by John McCain
These were just the detainees held by the CIA. God have mercy on those the Agency rendered to other countries.
Evidence for all the above charges and more was found in communications the Agency provided the committee voluntarily, and much of it was confirmed in a document the CIA accidentally provided and wished it hadn’t, the report of an internal review ordered by Leon Panetta, whom President Obama had appointed director of Central Intelligence. Panetta’s successor, John Brennan, accused committee investigators of improperly accessing the Panetta Review and removing it from the CIA, and had filed a criminal referral at Justice against lead investigator Dan Jones, a former FBI officer. It was an ass-covering feint. In truth, the Agency had inadvertently included the Panetta Review in a massive data dump to the committee, a tactic often used to hide embarrassing disclosures in a haystack of unimportant and dull information. When they realized the committee now possessed it, CIA personnel hacked the investigators’ computers, an unlawful act, and a violation of the separation of powers, which should have resulted in the firing of officials who had ordered it. I denounced the hacking as “clearly unconstitutional, and in some ways, worse than criminal.”
There were references to me in some of the cables and emails committee investigators reviewed. One memo from the Office of Legal Counsel reported that DCI Hayden had briefed several members of Congress including members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and Senator McCain on six of the enhanced interrogation techniques. “None of the members expressed the view that the CIA interrogation program should be stopped, or that the techniques at issue were inappropriate.” A memo prepared by the CIA about the briefing contradicted that assertion, acknowledging that after the briefing, “Senator John McCain informed the CIA that he believed the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, including sleep deprivation and the waterboard, were ‘torture.’ ” In another amusing exchange, one of the officers who had briefed me was asked by a colleague if I was “on board.” He replied, “Not totally.”
“If he’s moved in our direction at all, you’re a miracle worker . . . was it painful?”
“Very much so.”
“Is the issue the EITs still?”
“Yep.”
The committee’s investigation, in my opinion, was as professional as any I’ve observed by a congressional committee, and a credit to Dianne Feinstein’s leadership. It was ably managed by Dan Jones, an indefatigable, fair-minded, and conscientious seeker of the truth. I regretted the decision by most committee Republicans not to cooperate in the investigation, and to publish their own dissenting report. Although many of them are friends of mine, I fear their actions were a product of an ill-conceived priority to protect CIA officials from repercussions for their breach of core American values, and not a sincere effort to find the truth. Senior officials in the Obama administration, who opposed the release of the report, including, among others, the White House chief of staff and secretary of state, shared the same mistaken purpose.
As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, I am an ex officio member of the Intelligence Committee. As an ex officio member, I do not have a vote in the committee’s decisions. But before the vote to approve the report, I sent a letter to every member of the committee urging their support for it. I joined Dianne and committee Democrats as they resisted a two-year campaign by the Obama administration to prevent publication of an unclassified version of the report, and in pitched battles over unnecessary redactions they insisted on making to it. No protest from the Agency, the White House, or Republicans was complete without the dark warning that we would have “blood on our hands” if we went through with publishing the report, as it would result in the death of Americans.
Undaunted, on December 9, 2014, the committee released the unclassified report to the American public. Many of my Republican colleagues denounced it as a partisan smear. Former DCIs Tenet, Goss, and Hayden did the same in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. DCI Brennan disagreed with some of the committee’s conclusions. Dick Cheney called it “hooey.” And any number of hard-charging Washington tough guys repeated the same old false claims for the efficacy of waterboarding and all the other abuses the report had so thoroughly discredited.
I spoke on the Senate floor in support of the report’s release. “I believe the American people have a right,” I contended,
—indeed, a responsibility—to know what is done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values. . . . The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it nonetheless.
I ended my remarks by calling on all Americans to live our nation’s ideals, to remember that “we are always Americans, and different, stronger and better than those who would destroy us.”
In the following presidential campaign season that was soon to begin, the eventual Republican nominee and next President of the United States insisted torture “absolutely works” and swore he would bring back waterboarding “and worse.” His statement was made out of ignorance, attributable to his lack of experience in a role related to the defense of this country. It also exposed his apparent lack of appreciation for the importance of our values to our security, and for the understanding that simple human decency is as essential to the souls of nations as it is to the souls of people. There isn’t anything he can do about it, though. Dianne Feinstein and I offered an amendment to the defense bill in 2015 that mandated the CIA and all government agencies abide by the restrictions in the Army Field Manual in their interrogation of any detainee. President Trump would need congressional approval to resort to these techniques again, and I’m confident enough members of Congress, shamed by the abuses of the last decade, would refuse.
One critic of the committee’s report wrote in a column for the Washington Post that the Democrats had “lost the torture debate” because public polling showed that despite all the negative publicity about enhanced interrogation techniques, a majority of Americans still supported them. Democrats had failed to make the case that they were ineffective, unwarranted, and immoral, he argued.
You can fail to tell the truth. But the truth cannot be a failure even if it’s ignored or rejected. The report told the truth. And those who claim it did not are not telling the truth any more than they did when the practices were in use. They didn’t tell the truth to the American people then and they are not telling the truth to the American people now. They didn’t tell the truth to the most senior officials in the government they served in. They didn’t tell the truth to themselves. But the truth, or at least the closest, most thorough approximation of it that can be discovered and assembled in a coherent fashion at this time, exists in the classified and unclassified Senate Intelligence Committee’s report despite all the delays, all the attempts at obfuscation, all the unnecessary redactions, all the false claims by people who felt the truth was a threat to them. It exists and is accessible to the American people. Some Americans might not believe it. Some might read it and forget it. Some might not care that we tortured people. But their moral failure isn’t the truth’s failure. The moral values and integrity of our nation, and the long, difficult, fraught history of our efforts to uphold them at home and abroad, are the test of every American generation. Will we act in this world with respect for our founding conviction that all people have equal dignity in the eyes of God and should be accorded the same respect by the laws and governments of men? That is the most important question history ever asks of us. Answering in the affirmative by our actions is the highest form of patriotism, and we cannot do that without access to the truth. The cruelty of our enemies doesn’t absolve us of this duty. This was never about them. It was about us.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
In the Company of Heroes
I MADE MY FIRST TRIP to Afghanistan in January 2002. We were t
he first congressional delegation to travel there since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom three months earlier. There were nine of us, including some of my closest friends in the Senate at the time, Joe Lieberman, Chuck Hagel, Fred Thompson, and Susan Collins. We had spent the day in Tajikistan, waiting for dark and a specially equipped C-130 that normally ferried Special Forces and their supplies. I was anxious to go. I doubt the U.S. military command in Afghanistan was excited to see us. Kabul had fallen in November and Kandahar in December. The Battle of Tora Bora had been fought only a few weeks earlier. While many Taliban and al-Qaeda had fled to Pakistan, there was still hard fighting in the south, and large swaths of the country were mostly ungoverned and very dangerous. We were likely considered a distraction and a security headache. British prime minister Tony Blair was scheduled to make a visit the same day, complicating the situation. We weren’t allowed to spend the night, and would be in country for six hours or less. We boarded the C-130 accompanied by a guy dressed in black with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist containing $10,000 in cash to pay for our fuel. Evidently, Bagram Airfield didn’t take plastic. We flew without lights, with only glow sticks for illumination. Our pilots, fearing we would be fired at as we approached, took evasive measures. We arrived at Bagram at midnight. As we disembarked we were warned not to wander off the tarmac, as the surrounding ground was mined.
We drove through the ramshackle base in a Humvee as men with long beards dressed as mujahedeen and carrying arms observed us. They looked threatening. “Who are they?” my foreign policy aide, Dan Twining, asked. “They’re our guys,” someone replied. “Special Forces.” We were taken to a tent, seated on sandbags, and briefed on the war’s progress and the coalition’s efforts to help set up a functioning national authority. Hamid Karzai was brought in to meet with us. An Afghan assembly representing all districts in the country, a loya jirga, would select him as president of a transitional government in June. He hadn’t a title when we met him that first time, but he was clearly the U.S. and Britain’s preferred choice for the national government’s leader. He made an impression that night in his robes, captivating manner, and idiomatic English. I got along well with him, and continued to get along with him in the years to come though he would prove to be a corrupt and insecure leader, and difficult to deal with. That night he seemed the right man for the job, and we talked at length about his vision of a modern, democratic Afghanistan before Karzai had to leave to meet with the just arrived Tony Blair. It was a fascinating discussion, and meeting like that, under a tent in the desert night, was evocative, to say the least. We met briefly with Blair, too, before we departed for Pakistan in the early morning, all of us fairly optimistic that coalition authorities and enlightened Afghans had a decent shot to pacify the turbulent country once known as the graveyard of empires, and rid the world of one of the most inhumane regimes on earth. On my next trip to Afghanistan, I went with Twining to Bamiyan to see the ruins of the thousand-year-old Buddhist statues destroyed by the Taliban. Quite a metaphor for Taliban rule, I thought. The statues had survived Genghis Khan and the Mongol horde and the Soviet invasion, but not this crew of annihilating fanatics.
We paid a visit to the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, on station in the Arabian Sea, after that first visit to Afghanistan. Responding to the enthusiasm of a gung ho crowd of sailors and aviators, I said something I later regretted. “Next up, Baghdad!” I shouted, and was cheered. I was an advocate for invading Iraq, not because I believed that Saddam Hussein, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, was harboring al-Qaeda, but because I believed the U.S. intelligence community assessment that he had weapons of mass destruction, which he had proven willing to use in the past. He had refused to allow U.N. inspectors the access necessary to ascertain whether or not he had them. He was also as brutal a tyrant as any who lived, guilty of numerous atrocities, some of which he had committed when he believed the United States would not react. He routinely ordered his air defenses to shoot at U.S. overflights of Iraq. I also believed the overthrow of his regime and the establishment of an Arab democracy would strike as great a blow as any force of arms against extremism and despotism in the Middle East.
But the principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam had WMD, was wrong. The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it. None of that was known, of course, that day on the Roosevelt, when I was firm in my convictions, and self-assured. Even if we had been right about Saddam’s weapons program, I shouldn’t have used the occasion to cheer the prospect of war. All wars are awful. My exclamation would have been appropriate had I been an officer rallying troops to arms. But I wasn’t. I was a politician, and I had other responsibilities, one of which was to make certain there was a valid purpose for ordering Americans into harm’s way, and an achievable mission.
This isn’t to say that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s atrocious regime, and the effort to replace it with a rudimentary democracy, wasn’t a just cause. It was. And the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have risked their lives to achieve those ends are owed the eternal gratitude of Iraqis and Americans for the sacrifices they made for people who were strangers to them. But for all the justice they served, for all their courage and professionalism and endurance, they wouldn’t have been asked to make such sacrifices if we hadn’t believed Saddam had WMD. But we did, and we sent them to war in Iraq. Every public official involved in that decision has to accept responsibility for it. And we also had to accept responsibility for making sure that, mistake or not, the sacrifices made by Americans in that conflict wouldn’t end in our defeat.
Unlike my initial visit to Afghanistan, my first trip to Iraq didn’t leave me optimistic about our prospects for success. On the contrary, I thought we were heading in a direction that would almost certainly result in failure. It was August 2003, a few months after President Bush had announced on the USS Abraham Lincoln that major combat operations in Iraq were over. He never said “mission accomplished.” That unfortunate declaration was printed on a banner hung in the background by the ship’s crew. And he acknowledged that there was still fighting ahead in Iraq. But the event gave Americans the impression that we were just mopping up in Iraq, that our effort there was nearing a conclusion. It fit with the theory advanced by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that the armed resistance coalition forces were still encountering amounted only to a few “dead enders.” That was a very mistaken point of view, which was quite evident in August 2003.
We were a large, bicameral delegation, and on the ground for only thirty-six hours in total. My Arizona colleague, Jim Kolbe, was there, as was Lindsey Graham, a newly elected senator then. As in Afghanistan, we couldn’t remain in the country overnight. We made stops in Baghdad, Kirkuk in the north, and Basra in the south, and returned to Kuwait City at the end of each day. We met with Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator Paul Bremer, who a few months before had dissolved the Iraqi army and banned Baathists from serving in military or government positions. Even teachers who had to register with the Baathist Party in order to work, lost their jobs. Hundreds of thousands of armed and angry Sunni men had a lot of time on their hands, and scores to settle.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez was commanding coalition forces then, and was rumored to have opposed Bremer’s de-Baathification policy, as had most field commanders in Iraq, believing correctly that it was a primary cause of the incipient Sunni insurgency that had started causing trouble in the Sunni Triangle and elsewhere, and would ally with terrorist groups. We were meeting with Bremer and Walt Slocombe, a well-regarded senior Defense Department official, when Sunni jihadists struck their first hard blow. A suicide bomber enlisted by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq, drove a truck bomb next to the Canal Hotel and detonated it. The blast could be felt a mile away. We heard a thud, and a minute later an aide handed Bremer a note. He glan
ced at it, apologized, and cut short our meeting. The Canal Hotel housed the headquarters for the United Nations Mission in Iraq, which was led by one of the U.N.’s most accomplished diplomats, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in the blast along with twenty-one other U.N. staff and international and Iraqi aid workers. A second bombing in September would result in the U.N. effectively shutting down its Iraq mission, leaving the U.S. and its allies with even more responsibilities to rebuild the shattered country while we dealt with the spreading insurgency.
Security precautions in Baghdad were less restrictive in subsequent visits than they were on that initial one, but then got worse with each passing year. I’ve made over twenty trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, we could have dinner in a Baghdad restaurant, and walk unmolested at night back to the Al Rasheed Hotel. We moved around the city in SUVs. If we had a little spare time, we could poke around in the local markets. Two years later, our plane touched down after a corkscrew landing to avoid missiles, we traveled in armored vehicles through deserted streets, were mostly confined to the Green Zone, the heavily protected government district in central Baghdad, and wore Kevlar vests if we were going to spend even a few minutes in a public space.