Tenet: Aggressive Interrogations Brought U.S. Valuable Information
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A CIA program to administer aggressive interrogations to top Al Qaeda leaders brought America more valuable information about planned terror plots than all of the government’s other intelligence gathering efforts, a former director of central intelligence, George Tenet, has declared.
Mr. Tenet said the program was needed to deal with threats that emerged after September 11, 2001, including reports that there might be nuclear bombs in New York.
“I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots,” Mr. Tenet said in a “60 Minutes” interview set to air Sunday before the release of his new book. “I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us,” he said.
Mr. Tenet, who led the CIA between 1997 and 2004, defended the aggressive interrogations as appropriate to deal with figures such as the reputed mastermind of the 2001 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The former director said Mr. Mohammed initially rebuffed questioning by saying, “I’ll talk to you guys when you take me to New York and I can see my lawyer.”
Mr. Tenet declined to discuss the specific interrogation techniques, but members of the intelligence community have said they included a method known as waterboarding, which involves pouring water over a prisoner’s face to create the sensation of drowning. Human-rights groups contend waterboarding is torture and amounts to a mock execution. Critics have also said it is impossible to know whether less aggressive methods might have worked.
“We don’t torture people,” the former director told CBS. “The context is it’s post-September 11. I’ve got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are going to be blown up, planes that are going to fly into airports all over again, plot lines that I don’t know. … I’m struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur.”
Mr. Tenet’s book, “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” published by HarperCollins, is scheduled to go on sale Monday.
