History > 2007 > USA > Surveillance agencies

CIA, NI, NSA, IARPA

Clay Bennett

cartoon

The Christian Science Monitor        Boston

Cagle        12 November 2007

Editorial

Looking at America

December 31, 2007
The New York Times
 

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

Looking at America, NYT, 31.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died

to Save Image

December 30, 2007
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency’s every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.

That worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations — and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners began to include waterboarding. And it fueled the nearly three-year campaign by the agency’s clandestine service for permission to destroy the tapes, culminating in a November 2005 destruction order from the service’s director, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

Now, the disclosure of the tapes and their destruction in 2005 have become just the public spectacle the agency had sought to avoid. To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.

The Justice Department, the C.I.A.’s inspector general and Congress are investigating whether any official lied about the tapes or broke the law by destroying them. Still in dispute is whether any White House official encouraged their destruction and whether the C.I.A. deliberately hid them from the national Sept. 11 commission.

But interviews with two dozen current and former officials, most of whom would speak about the classified program only on the condition of anonymity, revealed new details about why the tapes were made and then eliminated. Their accounts show how political and legal considerations competed with intelligence concerns in the handling of the tapes.

The discussion about the tapes took place in Congressional briefings and secret deliberations among top White House lawyers, including a meeting in May 2004 just days after photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had reminded the administration of the power of such images. The debate stretched over the tenure of two C.I.A. chiefs and became entangled in a feud between the agency’s top lawyers and its inspector general. The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons. Had there been no political or security considerations, videotaping every interrogation and preserving the tapes would make sense, according to several intelligence officials.

“You couldn’t have more than one or two analysts in the room,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s No. 3 official at the time the interrogations were taped. “You want people with spectacular language skills to watch the tapes. You want your top Al Qaeda experts to watch the tapes. You want psychologists to watch the tapes. You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.”

Given such advantages, why was the taping stopped by the end of 2002, less than a year after it started?

“By that time,” Mr. Krongard said, “paranoia was setting in.”

The Decision to Tape

By several accounts, the decision to begin taping Abu Zubaydah and another detainee suspected of being a Qaeda operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was made in the field, with several goals in mind.

First, there was Abu Zubaydah’s precarious condition. “There was concern that we needed to have this all documented in case he should expire from his injuries,” recalled one former intelligence official.

Just as important was the fact that for many years the C.I.A. had rarely conducted even standard interrogations, let alone ones involving physical pressure, so officials wanted to track closely the use of legally fraught interrogation methods. And there was interest in capturing all the information to be gleaned from a rare resource — direct testimony from those who had attacked the United States.

But just months later, the taping was stopped. Some field officers had never liked the idea. “If you’re a case officer, the last thing you want is someone in Washington second-guessing everything you did,” said one former agency veteran.

More significant, interrogations of Abu Zubaydah had gotten rougher, with each new tactic approved by cable from headquarters. American officials have said that Abu Zubaydah was the first Qaeda prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner’s mouth and nose to create a feeling of drowning. Officials said they felt they could not risk a public leak of a videotape showing Americans giving such harsh treatment to bound prisoners.

Heightening the worries about the tapes was word of the first deaths of prisoners in American custody. In November 2002, an Afghan man froze to death overnight while chained in a cell at a C.I.A. site in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, the capital. Two more prisoners died in December 2002 in American military custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one C.I.A. officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided that written summaries of prisoners’ answers would suffice.

Still, that decision left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two Qaeda figures locked in an overseas safe.

Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy the tapes. But George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, was wary, in part because the agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, advised against it, current and former officials said.

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill, hoping for political cover. In February 2003, Mr. Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the C.I.A’s interest in destroying the tapes for security reasons.

But both Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat, thought destroying the tapes would be legally and politically risky. C.I.A. officials did not press the matter.

The Detention Program

Scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began investigating the program, and some insiders believed the inquiry might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.

Mr. Helgerson — now conducting the videotapes review with the Justice Department — had already rankled covert officers with an investigation into the 2001 shooting down of a missionary plane by Peruvian military officers advised by the C.I.A. The investigation set off widespread concern within the clandestine branch that a day of reckoning could be coming for officers involved in the agency’s secret prison program. The Peru investigation often pitted Mr. Helgerson against Mr. Muller, who vigorously defended members of the clandestine branch and even lobbied the Justice Department to head off criminal charges in the matter, according to former intelligence officials

“Muller wanted to show the clandestine branch that he was looking out for them,” said John Radsan, who served as an assistant general counsel for the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004. “And his aggressiveness on Peru was meant to prove to the operations people that they were protected on a lot of other programs, too.”

Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation of interrogations in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded that some of the C.I.A.’s techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture. Current and former officials said the report did not explicitly state that the methods were torture.

A month later, as the administration reeled from the Abu Ghraib disclosures, Mr. Muller, the agency general counsel, met to discuss the report with three senior lawyers at the White House: Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel; David S. Addington, legal adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney; and John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council.

The interrogation tapes were discussed at the meeting, and one Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Mr. Bellinger advised the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes. The positions Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Addington took are unknown. One person familiar with the discussion said that in light of concerns raised in the inspector general’s report that agency officers could be legally liable for harsh interrogations, there was a view at the time among some administration lawyers that the tapes should be preserved.

Looking for Guidance

After Mr. Tenet and Mr. Muller left the C.I.A. in mid-2004, Mr. Rodriguez and other officials from the clandestine branch decided again to take up the tapes with the new chief at Langley, Mr. Goss, the former congressman.

Mr. Rodriguez had taken over the clandestine directorate in late 2004, and colleagues say Mr. Goss repeatedly emphasized to Mr. Rodriguez that he was expected to run operations without clearing every decision with superiors.

During a meeting in Mr. Goss’s office with Mr. Rodriguez, John A. Rizzo, who by then had replaced Mr. Muller as the agency’s top lawyer, told the new C.I.A. director that the clandestine branch wanted a firm decision about what to do with the tapes.

According to two people close to Mr. Goss, he advised against destroying the tapes, as he had in Congress, and told Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Rodriguez that he thought the tapes should be preserved at the overseas location. Apparently he did not explicitly prohibit the tapes’ destruction.

Yet in November 2005, Congress already was moving to outlaw “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners, and The Washington Post reported that some C.I.A. prisoners were being held in Eastern Europe. As the agency scrambled to move the prisoners to new locations, Mr. Rodriguez and his aides decided to use their own authority to destroy the tapes, officials said.

One official who has spoken with Mr. Rodriguez said Mr. Rodriguez and his aides were concerned about protection of the C.I.A. officers on the tapes, from Al Qaeda, as the C.I.A. has stated, and from political pressure.

The tapes might visually identify as many as five or six people present for each interrogation — interrogators themselves, whom the agency now prefers to call “debriefers”; doctors or doctor’s assistants who monitored the prisoner’s medical state; and security officers, the official said. Some traveled regularly in and out of areas where Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists are active, he said.

Apart from concerns about physical safety in the event of a leak, the official said, there was concern for the careers of officers shown on the tapes. “We didn’t want them to become political scapegoats,” he said.

According to several current and former officials, lawyers in the agency’s clandestine branch gave Mr. Rodriguez written guidance that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that such a move would not be illegal.

One day in November 2005, Mr. Rodriguez sent a cable ordering the destruction of the recordings. Soon afterward, he notified both Mr. Goss and Mr. Rizzo, taking full responsibility for the decision.

Former intelligence officials said that Mr. Goss was unhappy about the news, in part because it was further evidence that as the C.I.A. director he was so weakened that his subordinates would directly reject his advice. Yet it appears that Mr. Rodriguez was never reprimanded. Nor is there evidence that Mr. Goss promptly notified Congress that the tapes were gone.

The investigations over the tapes frustrate some C.I.A. veterans, who say they believe that the agency is being unfairly blamed for policies of coercive interrogation approved at the top of the Bush administration and by some Congressional leaders. Intelligence officers are divided over the use of such methods as waterboarding. Some say the methods helped get information that prevented terrorist attacks. Others, like John C. Gannon, a former C.I.A. deputy director, say it was a tragic mistake for the administration to approve such methods.

Mr. Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods.

“To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.”

    Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image, NYT, 30.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/washington/30intel.html?hp

C.I.A. to Cooperate With House on Tapes

December 20, 2007
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has agreed to make documents related to the destruction of interrogation videotapes available to the House Intelligence Committee and to allow the agency’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, to testify about the matter, Congressional and intelligence officials said Wednesday.

But it remained unclear whether Jose A. Rodriguez, who as chief of the agency’s clandestine service ordered the tapes destroyed in 2005, would testify. Officials said Mr. Rodriguez’s appearance before the committee might involve complex negotiations over legal immunity at a time when the Justice Department and the intelligence agency were reviewing whether the destruction of the tapes broke any laws.

The agreement marked at least a partial resolution of a standoff between the Bush administration and Congress.

The standoff began on Friday, when the Justice Department urged the House panel to postpone any inquiry on the grounds it might hinder the review by Justice and the C.I.A.’s inspector general. The committee’s Democratic chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, and its top Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, responded by refusing to put off the investigation, saying there were many precedents for Congressional inquiries to proceed in parallel with criminal investigations.

This week, the administration has sought a compromise. “The Department of Justice has changed their minds, and today we have reason to believe that we will be getting the documents,” Mr. Reyes told reporters on Wednesday.

In a conciliatory statement Wednesday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department has “no desire to block any Congressional investigation” and has not advised the C.I.A. against cooperating with the committee.

“The wisdom, propriety and appropriateness of the decision to destroy these tapes are worthy and compelling subjects of an oversight investigation,” Mr. Roehrkasse said. But he said officials were still concerned that a Congressional inquiry could cause “disruption of our initial witness interviews, the delay and disruption of our document collection, and the tainting of any future criminal prosecutorial action because of Congressional grants of immunity to witnesses.”

The committee sent unsigned subpoenas for documents and for the testimony of Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Rizzo to the agency on Tuesday, and Mr. Reyes said he was prepared to sign the subpoenas if it became necessary.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Mark Mansfield, said the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, was eager to accommodate the committee as it performed its oversight role. “We’re in touch with the House Intelligence Committee on these matters, and we look forward to it being worked out,” he said.

An intelligence official, offering more details on condition of anonymity, said the top-secret documents would be made available either on Capitol Hill or at the agency, as soon as the logistics could be worked out, as early as Thursday afternoon.

The official also said Mr. Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel, would be prepared to testify at a hearing tentatively scheduled for Jan. 16. As the agency’s top lawyer for most of the last six years, Mr. Rizzo played a central role in discussions of whether the tapes should be destroyed.

The official declined to say whether Mr. Rodriguez would testify, and Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, declined to comment.

Current and former intelligence officials have said that the tapes of harsh interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in 2002 were made in part to document the methods being used for the first time by C.I.A. officers. But, they said, officials soon decided that taping sessions was a bad idea and could endanger interrogators if they were ever leaked.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that discussions about the proposal to destroy the tapes involved four high-level White House lawyers: Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

In a statement on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino, criticized a subheading on the Times article that said, “White House role was wider than it said,” noting that the White House has “not publicly commented on the issue,” except to note the president’s “immediate reaction upon being briefed on the matter.” She called any suggestion that might be taken from the subheading to indicate that there was an effort by the White House to mislead the public on the videotapes issue “pernicious and troubling.”

Citing the Justice Department’s preliminary investigation, Ms. Perino said White House officials had been asked not to discuss the videotapes and declined to say who on President Bush’s staff was aware of the tapes. “We have not described, neither to highlight nor to minimize, the role or deliberations of White House officials in this matter,” she said.

The New York Times said it would publish a correction on Thursday, and noted that the White House “had not challenged the content of our story,” the newspaper’s spokeswoman, Catherine J. Mathis, said in a statement.

At a confirmation hearing for President Bush’s nominee for deputy attorney general on Wednesday, lawmakers voiced frustration about being denied details of the videotapes’ destruction and urged the nominee, Mark Filip, to cooperate with Congressional inquiries.

Judge Filip, now on the federal bench in Chicago, told lawmakers he might have counseled the C.I.A. not to destroy the tapes.

“It might be the better practice to keep those in any event, given the interest in the subject matter that was on the tapes,” Mr. Filip told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Reporting was contributed by Steven Lee Myers, Philip Shenon, David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti.

    C.I.A. to Cooperate With House on Tapes, NYT, 20.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/washington/20intel.html?ref=washington

Bush Faces Questions About C.I.A. Tapes

December 20, 2007
Filed at 11:41 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Thursday he will reserve judgment on his administration's destruction of CIA interrogation tapes until several inquiries are finished. ''Let's wait and see what the facts are,'' Bush said.

The destruction in late 2005 of the tapes, showing harsh treatment of two terrorism suspects, is being investigated by the Justice Department, the CIA itself and by several congressional panels.

Bush stuck to the White House line that he personally did not know about either the existence of the tapes or their destruction until he was briefed earlier this month by CIA Director Michael Hayden.

''Sounds pretty clear to me when I say I have -- the first recollection is when Mike Hayden briefed me. That's pretty clear,'' Bush said.

Congressional Democrats condemned the destruction of the tapes and a federal judge ordered Justice Department lawyers to appear before him Friday to discuss whether destroying the tapes violated his 2005 order to preserve evidence in a lawsuit brought on behalf of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Bush said that he believed the ongoing investigations by his administration, ''coupled with oversight provided by the Congress, will end up enabling us all to find out what has happened.''

''Until these inquiries are complete, I will be rendering no opinion from the podium,'' he added.

Turning to domestic issues in a year-end news conference, Bush complained Congress had stuffed a spending bill with hundreds of projects he called wasteful and instructed his budget director to explore options for dealing with them.

Bush said that a $555 billion measure passed by Congress Wednesday night before breaking for the holidays contains some 9,800 so-called ''earmarks,'' or projects usually benefiting only one state or congressional district.

''So I am instructing Budget Director Jim Nussle to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill,'' Bush said.

However, without line-item veto powers, Bush's ability to block spending on specific projects appears limited. Presidential authority to strike, or veto, individual projects and other spending items from appropriations bills was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1998.

The president did praise Congress for sending him ''a spending bill to fund the day-to-day operations of the federal government. They passed this bill without raising taxes.'' But he complained that the measure was done so late in the year that it could slow the processing of tax returns to millions of Americans.

He said his administration would ''work hard to minimize'' such a delay.

Bush did not get specific when asked about proposals to stimulate the economy but said ''we'll consider all options.''

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the economy sprinted ahead at its fastest pace in four years during the summer, although it is expected to limp through the final three months of this year as the housing and credit crises weigh on individuals and businesses alike.

''Like many Americans, I am concerned,'' Bush said. ''I am concerned about the fact that Americans see their costs going up. I know Americans are concerned about whether or not their neighbor may stay in their house. So we're dealing with these issues.''

Bush spoke cautiously about the state of democracy in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, who has tightened control of the courts and the media and maneuvered to retain power as his term ends. Putin has agreed to serve as prime minister if his protege, Dmitry Medvedev, is elected as president as expected.

Putin was just named Time magazine's ''Person of the Year'' for imposing stability that restored Russia as a world power.

''I presume they put him on there because he was a consequential leader,'' Bush said. ''And the fundamental question is, consequential to what end? What will the country look like 10 years from now? My hope, of course, is that Russia is a country that understands there needs to be checks and balances.''

Bush said he hasn't talked to Putin about his serving as prime minister. ''I think we better just watch and see,'' Bush said.

Turning to Iraq, where Bush's military buildup is generally agreed to have helped reduce violence on the ground both against U.S. forces and Iraqi citizens, Bush said work remains to be done, especially in terms of political improvements in the country.

''Are we satisfied with progress in Baghdad? No, but to say nothing is happening is not the case,'' Bush said. And while the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has come under considerable criticism from various quarters, ''There is a functioning government.''

Bush suggested that people were feeling better about their lives both in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though thousands of combat troops remain in both countries to provide security.

The president also:

-- Said his administration will join international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, but that he will continue to oppose initiatives that would hamper U.S. economic growth. ''I take the issue seriously,'' Bush said about global warming. ''But I want to make sure that we're effective in what we do, and do not wreck our economy in whatever we do.''

-- Predicted that the GOP would win the White House in 2008 and regain seats in both the House and Senate. Bush said he wouldn't be dragged into the presidential race when asked about the comments of fellow GOP candidate Mike Huckabee, who criticized the administration's foreign policy as ''arrogant bunker mentality.'' He also said he would be ''very hesitant to support somebody who relied upon opinion polls and focus groups to define a way forward for a president,'' without identifying any such candidates by name.

-- Jokingly dismissed a question about former President Clinton's suggestion that if his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton were elected, she would send him and former President George H.W. Bush on a goodwill trip around the world. ''Well, 41 didn't think it's necessary,'' Bush said, referring to his father by the number of his presidency. ''Sounds like it's going to be a one-man trip.''

    Bush Faces Questions About C.I.A. Tapes, NYT, 20.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html?hp

Bush Lawyers Discussed Fate of C.I.A.Tapes

December 19, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal.

The destruction of the tapes is being investigated by the Justice Department, and the officials would not agree to be quoted by name while that inquiry is under way.

Spokesmen for the White House, the vice president’s office and the C.I.A. declined to comment for this article, also citing the inquiry.

The new information came to light as a federal judge on Tuesday ordered a hearing into whether the tapes’ destruction violated an order to preserve evidence in a lawsuit brought on behalf of 16 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The tapes documented harsh interrogation methods used in 2002 on Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects in C.I.A. custody.

The current and former officials also provided new details about the role played in November 2005 by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine branch, who ultimately ordered the destruction of the tapes.

The officials said that before he issued a secret cable directing that the tapes be destroyed, Mr. Rodriguez received legal guidance from two C.I.A. lawyers, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger. The officials said that those lawyers gave written guidance to Mr. Rodriguez that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that the destruction would violate no laws.

The agency did not make either Mr. Hermes or Mr. Eatinger available for comment.

Current and former officials said the two lawyers informed the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, about the legal advice they had provided. But officials said Mr. Rodriguez did not inform either Mr. Rizzo or Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, before he sent the cable to destroy the tapes.

“There was an expectation on the part of those providing legal guidance that additional bases would be touched,” said one government official with knowledge of the matter. “That didn’t happen.”

Robert S. Bennett, a lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez, insisted that his client had done nothing wrong and suggested that Mr. Rodriguez had been authorized to order the destruction of the tapes. “He had a green light to destroy them,” Mr. Bennett said.

Until their destruction, the tapes were stored in a safe in the C.I.A. station in the country where the interrogations took place, current and former officials said. According to one former senior intelligence official, the tapes were never sent back to C.I.A. headquarters, despite what the official described as concern about keeping such highly classified material overseas.

Top officials of the C.I.A’s clandestine service had pressed repeatedly beginning in 2003 for the tapes’ destruction, out of concern that they could leak and put operatives in both legal and physical jeopardy.

The only White House official previously reported to have taken part in the discussions was Ms. Miers, who served as a deputy chief of staff to President Bush until early 2005, when she took over as White House counsel. While one official had said previously that Ms. Miers’s involvement began in 2003, other current and former officials said they did not believe she joined the discussions until 2005.

Besides the Justice Department inquiry, the Congressional intelligence committees have begun investigations into the destruction of the tapes, and are looking into the role that officials at the White House and Justice Department might have played in discussions about them. The C.I.A. never provided the tapes to federal prosecutors or to the Sept. 11 commission, and some lawmakers have suggested that their destruction may have amounted to obstruction of justice.

Newsweek reported this week that John D. Negroponte, who was director of national intelligence at the time the tapes were destroyed, sent a memorandum in the summer of 2005 to Mr. Goss, the C.I.A. director, advising him against destroying the tapes. Mr. Negroponte left the job this year to become deputy secretary of state, and a spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment on the Newsweek article.

The court hearing in the Guantánamo case, set for Friday in Washington by District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. over the government’s objections, will be the first public forum in which officials submit to questioning about the tapes’ destruction.

There is no publicly known connection between the 16 plaintiffs — 14 Yemenis, an Algerian and a Pakistani — and the C.I.A. videotapes. But lawyers in several Guantánamo cases contend that the government may have used information from the C.I.A. interrogations to identify their clients as “unlawful combatants” and hold them at Guantánamo for as long as six years.

“We hope to establish a procedure to review the government’s handling of evidence in our case,” said David H. Remes, a lawyer representing the 16 detainees.

Jonathan Hafetz, who represents a Qatari prisoner at Guantánamo and filed a motion on Tuesday seeking a separate hearing, said the videotapes could well be relevant.

“If the government is relying on the statement of a witness under harsh interrogation, a videotape of the interrogation would be very relevant,” said Mr. Hafetz, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school.

In addition to the Guantánamo court filings, the American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal judge to hold the C.I.A. in contempt of court for destroying the tapes. The A.C.L.U. says the destruction violated orders in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by several advocacy groups seeking materials related to detention and interrogation.
 

David Johnston contributed reporting.

    Bush Lawyers Discussed Fate of C.I.A.Tapes, NYT, 19.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/washington/19intel.html?hp

C.I.A. Director Speaks to Senate Committee

December 12, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON — Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, distanced himself on Tuesday from the decision to record and subsequently destroy hundreds of hours of video taken during the interrogations of senior Qaeda captives.

Speaking in public after delivering classified testimony before a Senate committee, General Hayden said that the decision to record the interrogations in 2002 was made under George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and that the destruction of those tapes in 2005 came under the watch of Porter J. Goss, who succeeded Mr. Tenet.

“There are other people at the agency who know about this far better than I,” he said after he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He had become the agency director in May 2006, six months after intelligence officials have said the tapes were destroyed.

Congressional officials said Tuesday that they would probably call Mr. Goss and Mr. Tenet before the committee as part of its investigation into the matter.

In a statement to agency employees on Thursday, General Hayden indicated that he supported the decision to destroy the videos. He did not reiterate that support in his public comments on Tuesday, although he did not say the decision was wrong.

Congressional officials said General Hayden tried to provide a timeline of events surrounding the destruction of the tapes that he had constructed from agency records.

Emerging from the meeting, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the committee, called the hearing “useful” but said he still had questions about who authorized the destruction of the tapes in 2005 and why Congress was not told at the time.

General Hayden, said Thursday that the C.I.A. had informed leaders in Congress about the destruction of the videos, which documented the interrogations of two suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. But Republicans and Democrats have said that they can find no record of any formal notification.

“Trouble arises, as we see with the C.I.A. tape case, when intelligence leaders refuse to comply with their constitutional duty to keep Congress ‘fully and currently’ informed,” said Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, in a statement.

One Democratic aide said the Senate Intelligence Committee also planned to meet with John L. Helgerson, the agency’s inspector general, to learn more about a joint, preliminary investigation of the tapes’ destruction that he is conducting with the Justice Department.

The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not a spokesman for the committee, said members did not want to get in the way of what could become an investigation that could ultimately lead to criminal charges.

“We have to be very careful not to interfere with their ability to bring those charges,” he said.

In an interview with ABC News on Tuesday, President Bush said, “It will be interesting to know what the true facts are,” after the inquiry by the Justice Department and C.I.A. inspector general is complete.

But lawmakers from both houses showed far less patience. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, delivered a blistering indictment of the agency’s decision to destroy the videos, questioning whether there was a broader cover-up behind the agency’s decision.

One Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, said the Justice Department inquiry was not sufficient and asked that Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey appoint an independent counsel in the matter.

Mr. Mukasey indicated that he would probably turn down such calls, saying the Justice Department “is capable of doing whatever it needs to do.”

During his first news conference as attorney general, Mr. Mukasey said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein, who is leading the investigation, would “go wherever the facts lead him.”

Much of the news conference was dominated by questions about Mr. Mukasey’s views on the harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, in which a subject is made to believe he is being drowned. The issue nearly cost Mr. Mukasey his Senate confirmation after he refused to say if he considered the technique to be torture.

He said Tuesday that he still had not decided and that he was still reviewing classified legal opinions within the Justice Department.

Government officials have said that during Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation sessions, his C.I.A. questioners used tactics including noise, stress positions, isolation and waterboarding.

The Justice Department’s role in the videotape episode was questioned Tuesday by the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who in a letter to Mr. Mukasey asked for a complete account of the department’s involvement in the matter.

The letter was signed by Senators Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is the chairman, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee’s senior Republican. It asked for responses to several questions that have gone unanswered by Justice Department officials about whether officials viewed the tapes, whether they were ever aware of plans to destroy them and when they were first told they had been destroyed.

Elsewhere in Washington, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued an interim order on Tuesday directing the government not to destroy any evidence of torture that lawyers for a Guantánamo Bay detainee say they believe exists.

The order came after lawyers for the detainee, Majid Khan, filed a request asserting that he had been tortured in secret C.I.A. prisons for more than three years before he was transferred to Guantánamo last year.

J. Wells Dixon, one of Mr. Khan’s lawyers, said Tuesday that he believed the judges would not have issued the order “if they did not think there was any risk” that the government might destroy evidence of torture.

Philip Shenon contributed reporting from Washington, and William Glaberson from New York.

    C.I.A. Director Speaks to Senate Committee, NYT, 12.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/washington/12intel.html?hp

Letters

Checks and Balances for Our Spies

December 12, 2007
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Help Me Spy on Al Qaeda” (Op-Ed, Dec. 10):

Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, stresses the need for intelligence agencies to act quickly to intercept potential terrorist communications ahead of any court proceeding that might slow those interceptions. But this does not explain why the administration continues to oppose a provision that would allow for after-the-fact court oversight to ensure that our spies have not overstepped their wiretapping powers when it comes to Americans.

An oversight measure that I backed in the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, would allow the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor whether our spies have followed key privacy rules that limit the use and sharing of American communications.

The administration itself, in consultation with the court, will set these procedures to protect American phone calls and e-mail messages that are intercepted but have no intelligence value. There is simply no defensible reason for the administration to object to independent, retrospective scrutiny to make sure that it is playing by its own rules. Yet Mr. McConnell cited this provision as one reason he would advise the president to veto the amended surveillance legislation that recently passed out of the Judiciary Committee.

Charles E. Schumer
U.S. Senator from New York
Washington, Dec. 10, 2007

•

To the Editor:

The director of national intelligence is asking Congress to help him “spy on Al Qaeda.” That sounds reasonable and necessary. Our only question is: Why won’t the director now take yes for an answer? Last month, the House passed legislation that does precisely what Mike McConnell is asking for. It gives the intelligence community the ability to conduct surveillance on overseas targets without requiring an individual court order for each target.

Our bill also includes an important judicial check on surveillance that may involve Americans by requiring that an independent court ensure that Americans aren’t being targeted. Our bill also requires detailed oversight by an inspector general and by Congress.

Mr. McConnell’s only complaint about our legislation appears to be that it doesn’t include a Senate provision granting immunity for companies that participated in President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. The House was unable to consider that Senate provision because the administration refused to give us intelligence documents to explain what we’d be granting immunity for — even though those documents were given to our Senate counterparts.

If the director wants this immunity provision, let him explain why an American citizen’s senator can have access to critical intelligence documents but his representative cannot.

Steny Hoyer
John Conyers
Silvestre Reyes
Washington, Dec. 10, 2007

The writers are, respectively, House majority leader and chairmen of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.

•

To the Editor:

The Bush administration’s push to renew the Protect America Act is not about updating dusty old laws. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been amended more than 50 times since its creation — most recently during the Patriot Act reauthorization in January 2006. This new push is about expanding the spying powers of the government and emasculating the role of the courts in providing any form of substantive judicial review.

Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, also pleads for immunity for private companies that aided the president’s illegal spying program, revealed in these very pages nearly two years ago. These companies do not need liability protection. They need a government that would not ask them to follow it in breaking the law and forfeit their customers’ privacy. Having violated the law, the companies need to be held accountable by their customers, who have filed more than 40 lawsuits.

With the Protect America Act expiring in less than two months, the campaign of fearmongering and misinformation has begun anew. Congress may be the only thing standing between us and the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment. This time, Congress must find the backbone to protect it.

Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union
Washington, Dec. 10, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Mike McConnell seeks a continuation of the Protect America Act of 2007, a demand for a huge system of warrantless wiretapping and electronic data mining of the thoughts and words of American citizens. He assures us that they are only after the terrorists, but to identify terrorist communications they must record and store hundreds of millions of our calls, text messages and e-mail messages.

This is a society in which every Internet provider, every cellphone service and every phone company is literally required by law to become a spy agency of the federal government with no court oversight of individual cases.

Only a nation of cowards would buy a minor increase in personal safety by establishing a vast system of federal government surveillance. And only a myopic bureaucrat or a pathetic tyrant would seek it.

John D. Mullen
Oakdale, N.Y., Dec. 10, 2007

•

To the Editor:

While I’m flattered that Mike McConnell wants me — little old me — to help him ferret out Qaeda bad guys, I’m disappointed to learn that what he really wants is to help George W. Bush drive a dagger through the heart of the Fourth Amendment.

Gutting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act through the renewal of the so-called Protect America Act (another of Bush & Company’s great Orwellian misnomers) will simply give the administration carte blanche to violate our privacy under the banner of protecting our security. This noxious piece of police-state legislation should be allowed to expire.

Jon Krampner
Los Angeles, Dec. 10, 2007

•

To the Editor:

“Help Me Spy on Al Qaeda” offers no specifics on what prior spying has accomplished — such information would help the enemy, of course. Instead, Mike McConnell asks for retroactive protection for previous illegal activity and for immunity for phone companies that “cooperated” with the government’s illegal surveillance. It sounds very much as if Mr. McConnell is asking us to help him spy on ourselves.

H. R. Coursen
Brunswick, Me., Dec. 11, 2007

    Checks and Balances for Our Spies, NYT, 12.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/opinion/l12spy.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Help Me Spy on Al Qaeda

December 10, 2007
The New York Times
By MIKE McCONNELL

Washington

THE Protect America Act, enacted in August, has lived up to its name and objective: making the country safer while protecting the civil liberties of Americans. Under this new law, we now have the speed and agility necessary to detect terrorist and other evolving national security threats. Information obtained under this law has helped us develop a greater understanding of international Qaeda networks, and the law has allowed us to obtain significant insight into terrorist planning.

Congress needs to act again. The Protect America Act expires in less than two months, on Feb. 1. We must be able to continue effectively obtaining the information gained through this law if we are to stay ahead of terrorists who are determined to attack the United States.

Before the Protect America Act was enacted, to monitor the communications of foreign intelligence targets outside the United States, in some cases we had to operate under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, a law that had not kept pace with changes in technology. In a significant number of these cases, FISA required us to obtain a court order. This requirement slowed — and sometimes prevented — our ability to collect timely foreign intelligence.

Our experts were diverted from tracking foreign threats to writing lengthy justifications to collect information from a person in a foreign country, simply to satisfy an outdated statute that did not reflect the ways our adversaries communicate. The judicial process intended to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans was applied instead to foreign intelligence targets in foreign countries. This made little sense, and the Protect America Act eliminated this problem.

Any new law should begin by being true to the principles that make the Protect America Act successful. First, the intelligence community needs a law that does not require a court order for surveillance directed at a foreign intelligence target reasonably believed to be outside the United States, regardless of where the communications are found. The intelligence community should spend its time protecting our nation, not providing privacy protections to foreign terrorists and other diffuse international threats.

Second, the intelligence community needs an efficient means to obtain a FISA court order to conduct surveillance in the United States for foreign intelligence purposes.

Finally, it is critical for the intelligence community to have liability protection for private parties that are sued only because they are believed to have assisted us after Sept. 11, 2001. Although the Protect America Act provided such necessary protection for those complying with requests made after its enactment, it did not include protection for those that reportedly complied earlier.

The intelligence community cannot go it alone. Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits. I share the view of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, after a year of study, concluded that “without retroactive immunity, the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests in the future,” and warned that “the possible reduction in intelligence that might result from this delay is simply unacceptable for the safety of our nation.”

Time for the Protect America Act is growing short, but there is still an opportunity to enact permanent legislation that helps us to better confront both changing technology and the enemies we face in a way that protects civil liberties.

I served for almost 30 years as an intelligence officer before spending some time in the private sector. When I returned to government last winter, it became clear to me that our foreign intelligence collection capacity was being degraded. I was very troubled to discover that FISA had not been updated to reflect new technology and was preventing us from collecting foreign intelligence needed to uncover threats to Americans.

The Protect America Act fixed this problem, and we are safer for it. I would be gravely concerned if we took a step backward into this world of uncertainty; America would be a less safe place.

Mike McConnell is the director of national intelligence.

    Help Me Spy on Al Qaeda, NYT, 10.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/opinion/10mcconnell.html

Man Held by C.I.A. Says He Was Tortured

December 9, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 — The first of the so-called high-value Guantánamo detainees to have seen a lawyer claims he was subjected to “state-sanctioned torture” while in secret C.I.A. prisons, and he has asked for a court order barring the government from destroying evidence of his treatment.

The request, in a filing by his lawyers, was made on Nov. 29, before officials from the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that the agency had destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda that current and former officials said included the use of harsh techniques.

Lawyers for the detainee, Majid Khan, a former Baltimore resident, released documents in his case on Friday. They claim he “was subjected to an aggressive C.I.A. detention and interrogation program notable for its elaborate planning and ruthless application of torture” to numerous detainees.

The documents also suggest that Mr. Khan, 27, and other high-value detainees are now being held in a previously undisclosed area of the Guantánamo prison in Cuba he called Camp 7.

Those detainees include 14 men, some suspected of being former Qaeda officials, who President Bush acknowledged were held in a secret C.I.A. program. They were transferred to military custody at Guantánamo last year.

Asked about Mr. Khan’s assertions, Mark Mansfield, a C.I.A. spokesman, said, “the United States does not conduct or condone torture.” He said a small number of “hardened terrorists” had required what he called “special methods of questioning” in what he called a lawful and carefully run program.

The documents were heavily redacted by government security officials, and none of Mr. Khan’s specific assertions of torture could be read. One entire page was blacked out.

In addition to the court filing, Mr. Khan’s lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York released recently declassified notes of their first meetings with Mr. Khan, in October. The notes asserted that he had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder because of his treatment, including memory problems and “frantic expression.” They said he was “painfully thin and pale.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, declined to respond to the assertions about Mr. Khan’s condition, saying that most detainees at Guantánamo gain weight.

Pentagon officials have said they believe that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, selected Mr. Khan, who grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, to study the feasibility of blowing up gasoline stations and poisoning reservoirs in the United States. But he has not been charged with any offenses.

His lawyers said Mr. Khan, while living in Pakistan, was “forcibly disappeared” and that he had “admitted anything his interrogators demanded of him, regardless of the truth.”

Lawyers who represent Guantánamo detainees agree to stringent restrictions that bar them from disclosing information from their clients until it is cleared by government security officials.

The notes that were declassified from Mr. Khan’s lawyers, Gitanjali S. Gutierrez and J. Wells Dixon, say he “lives in Camp 7” and imply that he has contact with at least one other high-value detainee, Abu Zubaydah.

Officials at Guantánamo have not discussed the existence of a Camp 7. They often say publicly that the most recent center constructed there is Camp 6, a modern maximum-security building.

Commander Gordon, citing security concerns, declined to comment on the indication that there may be a secret detention unit, and added that “we do not disclose the exact location of detainees within Guantánamo.”

The request for an order barring the government from destroying any evidence of torture was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is considering a challenge by Mr. Khan to his detention.

Mr. Khan’s lawyers claim that “there is a substantial risk that the torture evidence will disappear.” They did not specify what evidence they believe may exist.

An intelligence official speaking on the condition of anonymity said the C.I.A.’s interrogations of Mr. Khan were not videotaped.

Mr. Dixon, one of Mr. Khan’s lawyers, said Saturday that the admission that officials had destroyed videotapes of interrogations showed why such an order was needed.

“They are no longer entitled to a presumption that the government has acted lawfully or in good faith,” Mr. Dixon said.

    Man Held by C.I.A. Says He Was Tortured, NYT, 9.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/washington/09gitmo.html

Congress Plans C.I.A. Obstruction Inquiries

December 8, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — The Central Intelligence Agency faced the threat of obstruction-of-justice investigations on Friday from both the Justice Department and Congressional committees over the destruction of videotapes of interrogations of Qaeda operatives.

The Justice Department said it would review calls for a formal inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, while the House and Senate intelligence committees said they were opening investigations of their own into the episode, which Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate panel, called “extremely disturbing.”

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said Friday that President Bush “has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction” before this week. She added that the C.I.A. and the White House counsel’s office were reviewing the facts and that they would cooperate with any Justice Department inquiry.

The pressure for a full investigation into the handling of the tapes puts Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a difficult position early in his tenure because of the questions that arose at his confirmation hearings in October about his views on harsh C.I.A. interrogation tactics.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal groups on Friday called for the appointment of an outside counsel to examine possible criminal acts by the C.I.A., arguing that the Justice Department had proved unable in the past to adequately investigate claims of prisoner abuse against the administration.

The tapes, which showed severe interrogation methods against two operatives from Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, were made in 2002 and destroyed in 2005, the C.I.A. acknowledged this week after being questioned about the issue by The New York Times. The agency said the tapes were destroyed in part to protect the identities of the interrogators.

Meanwhile, the former chairmen of the Sept. 11 commission, who said the C.I.A. assured them repeatedly during their inquiry that no original material existed from its interrogations of Qaeda figures, said they were furious to learn about the tapes.

The C.I.A. indicated that the Sept. 11 commission never specifically asked for any tape recordings of prisoner interrogations.

But in separate interviews on Friday, the co-chairmen, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, said they had made clear in hours of negotiations and discussions with the C.I.A., as well as in written requests, that they wanted all material connected to the interrogations of Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody in order to get a complete understanding of the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks for their 2004 report.

The commission ended up getting summaries of interrogation reports and was able to forward questions of its own for C.I.A. officers to ask the prisoners.

“The C.I.A. certainly knew of our interest in getting all the information we could on the detainees, and they never indicated to us there were any videotapes,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes. Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge.”

Mr. Kean said, “I’m upset that they didn’t tell us the truth.”

The existence of material on unidentified Qaeda detainees also became a central issue in the terrorism prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, who sought access to witness statements in an effort to show that he did not have advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Justice Department, under questioning from the federal judge in the case in 2005, denied that any tape recording of the interrogations existed, only to concede last month that the C.I.A. had found three tapes that are apparently still in existence. It is unclear which Qaeda figures are on those tapes.

Edward B. MacMahon Jr., who represented Mr. Moussaoui during his trial in 2006, said in an interview on Friday that based on the C.I.A.’s acknowledgment that tapes of two Qaeda prisoners were destroyed, “It’s obvious to me that they destroyed material evidence in the case.”

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the C.I.A., said in a statement on Thursday that the tape of Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation was not relevant to the Moussaoui trial. But Mr. MacMahon said, “General Hayden isn’t a federal judge, and that’s not his decision to make.”

Ms. Perino said President Bush “has complete confidence” in General Hayden and his handling of the issue.

With calls from House and Senate Democrats for a full investigation, the White House seemed to be bracing for an investigation from the Justice Department by initiating an inquiry of its own through the White House counsel’s office. The aim, Ms. Perino said, is to “gather facts.”

The Justice Department said that it was reviewing the requests from Congress for a full investigation. A senior Justice Department official, who spoke about internal deliberations on condition of anonymity, suggested that the department would be likely to wait for a referral from the C.I.A. inspector general.

Key questions in Justice Department or Congressional inquiries are likely to focus on the C.I.A.’s policies on the destruction of classified material; the legal rationale for destroying the tapes; the status of requests pending at the time of the destruction from Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers, the Sept. 11 commission and other proceedings; and what members of Congress were told about the tapes.

With Democrats seizing on the destruction of the tapes, some leading Republicans appeared to distance themselves from the political fallout. Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the intelligence committee, sent a letter to the C.I.A., along with Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, chairman of the panel, saying the agency’s suggestion that the committee was told of the tapes’ destruction “simply is not true.”

    Congress Plans C.I.A. Obstruction Inquiries, NYT, 8.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/washington/08inquire.html?hp

C.I.A. Was Urged to Keep Interrogation Videotapes

December 8, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.

The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said.

The disclosures provide new details about what Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, has said was a decision “made within C.I.A. itself” to destroy the videotapes. In interviews, members of Congress and former intelligence officials also questioned some aspects of the account General Hayden provided Thursday about when Congress was notified that the tapes had been destroyed.

Current and former intelligence officials say the videotapes showed severe interrogation techniques used on two Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were among the first three terror suspects to be detained and interrogated by the C.I.A. in secret prisons after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Top C.I.A. officials had decided in 2003 to preserve the tapes in response to warnings from White House lawyers and lawmakers that destroying the tapes would be unwise, in part because it could carry legal risks, the government officials said.

But the government officials said that Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations, had reversed that decision in November 2005, at a time when Congress and the courts were inquiring deeply into the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program. Mr. Rodriguez could not be reached Friday for comment.

As the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida, was among Congressional leaders who warned the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes, the former intelligence officials said. Mr. Goss became C.I.A. director in 2004 and was serving in the post when the tapes were destroyed, but was not informed in advance about Mr. Rodriguez’s decision, the former officials said.

It was not until at least a year after the destruction of the tapes that any members of Congress were informed about the action, the officials said. On Friday, Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2004 to 2006, said he had never been told that the tapes were destroyed.

“I think the intelligence committee needs to get all over this,” said Mr. Hoekstra, who has been a strong supporter of the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program. “This raises a red flag that needs to be looked at.”

The first notification to Congress by the C.I.A. about the videotapes was delivered to a small group of senior lawmakers in February 2003 by Scott W. Muller, then the agency’s general counsel. Government officials said that Mr. Muller had told the lawmakers that the C.I.A. intended to destroy the interrogation tapes, arguing that they were no longer of any intelligence value and that the interrogations they showed put agency operatives who appeared in the tapes at risk.

At the time of the briefing in February 2003, the lawmakers who advised Mr. Muller not to destroy the tapes included both Mr. Goss and Representative Jane Harman of California, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Ms. Harman described her role on Friday. Mr. Goss’s role was described by former intelligence officials.

According to two government officials, Mr. Muller then raised the idea of destroying the tapes during discussions in 2003 with Justice Department lawyers and with Harriet E. Miers, who was then a deputy White House chief of staff. Ms. Miers became White House counsel in early 2005.

The officials said that Ms. Miers and the Justice Department lawyers had advised against destroying the tapes, but that it was not clear what the basis for their advice had been.

A message left at Mr. Muller’s law office on Friday was not returned, and White House officials would not comment about Ms. Miers’s role.

It was also not clear when the White House or Justice Department were told that the tapes had been destroyed, or whether anyone at either place was notified in advance that Mr. Rodriguez had ordered that the step be taken. Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said Friday that President Bush had “no recollection” of being made aware of the tapes’ destruction before Thursday, when General Hayden briefed him on the matter.

In his message to C.I.A. employees on Thursday, General Hayden said that the leaders of the intelligence committee had been informed of the agency’s “intention to dispose of the material,” but he did not say when that notification took place.

Several former intelligence officials also said there was great concern that the tapes, which recorded hours of grueling interrogations, could have set off controversies about the legality of the interrogations and generate a backlash in the Middle East.

According to one former intelligence official, the C.I.A. then decided to keep the tapes at the C.I.A. stations in the countries where Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri were interrogated.

Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan, and it has been reported that he was taken to Thailand for part of his interrogation. It is unclear where Mr. Nashiri was interrogated by C.I.A. operatives.

Mr. Nashiri, a Qaeda operations chief in the Arabian Peninsula until his capture in 2002, is thought to have planned the October 2000 bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen.

The current and former intelligence officials said that when Mr. Rodriguez ultimately decided in late 2005 to destroy the tapes, he did so without advising Mr. Rizzo, Mr. Muller’s successor as the agency’s top general counsel. Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Goss were among the C.I.A. officials who were angry when told that the tapes had been destroyed, the officials said.

Mr. Rodriguez retired from the agency this year.

The Senate Intelligence Committee announced Friday that it was starting an investigation into the destruction of the videotapes.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said, “Whatever the intent, we must get to the bottom of it.”

    C.I.A. Was Urged to Keep Interrogation Videotapes, NYT, 8.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/washington/08intel.html?hp

C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations

December 7, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.

In a statement to employees on Thursday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that the decision to destroy the tapes was made “within the C.I.A.” and that they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.

The destruction of the tapes raises questions about whether agency officials withheld information from Congress, the courts and the Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which was appointed by President Bush and Congress, and which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

The disclosures about the tapes are likely to reignite the debate over laws that allow the C.I.A. to use interrogation practices more severe than those allowed to other agencies. A Congressional conference committee voted late Wednesday to outlaw those interrogation practices, but the measure has yet to pass the full House and Senate and is likely to face a veto from Mr. Bush.

The New York Times informed the intelligence agency on Wednesday evening that it was preparing to publish an article about the destruction of the tapes. In his statement to employees on Thursday, General Hayden said that the agency had acted “in line with the law” and that he was informing C.I.A. employees “because the press has learned” about the matter.

General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk” and that if they had become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

Current and former intelligence officials said that the decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who was the head of the Directorate of Operations, the agency’s clandestine service. Mr. Rodriguez could not be reached Thursday for comment.

Two former intelligence officials said that Porter J. Goss, the director of the agency at the time, was not told that the tapes would be destroyed and was angered to learn that they had been.

Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined to comment on the matter.

In his statement, General Hayden said leaders of Congressional oversight committees had been fully briefed about the existence of the tapes and told in advance of the decision to destroy them. But the two top members of the House Intelligence Committee in 2005 said Thursday that they had not been notified in advance of the decision to destroy the tapes.

A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, who was the committee’s chairman between 2004 and 2006, said that Mr. Hoekstra was “never briefed or advised that these tapes existed, or that they were going to be destroyed.”

The spokesman, Jamal Ware, also said that Mr. Hoekstra “absolutely believes that the full committee should have been informed and consulted before the C.I.A. did anything with the tapes.”

Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the committee between 2002 and 2006, said that she told C.I.A. officials several years ago that destroying any interrogation tapes would be a “bad idea.”

“How in the world could the C.I.A. claim that these tapes were not relevant to a legislative inquiry?” she said. “This episode reinforces my view that the C.I.A. should not be conducting a separate interrogations program.”

In both 2003 and 2005 C.I.A. lawyers told prosecutors in the Moussaoui case that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge. Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui, showing that the Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that the court had sought tapes of “specific, named terrorists whose comments might have a bearing on the Moussaoui case” and that the videotapes destroyed were not of those individuals. Intelligence officials identified Abu Zubaydah as one of the detainees whose interrogation tape was destroyed, but the other detainee’s name was not disclosed.

General Hayden has said publicly that information obtained through the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program has been the best source of intelligence for operations against Al Qaeda. In a speech last year, President Bush said that information from Mr. Zubaydah had helped lead to the capture in 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes had existed until 2005.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

Mr. Gimigliano, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency “went to great lengths to meet the requests of the 9/11 commission,” and that the C.I.A. had preserved the tapes until the commission ended its work in case members requested the tapes.

Several current and former intelligence officials were interviewed for this article over a period of several weeks. All requested anonymity because information about the tapes had been classified until General Hayden issued his statement on Thursday acknowledging that they had been destroyed.

The C.I.A. program that included the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects began after the capture of Mr. Zubaydah in March 2002. The C.I.A. has said that the Justice Department and other elements of the executive branch reviewed and approved the use of a set of harsh techniques before they were used on any prisoners, and that the Justice Department issued a classified legal opinion in August 2002 that provided explicit authorization for their use.

Some members of Congress have since sought to ban some of the techniques, saying that they amounted to torture, which is prohibited under American law. But President Bush, who revealed the existence of the C.I.A. program in September 2006, has defended the techniques as legal, and has said they have proven beneficial in obtaining critical intelligence information.

Some of the harshest techniques, including waterboarding, which induces a feeling of drowning and near-suffocation, were used on several of the first Qaeda operatives captured by the C.I.A., including Abu Zubaydah. But intelligence officials have said that waterboarding is no longer on an approved list spelled out in a classified executive order that was issued by the White House this year.

In his statement, General Hayden said the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.” He said the agency stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

“The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages,” he said. He said they were destroyed only after the agency’s Office of the General Counsel and Office of the Inspector General had examined them and determined that they showed lawful methods of questioning.

Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said General Hayden’s claim that the tapes were destroyed to protect C.I.A. officers “is not credible.”

“Millions of documents in C.I.A. archives, if leaked, would identify C.I.A. officers,” Mr. Malinowski said. “The only difference here is that these tapes portray potentially criminal activity. They must have understood that if people saw these tapes, they would consider them to show acts of torture, which is a felony offense.”

It has been widely reported that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to several tough physical tactics. But the current and former intelligence officials who described the decision to destroy the videotapes said that C.I.A. officers had judged that the release of photos or videos depicting his interrogation would provoke a strong reaction.

In exchanges involving the Moussaoui case, the C.I.A. notified the United States attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., in September that it had discovered two videotapes and one audio tape that it had not previously acknowledged to the court, but made no mention of any tapes destroyed in 2005.

The acknowledgment was spelled out in a letter sent in October by federal prosecutors that amended the C.I.A.’s previous declarations involving videotapes. The letter is heavily redacted, with sentences identifying the detainees blacked out.

Signed by the United States attorney, Chuck Rosenberg, the letter states that the C.I.A.’s search for interrogation tapes “appears to be complete.”

Mr. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing legislation in Congress to have all detainee interrogations videotaped so officials can refer to the tapes multiple times to glean better information.

Mr. Holt said he had been told many times that the C.I.A. did not record the interrogation of detainees. “When I would ask them whether they had reviewed the tapes to better understand the intelligence, they said, ‘What tapes?’,” he said.

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane contributed reporting.

    C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations, NYT, 7.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/washington/07intel.html?hp

Details in Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran, U.S. Says

December 6, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday.

The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles.

The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active. But according to the intelligence and government officials, they give no hint of why Iran’s leadership decided to halt the covert effort.

Ultimately, the notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, the officials said, including intercepted conversations among Iranian officials, collected in recent months. It is not clear if those conversations involved the same officers and others whose deliberations were recounted in the notes, or if they included their superiors.

The American officials who described the highly classified operation, which led to one of the biggest reversals in the history of American nuclear intelligence, declined to describe how the notes were obtained.

But they said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

“It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation.

The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programs that American officials first learned about from a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the C.I.A. in 2004.

Ever since the major findings of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program were made public on Monday, the White House has refused to discuss details of what President Bush, in a news conference on Tuesday, termed a “great discovery” that led to the reversal.

Some of Mr. Bush’s critics have questioned why he did not adjust his rhetoric about Iran after the intelligence agencies began to question their earlier findings.

In a statement late Wednesday, the White House revised its account of what Mr. Bush was told in August and acknowledged that Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had informed him new information might show that “Iran does in fact have a covert weapons program, but it may be suspended.”

Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, said Mr. McConnell had warned the president that “the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran’s covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn’t be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data.”

A senior intelligence official and a senior White House official said that Mr. McConnell had been cautious in his presentation to Mr. Bush in an attempt to avoid a mistake made in the months leading to the Iraq war, in which raw intelligence was shared with the White House before it had been tested and analyzed.

“There was a big lesson learned in 2002,” the senior intelligence official said. “You can make enough mistakes in this business even if you don’t rush things.”

In fact, some in the intelligence agencies appear to be not fully convinced that the notes of the deliberations indicated that all aspects of the weapons program had been shut down.

The crucial judgments released on Monday said that while “we judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years,” it also included the warning that “intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate” led both the Department of Energy and the National Intelligence Council “to assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program.”

The account is the most detailed explanation provided by American officials about how they came to contradict an assertion, spelled out in a 2005 National Intelligence Estimate and repeated by Mr. Bush, that Iran had an active weapons program.

Several news organizations have reported that the reversal was prompted in part by intercepts of conversations involving Iranian officials. In an article published on Wednesday, The Los Angeles Times said another main ingredient in the reversal was what it called a journal from an Iranian source that documented decisions to shut down the nuclear program.

The senior intelligence and government officials said a more precise description of that intelligence would be exchanges among members of a large group, one responsible for both designing weapons and integrating them into delivery vehicles.

The discovery led officials to revisit intelligence mined in 2004 and 2005 from the laptop obtained from the Iranian engineer. The documents on that laptop described two programs, termed L-101 and L-102 by the Iranians, describing designs and computer simulations that appeared to be related to weapons work.

Information from the laptop became one of the chief pieces of evidence cited in the 2005 intelligence estimate that concluded, “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons.”

The newly obtained notes of the deliberations did not precisely match up with the programs described in the laptop, according to officials who have examined both sets of data, but they said they were closely related.

On Wednesday President Bush repeated his demand that Iran “come clean” and disclose details of the covert weapons program that American intelligence agencies said operated from the 1980s until the fall of 2003.

Iran’s government, Mr. Bush said, “has more to explain about its nuclear intentions and past actions, especially the covert nuclear weapons program pursued until the fall of 2003, which the Iranian regime has yet to acknowledge.”

Mr. Bush spoke at Eppley Airfield near Omaha, where a visit intended to showcase health care and to raise money for a Senate race was overshadowed by the furor caused by the National Intelligence Estimate and Iran’s taunting reaction to it.

He faced calls from across the political spectrum for the United States to make a more concerted effort to negotiate with Iran, offering a package of incentives that could persuade it to suspend its uranium enrichment program and clear up concerns that it is building a civilian energy program to develop the expertise for a covert military program.

“Bush has made a big mistake, and he’s not responding in a way that gives confidence that he’s on top of this,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency and president of the Institute for Science and International Security. “He isn’t able to respond because he’s not able to say he’s wrong.”

Mr. Bush, though, made it clear that there would be no immediate change in the United States’ approach, saying that the administration had already offered to talk, though on the condition that Iran suspend its current enrichment program first, as called for in two United Nations Security Council resolutions. Administration officials have said that they would continue to advocate tougher sanctions, which seems increasingly unlikely.

    Details in Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran, U.S. Says, NYT, 6.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/world/middleeast/06intel.html?hp

New Data and New Methods Lead to Revised View on Iran

December 5, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — How could American intelligence agencies have overstated Iran’s intentions in 2005 so soon after being reprimanded for making similar errors involving Iraq?

The spy agencies had swallowed hard and pledged to do better after a presidential commission in March 2005 issued a blistering accounting of the intelligence failures leading to the Iraq war.

But a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that was issued two months later said Iran’s leaders were working tirelessly to acquire a nuclear weapon — a finding that, like the prewar intelligence on Iraq, has now been acknowledged to have been wrong in one of its chief conclusions.

Current and former intelligence officials insist that much of the 2005 Iran report still holds up to scrutiny.

At the same time, they acknowledge that in retrospect, some of its conclusions appear to have been thinly sourced and were based on methods less rigorous than were ultimately required under an intelligence overhaul that did not begin in earnest until later.

It was also written by some of the same team that had produced key parts of the flawed Iraq estimate. Robert D. Walpole oversaw both reports as the national intelligence officer responsible for assessing illicit-weapons programs.

Robert Hutchings, who as head of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to early 2005 oversaw early production of the 2005 Iran assessment, said the quality of information about Iran’s nuclear program should have made American intelligence analysts wary of judging anything with “high confidence.” That was how the 2005 report described the basis for its assertion that Iran was determined to develop nuclear weapons, a conclusion that has been disavowed.

“The fact that we’ve reversed course two years later suggests that the high confidence back then wasn’t warranted,” said Mr. Hutchings, who had left the intelligence council by the time the intelligence estimate was produced in May 2005.

Paul R. Pillar, another member of the National Intelligence Council in 2005, said it was a “fair point” to criticize intelligence agencies for overstating their confidence in the judgments of the 2005 estimate. But he said the judgment that Iran is determined to obtain the bomb could prove correct in the long run.

The intelligence agencies’ 2005 finding that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program was consistent with strong warnings about Iran issued at the time by Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and John R. Bolton, then the under secretary of state. But there has been no indication that policy makers sought in any way to influence the agencies’ conclusions on Iran, which like all intelligence assessments are supposed to be immune from political pressure.

The officials said that the 2007 estimate was an attempt by spy agencies to examine the Iran problem in a new light, and that in the process they recast many of their principal judgments about Iran’s weapons programs that might have relied on outdated information.

Some sources used for the 2005 estimate were discarded for the new report, and some old information that intelligence agencies did not use for the 2005 estimate was re-examined and included in the estimate released Monday.

The new intelligence estimate concludes with “high confidence” that Iran halted work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “puzzling” and “disturbing” that intelligence agencies in 2005 could produce a flawed estimate so soon after what he called the Iraq “debacle.”

Government officials who have read both estimates said the 2005 report was filled with analysis based on somewhat murky knowledge of Iran’s capabilities and the goals of its leaders. They said the new intelligence estimate contained very specific information to back up unusually confident conclusions about the state of Iran’s weapons program.

Government officials said the new judgments were grounded largely in information from human sources that is buttressed by other information gathered by spy satellites and communications intercepts.

John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2000 to 2004 and the acting director for two months in 2004, said the agencies’ shifting view between 2005 and 2007 simply showed how difficult intelligence was to get right.

“In 2005, what we had was what we had,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “I think people should take comfort from the fact that they’ve changed their view.”

Over the past year, officials have put into place rigorous new procedures for analyzing conclusions about difficult intelligence targets like Iran, North Korea, global terrorism and China.

Analysts from disparate spy agencies are no longer pushed to achieve unanimity in their conclusions, a process criticized in the past for leading to “groupthink.” Alternate judgments are now encouraged.

In the case of the 2007 Iran report, “red teams” were established to test and find weaknesses in the report’s conclusions. Counterintelligence officials at the C.I.A. also did an extensive analysis to determine whether the new information might have been planted by Tehran to throw the United States off the trail of Iran’s nuclear program.

One result was an intelligence report that some of the intelligence community’s consistent critics have embraced.

“Just possibly, the intelligence community may have taken a major step forward,” Senator Rockefeller said.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

    New Data and New Methods Lead to Revised View on Iran, NYT, 5.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/washington/05intel.html?hp

Iran Welcomes New US Intelligence Report

December 4, 2007
Filed at 12:53 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's foreign minister on Tuesday welcomed the U.S. decision to ''correct'' its claim that Tehran has an active nuclear weapons program, state-run radio reported.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was referring to a U.S. intelligence assessment released Monday that reversed earlier claims that Iran had restarted its weapons program in 2005 after suspending it in 2003.

''It's natural that we welcome ... countries that correct their views realistically which in the past had questions and ambiguities about (Iran's nuclear activities),'' Mottaki said.

The new U.S. intelligence report Monday concluded that Iran's nuclear weapons development program has been halted since the fall of 2003 because of international pressure.

The finding is part of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that also cautions that Tehran continues to enrich uranium and still could develop a bomb between 2010 and 2015 if it decided to do so.

The conclusion that Iran's weapons program was still frozen, through at least mid-2007, represents a sharp turnaround from the previous intelligence assessment in 2005.

Then, U.S. intelligence agencies believed Tehran was determined to develop a nuclear weapons capability and was continuing its weapons development program. The new report concludes that Iran's decisions are rational and pragmatic, and that Tehran is more susceptible to diplomatic and financial pressure than previously thought.

''Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005,'' says the unclassified summary of the secret report.

The findings come at a time of escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, which President Bush has labeled part of an ''axis of evil,'' along with Iraq and North Korea.

At an Oct. 17 news conference, Bush said, ''If you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.''

Rand Beers, who resigned from Bush's National Security Council just before the Iraq war, said the report should derail any appetite for war on the administration's part, and should reinvigorate regional diplomacy. ''The new NIE throws cold water on the efforts of those urging military confrontation with Iran,'' he said.

However, Israel's defense minister said Tuesday that Israeli intelligence believes Iran is still trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

''There are differences in the assessments of different organizations in the world about this, and only time will tell who is right,'' Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio.

On Monday, senior intelligence officials said they failed to detect Iran's fall 2003 halt in nuclear weapons development in time to reflect it in the 2005 estimate.

One of the officials said Iran is the most challenging country to spy on -- harder even than North Korea, a notoriously closed society. ''We put a lot more collection assets against this,'' the official said, ''but gaps remain.'' The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, said the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains ''a serious problem.''

''The bottom line is this: For that strategy to succeed, the international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution,'' Hadley said.

Bush was briefed on the 100-page document on Nov. 28. National Intelligence Estimates represent the most authoritative written judgments of all 16 U.S. spy agencies. Congress and other executive agencies were briefed Monday, and foreign governments will be briefed beginning Tuesday, the officials said.

The intelligence officials said they do not know all the reasons why Iran halted its weapons program, or what might trigger its resumption. They said they are confident that diplomatic and political pressure played a key role, but said the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Libya's termination of its nuclear program and the implosion of the illegal nuclear smuggling network run by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan also might have influenced Tehran.

To develop a nuclear weapon, Iran needs to design and engineer a warhead, obtain enough fissile material, and build a delivery vehicle such as a missile. The intelligence agencies now believe Iran halted warhead engineering four years ago and as of mid-2007 had not restarted it.

But Iran is still enriching uranium for its civilian nuclear reactors that produce electricity. That leaves open the possibility that fissile material could be diverted to covert nuclear sites to produce highly enriched uranium for a warhead.

This national intelligence estimate was originally due in the spring of 2007 but was delayed because the agencies wanted more confidence their findings were accurate, given the inaccuracy of the 2002 intelligence estimate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., said the report showed ''a level of independence from political leadership that was lacking in the recent past.''

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell decided last month that key judgments of NIEs should not be declassified and released. The intelligence officials said an exception was made in this case because the last assessment of Iran's nuclear program in 2005 has influenced public debate about U.S. policy toward Iran, and must be updated to reflect the latest findings.

------

Associated Press writers Pamela Hess in Washington and Matti Friedman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

    Iran Welcomes New US Intelligence Report, NYT, 4.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html

Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Report on Weapons

By STEVEN ERLANGER and GRAHAM BOWLEY
December 5, 2007
The New York Times
 

JERUSALEM, Dec. 4 — Israel today took a darker view of Iran’s nuclear ambitions than the assessment released by United States intelligence agencies on Monday, saying it was convinced that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.

It said Iran had probably resumed the nuclear weapons program the American report said was stopped in autumn 2003. “It is apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a certain period of time,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio. “But in our estimation, since then it is apparently continuing with its program to produce a nuclear weapon.”

Israel led the reaction around the world today to the new intelligence assessment released in the United States on Monday that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Iran welcomed the report. “It is natural that we welcome it,” the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told state-run radio. “Some of the same countries which had questions or ambiguities about our nuclear program are changing their views realistically.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna said the new assessment should now help ease the international confrontation with Iran and prompt it to cooperate fully with the United Nations nuclear watchdog. The agency had been criticized in the past by the Bush administration for not pressing Iran hard enough on its nuclear intentions.

"This new assessment by the U.S. should help to defuse the current crisis," the IAEA’s director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said in a statement.

"At the same time, it should prompt Iran to work actively with the IAEA to clarify specific aspects of its past and present nuclear program as outlined in the work plan and through the implementation of the additional protocol."

But the United States, Britain and France urged the international community to maintain pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment activities despite the new assessment.

"We think the report’s conclusions justify the actions already taken by the international community to both show the extent of and try to restrict Iran’s nuclear program and to increase pressure on the regime to stop its enrichment and reprocessing activities," a spokesman for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was quoted by Reuters as saying.

"It confirms we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons and shows that the sanctions program and international pressure were having an effect,” he said.

France expressed a similar opinion. "It appears that Iran is not respecting its international obligations," a French foreign ministry spokeswoman was quoted by Reuters as saying.

"We must keep up the pressure on Iran,” the spokeswoman said, adding that France “will continue “to work on the introduction of restrictive measures in the framework of the United Nations.”

At a meeting with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, today in Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said Iran should ensure its nuclear activities are "open and transparent," Bloomberg reported. Mr. Putin’s spokesman said that Russia is offering to supply Iran fuel for the Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr, in southern Iran, with the intention of persuading Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, Bloomberg reported.

“The sooner we ship it, the less they will have a need for their own program," the spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was quoted as saying.

The new American intelligence assessment comes at a sensitive time, when the six powers involved in negotiating with Iran — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France, and Germany — have decided to press ahead with a new United Nations Security Council resolution.

Iran had maintained since 2003, when it started negotiations with the three European countries, France, Germany and Britain, that its program was peaceful and not meant for military purposes. It insisted that it wanted to enrich uranium to produce nuclear fuel for its nuclear reactors.

However, the West had accused Iran of having a clandestine nuclear program. The Security Council has already imposed two sets of sanctions on Iran for its defiance to halt its enrichment program.

With his comments today, Mr. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, came close to contradicting the American assessment of “moderate confidence” that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program by mid-2007 and that the halt to the weapons program “represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program.”

In other words, while the Americans think Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program while continuing to enrich uranium as rapidly as it can, Israel thinks that Iran has resumed its nuclear weapons program with the clear aim of building a nuclear bomb.

Israel must act in accordance with its intelligence estimates, Mr. Barak suggested. “It is our responsibility to ensure that the right steps are taken against the Iranian regime. As is well known, words don’t stop missiles.”

Assessments may differ, Mr. Barak said, “but we cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.”

Mr. Barak also said that the apparent source for the new American assessment on the weapons program was no longer functioning. “We are talking about a specific track connected with their weapons building program, to which the American connection, and maybe that of others, was severed,” Mr. Barak said cryptically.

It was only today that Israel received and began to assess a copy of the classified American report, which is believed to run some 130 pages, Israeli officials said.

Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that diplomacy remained the correct path for now to deter Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. But he was explicit about the Israeli conclusion that Iran’s intention is military, not civilian.

“We believe that the purpose of the Iranian nuclear program is to achieve nuclear weapons,” Mr. Regev said. “There is no other logical explanation for the investment the Iranians have made in their nuclear program.”

Some of the differences on estimates for when Iran could be capable of producing a bomb are slight, a matter of a few months, between Israel’s estimate of late 2009 or early 2010 to Washington’s 2010-2015. “A lot of it is splitting hairs,” Mr. Regev said. “Is it 2009 or 2010? Is it likely or very likely? These words are vague.”

Mr. Olmert, who had been briefed on the new assessment in Washington last week, tried to play down the gap in judgments with Washington. “According to this report, and to the American position, it is vital to continue our efforts, with our American friends, to prevent Iran from obtaining non-conventional weapons,” he said.

The American assessment said that Iran probably halted the weapons program “primarily in response to international pressure,” a judgment Israel embraced as a call for further diplomatic action.

But Israeli experts on Iran said that the American report will make any action against Iran less likely, whether diplomatic or military, and would probably kill or dilute American-led efforts to pass another sanctions resolution through the United Nations Security Council.

Efraim Kam, former Israeli military intelligence official on Iran and deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said that the report “makes it very hard for anyone in the United States or Israel who was thinking of going for a military option.”

If American intelligence thinks there is no military nuclear program, “that makes it harder for Israel to go against it,” he said, since an Israeli attack would require operational coordination with Washington, “and will also make it harder to pass tougher sanctions. A lot of countries will be happy to go along with that — Russia, China — it’s a gift for the Iranians.”

He said the American assessment surprised him. “The report says its assessment is correct for now, but it could change any time,” he said. “Maybe the Iranians assessed that it was better for them to halt the military program and concentrate on enriching uranium,” which takes a long time, “and then go back to it.”

Iran was shocked this week when Chinese banks refused loans to Iranian businessmen, probably because of American pressure.

The head of the Iran-China chamber of commerce said Monday that over the past week Chinese state banks had refused to open a letter of credit for Iranian businessmen, the daily Etemad reported.

“The banks have not given any reason for these restrictions yet,” he said, adding that a trade delegation was in Beijing to discuss the restriction and that Iran’s central bank was also negotiating with the Chinese.
 

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.

    Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Report on Weapons, NYT, 4.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/world/middleeast/05webreact.html?hp

U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work

December 3, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to be major factor in the tense international negotiations aimed at getting Iran to halt its nuclear energy program. Concerns about Iran were raised sharply after President Bush had suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III,” and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.

The finding also come in the middle of a presidential campaign during which a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear program has been discussed. The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran’s ultimate intentions about gaining a nuclear weapon remain unclear, but that Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.”

“Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways might — if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible — prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program,” the estimate states.

The new report comes out just over five years after a deeply flawed N.I.E. concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons programs and was determined to restart its nuclear program. The report led to congressional authorization for a military invasion of Iraq, although most of the N.I.E.’s conclusions turned out to be wrong. The estimate does say that Iran’s ultimate goal is still to develop the capability to produce a nuclear weapon.

The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, quickly issued a statement describing the N.I.E. as containing positive news rather than reflecting intelligence mistakes. “It confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons,” Mr. Hadley said. “It tells us that we have made progress in trying to ensure that this does not happen. But the intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.”

“The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically — without the use of force — as the administration has been trying to do,” Mr. Hadley said.

Last month, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the international Atomic Energy Agency, had reported that Iran was operating 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges, capable of producing fissile material for nuclear weapons.

But his report said that I.A.E.A. inspectors in Iran had been unable to determine whether the Iranian program sought only to generate electricity or also to build weapons.

The N.I.E. concludes that if Iran were to end the freeze of its weapons program, it would still be at least two years before Tehran would have enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. But it says it is still “very unlikely” Iran could produce enough of the material by then.

Instead, today’s report concludes it is more likely Iran could have a bomb by the early part to the middle of the next decade. The report states that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research judges Iran is unlikely to achieve this goal before 2013, “because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.”

The new assessment upends a judgment made about Iran’s nuclear capabilities in 2005. At the time, intelligence agencies assessed with “high confidence” that Iran is determined to have nuclear weapons and concluded that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program.

Since then, officials said they have obtained new information leading them to conclude that international pressure, including tough economic sanctions, had been successful in bringing about a halt to Iran’s secret program.

“We felt that we needed to scrub all the assessments and sources to make sure we weren’t misleading ourselves,” said one senior intelligence official during a telephone interview, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In a separate statement accompanying the N.I.E., Deputy Director of National Intelligence Donald M. Kerr said that given the new conclusions, it was important to release the report publicly “to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.”

    U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work, NYT, 3.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/middleeast/03cnd-iran.html?hp

Text

White House Reaction to Iran Report

December 3, 2007
The New York Times

Here is the text of a statement issued today by Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, concerning the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The intelligence estimate says that, contrary to previous assessments, Iran halted the program in 2003 in response to international pressure and has probably not restarted it since then, though it has the capacity to do so.

Today’s National Intelligence Estimate offers some positive news. It confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. It tells us that we have made progress in trying to ensure that this does not happen.

But the intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem. The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically — without the use of force — as the Administration has been trying to do. And it suggests that the President has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests while ensuring that the world will never have to face a nuclear armed Iran.

The bottom line is this: for that strategy to succeed, the international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran — with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure — and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution.

    White House Reaction to Iran Report, NYT, 3.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/04irantext.html

C.I.A. Officer Admits Guilt

Over Hezbollah Files

November 14, 2007
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — A Lebanese-born C.I.A. officer who had previously worked as an F.B.I. agent pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that she illegally sought classified information from government computers about the radical Islamic group Hezbollah.

The plea agreement by the defendant, Nada Nadim Prouty, appeared to expose grave flaws in the methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct background checks on its investigators.

Ms. Prouty, 37, who also confessed that she had fraudulently obtained American citizenship, faces up to 16 years in prison.

Court papers do not specifically say why Ms. Prouty sought information about Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that is based in southern Lebanon, from the F.B.I.’s computer case files in June 2003, the month she left the bureau to join the C.I.A.

There is no accusation in the documents that she passed information on to Hezbollah or any other extremist group.

The plea agreement noted, however, that Ms. Prouty’s sister and her brother-in-law attended a fund-raising event in Lebanon in August 2002 at which the keynote speaker was Sheikh Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Sheikh Fadlallah has been designated by the United States government as a terrorist leader.

The plea agreement said that in 2003 Ms. Prouty specifically went searching for computerized case files maintained by the F.B.I.’s Detroit field office in an investigation that centered on Hezbollah although she “was not assigned to work on Hezbollah cases as part of her F.B.I. duties and she was not authorized by her supervisor, the case agent assigned to the case, or anybody else to access information about the investigation in question.”

The C.I.A. would not describe Ms. Prouty’s duties at the agency, apart from describing her as a “midlevel” employee, nor would it say if she traveled abroad as part of her duties or had been considered undercover.

Government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the investigation with reporters, said Ms. Prouty was an “operations” officer at the C.I.A., meaning she was involved in some way in basic espionage work, not as an analyst or translator.

As part of the plea agreement, she agreed to resign from the C.I.A. and give up any claim to American citizenship.

“It is fitting that she now stands to lose both her citizenship and her liberty,” Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general, said in announcing the guilty plea, which was entered in Federal District Court in Detroit.

Mr. Wainstein, who runs the Justice Department’s national security division, said Ms. Prouty “engaged in a pattern of deceit to secure U.S. citizenship, to gain employment in the intelligence community and to obtain and exploit her access to sensitive counterterrorism intelligence.”

She pleaded guilty to one count each of criminal conspiracy, which has a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine; unauthorized computer access, which has a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine, and naturalization fraud, which has a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

In her plea agreement, Ms. Prouty, who lived mostly recently in Vienna, Va., close to the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va, acknowledged that her crimes began shortly after she entered the United States from Lebanon in June 1989 on a one-year student visa.

She acknowledged that after overstaying her visa, she had illegally offered money to an unemployed American man to marry her in 1990, which allowed her to remain in the United States as his wife, although the couple never lived together.

She then submitted a series of false and forged documents to obtain American citizenship, which she was granted in 1994. She obtained a divorce the next year and worked in a series of jobs, including as a waitress and hostess in a chain of Middle Eastern restaurants in the Detroit area owned by her brother-in-law.

In 1997, she was hired as a special agent of the F.B.I., which has been under pressure for years to hire more agents and other employees who speak Arabic for terrorism investigations. She was assigned to the bureau’s Washington field office, given a security clearance and placed in “an extraterritorial squad investigating crimes against U.S. persons overseas,” the Justice Department said in a statement to reporters.

Ms. Prouty acknowledged two sets of illegal computer searches at the F.B.I. The first, in September 2002, involved case files that contained her name, her sister’s name or her brother-in-law’s name. The second, in June 2003, involved files from a national-security investigation of Hezbollah that was being conducted in Detroit, which has one of the nation’s largest Arabic-speaking communities.

The court papers say Ms. Prouty’s crimes first became known to the F.B.I. in December 2005 and have been under investigation for nearly two years. The documents suggest that she came under scrutiny as part of an investigation of her brother-in-law, Talal Khalil Chahine, in a scheme to funnel millions of dollars from his restaurant to people in Lebanon. Mr. Chahine is a fugitive from tax evasion charges filed in Michigan.

C.I.A. Officer Admits Guilt Over Hezbollah Files, NYT, 14.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/washington/14spy.html