Senate investigation: CIA had methods ready before it had the OK — or even a prisoner

WASHINGTON — Intelligence and military officials under the Bush administration began preparing to conduct harsh interrogations long before they were granted legal approval for doing so — and weeks before the CIA had captured its first high-ranking terrorist suspect, Senate investigators have concluded.

Previously secret memos and interviews show CIA and Pentagon officials exploring ways to break Taliban and al-Qaida detainees in early 2002, up to eight months before Justice Department lawyers approved the use of waterboarding and nine other harsh methods, investigators found.

The findings are contained in a Senate Armed Services Committee report, released late Tuesday, that also documents multiple warnings — from legal and trained interrogation experts — that the techniques could backfire, and might violate U.S. and international law.

One Army lieutenant colonel who reviewed the program warned in 2002 that coercion "usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain," according to the report. A second official, briefed on the aggressive techniques, was quoted the same year as asking: "Wouldn't that be illegal?"

Once accepted, the methods became the basis for harsh interrogations not only in CIA secret prisons, but also in Defense Department internment camps in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq, the report said. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the committee, said the new findings show a direct link between the early policy decisions and the highly publicized abuses of detainees at prisons such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

"Senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques," Levin said. "Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses."

The new findings are expected to add further pressure on the White House to authorize an independent investigation of the policies. President Obama for the first time Tuesday refused to rule out a probe to determine whether government lawyers acted illegally in approving interrogation practices.

The 261-page report sheds new light on the adaptation of techniques from a U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, used to train service personnel to resist interrogations if captured.

The military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency has been reported previously to have reverse-engineered these methods to break al-Qaida prisoners. The techniques, including waterboarding, or simulated drowning, were drawn from methods used by Chinese communists to coerce confessions from U.S. soldiers during the Korean War.

The report shows Pentagon officials reaching out to the military agency for advice on interrogations as early as December 2001, and finding specialists eager to help. By late 2001, counter-terrorism officials were becoming frustrated over the paucity of useful leads coming from interrogations — a meager showing linked, according to one Army major, to interrogators' insistence of "establishing a link between al-Qaida and Iraq," the report said.

By January 2002, James Mitchell, a retired Air Force psychologist, and Bruce Jessen, the senior SERE psychologist at the agency, drafted a paper on al-Qaida "resistance capabilities and countermeasures to defeat that resistance." Both later consulted the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, and held training courses on how to interrogate high-level captives, the report said.

A memo by Jessen proposed an interrogation program that closely resembled the ones adopted by the CIA and Defense Department. It recommended creation of an "exploitation facility" that would be off-limits to outside observers. Tactics such as sleep deprivation, physical violence and waterboarding would be used.

Agency officials also suggested other controversial tactics later reported to have been used in interrogation programs, including sexually provocative acts by female interrogators, and the use of military dogs to induce fear, the report said.

The school instructors conducted a training seminar for intelligence officials in early July 2002. Two "agency legal personnel" told the group that harsh measures already were acceptable, even though Justice Department approval was a month away.

"They [interrogators] could use all forms of psychological pressure discussed, and all the physiological pressures with the exception of the 'water board,' " the lawyers were quoted as saying at the seminar. Waterboarding also might be permitted, but interrogators "would need prior approval," the report said.

The Senate report confirms participation by SERE officials in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaida associate who was the first high-level CIA detainee and the first to be subjected to waterboarding.

Jessen, interviewed by Senate committee staff in November 2007, confirmed such a meeting. Mitchell, the former Air Force psychologist, was present at Zubaydah's interrogation, and was said to have had a key role in what the CIA called an "increased pressure phase," former intelligence and law-enforcement officials said.

The report also repeats, but does not confirm, long-held suspicions that the interrogation of Zubaydah became coercive before the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department issued a memo on Aug. 1, 2002, sanctioning use of 10 escalating techniques, culminating in waterboarding.

Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, and transferred to a secret CIA prison in Thailand. To justify use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah, the Aug. 1, 2002, memo invoked a ticking-bomb scenario.

The CIA told the Justice Department there was a "level of chatter" equal to the period before the Sept. 11 attacks and said Zubaydah was withholding information regarding "terrorist networks in the United States" and "plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against our interests overseas," according to the memo. John Rizzo, a CIA attorney, asked the Justice Department whether additional interrogation techniques would violate the prohibition against torture.

Yet, the Senate report notes, an FBI agent described the CIA's handling of Zubaydah as "borderline torture" weeks before the Justice Department approved harsh interrogation for him.

Brent Mickum, one of Zubaydah's attorneys, said he believes the Aug. 1, 2002, memo retroactively approved coercive tactics that already had been used.

"If torture occurred before the memo was written it's not worth the paper it's written on and the writing of the memo is potentially criminal," Mickum said.

Post staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.