CIA emails reveal tension over terrorism probe
Internal Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) e-mails detail misgivings about an in-house review of aggressive, Bush-era interrogations of terrorism suspects and show how that inquiry was curtailed by a separate Justice Department probe, according to the documents obtained by POLITICO, an American political journalism organization that distributes its content via television, the Internet, newspaper and radio.
The e-mails appear to discuss the same internal review at the core of an unusual public row between the CIA and lawmakers that escalated dramatically Tuesday when Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein delivered a blistering floor speech accusing the agency of trying to thwart oversight and possibly undermining the Constitution by spying on the work of Senate aides.
The showdown with Congress over the CIA’s internal review and a still-unreleased 6,300-page Senate report on the agency’s use of interrogation practices like waterboarding threatens to pull the intelligence community back into an uncomfortable, polarising debate that President Barack Obama has been extremely reluctant to revisit.
In recent weeks, senators have stepped up demands that the CIA hand over records related to the review — ordered by then CIA Director Leon Panetta in March 2009 — which lawmakers believe supports their conclusion that the interrogation program was mismanaged, involved wrongdoing and was unproductive.
Several former CIA officials said they believe the heavily-redacted e-mails, which are marked as “unclassified/AIUO,” meaning for “administrative, internal use only” and released to POLITICO under the Freedom of Information Act, refer to that review.
The e-mails (posted here) show worries about the political atmosphere surrounding the review, concerns over the backgrounds of CIA personnel assigned conducting it and suggest the scope of the project was reined in.
“SRT [Senior Review Team] did as good a job as it could given the very rough political environment,” one CIA e-mail says. “The only thing I would have changed that could cause us problems in the future is that when [redacted] and I arrived there were too many folks who had been involved in the program working in the Task Force. For obvious reasons, I believe that no CTC [Counter Terrorism Center] employees who had been involved in the program should have been assigned to SRT.”
The same March 2010 e-mail suggests that, at least at the outset, the internal review was supposed to be a broad examination of the agency’s interrogation activities.
“These objectives changed (not due to capriciousness of Task Force or 7th Floor mgmt.) but because the environment changed, e.g. AG Holder’s decision to review the facts to determine if any U.S. laws were broken,” wrote the unidentified CIA staffer, referring to Attorney General Eric Holder. “No one had reviewed systematically, the Interrogation Program prior to SRT’s founding.”
In a separate e-mail sent a couple of weeks earlier, a CIA staffer wrote of a “possible course correction” directed by agency lawyers.
“OGC [Office of General Counsel] is now concerned that we’re moving too fast, according to [redacted.] We’ll meet in the morning to discuss ways of slowing — at least for a few days — the pace of programmatic research,” the CIA official wrote. [emphasis in original]
A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the e-mails. A spokesman for Feinstein did not respond to a request for comment.
One intelligence expert, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, said he was taken aback by the statement in the e-mails that CIA’s internal review was staffed by people who took part in the hotly-disputed interrogation program.
“It’s startling,” he said. “It’s a statement that there’s a conflict of interest built into the review team. Some of the reviewers should have been witnesses, not questioners. That is a problem.”
The e-mails also cast doubt on claims by current and former CIA officials that the review in dispute between the agency and the Senate was largely an effort to catalog what was being turned over to Senate investigators and not a comprehensive attempt to find facts or set policy.
Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) have argued that the internal review documents acknowledge CIA wrongdoing and are at odds with what is now the agency’s official account of the interrogation program. The senators have indicated that the internal review supports the Senate panel’s findings that the program was mismanaged, led to misconduct, and was ultimately ineffective — things the CIA’s official response submitted last year disputes at least in part.
Efforts by CIA officials to minimize the thoroughness of the earlier internal review could help bolster the agency’s argument that the review-related documents were cursory and off base.
“Basically, it was just looking at the material that was being provided to the Hill,” Panetta told POLITICO in a brief interview Tuesday. “There wasn’t any kind of formal study. They call it ‘the Panetta review,’ but it wasn’t a formal study.”
Panetta’s CIA chief of staff, Jeremy Bash echoed that position. “The purpose of the group Panetta put together was to keep track of the materials and documents that were being provided to the committee because the scope and breadth of the documents were really unprecedented,” he said in an interview.
“They were drafts. They were incomplete and they were never provided to Director Panetta,” Bash added on MSNBC, speaking about the review materials obtained by the Senate.
The ongoing fight over the reviews and Tuesday’s charges and counter-charges between the agency and Senate are also awkward for CIA Director John Brennan, a senior official at CIA in the Bush years who has said he objected to the most aggressive techniques used against terror suspects.
Brennan on Tuesday denied any intent to spy on congressional aides, while also sending agency employees a letter which described as “very serious matter” the Senate staffers’ acquisition of documents related to the CIA’s internal interrogation review.
At an open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in January, Brennan also played down the scope of the inquiry the CIA conducted into its interrogation practices.
“It wasn’t a review, Senator, it was a summary,” the director said in response to questions from Udall.
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