Published: April 19, 2009
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency, said Sunday that the Obama administration’s recent release of memos detailing harsh interrogation techniques would limit the agency’s ability to pursue terrorists in the future.
The C.I.A. used harsh techniques like waterboarding on detainees from 2002 through 2005, before General Hayden became director. He told a Congressional committee in 2008 that the technique was explicitly dropped from the agency’s authorized methods in 2006 and that he believed its use was likely to have been illegal.
But speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” General Hayden said that the descriptions gave Al Qaeda a tactical advantage by allowing them to prepare for specific practices used by the C.I.A., even if those practices are not in use now.
“It describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond,” General Hayden said. “To me, that’s very useful for our enemies, even if, as a policy matter, this president at this time had decided not to use one, any, or all of those techniques.”
The detailed memos released Thursday by the Justice Department describe techniques that were used by the C.I.A. between 2002 and 2005. The Obama administration outlawed harsh interrogations and ordered the C.I.A.’s secret prisons closed on his second day in office. The president has said that the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” amounted to a dark chapter in American history.
Senator John Ensign, a Republican from Nevada, also criticized the administration on Sunday, saying that the disclosure would limit future options against terrorism.
“The harm is that if we ever return to those policies, one is they can train against them now,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Do we really think that having advanced interrogation techniques is something we don’t want to use if we find Osama bin Laden?”
The Obama administration has said that it opposes prosecuting agents involved in interrogations using techniques that they had been told were legal, although some Democrats have raised the prospect of prosecuting senior Bush administration officials and Justice Department lawyers who authorized the harsh interrogations.
Mr. Ensign and Gen. Hayden also argued that the prospect of prosecution would give C.I.A. agents pause when accepting legal advice about the practices they use.
“The basic foundation of the legitimacy of the agency’s action has shifted from some durability of law to a product of the American political process,” he said. “That puts agency officers in a horrible position.”
Democrats on Sunday played down the importance of the release of the documents, saying that most of the information was already public. David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Obama, said there was “no legal rationale for keeping them classified.”
Mr. Axelrod said that the president’s ban on enhanced interrogation techniques was more important that the release of the C.I.A.’s memos.
“We’re moving past all of that,” Mr. Axelrod said on “Face the Nation.” “And to revisit it again and again and again isn’t, in the president’s view, in the country’s interest.”
Mr. Axelrod reiterated that harsh interrogation techniques are ineffective. This view was bolstered by the disclosure in the memos released last week of a debate within the C.I.A. about whether the brutal treatment of Abu Zubaydah, a detainee captured in Pakistan in 2002, yielded any real intelligence. According to the documents and former intelligence officials, the first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against Abu Zubaydah was ordered despite the belief of interrogators that he had already told them all he knew. The harsh treatment led to no breakthroughs, according to one intelligence official with knowledge of the case.
Gen. Hayden on Sunday questioned this account, saying that Abu Zubaydah had “clammed up,” but then gave up information that led to the arrest of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was later charged with helping coordinate the Sept. 11 attacks.
In an opinion column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Gen. Hayden and former U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey wrote that “fully half” of the government’s information about Al Qaeda’s structures and activities came from interrogation when “coercive interrogation” was used.
