In the wake of the release of the “executive summary” of the Senate Intelligence Agency reports on the CIA’s torture program, Michael Hirsh of Politico magazine scored an interview with Michael Hayden, President George W. Bush’s third CIA director. The report alleges that Bush, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell were out of the loop when it came to key details of the “enhanced” — heck, why not just call them value-added? — interrogation programs. Hayden took, um, umbrage at that.
The president personally approved the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah [in 2002]. It’s in his book! … What I can say is that the president never knew where the [black] sites were. That’s the only fact I’m aware that he didn’t know.
Then Hirsh asked if he, along with “along with others at senior levels, were misled about what was actually going on in the program?”
Hayden: My testimony is consistent with what I was told and what I had read in CIA records. I said what the agency told me, but I didn’t just accept it at face value. I did what research I could on my own…
Hirsh: You seem upset.
Hayden: Yeah, I’m emotional about it. Everything here happened before I got there [to the CIA], and I’m the one she [Sen. Feinstein] condemns on the floor of the Senate? Gee, how’d that happen? I’m the dumb son of a bitch who went down and tried to lay out this program in great detail to them. I’m mentioned twice as much in there as George Tenet—but George and Porter Goss had 97 detainees during their tenure, while I had two.
Then Hirsh says: “One of the most stunning and cited conclusions of the report is that interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
Hayden: That is untrue. … The question is, is the DoJ going to open any investigation and the DoJ answer is no. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have all this supposed documentary evidence saying the agency mistreated these prisoners and then Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice saying no, you’ve got bupkis here.
Hirsh says: “You don’t believe you’re in legal jeopardy?”
Hayden: No, not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. How could I be in legal jeopardy?
While Hayden makes some good points, they hardly absolve him from his role in the torture program. There’s more than enough blame to go around.