McClatchy reports that one of the reasons Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got waterboarded 183 times and Abu Zubaydah got waterboarded 83 times is that Cheney and Rumsfeld refused to believe they had no information on ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq. (h/t Hmmm)

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

[snip]

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

This suggests that when Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded an additional time–perhaps his 83rd–against the judgment of the interrogators working with him directly, the "elements with CIA Headquarters" that ordered up the additional torture were being pushed by Cheney and Rummy (a suggestion JimWhite made here).

This is not to say that the interrogation program has worked perfectly. According to the IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have the information. See IG report at 83-85. On at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques. On that occasion, although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements with CIA Headquarters still believed he was withholding information. [Redaction of more than one full line] See id, at 84. At the direction of CIA Headquarters interrogators, therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah. [Redacted] See id, at 84-85. [my emphasis]

I’ll have more to say on the intelligence they got from Abu Zubaydah in a later post. But if Cheney can be tied–presumably through Tenet–to waterboarding sessions that even the torturers considered excessive, it sure explains why Tenet got the White House to endorse its torture program in a statement as one of the last things he did as DCI. And it explains why Cheney has been so quick to enter the fray with his torture apologies.

We’re mighty close to tying Cheney–through just one degree of separation–to "frivolous" torture. And I suspect he’s aware of that.

The SASC Report on Torture strongly suggests that CIA was following one set of guidelines on waterboarding, but had gotten approval from DOJ for another set of guidelines. 

The SASC reveals that on July 26, 2002, JPRA sent a report on SERE techniques. That report is almost certainly one of the resources Jay Bybee consulted when writing his memo, which was published on August 1, 2002. The SASC report says,

[DOD General Counsel] Haynes also recalled that he may have been "asked that information be given to the Justice Department for something they were working on," which he said related to a program he was not free to discuss with the Committee, even in a classified setting

See Valtin’s story showing that the data came from the same place.

Now, as SASC describes it, the JPRA document didn’t describe waterboarding as it used to be done in Navy training. 

JPRA’s description of the waterboarding technique provided in that first attachment was inconsistent in key respects from the U.S. Navy SERE school’s description of waterboarding. According to the Navy SERE school’s operating instructions, for example, while administering the technique, the Navy limited the amount of water poured on a student’s face to two pints. However, the JPRA attachment said that "up to 1.5 gallons of water" may be poured onto a "subject’s face." While the Navy’s operating instructions dictated that "[n]o effort will be made to direct the stream of water into the student’s nostrils or mouth," the description provided by JPRA contained no such limitation for subjects ofthe technique. While the Navy limited the use ofthe cloth on a student’s face to twenty seconds, the JPRA’s description said only that the cloth should remain in place for a "short period of time." And while the Navy restricted anyone from placing pressure on the chest or stomach during the administration of this technique, JPRA’s description included no such limitation for subjects of the technique. [my emphasis]

In other words, JPRA was advising waterboarding to be used in torture to use six times the amount of water as that used in training, and JPRA eliminated the 20 second limit on waterboarding.

Now, Bybee’s memo is closer to what it appears Navy did in SERE, with limits on timing (though twice as long as SERE allowed), and description of  water being poured from a "canteen cup."

Finally, you would like to use a technique called the "waterboard" in this procedure, the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual’s feet are generally elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers tbe mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth. Tbis causes an increase in carbon dioxide level in the individual’s blood. This increase in the carbon dioxide level stimulates increased effort to breathe. This effort plus the cloth produces the perception of"suffocalion and incipient panic," i.e., the perception of drowning. The individual does not breathe any water imo his lungs. During those 20 to 40 seconds, water is continuously applied from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches. Afler this period, the cloth is lifted, and the individual is allowed to breathe unimpeded for three or four full breaths. The sensation of drowning is immediately relieved by the removal of the cloth. The procedure may then be repeated. The water is usually applied from a canteen cup or small watering can with a spout.

But, as we know, that’s not how waterboarding was done in practice.

The IG Report noted that in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated, see IG Report at 5, 44, 46, 103-04, and also that it was used in a different manner. See id. at 37 ("[T]he waterboard technique  … was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator …  applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real–and is more poignant and convincing.") [my emphasis] 

They got approval for SERE techniques. But they had already formally decided to far exceed the guidelines used in SERE. 

The Senate Armed Services Committee just released its report on torture.

Spencer has a post on it here.

Remember, as you’re reading it, that not only did they re-purpose SERE. But we know they went far beyond SERE in its application.

I’ll be reading it as I fall asleep and should have more detailed comments tomorrow morning. Plus, I’m working on a post that should demonstrate, once and for all, just how futile all this torture was. 

One more thing. As you read this, remember that Kirk Lippold who has become one of the talking heads attacking Obama’s efforts to shut Gitmo, worked on crafting Gitmo detainee strategies. 

You can donate here

By now you’ve heard Cheney’s claim that he asked the CIA to declassify all the great intelligence we got from waterboarding and Greg Sargent’s earlier report that Cheney hadn’t asked the CIA directly for those documents.

Greg Sargent has an update that explains how the former Fourth Branch intends to get them, now that he’s a withering vine.

 That whole question of whether Dick Cheney asked the CIA to declassify and release intelligence supposedly proving that the torture worked? Turns out Cheney made the request through the National Archives, a spokesperson for the archives confirms.

That means that we may, in fact, see the documents that Cheney claims will demonstrate that the Bush torture program collected a whole bunch of useful intelligence, though it may take awhile.

National Archives spokesperson Susan Cooper confirms that Cheney did submit a request for unspecified documents on March 31st. Cooper said that the National Archives had asked the relevant agency — she wouldn’t say which one, but there’s little reason to doubt that it’s the CIA — for the relevant documents this morning.

Cooper confirmed that the docs Cheney asked for were in fact classified. Keep in mind we have no way of knowing what Cheney actually asked for or whether they really say what Cheney claims. It’s now up to the CIA to make the determination whether to declassify the docs Cheney wants. So this could get very, very interesting in various ways.

Remember why Cheney and the National Archives have been in the news of late–the report that, contrary to plan, Cheney decided to keep all his materials at the Archives rather than send them to Dallas to put in Bush’s Library. He needs the materials close, you see, so he can access them for his memoirs.

Now, the date of Cheney’s request for CIA documents–March 31, well before it was clear whether the OLC memos would be declassified–suggests Cheney’s request has everything to do with his memoirs and nothing to do with the release of the OLC memos.

So Cheney’s call to declassify these documents has nothing to do with a real debate about the torture. It is Cheney’s attempt to use those documents to continue creating a myth that his torture did anything to keep this country safe.

I wanted to make two points about Spencer’s important story at the Windy, identifying a previously unknown 2007 Bradbury torture memo.

A former senior intelligence official, who would not speak for the record, said that in 2007, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury, issued a still-secret memorandum authorizing an updated CIA interrogation regimen. The Justice Department issued the document after months of internal Bush administration debate, a Supreme Court decision in 2006 that extended protections from Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to enemy combatants in U.S. custody, a piece of new legislation responding to the Court’s decision and a presidential executive order on interrogations.

[snip]

The still-unreleased Office of Legal Counsel memo spelled out for the CIA what interrogation practices were considered lawful after President Bush issued an executive order on July 20, 2007 that sought to reconcile the CIA’s interrogation program with the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3, which prohibits inflicting “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” upon wartime detainees.” The Supreme Court, in 2006’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, ruled that Common Article 3 protections applied to enemy combatants in U.S. custody, a determination that the Bush administration had resisted since creating its post-9/11 detention and interrogation policies. Congress in 2006 responded by passing the Military Commissions Act, which reserved for the president the right to define the applicability of Common Article 3 protections for detainees in the war on terrorism. Bush’s order, known as Executive Order 13440, determined that the the CIA’s interrogation program fit within Common Article 3, provided that it met certain criteria, such as the exclusion of practices like “murder, torture, cruel or inhuman treatment, mutilation or maiming.”

But the order did not define which interrogation techniques it now considered legal. Anonymous Bush administration officials told reporters on the day of the order’s release, “it would be very wrong to assume that the program of the past would move into the future unchanged.” As a result, according to the former senior intelligence official, after Bush issued the order, the CIA again asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to review the techniques listed in the revised interrogation program in order to determine their legality, just as the Office of Legal Counsel had done in 2002 and 2005, after previous periods of challenge to the post-9/11 interrogation program. [my emphasis]

Note the timing. Spencer understands that Bush wrote his Executive Order, and then CIA got a new OLC memo (though Spencer reminds me that he doesn’t have the memo in hand to confirm that).

I find that particularly interesting considering our discussion the other day about the 2003 OLC memo CIA got.  As the WaPo reported last year, the CIA under Tenet twice pushed the White House to give it memos saying, “the torture program is formal policy, not just CIA going wacko.”

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

[snip]

Tenet first pressed the White House for written approval in June 2003, during a meeting with members of the National Security Council, including Rice, the officials said. Days later, he got what he wanted: a brief memo conveying the administration’s approval for the CIA’s interrogation methods, the officials said.

Administration officials confirmed the existence of the memos, but neither they nor former intelligence officers would describe their contents in detail because they remain classified. The sources all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to discuss the events.

The second request from Tenet, in June 2004, reflected growing worries among agency officials who had just witnessed the public outcry over the Abu Ghraib scandal. Officials who held senior posts at the time also spoke of deteriorating relations between the CIA and the White House over the war in Iraq — a rift that prompted some to believe that the agency needed even more explicit proof of the administration’s support.

You’ll note an undoubtedly related sign of anxieties over the difference between legal opinion and policy on the 2005 Bradbury torture memos, which all say in a footnote, “The legal advice provided in this memorandum does not represent the policy views of the Department of Justice concerning the use of any interrogation methods.” Though Bradbury may have had to include those footnotes since then Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey objected to the memos.

Now, the chronology Spencer describes is the reverse of what appears to have happened with the 2003 and 2004 policy memos: Bush made a formal statement of policy, the executive order, and only then, at the urging of CIA, got an OLC memo analyzing that policy to certify its legality. But it seems to reflect a similar tension between CIA and the White House over ensuring the White House remained as exposed by the torture policy as did CIA.

Note, too, top CIA officers surely already knew what we only discovered later that year: that Bush had a different OLC memo telling him he could change the meaning of Executive Orders willy nilly without changing the actual text of the order. (In fact, since the one prior known example of Executive Order pixie dust related to Iran-Contra, in the aftermath of which John Rizzo, then fairly early in his career in the Office of General Counsel at CIA, was deeply involved, the possibility that Bush’s EO on torture was just more pixie dust had to have been in the mind of lawyers at the CIA.) So it’s no surprise that CIA insisted on getting legal cover in addition to the apparent statement of policy represented by the EO.

And one more interesting timing note: All this was happening in the months (presumably) before Steven Bradbury’s long-simmering nomination to head OLC came back up before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. And at the time Bradbury wrote the memo, he had already been serving as Acting Head of OLC for more than 210 days after his second nomination was rejected, making his service in that role arguably illegal (though GAO later ruled it was not illegal).

In June 2005, Mr. Bradbury was nominated by the President to be the Assistant Attorney General for OLC.  His nomination was returned by the Senate in December 2005.  He was nominated for a second time in January 2006 and returned by the Senate in September 2006.  He was nominated for a third time in November 2006 and returned by the Senate the following month. He was nominated for a fourth time in January 2007 and returned by the Senate at the end of that year.  And he was nominated for a fifth time in January 2008; his nomination is pending.

Mr. Bradbury was appointed to be the Acting Assistant Attorney General of OLC in or about June 2005.  The Vacancies Reform Act permits an official to serve in an acting capacity throughout the pendency of a first or second nomination, but “for no more than 210 days after the second nomination is rejected, withdrawn, or returned.”  5 U.S.C. 3346(b).  Mr. Bradbury’s second nomination was returned on September 29, 2006, so his 210-day stint as Acting Assistant Attorney General expired on or about April 26, 2007.

Since that time, Mr. Bradbury has continued to perform the same duties and functions he had previously been performing – albeit with a different title: “Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General.”  This appears to be an end run around and violation of the Vacancies Reform Act, which does not permit an official to continue leading an office after the 210-day period has expired.

Mr. Bradbury has done exactly that.  Just because the Justice Department has changed Mr. Bradbury’s business cards and letterhead to say “Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General” rather than “Acting Assistant Attorney General” does not change the fact that he has continued to serve as the top official at OLC long after the Vacancies Reform Act required his departure in April 2007.

The CIA, not surprisingly, wanted continued cover for its role in interrogations. But their claim to have it, either through EO or OLC Memo, may have given them only questionable legal cover.

The Village has been out in force declaring that Obama’s decision to release the torture memos will hurt the morale of CIA’s employees.

But CIA’s employees sure greeted Obama warmly when he spoke at Langley yesterday. See also the beginning of the applause at the end of the Panetta introduction.

Now I realize these things are carefully stagecrafted. I realize the members of the clandestine service–the men and women being asked to push the limits in the name of national security–are probably not sitting in front of the camera at an Obama photo op. 

But I’ve been re-reading the books that first exposed our torture program in the last few days, and it’s clear that opposition came not just from the FBI. It came, in some cases, from those at CIA who thought the torture ineffective, too much, dehumanizing to the interrogators. As Scott Horton describes,

CIA interrogators were not wild about the use of these techniques.

[snip]

But the rebellion included whistleblowers who went to the CIA’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson. He launched a probe which documented what was going on and concluded, correctly, that a number of the techniques then in use were potentially prosecutable as federal crimes. Bybee’s memo and those of his successor Steven G. Bradbury are designed to silence and override the dissenters, most notably the CIA inspector general, and thus put down the rebellion against torture at the CIA.

Now, I will grant you that some in the CIA are still defending the efficacy of the torture. Others are no doubt worried they will be prosecuted.

But some will be grateful that Obama is forcing the CIA out of the torture business. 

When asked about his feelings about the release of the torture memos, McCain recalled his efforts in 2005 to make torture (more) illegal.

As you know it was my legislation, the Detainee Treatment Act, that prohibited torture, that said we had to abide by the Geneva Convention for treatment of enemy combatants and wish that we had done that. But release of these memo helps no one, doesn’t help America’s image, does not help us address the issue, and I think it was a serious mistake.

I wonder what McCain thinks about this footnote from the May 10, 2005 "Techniques" memo? Though it reflects an earlier Congressional effort than McCain’s attempt to make torture (more) illegal passed later that year, the bill Bradbury mentions was part of the effort in 2005 to bring interrogation under the rule of law.

Finally, we note that section 6057(a) of H.R. 1268 (109th Cong. 1st Sess.), if it becomes law, would forbid expending or obligating funds made available by that bill to "subject any person in the custody or under the physical control of the United States to torture," but because the bill would define "torture" to have "the meaning given that term in section 2340(1) of title 18, United States Code, 6057(b)(1), the provision (to the extent it might apply here at all) would merely reaffirm the preexisting prohibitions on torture in sections 2340-2340A.

Maybe McCain doesn’t like having these memos released because they demonstrate the disdain with which the Bush Administration treated Congressional attempts to end the torture program?

Sign the petition telling Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture here. 

Michael Hayden said something that confused me today on Fox News. When asked whether he thought waterboarding is torture, he replied simply that DOJ had said it was not.

Question: Are you satisfied that waterboarding is not torture?

HAYDEN: I’m satisfied that the Justice Department, in a series of opinions — ‘02, ‘03, ‘05 — said that it was not. Now…

See, we know that DOJ addressed waterboarding specifically in 2002 and 2005 in the memos released last week. 

But 2003?

Yes, there is one I, at least, have forgotten. The one in which the White House signed off on waterboarding, even after they had waterboarded KSM 183 times in a month. 

6/XX/03
White House
CIA
Interrogation of prisoners

 Here’s the WaPo’s description of this 2003 memo, from last year when we were all trying to elect Barack Obama President. 

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first — and, for years, the only — tangible expressions of the administration’s consent for the CIA’s use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said.

Gosh, that would be an interesting memo to see, wouldn’t it?

(Updated entirely to make sensible after I discovered I’m a bone-head.)

I think I’ve finally gotten some folks to to pay attention to the OLC Memo revelation that KSM was waterboarded 183 times in a month.

In that post, I suggested that if it took 183 uses of waterboarding to make KSM comply with interrogators wishes, then waterboarding is far less effective than the CIA would like us to believe. It appears the CIA IG was raising the number of times KSM was waterboarded in the same context I am–to question the efficacy of waterboarding someone that many times. 

As I described last night, Steven Bradbury spends four pages of the May 30, 2005 memo trying to prove that enhanced interrogation is effective. He appears to be responding to a six-page passage in the CIA IG Report addressing the efficacy of enhanced interrogation.

I dealt with that section in some detail last night.  But by reconstructing that section best as we can from the fragments Bradbury gives us (see my work below), we see the IG Report was tying the number of times KSM and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded with its judgment of waterboarding’s (in)efficacy.

Bradbury doesn’t reveal how the IG Report begins the discussion of the efficacy of the enhanced interrogation program. But shortly after the beginning, the IG Report seems to refute claims that individual, high value detainees are the key to collecting information on al Qaeda. It points out that CTC relies on the information from lower-level detainees–presumably collected without enhanced methods since CIA claims it only uses enhanced methods on high value detainees–to round out its understanding of information collected from high value detainees.

CTC frequently uses the information from one detainee, as well as other sources, to vet the information from another detainee. Although lower-level detainees provide less information than the high value detainees, information from these detainees has, on many occasions, supplied the information needed to probe the high value detainees further. … [T]he triangulation of intelligence provides a fuller knowledge of Al-Qa’ida activities than would be possible from a single detainee.

Bradbury leaves out the next part of the IG Report’s discussion. But from there, the IG Report says we can’t conclusively determine whether enhanced interrogations have provided information that has prevented specific attacks (note, the wording of this discussion is very vague, perhaps intentionally so; it could mean any number of things, including that we have zero evidence that torture has prevented attacks, or that we just don’t have evidence one way or another). Then, the IG Report appears to elaborate on this difficulty, noting that, "there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness." Again, this quotation is unclear, but it appears to refer to the effectiveness of one enhanced interrogation method over another. That is, the IG Report appears to be saying it has no way of assessing whether waterboarding is more effective than sleep deprivation than persuasion. Finally, the IG Report admits that enhanced interrogation–or perhaps just waterboarding–is tied to an increase in the number of reports (though it appears to have already dismissed any possibility of assessing the quality of these reports). And it is in that context in which the IG Report discusses the sheer number of times that Abu Zubaydah and KSM were waterboarded. 

In other words, at the tail end of an extended discussion explaining all the reasons we can’t say enhanced interrogation prevented any specific attacks and why it may be a mistake to focus exclusively on individual high value detainees, the IG Report connects the sheer number of reports CIA has gotten when using waterboarding with the sheer number of times it was used on Abu Zubaydah and KSM.

And significantly, 12 pages later the IG Report notes that CIA was using waterboarding more than it had said it had been using it.

Now all of this is obviously very fragmentary, and Bradbury seems to have deliberately obscured the IG Report’s language in key passages. As it happens, though, both the White House and SSCI are in the middle of attempts to assess the efficacy of waterboarding. 

In response to those efforts, the CIA has begun assembling thousands of classified cables that contain daily reports from the agency’s secret prisons, tracking the interrogation methods used on high-value detainees and how much information was obtained as a result.

Let’s hope this inquiry–unlike the memos sent to Steven Bradbury tailored to allow him to claim that torture was effective–do more than track the number of reports gathered under torture. And heck, while they’re at it, perhaps the White House and the SSCI could release this part of the IG Report, which seems to conclude–after having watched thousands of hours of torture videos–that it was not effective.

Sign the petition telling Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture here.

As Bradbury notes on page 10 of is memo, the IG Report discusses the efficacy of enhanced interrogation from page 85 though 91. Here are the topics that discussion covers, in order, with the Bradbury description of the reference:

Page 85: No direct reference

Page 86: A description of an increase in intelligence reports attributable to enhanced methods and a discussion arguing that you can’t measure the efficacy of interrogation by pointing to just the reports from one detainee..

See IG Report at 86, 90-91 (describing increase in intelligence reports attributable to use of enhanced techniques). 

---

According to the CIA Inspector General:

CTC frequently uses the information from one detainee, as well as other sources, to vet the information from another detainee. Although lower-level detainees provide less information than the high value detainees, information from these detainees has, on many occasions, supplied the information needed to probe the high value detainees further. … [T]he triangulation of intelligence provides a fuller knowledge of Al-Qa’ida activities than would be possible from a single detainee.

IG Report at 86.

Page 87: No direct reference

Page 88: A statement that it is difficult to determine whether interrogations have stopped specific attacks.

As the IG Report notes, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks. See id. at 88.

Page 89: A statement noting that there is limited data on whether enhanced methods are effective (note–Bradbury pitches this as an observation that the techniques were used "sparingly," which from the context appears to be disingenuous).

And, because the CIA has used enhanced techniques sparingly, "there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness." Id at 89.

Page 90: A comment on the increased number of reports tied to enhanced methods, along with a discussion of the number of times Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded.

See IG Report at 86, 90-91 (describing increase in intelligence reports attributable to use of enhanced techniques). 

---

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.  

Page 91: A comment on the increased number of reports tied to enhanced methods, along with a discussion of the number of times KSM was waterboarded.

See IG Report at 86, 90-91 (describing increase in intelligence reports attributable to use of enhanced techniques). 

---

The CIA used the waterboard … 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.  

Pages 103 and 104: An observation that waterboarding was used more than initially indicated.

The IG Report noted that in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated, see IG Report at 5, 44, 46, 103-04,

image courtesy of quapan

In another thread, Bob Schacht wrote,

BTW, according to CNN, Haynes and Mukasey are claiming that “half” of what we “know” about Al Qaeda came from torture sessions. Did they really write that, and if so, I’m wondering if its puffery or true.

Using the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, I think I can show where it comes from–and show why it’s a totally useless claim.

Bradbury Needed to Appeal to Efficacy to Claim These Techniques Didn’t Violate the Convention Against Torture

In the May 30, 2005 Memo, Steven Bradbury spends four pages recording the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation. He does this, at least partially, to make sure he can claim that the techniques at issue don’t "shock the conscience" and therefore don’t violate the Fifth Amendment (and therefore don’t violate CAT, which is the whole point of this memo) . In particular, Bradbury resorts to efficacy when trying to distinguish between torture condemned by the State Department and that practiced by the US. Speaking of torture practiced by other countries, Bradbury claims it simply doesn’t serve the same purpose as our torture.

There is no indication that techniques are used only as necessary to protect against grave terrorist threats or for any similarly vital government interests.

And when Bradbury is trying to distinguish enhanced interrogation from SERE, he again appeals to efficacy and necessity.

… the interrogation program we consider here furthers the paramount interest of the United States in the security of the Nation more immediately and directly than SERE training.

[snip]

It follows that use of these techniques will not shock the conscience in at least some circumstances. We believe that such circumstances exist here, where the techniques are used against unlawful combatants who deliberately and secretly attack civlians in an untraditional armed conflict in which intelligence is difficult or impossible to collect by other means and is essential to the protection of the United States and its interests, where the techniques are used only when necessary and only in the interrogations of key terrorist leaders reasonably thought to have acionable intelligence, and where every effort is made to minimize unnecessary suffering and to avoid inflicting significant or lasting harm.

It bears noting that this rant goes far beyond what Bradbury elsewhere carefully laid out as the premise of his memo. But both this claim and the one dismissing State Department concerns about torture rely on his argument that the program was necessary to protect the US. 

So to accomplish his apparent task–which was to find a way to declare the CIA interrogation program did not violate CAT (after CIA’s own IG had already concluded it did), Bradbury needed to be able to say it was effective.

The CIA IG Report Appears to Have Been Ambivalent about the Value of Enhanced Interrogation Program

Now, in addition to the overriding problem presented by the IG Report’s conclusion that the CIA interrogation program violated the Convention Against Torture, the IG Report presented another problem for Bradbury. Based on the citations that appear in this memo, the IG Report appears to have been very ambivalent about the value of the enhanced interrogation program. For example, the IG Report notes it is difficult to measure the efficacy of the interrogations.

As the IG Report notes, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks. See id. at 88. And, because the CIA has used enhanced techniques sparingly, "there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness." Id at 89.

(There’s a third reference to the IG Report just below these two, but it appears to be a somewhat gratuitous reference on Bradbury’s part so he could pretend he had addressed all the IG Report’s concerns.)

In addition, the IG Report notes that the value of the program cannot be measured by individual pieces of information.

According to the CIA Inspector General:

CTC frequently uses the information from one detainee, as well as other sources, to vet the information from another detainee. Although lower-level detainees provide less information than the high value detainees, information from these detainees has, on many occasions, supplied the information needed to probe the high value detainees further. … [T]he triangulation of intelligence provides a fuller knowledge of Al-Qa’ida activities than would be possible from a single detainee.

IG Report at 86. As illustrated below, we understand that even interrogations of lower-tier high value detainees supply information that the CIA uses to validate and assess information elicited in other interrogations and through other methods.

Now, I can’t be sure without the full context of the IG Report, but Bradbury appears to be pulling a rhetorical switch here. The IG Report passage appears to say that CIA should not focus exclusively on these high value individuals, because without the information from "lower level detainees" (note, not "lower-tier high value detainees," which Bradbury uses but which in this memo has no real meaning), interrogators can’t really get information from high value detainees anyway. This "triangulation" approach actually would seem to support the FBI method of interrogation more than the CIA method. But, in a discussion about the efficacy of enhanced techniques purportedly used only with high value detainees, Bradbury promptly elides the difference between interrogation of other detainees with that of high value detainees, and in so doing ascribes some of the value of more mundane interrogation to the enhanced interrogation program.  

Now, Bradbury calls his discussion of these two points "caveats," suggesting that he reluctantly cedes the IG Report’s doubts about the enhanced interrogation methods. 

He only makes one reference to the IG Report in a manner that appears to be positive–but Bradbury claims it supports a point it doesn’t appear to. Here’s the context:

In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including KSM and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques. Both KSM and Zubaydah had "expressed their belief that the general US population was ‘weak,’ lacked resilience, and would be unable to ‘do what was necessary’ to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals." [Effectiveness Memo] at 1. Indeed, before the CIA used enhanced techniques in its interrogations of KSM, KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, "Soon, you will know."  Id. We understand that the use of enhanced techniques in the interrogation of KSM, Zubaydah, and others, by contrast, has yielded critical information. See IG Report at 86, 90-91 (describing increase in intelligence reports attributable to use of enhanced techniques). 

Note what he’s doing here. In support of his claim that "enhanced techniques … yielded critical information" he provides citations that prove enhanced techniques yielded a larger number of reports. Bradbury here is conflating quality–"critical"–with sheer number in a bid to pretend the IG Report said something that–at least from his citations of it–it didn’t say.

In other words, faced with the need to use efficacy as a way to claim the interrogation program didn’t violate CAT, Bradbury was also faced with the IG Report’s assessments which–at best, at least according to his citations–only accepts that the enhanced interrogation methods led to an increase in the number of intelligence reports. 

CIA Produced Two Documents in Preparation for this Memo

So Bradbury got the CIA to create two documents for him that argue for the efficacy of the program.

Bradbury primarily cites two documents to make his claim that the interrogation program was effective (along with some older intelligence reports):

• Memorandum for Steven G. Bradbury, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, from [redacted], DCI Counterterrorist Center, Re: Effectiveness of the CIA Counterintelligence Interrogation Techniques (March 2, 2005) ["Effectiveness Memo"]
• Fax from [redacted], DCI Counterterrorist Center, Briefing Notes on the Value of Detainee Reporting (April 15, 2005) ["Briefing Notes"]

The descriptions make clear that both these documents were created for him. And, both these documents were created in the months leading up to this memo. In other words, these documents appear to have been created precisely to give Bradbury what he needed–the ability to argue the program was effective.

And largely based on these two documents, Bradbury provides a page and a half of specific intelligence derived from enhanced interrogation of KSM and Abu Zubaydah. Even in that page and a half, there are factual problems with Bradbury’s description. There’s information included that we know was available prior to their detention; there’s information included that was reportedly collected through persuasive rather than coercive interrogation; much of it relates to and came from lower level detainees; it includes the Padilla dirty bomber claim.

In addition, for both KSM and AZ, Bradbury includes a footnote saying "we discuss only a small fraction of the intelligence CIA interrogators have obtained" from them. Perhaps there is more important intelligence they got. Perhaps Bradbury has simply left out the inaccurate information. But we don’t know because he doesn’t give it to us.

And to be fair, there’s a better part of a page listing the intelligence gained from AZ that is entirely redacted.

(Also note, I can’t be sure, because of the huge redaction that appears in this section, but Bradbury doesn’t appear to deal with intelligence gotten from Rahim al-Nashiri, which I find a notable omission since waterboarding was supposed to have been immediately successful with him.)

From a qualitative standpoint, what Bradbury has given us does not make a convincing case for the importance of the intelligence gathered through torture. More importantly, Bradbury stops far short of providing an assessment of all the intelligence gained through torture, to weigh what was valid and important against the intelligence that turned out to be useless. So while Bradbury’s qualitative argument that enhanced interrogation is unconvincing, he doesn’t even try to address the claim that torture produces a lot of worthless intelligence.

The "Half the Intelligence" Claim Refers Only to Number of Reports

Which brings us, finally, to the claim the torture apologists are relying on–that half the intelligence they’ve gotten, or "half of what we know" comes from enhanced interrogation.

That claim comes–at least partly–from the Briefing Notes created for Bradbury so he’d have some way to make a claim that the torture program was effective. After all his list of specific intelligence gleaned through the program, Bradbury includes this:

More generally, the CIA has informed us that, since March 2002, the intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of CTC’s reporting on al Qaeda. See Briefing Notes at 1; see also IG Report at 86 (noting that from September 11, 2001, through April 2003, the CIA "produced over 3,000 intelligence reports from" a few high value detainees). You have informed us that the substantial majority of this intelligence has come from detainees subject to enhanced interrogation techniques. 

So this is how (or at least one possible way how) torture apologists get to half of "what we know." In a document created for this purpose, the CIA says that CIA detainees account for half of CTC’s reporting on al Qaeda. Which, I assume, doesn’t count what FBI knows about al Qaeda, for example. And that’s not all from torture–though "the substantial majority" is.

Or, you can use a different measure and realize that if a few high value detainees led to the production of 3,000 intelligence reports and two years later half of what CTC knew amounted to 6,000 reports, then those 3,000 reports from eighteen months of torture is awfully impressive!

But you’d still be talking only about the sheer number of reports!! 

Golly. The CIA is very impressed with itself that–after waterboarding KSM and AZ a combined 266 times, they spat up 3,000 intelligence reports, many of them utterly useless.

And that’s what–at least from the evidence in this OLC memo–the torture apologists’ claim appears to amount to. Self-congratulation that they’ve crafted a system designed to churn out as many intelligence reports as they can possibly churn out.

But even the torture apologists are not making a claim for the quality of that intelligence.