First, if the program was successful, then why hide it and lie about it? The CIA repeatedly “impeded” oversight from Congress, the White House and even the agency’s own inspector general. It did so by refusing to brief on the program until months after it was already underway (or, in the Office of the Inspector General’s case, only when a detainee died), withholding crucial documents when asked for them, giving inaccurate testimony on the effectiveness of the program in stopping terrorist plots and later destroying evidence of the interrogations, such as the videotapes of the waterboardings of Abu Zubaida. (Wednesday morning, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) revealed that the CIA’s own internal report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Congress, the president, and the public.”) We still don’t even know the extent of the waterboarding, because the CIA won’t explain why there was a photograph of a “well-used” waterboard device at a detention site where the agency claimed there was no waterboarding.

These actions don’t make sense if the torture defenders (or, to give them their favorite euphemism, “enhanced interrogation” defenders) were so convinced of the program’s necessity and effectiveness. The “it was classified” defense doesn’t work, since the agency had (and still has) no problem leaking classified information to the media when doing so suited its purposes, “including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.” The “blowback” defense (the fear there would be reprisals) doesn’t check out either for two reasons: First, the agency was quick to obstruct even oversight that took place behind closed doors, and second, as Dan Drezner says, “there is no shortage of U.S. foreign policy actions and inactions in the region to inflame enemies.” With or without the torture program becoming public, al-Qaeda was going to find recruits. Compared with these excuses, it makes more sense that the CIA hid the program because officials knew it was wrong both morally and constitutionally, but the agency’s people and its allies didn’t want to be called to account.

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My colleague David Ignatius suggests that these abuses, like those of the 1950s and ’60s prior to the famous Church Committee, “were ordered by presidents or their henchmen, who didn’t want to know the dirty details.” This leads to the second question: Why wouldn’t the president or his subordinates want to know about the program, and why wouldn’t the CIA want to bring it to their attention? One would think that, at the very least, if the program was as successful at preventing terrorist attacks as the CIA (misleadingly) claimed, they’d be eager to share the success with the White House. But President George W. Bush wasn’t briefed on the program until 2006; “CIA records state that when the president was briefed, he expressed discomfort with the ‘image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.’ ” Similarly, the CIA kept the program from then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for more than a year after the program was implemented, apparently on White House orders. (In the case of Powell, then-acting general counsel John Rizzo said the White House was concerned “Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed.” Again, we see people up and down the chain of command unwilling to face the consequences of the torture program.