What the CIA Documents Show

It's not very often that there is agreement between the leadership of the American Civil Liberties Union and officers at the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA jealously guards the nation's most highly classified secrets; the ACLU is a crusader for government transparency. CIA operatives risked their lives to capture al Qaeda terrorists; the ACLU would risk ours to set them free. The CIA is dedicated to defending America; the ACLU has spent millions defending al Qaeda.

But a growing number of CIA officials--both current and former--are in agreement right now with the ACLU about some of the most-sensitive information the U.S. government has obtained in the eight-year war on terror.

The ACLU has been fighting in the courts for years for the release of a wide range of documents related to the CIA's interrogation programs. It was in response to ACLU lawsuits that in April the Justice Department released four memos written by lawyers in the Bush Justice Department. And the Obama administration's recent release of the 2004 CIA inspector general's report on the interrogation of terror suspects also came in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request. CIA director Leon Panetta and a small army of agency lawyers fought vigorously against releasing any documents, but they lost those battles to Attorney General Eric Holder and his boss, the president.

But now there's a push from within the CIA to declassify and release even more information about the CIA's enhanced interrogation program. CIA officers believe that making public additional details will end the debate over the efficacy of the program, and so they are pushing to have hundreds of pages of highly classified documents declassified and released, including a detailed response to the IG report, two internal reviews of the interrogation program undertaken by respected national security experts, and perhaps even redacted versions of the raw interrogation logs.

For years, Bush administration critics demanded the release of the May 2004 report by CIA inspector general John Helgerson. The 109-page review of the enhanced interrogation program was supposed to demonstrate conclusively that abuse was routine and that enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) are ineffective. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called the report the "Big Kahuna." The Washington Post's WhoRunsGov blog took to calling the IG report the "holy grail" and said that staffers for congressional Democrats told him it would "detail torture in unprecedented detail" and "cast doubt on the claim that torture works."

Helgerson was well known inside the CIA as a critic of the detention program, and his report reflects those views. But while Helgerson sought to avoid declaring that the EITs worked--writing that measuring their effectiveness was a "challenge"--the weight of the evidence he presented points directly to that conclusion.

Two examples. The report noted of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, mastermind of the USS Cole attack: "Following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs." And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man behind the 9/11 attacks, "provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard," reports that were largely "outdated, inaccurate or incomplete." After the application of EITs, the IG report notes KSM became "the most prolific" and "preeminent" source of intelligence on al Qaeda, revealing names and locations of al Qaeda leaders and details of coming plots.

In his 2004 report, Helgerson recommended bringing in an outside group to review the program. CIA director George Tenet delegated the task to the directorate of operations. Concerned about sharing details of the top secret program, officials "outside" of the interrogation program but still inside the CIA were selected to do the review. The team's findings are known inside the agency as the "rebuttal," and they argue that the program worked even more unambiguously than the IG report suggested.

In 2005, Porter Goss, who had replaced Tenet as CIA director, ordered a second independent assessment of the program. He sought to put together a small, bipartisan team of national security experts from outside of the CIA. More than one person, including former Republican senator Warren Rudman, turned down the request to serve. (The reasons given most often were lack of time and subject-matter expertise, but several intelligence officials suspect the real reason for the reluctance was a fear of having to conclude, in writing, that the controversial program was a success.)