Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'

Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al
Qaeda Suspects

By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and
ARIANE de VOGUE

SOURCE: April 9, 2008, ABC News

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White
House, the most senior Bush administration officials
discussed and approved specific details of how high- value al
Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central
Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings
also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques
-- using different techniques during interrogations, instead
of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who
proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed
off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects --
whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or
subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced
interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources
said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost
choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could
use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's
Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who
met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national
security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President
Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State
Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and
Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings,
which took place in the White House Situation Room and were
typically attended by most of the principals or their
deputies.

Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld
and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation
program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings.
Powell said through an assistant there were "hundreds of
Principals meetings" on a wide variety of topics and that
he was "not at liberty to discuss private meetings."

The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and
Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment today.

Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the
interrogation program, which pushed the limits of
international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and
his top aides have consistently defended the program. They
say it is legal and did not constitute torture.

"I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has
given us the information that has saved innocent lives by
helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and
across the world," Bush said in a speech in September 2006.

In interview with ABC's Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said:
"It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney
General of the United States."

But this is the first time sources have disclosed that a
handful of the most senior advisers in the White House
explicitly approved the details of the program. According to
multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee
that not only discussed specific plans and specific
interrogation methods, but approved them.

The discussions and meetings occurred in an atmosphere of
great concern that another terror attack on the nation was
imminent. Sources said the extraordinary involvement of the
senior advisers in the grim details of exactly how individual
interrogations would be conducted showed how seriously
officials took the al Qaeda threat.

It started after the CIA captured top al Qaeda operative Abu
Zubaydah in spring 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. When his
safe house was raided by Pakistani security forces along with
FBI and CIA agents, Zubaydah was shot three times during the
gun battle.

At a time when virtually all counterterrorist professionals
viewed another attack as imminent -- and with information on
al Qaeda scarce -- the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a
potentially critical breakthrough.

Zubaydah was taken to the local hospital, where CIA agent
John Kiriakou, who helped coordinate Zubaydah's capture, was
ordered to remain at the wounded captive's side at all times.
"I ripped up a sheet and tied him to the bed," Kiriakou said.

But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA
prison in Thailand, he was uncooperative.

"I told him I had heard he was being a jerk," Kiriakou
recalled. "I said, 'These guys can make it easy on you or
they can make it hard.' It was after that he became defiant."

The CIA wanted to use more aggressive -- and physical --
methods to get information.

The agency briefed high-level officials in the National
Security Council's Principals Committee, led by then-
National Security Advisor Rice and including then- Attorney
General Ashcroft, which then signed off on the plan, sources
said. It is unclear whether anyone on the committee objected
to the CIA's plans for Zubaydah.

The CIA has confirmed Zubaydah was one of three al Qaeda
suspects subjected to waterboarding.

After he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up
valuable information that led to the capture of 9/11
mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter
Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

Mohammad was also subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. At a
hearing before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on March
10, 2007, KSM, as he is known, said he broke under the harsh
interrogation.

COURT: Were any statements you made as the result of any of
the treatment that you received during that time frame from
2003 to 2006? Did you make those statements because of the
treatment you receive from these people?

KSM: Statement for whom?

COURT: To any of these interrogators.

KSM: CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning, when they
transferred me...

Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified
memo, which was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal
authority to government interrogators to use the "enhanced"
questioning tactics on suspected terrorist prisoners. The
August 2002 memo, signed by then head of the Office of Legal
Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the so-called "Golden
Shield" for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable
if the harsh interrogations became public.

Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly
how past covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era "Phoenix
Program" of assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra
arms sales of the 1980s were painted as the work of a "rogue
agency" out of control.

But even after the "Golden Shield" was in place, briefings
and meetings in the White House to discuss individual
interrogations continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to
protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the
NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal.

According to a former CIA official involved in the process,
CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the
field asking for authorization for specific techniques.
Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would
await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with
high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later
Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior
advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about
detainees in CIA custody overseas.

"It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one
every time," said one high-ranking official who asked not to
be identified. "They'd say, 'We've got so and so. This is the
plan.'"

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals
present approved.

"These discussions weren't adding value," a source said.
"Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used
to do and conclude it's legal, (you should) just tell them to
implement it."

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the
discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to
allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they
were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers
should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations,
sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one
meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House?
History will not judge this kindly."

The Principals also approved interrogations that combined
different methods, pushing the limits of international law
and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the
2002 memo, sources told ABC News.

At one meeting in the summer of 2003 -- attended by Vice
President Cheney, among others -- Tenet made an elaborate
presentation for approval to combine several different
techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method
at a time, according to a highly placed administration
source.

A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of
Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal
memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA
interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to
the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department,
Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the Golden Shield
-- that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia.
Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the
Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain
"enhanced interrogation techniques."

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was
decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell
-- that the program was harming the image of the United
States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the
CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."