York Times .
Concurrently with the OIG review, the presidentially mandated 9/11 Commission got under way. Its charter was markedly different from the OIG review: It was conducting a comprehensive postmortem on the events, and the U.S. Government’s actions, in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks. It was not the 9/11 Commission’s mandate to look into the measures the government took, such as the interrogation program, in response to the attacks.
The 565-page final report the commission issued in late 2004 relied heavily on the CIA-prepared accounts of Abu Zubaydah and several other key Al Qaeda figures (including the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [KSM]) the CIA had in its custody by 2003. The commission staff, led by a very aggressive former federal prosecutor named Dieter Snell, pressed the Agency hard for access to the detainees so they could pose their own questions to them. I could understand why; after all, our interrogators were most focused on Al Qaeda plans and actions post-9/11, not before.
Nonetheless, the Agency strongly opposed the idea, and we didn’t budge. First, the foreign location of the “black site” was a zealously guarded secret; outside the Agency, fewer than a dozen people in the entire government knew where it was (indeed, to this day it is one of the very few details about the interrogation program that remains classified). The foreign government hosts, in allowing the CIA to build its detention facility, insisted that only CIA personnel could have access to it; they themselves stayed away. Second, our psychologists and analysts studying the detainees argued against introducing any new interlocutors on the scene beyond the handful already there. They feared that diabolical but cagey manipulators like Zubaydah and KSM would seize the opportunity to posture, prevaricate, and rupture the flow of the ongoing interrogations.
Finally, the 9/11 Commission leadership grudgingly agreed to a compromise: Their staffers could submit their questions in writing and the CIA interrogators would sprinkle them into their regular sessions with the detainees as unobtrusively as possible.
For months, the commission also bombarded the Agency with a relentless volley of requests for thousands of documents, and the CIAprovided mostly all of them. We scoured all of the requests, provided in writing and in specific detail by the commission staff. They knew exactly what they wanted, and they took pains to spell it out. They never asked us if we had any videotapes of the detainees. If they had, we would have told them the truth.
Instead of parsing literally every word in each of the commission’s requests, should we have taken the initiative to tell the commission about the existence of the videotapes? In hindsight, I think the answer is clearly “Yes.”
Volunteering their existence would have prompted the commission to ask to look at them. But then we could have just said “No.” Just as we did when they wanted access to the detainees, and just as we did when the commission wanted a briefing on the EIT program. Both times the commission backed down.
The commission’s co-chairs, Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean, were serious, substantial men. They were consistently fair and trustworthy in their dealings with the Agency. We could have told them, and them alone, about the tapes and why we couldn’t give the commission access to them. We didn’t. Big mistake, as things turned out.
The third matter to come along in 2003 that argued against destroying the tapes was the criminal prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, a malignant but spectacularly inept Al Qaeda operative who had been arrested in Minneapolis about a month before 9/11. Moussaoui, who proved to be as unhinged as Zubaydah but nowhere near as capable, had managed to draw attention to himself by seeking lessons in Texas and Minnesota flight training schools and by loudly insisting on instructions on how to fly a 747, but not how to