Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has strongly defended waterboarding as an interrogation tactic, was informed of and condoned its repeated use on a suspected terrorists, according to a report released Monday.
John Ashcroft
The 2004 report, by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, found that CIA officers “used the waterboard on [Khalid Shaikh Mohammed] in a manner inconsistent” with special training endured by military personnel and a Justice Department legal memorandum blessing its application in detainee interrogations. The latter use of the technique evolved from the former, a survival training program known as SERE.
According the report (as well as a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum declassified in April), KSM, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. Ashcroft ”was informed the waterboard had been used 119 times on a single individual,” according to the report.
CIA investigators said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than permitted by a 2002 Justice Department legal memorandum. It was previously known that Ashcroft and other high-ranking Bush administration officials were briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques, some as early as 2002, but the report describes in fuller detail what CIA officials disclosed and what Ashcroft consented to.
The report goes on:
According to the General Counsel, the Attorney General acknowledged he is fully aware of the repetitive use of the waterboard and that the CIA is well within the scope of the DOJ opinion and the authority given to CIA by that opinion.
The report returns to Ashcroft in near the end (pg. 100). In July 2003, George Tenet, then director of Central Intelligence, and the general counsel of the CIA briefed senior administration officials on the expanded use of enhanced interrogation techniques.
“At the time, the Attorney General affirmed that the Agency’s conduct remained well within the scope of the 1 August 2002 DOJ legal opinion,” the report says.
After the Justice Department reviewed the report in 2004, Jack Goldsmith, then-assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a letter to the CIA inspector general, taking issue with some of the language used to characterize Ashcroft’s positions. The letter and the report were released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU.
To clarify, Goldsmith suggested, the report’s authors should state:
The Attorney General expressed the view that the legal principles reflected in DOJ’s specific original advice could appropriately be extended to allow use of the same approved techniques (under the same conditions and subject to the same safeguards) to other individuals besides the subject of DOJ’s specific original advice. The Attorney General also expressed the view that, while appropriate caution should be exercised in the number of times the waterboard was administered, the repetitions described did not contravene the principles underlying DOJ’s August 2002 opinion.
The CIA IG never adopted the language.
This post has been updated.
