An Odd Controversy Gets Odder
One of the several controversies surrounding the CIA's destruction of tapes of the interrogations of at least two terrorists involves the September 11 Commission. The chairmen of the Commission have expressed outrage over the tapes' destruction and have alleged that the CIA "withheld" the tapes from the Commission, notwithstanding the Commission's requests for information about the interrogations.
Philip Zelikow prepared a memorandum for the Commission reviewing the Commission's requests and the CIA's responses thereto; he concluded that further investigation was needed to determine whether the agency's nondisclosure of the tapes' existence constituted a crime. Zelikow's memo, dated December 13, was leaked to the New York Times.
I read the memo, thinking that it might shed some light on the operations of the Commission, the CIA or both. In fact, the memo turns out to be interesting mostly for the questions it raises but does not answer.
Zelikow devotes most of the memo to reviewing the Commission's requests of the Agency and the Agency's responses thereto, with the apparent intention of showing that the Commission made requests for documents that would have included the video tapes. This effort is not very successful; Zelikow does not quote any request made by the Commission that unambiguously covered the video tapes. But the review raises much more fundamental questions: does the CIA have transcripts of terrorist interrogations, and if so, did the September 11 Commission ask for them?
I would have considered it obvious that the CIA must make transcripts of such interrogations. Otherwise, would it rely on summaries drawn from the memories of the interrogators? That seems a ridiculous suggestion. I also would have thought it obvious that in preparing its report, the September 11 Commission would have asked for and obtained copies of these transcripts, or at least the relevant portions. Both of these assumptions, however, are called into question by Zelikow's memo.
Zelikow writes:
[The Commission's] initial presumption was that perhaps there were transcripts of the interrogations that were turned into reports. The initial document request for interrogation material (DCI Document Request No. 4 filed on June 6, 2003) thus asked broadly for “all TDs [disseminated intelligence reports] and other reports of intelligence information obtained from interrogations” of forty named individuals. Later supplements added requests for information gained from interrogations of seventy-eight other named persons.
This initial set of requests also "warned that the Commission 'may request more detailed information about specific interrogations, including selected transcripts, as we review these reports and identify particular concerns.'" The CIA responded to this first set of requests by giving the Commission "a large number of disseminated intelligence reports (“TDs”) that came from interrogations." So the Commission asked for neither transcripts nor tapes, and none were provided.
The Commission, Zelikow writes, found that these reports were "not as detailed as they had expected." So Commission staffers had discussions with the CIA about "the interrogation process and the preparation of reports from it." The staffers "recall being told that interrogations were turned into written reports, first through operational cables sent to reports officers and then as the reports officers wrote up the material for dissemination to the intelligence community. The staff was repeatedly assured that there were no material or substantive differences between the information contained in the operational cables and the information in the disseminated reports." Still nothing about transcripts or tapes. Again, it seems inconceivable that Commission staffers could have had these conversations without determining whether transcripts existed.
These conversations led to the Commission's second set of requests, which:
...posed dozens of very specific questions about puzzles in the interrogation reports themselves, including questions for anyone involved in the interrogations (e.g., interrogation administrators, interrogators, or reporting officers) to clarify statements made in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations (among others) or to clarify statements with further questions to the detainees.
In addition, the Commission asked "more general" questions about:
...the translation process in the interrogations; the knowledge base of the interrogators; the way the interrogators had handled inconsistencies in the detainees’ stories; the context of what particular questions had been asked in order to elicit the reported information; the context of how interrogators had followed up on particular lines of questioning; and more information to assess the credibility and demeanor of the detainees in making the reported statements – and the views or assessments of the interrogators themselves.
Still no unambiguous request for transcripts or tapes, although such might have been furnished by the Agency in response to some of the above requests. In fact, the Agency replied by "supplying additional disseminated reports and providing general, summary written replies to the questions about the context and character of the interrogations." Zelikow adds this puzzling observation:
The CIA did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been recorded or that it had preserved any further detailed information, in any form, about the questions the Commission had asked.
The reference to the CIA having "preserved any further detailed information, in any form" would appear to include transcripts. So Zelikow seems to be saying one of two things: either the Commission never asked whether the CIA had transcripts of the interrogations, or the CIA told the Commission (presumably in one of the conversations with staff referred to above) that no transcripts existed. Either hypothesis strikes me as bizarre.
Zelikow goes on to describe a "third wave" of efforts by the Commission to get information from the CIA. This time, it proposed to ask follow-up questions of the detainees themselves. This actually was done, in written form.
Putting all of this together, it appears that that the September 11 Commission never made a request of the CIA that clearly would have encompassed the video tapes of interrogations. Thus, the outrage expressed by the Commission's Chairmen and the suggestion that someone at the CIA may have committed a crime are misplaced.
That conclusion, however, is relatively trivial. Much more remarkable is that the Commission apparently never obtained even partial transcripts of the interrogations. This is consistent with what the Commission wrote on page 146 of its report:
Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members. A number of these “detainees” have firsthand knowledge of the 9/11 plot. Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses—sworn enemies of the United States—is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked.
There are three possibilities here, none of them reassuring. If the CIA doesn't make or keep transcripts of its interrogations of terrorists, the agency is more incompetent than we could have imagined. That seems inconceivable. If the September 11 Commission asked for transcripts and the CIA pretended not to have them, that would be far more serious than the alleged withholding of the video tapes. And if, as seems possible from Zelikow's memo, the Commission failed to obtain transcripts (or video tapes) because it never asked for them, then the Commission was more inept, and its report less reliable, than we had believed.
One more observation: regardless of whether it "withheld" the video tapes or transcripts, the CIA obviously was not fully forthcoming and helpful to the Commission. It appears to have treated the Commission's requests much as a litigant treats document requests from an opposing party. The reason for this wariness seems obvious: the CIA must have feared that the Commission would criticize its failure to detect the September 11 plot. One wonders how much information about al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks residing somewhere in the intelligence community was never discovered by the Commission.
To comment on this post, go here.
