The CIA’s secret push to keep Bush-era torture rules

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 19:20:00 +0000

On December 9, little more than a month after Election Day, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency gave President-elect Barack Obama a rather astonishing demonstration. The CIA director, a bald-headed, bespectacled former Air Force officer named Michael Hayden, had flown to Chicago to brief Obama and his top aides for the first time on American intelligence operations around the world. It was a long session, more than two hours. Hayden ran through America’s covert intelligence activities, country by country and program by program, a tour d’horizon of the innermost secrets of American foreign policy.

Hayden saved the most sensitive part of his briefing for the very end. It covered the CIA program for combating terrorists, the program known to intelligence officials as RDI — rendition, detention and interrogation. These were nice, antiseptic words for a tough reality: The CIA snatched up suspected terrorists around the world, turned them over to other countries or brought them to secret American-run camps, and tried to get them to talk. The program had been, for several years, the subject of international protests, congressional investigations, news stories and political attacks, including direct criticism from the successful Democratic presidential candidate. Barack Obama had, only a year earlier, called the Bush administration’s interrogation program “an outrageous betrayal of our core values.”

Salon.com > James Mann

The CIA’s secret push to keep Bush-era torture rules