CIA reportedly declined to closely evaluate harsh interrogations
"I cannot describe the specific methods used," Bush said. "But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary."
By then, Bush administration officials had become concerned with a shifting legal landscape. Congress had passed new laws on the treatment of detainees, and the Supreme Court issued a ruling that undercut the administration's claim that detained terrorism suspects were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.
But officials said that the first high-level concern about the direction of the CIA's interrogation program had come in 2003, when then-CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson began distributing draft copies of his report on the program across the executive branch.
The document triggered alarms about waterboarding, documenting that it had been employed far more frequently -- including 263 times against two Al Qaeda suspects -- than had been widely believed.
The report also faulted how agency operatives applied the method, dumping large quantities of water on prisoners' faces, apparently violating the agency manual and its agreements with the Justice Department. Nervous about the report's implications, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet suspended the use of waterboarding in 2003.
The document also was critical of other approaches, including sleep deprivation. But for all of its criticism of the program, the 200-plus-page document also included passages that have been cited by some as evidence that the interrogation operation was effective.
A May 2005 Justice Department memo noted that the inspector general's report described an "increase in intelligence reports attributable to the use of enhanced techniques."
A U.S. intelligence official familiar with its contents confirmed that the inspector general's report contains language that is consistent with the assertions by former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and others that the interrogation program accounted for more than half of the intelligence community's reports on Al Qaeda.
But officials said the document did not assess the quality of those reports. It also did not attempt to determine which methods were yielding the best information, or explore whether the agency's understanding of Al Qaeda would have suffered significantly without the use of coercive techniques.
"Certainly you got additional considerable volume of reporting when you started up with anything enhanced," the U.S. intelligence official said. "But nobody went back to say exactly what were the conditions under which we learned that which was the most useful."
In fact, Helgerson's team had steered away from that question by design, the official said, hoping that agency leaders would turn to interrogation experts for a thorough study on which methods were working and which should be discarded.
White House National Security Council officials who saw the inspector general's report became concerned with its conclusions, current and former officials said. Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security advisor, was particularly persistent on pushing the CIA director to follow up on the inspector general's recommendation.
Goss, who had taken the helm at the CIA four months after the inspector general's report was filed, eventually complied. But Helgerson had envisioned a group of experts, perhaps including specialists from the FBI; Goss turned instead to two former government officials with little background in interrogation.
Gardner Peckham, a national security advisor to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, produced the approximately 10-page document that praised the program. It concluded that the program was "very structured and very disciplined," said a former official familiar with its contents, but did not assess the effectiveness of various methods.
A separate report, submitted by John Hamre, a former deputy Defense secretary, was similar in scope and led to no significant alterations of the program. Hamre and Peckham both declined to comment.
Despite the high-level attention, former Bush administration officials said they never saw the results of the audits that Goss had commissioned.
"They never came and presented anything to the White House that said in response to the I.G. report they have commissioned a review," said one such official. "They essentially came back with the recommendations that this was the program and it couldn't be changed."
