Opinion Dianne Feinstein's Travesty

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

The Senate Intelligence Committee spent roughly $50 million on its investigation into the CIA and apparently couldn’t find Michael Hayden’s phone number.

The committee portrays Gen. Hayden, the former CIA director, as a liar who deceived Congress about the agency’s interrogation program, yet the committee couldn’t be bothered to interview him.


That’s because it didn’t bother to interview anyone. The committee’s chair, Dianne Feinstein, says such interviews were made impossible by Justice Department investigations into the people responsible for the interrogation program, but those investigations ended years ago.

The reality is that the committee didn’t want to include anything that might significantly complicate its cartoonish depiction of a CIA that misled everyone so it could maintain a secret prison system for the hell of it.

It isn’t an insult to call the resulting report partisan; it is a simple fact. Republicans stopped cooperating as soon as it became clear that Feinstein wanted a prosecutor’s brief, not a report tainted by any hint of fair-minded inquiry.

The Feinstein report scores some points. It makes plain that the CIA program wasn’t adequately controlled, especially at the beginning, that it went too far and that the agency became too invested — not unexpectedly, given normal bureaucratic imperatives — in defending it.

But the thrust of the report is devoted to the proposition that torture, or harsh interrogation, never works. This is important to critics of the CIA program because they are almost never willing to say that torture is wrong and that we should never do it — even if it sometimes works and potentially saves lives. They lack the moral conviction to make their case solely on principle.

Even though its executive summary runs more than 500 pages, the report lacks basic context, specifically an account of the post-Sept. 11 environment in which nearly everyone expected another attack, and wanted to do everything possible to avoid it. The New York Times ran a piece in May 2002, saying that “there has been a drumbeat of warnings from top officials that further terrorist attacks, even a nuclear one, are all but inevitable.”

This is why the impeccably liberal Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, could at this time practically sound like the much-maligned Michael Hayden.

After the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003, Rockefeller said on CNN that we should be “very, very tough with him”; that he has information that will save American lives and that “we have no business not getting that information”; and that we should consider shipping him to a country with no laws against torture. “I wouldn’t take anything off the table where he is concerned,” Rockefeller declared, “because this is a man who has killed hundreds and hundreds of Americans over the last 10 years.”

The interrogation program was born against this backdrop. When we caught KSM, no one was saying, “Let’s give him some dates and olives and hope, once he finds out what nice people we are, he spills his guts and gives up Osama bin Laden’s location.”

The harsh methods that the CIA adopted don’t, in isolation, shock the conscience. There’s nothing, for instance, about throwing someone up against a flexible wall, grabbing and shaking him, keeping him in a tight space, or slapping him, that is clearly out of bounds in pressuring a terrorist believed to have actionable intelligence to talk.

It is cumulatively, over an extended period, as with Abu Zubaydah, who was put through the ringer for two weeks, that the methods take on a different complexion. KSM was waterboarded on 15 separate occasions (the widely cited 183 figure is for each application of water). He was kept awake for days.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether in such extreme cases we went over the line of what we should do to anyone in any circumstance. But in making a totalist case against the CIA program, the Feinstein report implausibly asserts that it had no benefits whatsoever.

It points out, as though it settles something, that terrorists lied when they were subjected to coercive interrogations. Of course, terrorists also lied when they weren’t subjected to coercive interrogations.

Lying is an unalterable part of the human condition. Common criminals lie even when they are afforded all the legal protections of our criminal justice. White House press secretaries lie when they are merely asked awkward questions in the briefing room.

The standard for judging the CIA program shouldn’t be if it produced 100 percent truthfulness but whether it produced intelligence that wouldn’t have been available as quickly or at all, otherwise. The Feinstein report strains to declare all the thousands of intelligence reports that resulted from the interrogations as useless with mincing distinctions and counterfactuals that make little sense.

It insists that the harsh interrogation of Abu Zubaydah didn’t help lead to the capture of KSM. The Republican counter to the Feinstein report notes, “There is considerable evidence that the information Abu Zubaydah provided identifying KSM as ‘Mukhtar’ and the mastermind of 9/11 was significant to CIA analysts, operators, and FBI interrogators.”

The Feinstein report pooh-poohs the notion that the interrogations helped put the CIA onto bin Laden’s courier, in part because the agency had information about him prior to its interrogations. But the interrogations highlighted the importance of the information already in the CIA’s possession.

The overall contention of the Feinstein report is that we would have been just fine and achieved the same results in the war on terror with less information, rather than more. Not only does that defy common sense, it is a bet no one would have been willing to make in 2002.

The war with Islamic extremists isn’t one that we choose. It was thrust on us, and after Sept. 11, we scrambled to neutralize a threat from fanatics with no regard for the rules of warfare or of civilization. Inevitably, fighting back involved moral complications — and it still does.

Few people would have guessed 10 years ago that it would be considered more in keeping with American values to assassinate people from drones rather than capture them and ask them questions under duress.