SSCI Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrorgation Program

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. KING. Mr. President, I also want to address the report that was released this morning by the Chair of the Intelligence Committee. I come at this in a slightly different way than some of my colleagues, because I came to this process late.

I joined the Intelligence Committee in January of 2013. By that time the report had been authorized, had been written, and actually had been finalized. So I came to it as a final product and the decision was whether it should be released.

Before talking about the report, there are two very important points that should be made.

No. 1, one of my problems with this discussion is that everybody talks about the CIA. The CIA did this, the CIA did that. The fact is the CIA as an institution doesn't do anything. People do things.

I have been around the world and met with CIA people in many countries. I have met with them here. They are patriotic, they are dedicated, they are smart, and they are brave. The problem with this situation is their reputation has been sullied by a relatively small group of people early in the prior decade.

So I want to make clear, at least as far as I am concerned, this is not an attempt to discredit or otherwise undermine the CIA or the good people who are there, but to point out that mistakes were made.

No. 2, I think we need to acknowledge that those were extraordinary times, the year or so after September 11. We thought there was going to be another attack. There was a lot of pressure to uncover that information. It is easy, 10 years later, to look back and say: Well, we shouldn't have done this or we shouldn't have done that. I understand that. We have to acknowledge that. However, those circumstances cannot justify a basic violation of who we are as Americans and what our values are.

The process is the report was completed and accepted by the committee on a bipartisan basis. My predecessor, Olympia Snowe, voted in favor of the acceptance of the report in December of 2012.

It was then sent to the CIA. They responded, a rather full response. It took about 6 months, and then they submitted their response to the committee.

I knew the vote was going to be coming up last spring as to whether to release the report. I went to the secure site in one of our buildings and sat down every night for a week and read this executive summary, every single word--all 500 pages, all of the footnotes--and made my own judgment as one who was in no way invested in this report. Here are the conclusions I reached. I must say, until I sat and read it, I didn't fully comprehend what this issue was, why we needed this large report, why we needed to do this study. After reading it, I was shaken and convinced that the report was important and should be released.

Basically, it has four conclusions. I am not going to go through them in detail, but No. 1 was: We committed torture. I am not going to argue that. I would say, as I said repeatedly, read the report. No person can read the description of what was done in our name and not conclude that it was way outside the values of our country and constituted torture by any definition.

No. 2, it was terribly managed. That is not a very exciting point about management, but nobody was in charge. Contractors were actually designing the program and assessing whether it was successful--the people who had designed it and were implementing it. There was no central place at the CIA that managed it, so that was a problem.

No. 3--and this we are going to talk about for a few minutes--it was not effective. The guts of this report are an analysis of the 20 principal cases the CIA presented as justification for the torture to say that it worked, that it led to intelligence that was reliable and current, and the report goes through in excruciating detail looking at each one of those allegations.

It basically finds that the information was either already available, it was available in our hands, it was available in other ways, and the witnesses had given up the data prior to their being subjected to these extraordinary measures. I am going to talk, as I mentioned, in a couple of minutes about this issue of effectiveness.

I should have said this at the beginning. My poor words can't contribute a great deal to this debate, but the speech Senator John McCain made on this floor this morning should be required viewing for every schoolchild in America, every Member of this body, every Member of this Congress, and every American. He spoke eloquently about the violation of our ideals of this program and the fact that it cannot, will not, and could not work.

The final point we take from the report is this program was continually misrepresented. It was misrepresented to the President, it was misrepresented to the Justice Department, it was misrepresented

to the Congress, and it was misrepresented to the Intelligence Committee.

The problem is that continues today. In the past few days we have seen an outburst of statements, speeches, and interviews on television saying it was effective. It wasn't effective, and the report makes that clear.

There is a semantic sleight of hand going on, and I have already seen it in two or three interviews on television where people slide from the report and they say: The program of detention of people whom we captured after September 11 was effective in generating intelligence.

Absolutely true. There is no doubt of that. People were detained, they were interrogated, they gave good intelligence, it taught us what we know about Al Qaeda, and it was very helpful to the country in preventing future plots.

The question for the House, though, is was the torture effective? If you have somebody in custody, they give up good information, and then later you torture them and they don't give you anymore information, the torture didn't create that information or that intelligence. The question is did the extraordinary methods create additional evidence.

People should cock their ears when they hear people say the program created this good intelligence. It did. But the program is not what we are talking about today. We are talking about so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

I would suggest when people come up with a euphemism such as enhanced interrogation techniques, that should tip us off that something is going on that we should be concerned about.

I wrestled with this decision. It was not easy. There is risk involved. There has been a lot of commentary today. Our people are on alert. Will someone attack us because of this report?

I can't deny that risk. I think it is impossible to say. But we have already learned that these people will attack us for any or no reason. They have been trying to attack us for 10 years. That is their reason for existing.

ISIL has beheaded Americans, not because of this report, but because that is their agenda. Now they may issue a press release or a YouTube video and say we are doing this because of the report, but I would submit they are going to do it anyway.

What they are going to cite--it is not the report, it is what we did that has inflamed opposition around the world, and it has done so for many years already.

Finally, on the question of the risk, when the terrible activities at Abu Ghraib came to the attention of the Congress, we did a report. The Armed Services Committee did a study and issued a report in grisly detail of what was done, and at that point we had 100,000 troops in Iraq. If ever there was a report that would have inflamed public opinion in a foreign country and generated retribution against us, it was that. We cannot be intimidated by people who tell us that we cannot exercise and be true to our own ideals.

But if there is any risk, why should we do it? Because these actions are so alien to our values, they are so alien to our principles that we simply can't countenance them.

By the way, if this wasn't torture, if this wasn't a problem, why did the CIA destroy the tapes of one of these interrogations? That is what started all of this, when the Senate learned they had destroyed tapes. If they thought this was not torture--which is what they were telling us--then why are they destroying the tapes? That is what began this process.

To me, one of the most telling quotes in the whole report was a back-and-forth between the CIA and I think the White House--but I think it was within the CIA where the statement was made: ``Whatever you do, don't let Colin Powell find out about this, he'll blow his stack.''

Now that tells me they knew they were doing something that wasn't acceptable to our country and to the American people. But the second reason to release this report is the key: so it will never happen again. That is the whole deal here.

The campaign of the last few days of people saying it worked and it wasn't torture and you shouldn't do it because

[Page: S6430]
of the risk--that, to me, validates my concern because these people are essentially saying: We would do it again if we had the chance. And the only thing standing between them and doing it again is an Executive order signed by this President in January of 2009, which could be wiped out in the first week of a new Presidency or in the first month of a new Presidency. We cannot have this happen again.
The oratory is that it works. I have a letter, which I will submit for the Record, from 20 former terrorist interrogators--Army, Air Force, CIA, FBI--saying these kinds of tactics don't work and, in fact, they produce bad intelligence. There is an article in Politico today by Mark Fallen, who is a 30-year interrogator, saying it doesn't work.

We have to have this discussion and lay that to rest because the people who are saying it works are really saying: And we will do it again if we have to. And that is not who we are as people.

Interestingly, in the CIA's response to the report--all during the early part of this past decade the argument was--and we are hearing it today--it works. We are certain it works. We got valuable intelligence. We got Osama bin Laden.

The CIA is not saying that today. When they submitted their response to the committee's report, what they said about effectiveness was that it is unknowable whether it was effective. I believe the migration from the certainty they gave to Members of Congress and the President and the Department of Justice--the migration from ``certainty'' to ``unknowable'' speaks volumes because they couldn't refute the facts that are in this report.

If this idea that this kind of interrogation works becomes conventional wisdom, it will definitely happen again.

I go back in conclusion to John McCain's statement this morning. I can't match his eloquence. It was one of the most powerful messages I have ever heard in this body or anywhere else. He talked about who we are as Americans, and he also talked from personal experience about what torture will do and whether it will produce good information, and I would submit that John McCain knows more about that particular subject than all the rest of us in this body put together.

I got a critical note from a friend in Maine this morning that said ``You know, you are naive'' and all those kinds of things. I just wrote him back and said, ``Don't take it from me; watch what John McCain had to say.''

We are exceptional, but we are not exceptional because of natural resources or because we are smarter and better looking than anybody else; we are exceptional because of our values. We are one of the few countries in the world that was founded on explicit values and ideals and principles. And principles aren't something you discard when times get tough. That is when they are important. That is like saying: I am in favor of free press unless somebody says something offensive. These are principles that make us distinct and different.

I believe this debate is about the soul of America. It is about who we want to be as a people. It is a hard debate. It is difficult. It is hard to talk about these things. This was a dark period. But I believe that having this discussion, having this debate, getting this information out--and by the way, all the information is going to be out: the report; the CIA's response was made public today; the minority had their own statement that is quite substantial. So the public is going to be able to look at all this information and make their own decisions. I looked at the information, and the decision I made was that this is important information the people of America are entitled to, they should understand, and we should move forward consistent with our ideals and our principles as a nation and see that something like this never happens again.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter I referred to earlier.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

February 4, 2014.
Hon. ANGUS KING,
U.S. Senate, 359 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC.

DEAR SENATOR KING: We write to you as current and former professional interrogators, interviewers, and intelligence officials regarding the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's (SSCI) 6000-plus page study of the CIA's post-9/11 rendition, detention, and interrogation program. We understand that the SSCI may soon take up the issue of whether to pursue declassification and public release of the study. In the interest of transparency and furthering an understanding of effective interrogation policy, we urge you to support declassification and release of as much of the study as possible, with only such redactions as are necessary to protect national security.

Since the CIA program was established over a decade ago, there has been substantial public interest in, and discussion of, the fundamental efficacy of the so-called ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' (EITs). Despite the employment of these methods, critical questions remain unanswered as to whether EITs are an appropriate, lawful, or effective means of consistently eliciting accurate, timely, and comprehensive intelligence from individuals held in custody. Based on our experience, torture and other forms of abusive or coercive techniques are more likely to generate unreliable information and have repeatedly proven to be counterproductive as a means of securing the enduring cooperation of a detained individual. They increase the likelihood of receiving false or misleading information, undermine this nation's ability to work with key international partners, and bolster the recruiting narratives of terrorist groups.

We would like to emphasize that this view is further supported by relevant studies in the behavioral sciences and publicly available evidence, which show that coercive interrogation methods can substantially disrupt a subject's ability to accurately recall and convey information, cause a subject to emotionally and psychologically ``shut down,'' produce the circumstances where resistance is increased, or create incentives for a subject to provide false information to lessen the experience of pain, suffering, or anxiety.

Despite this body of evidence, some former government officials who authorized the CIA's so-called ``enhanced interrogation'' program after 9/11 claim that it produced a significant and sustained stream of accurate and reliable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots, save American lives, and even locate Osama Bin Laden. While some of the particular claimed successes of the program have been disproven based on publicly available information, the broader claim that the EIT program was necessary to disrupt terrorist plots and save American lives is based on classified information unavailable to the public.

The SSCI study--based on a review of more than 6 million pages of official records--provides an important opportunity to shed light on these important questions. We understand that the SSCI minority and CIA have separate views regarding the meaning and significance of the official documentary record. Those views are important and should also be made public so that the American people have an opportunity to decide for themselves whether the CIA program was ultimately worth it.

It is beyond time for this critical issue of national importance to be driven by facts--not rhetoric or partisan interest. We therefore urge you to vote in favor of declassifying and releasing the SSCI study on the CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program.

Sincerely,
Tony Camerino, Glenn Carle, James T. Clemente, Jack Cloonan, Gerry Downes, Mark Fallon, Brigadier General David R. Irvine, USA (Ret.), Steven Kleinman, Marcus Lewis, Mike Marks, Robert McFadden, Charles Mink, Joe Navarro, Torin Nelson, Erik Phillips, William Quinn, Buck Revell, Mark Safarik, Haviland Smith, Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyster (Ret.).

Mr. KING. I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source