In the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, officials at the Central Intelligence Agency initially proposed a less controversial system of detention facilities to hold suspected terrorists that resembled federal or military prisons,
The New York Times reports.
If the early plan had been adopted, the controversy surrounding the CIA's more aggressive interrogation tactics might have been avoided, critics of the program say.
"Imagine if we didn’t go down that road. Imagine. We played into the enemy’s hand," Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent and opponent of the CIA's tactics, told The Times.
Just six days after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, President George W. Bush signed a covert action Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA director to "undertake operations designed to capture and detain persons who pose a continuing, serious threat of violence or death to U.S. persons and interests or who are planning terrorist activities," according to the report summary issued by the Democratic majority of the
Senate Intelligence Committee.
Bush's order expanded the limited authority the CIA had to detain specific, named individuals pending the issuance of formal criminal charges, but it did not detail how the order should be carried out, leaving officials at the CIA responsible for designing a system.
Administration officials began meeting to flesh out Bush's order, setting off a flurry of emails and proposals. One of the first ideas was detailed in a memo authored by J. Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterrorism chief, that was titled "Approval to Establish a Detention Facility for Terrorists," according to The Times.
In early November 2001, CIA officials determined that any future CIA detention facility would have to meet U.S. prison standards and that CIA detention and interrogation operations should be tailored to "meet the requirements of U.S. law and the federal rules of criminal procedure," the Senate committee's report states.
The proposal, however, met with resistance from officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who did not want the terrorists housed on military facilities.
"Rumsfeld took military bases off the table, so we started looking around at what became the black sites. We brainstormed. Do we put them on ships? We considered a deserted island. It was born out of necessity. It wasn’t some diabolical plot," John Rizzo, the CIA's former general counsel, told the Times.
In response to the report released this week by California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein,
CIA Director John Brennan conceded that "serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact that the Agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required to carry out an unprecedented, worldwide program of detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorists.
"In carrying out that program, we did not always live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves and that the American people expect of us."
However, Brennan took issue with the Feinstein committee's decision not to interview agents involved in the program, which "would have provided Members with valuable context and perspective surrounding these events."
The report's lack of balance is one criticism of the report made by former Nebraska Sen.
Bob Kerrey, who says the nation would have been better served had it included recommendations.
"The worse consequence of a partisan report can be seen in this disturbing fact: It contains no recommendations. This is perhaps the most significant missed opportunity, because no one would claim the program was perfect or without its problems.
"But equally, no one with real experience would claim it was the completely ineffective and superfluous effort this report alleges," Kerrey, a Democrat, wrote in a USA Today op-ed.
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