis.
Policy makers post-9/11 have been awash in endless “streams” of terrorist threat reporting.5 Terrorist threat reporting almost always appears to increase post any terrorism disaster. The reporting in turn formed the policy makers’ perceptions of what appeared myriad, pervasive terrorist threats. Of course, policy makers also felt obliged to respond to these reports, lest an attack occur on their watch. The dynamic of “streams” of reports shaping a sense of pervasive threat, leading to vigorous preemptive counterterrorism actions, was hard to resist with 3,000 Americans incinerated or decomposing in lower Manhattan.
The perception of increased threat after a disaster, embodied in the apparent (and probably numerical) increase in threat reporting, is a deep-rooted, atavistic phenomenon. Wildebeests at a watering hole know as they drink that there are crocodiles somewhere under the surface. When a crocodile suddenly pulls a wildebeest below the water in a terrifying rush of splashes and thrashing, in panic all the more fortunate wildebeests thunder up the embankment to safety, aware all of a sudden of a grave danger before them. After all, they all just saw one of their own devoured. Yet, the danger is no greater than before and, if only wildebeests could think, they already knew about it. They cannot reason themselves past the alarm of having seen one of their own pulled down to his death. They must do something to protect themselves—how could their lookouts have failed so miserably?—and so, up the embankment they rush.
Humans imagine themselves masters of their emotions, their perceptions servants of their reason. But humans, and the institutions they create, are also ruled first by unconscious, instinctive drives; the difference being that we wear the mantle of “civilization” and reason as we scurry away from the watering hole. We may have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing upon it, but we have not dominion of ourselves, and often are unaware of why we act and feel as we do.
Neither the Intelligence Community nor policy makers resisted or were aware of their herd behavior, or the bureaucratic exaggerations and limitations on perception. And so, prudence, fear, institutional bias and limitation, passing judgment up the chain of command, all conspired to foment more fear, a sense of greater threat, and cruder policy responses, than an independent and cold assessment of terrorist threat reporting warrants. The administration, abetted by parts of an Intelligence Community unaware of its cognitive biases and psychological reflexes, led us thundering up the embankment.
There are evildoers who killed many of us, and who merit cold excision from the world of men. I did my best to make it happen. But our own atavistic reflexes and errors are the deepest failure of 9/11, not the attacks themselves, because although we sometimes must suffer the deeds of others, we always must be responsible for our own.
These are organic consequences of how terrorism analysis is conducted within the IC. Nonetheless, many officers and components of the IC opposed the “global movement” perspective and strove to give greater local, regional, religious, political, and sociological nuance to the IC’s analyses of Islamic terrorism. Tragically, OTA’s paradigm about the overarching framework of Islamic terrorism dominated, but also proved distorting and alarmist, while the Bush administration considered any challenge to this perspective, and the administration’s consequent GWOT, to be proof of political hostility or insubordination. When faith, fear, and death combine, they sacrifice nuance first.
I learned something else important and must be explicit: The contention that enhanced interrogation techniques [sic] provided critical intelligence and saved many lives is flat wrong. Close review of most specific claims of critical intelligence obtained from rendition, detention, and enhanced interrogation techniques shows that, in almost every case, the “intelligence” obtained was faulty and subsequently discredited or suspect, or of secondary importance. The after-action assessments have mostly, albeit very quietly, found that we obtained little of critical benefit.
Some who have asserted that enhanced interrogation techniques provided critical intelligence and saved lives, like former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, are honest victims of their institutions. They, as I had, believed that the entire institution would know what it was saying and would tell the Director the truth—or would know how to recognize the truth. But the internal assessments of the interrogation techniques and programs fed up the chain of command were like the proverbial “self-licking ice-cream cone.” To protect the administration, the CIA, the rendition, detention, and interrogation programs, and the officers involved, the assessments “found” that the counterterrorism and interrogation programs justified the premises that had engendered them. The institution and its leaders also fell victim to the perennial problem in the intelligence business: that one usually finds what one is looking for. I saw the reporting. I worked the cases. I wrote many of the reports myself. I know the culture. One simply does not write an assessment that says, in effect,
Our assumptions were wrong, our policies flawed, the results obtained paltry, misleading, or harmful to our own interests.
Instead, one writes something like,
We responded vigorously to a grave threat. The measures were carefully reviewed. We have had significant successes in protecting our nation. Our officers are selfless. We continue to refine our actions, to respect our obligations, to uphold the law, and to fulfill our mission.
Others who assert that enhanced interrogation techniques provided critical intelligence and saved many lives, like former vice president Dick Cheney, are either sincerely misinformed (although the IC concluded and reported years before the end of the Bush administration that enhanced interrogation had provided little breakthrough intelligence), persist in their delusions, are protecting from criticism the policies they have advocated and the men who made them, or are incapable or unwilling to acknowledge grievous error. This group, more than any I saw during my decades in intelligence, or than any that I heard about from colleagues whose experiences extend decades before my own, sought any shred of information that justified their preconceptions, and took differing views as proofs of disloyalty. But what senior leader has ever acknowledged, even recognized, in matters of war, peace, torture, and the rule of law, that they understood little, misunderstood much, did almost everything horribly wrong, killed thousands needlessly, and cost the nation boundless treasure?
In a number of ways, the least delusional of the protagonists in the Global War on Terror versus global jihad dynamic have been al-Qa’ida and all the fellow-traveler jihadists whom al-Qa’ida inspires. They have accurately identified Western values, and the United States as the West’s champion and heart, as existential threats to their theology and way of life. Yet they are utterly deluded in imagining that they can exorcise the demon of Western thought and life through physical violence—or in any way at all.
The rise of the individual, based upon the growth of knowledge, is the single, irresistible dynamic driving human history, across epochs, geography, cultures, and institutions, and despite religion. Al-Qa’ida’s very existence, and its leaders’ theological ratiocinations, demonstrates the rise of individual thought and agency that al-Qa’ida’s leaders decry as the root of decadence and that is the center of Western civilization. Yet, Usama Bin Ladin and his acolytes have eaten of the apple of knowledge (in the form of literacy, mass communications, the decline of traditional authority figures and references), their eyes were opened, and they can never again cover their nakedness, try as they may, until they return to dust.
Progressively, then, as I lived the CAPTUS case, I came to realize that our leaders, our Intelligence Community, and our public have been deluded into exaggerated fears, reinforced by institutional and perceptional bias; that enhanced interrogation techniques do not provide critical information that could not be obtained from more acceptable, conventional interrogation methods; and that our jihadist enemies have deluded themselves that they know what they are doing in anything beyond a tactical sense, and have a solution for the social and theological “ills” that so exercise them.
Consequences
The CAPTUS case reveals how our rendition, detention, and coercive interrogation policies have corrupted our government’s institutions, eroded our society’s most deeply cherished values, undermined our system of laws, and, in any event, do not work. My initial reaction to the beginning of my first briefing for the CAPTUS case was “We don’t do that.” The “that” was, make no mistake, what all men not deluding themselves or others with sophistry would in familiar conversation call “torture.”
Defining torture is quite difficult. I wrestled with this conundrum throughout my handling of the CAPTUS case. In fairness, the entire administration and executive branch struggled hard to define it clearly, and the CIA was always aggressive in demanding clear legal guidance from the most senior legal bodies in the government. One truly enters the “gray world” when attempting to define what is acceptable in an interrogation, what is legal, what is necessary, and what is torture.
The “hallway” characterization of the legal guidance we received during my tenure on the CAPTUS case was that coercive measures did not constitute torture so long as the physical and psychological effects were not “severe,” “lasting,” or “permanent.” I always found that argument spurious concerning physical pain, and would have nothing to do with it. Going back decades to my own SERE training and interrogation experience, however, I at first accepted the efficacy and acceptability of measures that disrupt and disorient a prisoner psychologically, for brief periods. I had been trained that our experts had determined that these measures could induce cooperation in a prisoner.
As I became involved in the CAPTUS case, however, and my own experiences came back vividly, I realized that believing psychological dislocation was an effective and legitimate interrogation method was yet another delusion. It was easy to disorient and disrupt one’s psyche and sense of self. It had happened to me with shocking speed. But even in that “psychologically dislocated” state, I was no more likely to share information than had it not occurred. I became angry in my misery, that was all. Could one more readily fool or manipulate a “psychologically dislocated” individual into revealing information? Not in my personal experience, either as a person subjected to coercive interrogation measures or as the interrogator of CAPTUS. Already, decades ago, the infamous KUBARK manual had explicitly noted that coercive methods bred resentment and a decline in cooperation, rather than induced revelations. I concluded, to paraphrase the Duke of Otranto, that torture is worse than a crime, it is an error.
Yet, when I read the legal support for our instructions—the now infamous Department of Justice “torture memo”—it was simply transparent that the justification was a “do-what-you-want” card that swept away in one executive note extensive American and international jurisprudence and proscriptions against torture. I had been immediately concerned about torture, but my concerns grew deeper as the case progressed; I became alarmed about our institutions of government.
As I stood gazing out the window of Hotel California at the bleak landscape, making a sardonic reference to Diogenes’s lamp, I started to fear that the CAPTUS case was symptomatic of an even deeper crisis than the involvement of the United States in torture. I became acutely uneasy that the CIA and all of us were being subjected to a de facto usurpation of constitutional and executive powers, rationalized with de jure, self-authorizing flimflammery (gussied up by casuists as the “theory of the unitary executive”). It was shocking to learn that the president’s advisers informed him that his orders superseded our laws. We were becoming—in secret and out of sight except to the few of us involved in the “dark side, if you will” of the Global War on Terror—no longer the government of checks, balances, and law that has defined us as a nation, and which I had proudly sworn to “preserve and protect.” Even more alarming, it was apparent that our leaders believed that they were doing right. The landscape I gazed at was bleak indeed.
We denounce these procedures as totalitarian in other countries. We oppose them. I feared that I had become part of what constituted elements of a de facto American junta. The thought was so outlandish that for a long while I doubted my own perceptions. It simply could not be true. Finally, when I mentioned these concerns, most looked at me as though I were wildly exaggerating for effect, a crackpot, or a partisan. No one could take seriously that such a term might be applicable in the United States. “We have to do whatever is necessary to protect ourselves from a grave threat” was one immediate response. But I had learned—I had lived—that our assumptions were wrong, our fears exaggerated, our actions harmful to the society, laws, and values we sought to protect. “Americans do not do that sort of thing” was the next stock reaction to my concerns . . . just as I had reacted to Wilmington at first, when I said “we don’t do that.” But we did, largely in secret and the dark, the measures taken and laws traduced justified by our leaders and their followers, as juntas do, as necessary responses to grave national danger.
Truth
Finally, the CAPTUS case begs the question: What should be done to dispel the delusions we have believed, and to repair the harm to our society and government caused by coercive interrogation and the corrosion of our laws?
The U.S. Intelligence Community became aware of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism many years prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks. DCI George Tenet increased the resources and focus devoted to counterterrorism by orders of magnitude in the years prior to the 9/11 attacks. From the mid-1990s on I, like countless others in the IC, was drawn into our efforts to neutralize, detain, or kill Usama Bin Ladin and his acolytes. CTC had been a backwater; after 9/11 it became the center of all attention. Suddenly officers coveted CTC assignments, following the old dicta that promotions come from assignments where the bombs go off, and where policy makers focus their attention. The Agency took substantial measures to enhance the professionalism and specialization of counterterrorism officers.
These trends increased after 9/11, and are manifest in the recommendations of the Bush administration, to increase the number of counterterrorism analysts and field officers by 50 percent, and of the 9/11 Commission, to create the Department of Homeland Security, and especially the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC)—the two signal organizational responses to the “failures” of 9/11 and the threats from Islamic terrorism.6
Whenever there is a “failure” or a “flap,” the CIA must demonstrate to Congress and the public that it has identified the problem behind the failure and will address its causes. This almost invariably takes the form of an institutional reorganization—as though a new box on the flow chart, or new procedures, will banish the misperceptions and errors in judgment that are almost always the underlying causes of intelligence failures.7 The defect in this classic response to disaster is that no one can institutionalize better judgment. Bureaucratic reorganization and new procedures designed to rectify past errors give the appearance of motion and soothe anxieties, but almost always actually slow institutions down, while the employees remain as flawed (and dedicated) as before.
Perversely, the specialization of our counterterrorism officers and offices throughout the Intelligence Community in response to the threat of Islamic terrorism has in some ways made matters worse. Just as our instinctive reflexes noted above distorted our perceptions, our counterterrorism institutions and officers see terrorist threats as looming larger than they do, because the counterterrorism perspective has narrowed. These assessments of threat in turn appear to justify the specialized focus on and resources devoted to them. It is as though we have built an institutional telescope and can now see only a larger threat than we would if we took our eyes away from the eyepiece and looked at the broader view—as our substantive generalists can and must.
It is an error to isolate counterterrorist offices from the larger regional analytical offices in the intelligence, foreign policy, and national security establishments. It is an error to overspecialize our counterterrorism offices and officers—as creating NCTC has done. Each step diminishes perspective, lessens insight, and impairs judgment.
The Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)—a small office of a few dozen officers barely known to the American public—tends to produce deeper and more policy-useful analysis than the far more richly resourced CIA. Ironically, INR benefits from its paucity of resources. INR officers must be generalists as well as experts, which forces a broader perspective on them often denied to their more specialized CIA counterparts. INR can address only critical, strategic issues (or at least try to address them), rather than attempt to provide comprehensive and highly focused analysis on all conceivable issues. In consequence, INR is less likely inadvertently to hype what are secondary issues through an institutionally engendered cognitive bias.
There are remedial steps to this self-created problem of narrow perspective, hyped threats, and deluded perceptions about the real terrorist challenges facing the United States and Western values.
Our counterterrorism analysis and operations would have a more measured perspective about the trends and nature of Islamic terrorism, and would be less likely to delude themselves and policy makers, if terrorism analysts were incorporated as important parts of regional analytical offices, charged with broader regional, sociological, and political analysis, rather than separated, isolated, and placed on an institutional par (and rivalry) with regional analysts. During my tenure as DNIO for Transnational Threats (i.e., terrorism), I often cautioned my colleagues to “beware the questions you ask, for you will receive answers to them.” Our counterterrorism structures post-9/11 too often have queered the questions we ask, and the answers we give, about the terrorist threats facing us. The organizational changes noted above would give a broader and more accurate perspective to our counterterrorism analysis, operations, and policies, producing probably greater strategic coherence and success. At least, it would be more difficult for policy makers to find justification for their policies in distorted expertise.
Almost all individuals and institutions involved in coercive interrogations strictly followed guidance that had received the repeated approval of the highest bodies in the U.S. government. Prosecution would not rectify the errors committed, but it would fray our society. Punishment metes out no justice.
We do not need more laws. The laws are only as strong as the men who interpret and enforce them, and the social compact that embraces them. As I lived the CAPTUS case, I saw that a few of our leaders, in their insularity and sanctimonious certainty, corrupted the laws and started to corrode our social compact. We can take actions, however, to diminish such men, and that reaffirm our society’s commitment to our principles, our institutions, and the rule of law.
The U.S. Congress should hold public hearings on the coercive interrogation programs of the United States. All involved should have immunity, except for a refusal to speak the truth and to tell what one knows. The hearings would be an American version of the “Truth Commissions” that did so much to heal South Africa of the decades of apartheid.
I am not naive about what would happen: Behind courtly smiles, some members of Congress, pundits, and interested citizens would cast doubt on the impartiality, integrity, and trustworthiness of those who criticize or lay out what enhanced interrogation is. They would express concerns about weakening national security by what they would characterize as a distorted account of practices that in their version saved lives and safeguarded the republic. They would note that no attack has occurred since September 11, 2001, and would attribute this to the courageous decisions taken by our leaders in a time of war—when in fact enhanced interrogation has had nothing to do with the lack of another successful attack on U.S. territory. They would worry that discussing controversial practices will strengthen our enemies. Statements would be made indirectly that those speaking out are neither patriots nor strong enough to protect the public from ruthless killers. Some politicians and pundits would state that they know who are “real Americans”—who would not include critics of enhanced interrogation techniques. Off-stage, disturbing reports would surface about the integrity, impartiality, courage, and character of various individuals testifying. In the struggle for influence and power, one always seeks to destroy a messenger perceived as hostile to one’s interests, to discredit the message, and to divert attention with counterclaims. The average citizen, pulled in opposite directions by authority figures, on subjects the average citizen cannot know firsthand, would be confronted with a sterile “he said, she said” polemic and would usually accept the views expressed by the political leaders with whom he or she identifies. Everyone would decry the character assassinations and unsubstantiated assertions; all would deny engaging in them; those whose power base and interests were threatened by the truth about enhanced interrogation would make sure they happen.
What good, then, a public hearing that ruthless politics is sure to distort and sully? The facts. The facts. The facts in conflict with our laws and our principles. In the end, despite innuendo, fear-mongering, misleading assertions, and probably a variant of Swift Boat character assassination, the facts will out—and will make it harder for leaders to corrupt our system of laws, checks, and balances when a new crisis pressures them to shake off the fetters that bind our power but guarantee our freedom.
Knowledge of the truth strengthens a nation, and may strengthen its laws, more than punishment. An evil known can be avoided in the future. Yet, it is difficult for a society to protect itself against actions taken in secret. The executive branch should not be allowed to hide matters of law and principle behind arguments of “national security” and “operational sources and methods.”
Those most responsible for having subverted our laws against torture are the small number of senior officials who drafted the legal rationalizations for the coercive interrogation methods, and the governmental officials who ordered them to do so. They were the highest legal officials and policy makers in the country, to whom the CIA turned for guidance, the ultimate guarantors of our system of laws, checks, and balances. They did not err; they committed willful, if deluded, acts of subversion. Yet, the punishment for the policy makers who traduced their oaths should consist of public shaming and lasting disgrace, nothing more. This is especially true for those lawyers who perverted the spirit of our laws by writing justifications that undermined centuries of blood, struggle, and sacrifice for a constitution that guaranteed habeas corpus, for everyone, wherever our flag held sway, even for our enemies, whatever their practices, and that established a government of laws, and not of executive orders. We would be a stronger nation for it.
The United States must have a robust, aggressive, and subtle intelligence service that operates in the “gray world” with all the tools necessary to defend or advance the national interest in the ruthless interplay of states and competing interests. Rendition, detention, and interrogation all have their legitimate places among the methods used by our national security establishment, as does protecting sources and methods of intelligence collection. The Clandestine Service is clandestine so that it can function successfully. The public has no “right to know” intelligence activities, sources, or methods, and should not have one. Coercive interrogation methods, however, have no place among the methods used by our national security establishment. No threat justifies institutionalizing these practices, or subverting the numerous laws against torture that the United States subscribes to and often champions.
Upon reading this book, some will call me a torturer. Others, perhaps, a hero. Colleagues whom I respect have told me that they believe openly discussing our failings in the conduct of the Global War on Terror—and, they have told me, writing this book—would “aid and abet” our enemies. Other colleagues have quietly urged me to tell the sordid truth to the American public. My critical colleagues make a profound error: Our flag has long been a rallying point for the oppressed and a symbol of freedom because it embodies public debate, draws strength from acknowledging our failings, and then makes them good. The weak and the guilty flee their acts, or hide them behind claims of “sources and methods” and “national security.” The strong and honorable take responsibility for even their failings.
One cannot gainsay what happened in the CAPTUS case and in the Global War on Terror. I know what we did. I did it. Yet, in the end, the way to contend with the demons and harm to our country that this story reveals is what I kept telling CAPTUS: Tell the truth. If we are strong enough to do so, our fears may not possess us once again, and we may avoid becoming the demons whom we claim to oppose, as well as victims of delusion. Fahimt?!
1 Delusion: a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.
2 For example, operational reports from the field that a terrorist individual or group was planning to do something.
3 The Bush administration, from January 2001 until September 11, 2001, had three foreign policy priorities: confront the rise of China, taken to be hostile to U.S. preeminence; build a ballistic missile defense system; destroy Saddam Hussein. The Clinton administration’s grave concerns and deep focus on the threat of terrorism were taken as a small-bore issue, unworthy of a superpower, and diverting U.S. attention from its true strategic interests.
4 See in particular Richards J. Heuer Jr., Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2003), especially Chapter 12, p. 149; but also the work of Dr. John Ioannidis, who has found disturbing cognitive bias and distortion among medical researchers, and the hard-to-resist pressures to conform to dominant paradigms of thought. See David H. Freeman, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2010.
5 The concept of “streams” of reporting is a malign consequence of the Bush administration’s and the Intelligence Community’s responses to the 9/11 attacks. The term was, to my knowledge, not used before 9/11. At least it was not in vogue inside the Intelligence Community. It implies to the layman that there are numerous, concordant sources of information, providing regular reports on a given threat or subject. But the term is largely meaningless. There are intelligence sources and reports. Some are reliable; some not, some unreliable but accurate, others reliable but wrong. There are rarely “streams,” and no experienced intelligence professional whom I know found the term to mean anything. Were there a “stream” of intelligence, the information in the “stream” most likely then would have been substantial enough to act upon, rather than merely allude to in public. The concept and expression endowed the confusing, sporadic, contradictory, and on occasion critically revelatory process of collecting, disseminating, and acting upon clandestine information with an aura of competence and awareness that policy makers were only too happy to weave into the narrative of threat they presented to a public that had to trust its leaders in time of danger. In fact, the stream of intelligence exaggeration has sometimes misled senior intelligence officials (I have observed it happen), scared many citizens for years, and provided officials a way to appear to substantiate their assessments and policies, and to sound like dynamic, courageous leaders. Worse, those using the term were often sincere, duped by the illusion of professional assessment implied in the term “streams of intelligence,” and confirmed in their preconceptions. There is nothing so dangerous as a sincere ideologue, whatever the object of his devotions.
6 The other signal responses to 9/11, of course, are the Patriot Act of 2004, which addressed the legal framework of counterterrorism work, and the creation of the position I filled briefly as head of and then as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats (responsible for terrorism analysis).
7 In addition, one must acknowledge, though never accept, that sometimes our opponents simply succeed through no fault of our institutions or men and women.