What's Missing from the CIA Docs

But the biggest news Monday was the extent to which the Obama administration is keeping information about the CIA program secret.

The simple fact is that the OIG report contains heavy, retro-Bush era blackouts. And the content of what is redacted is serious business indeed.

The heavy redactions begin on page 25-27 of the report: A whole section is completely deleted that appears to concern the origins of the program or possibly CIA guidance on the capture of detainees. (The section alternatively may discuss the CIA’s early reliance on rendition to third countries like Egypt.) There are also significant redactions in a section discussing the training of interrogators.

Worse, the main portions of the report discussing the interrogations of HVDs Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad are also heavily redacted.

To be sure, details emerge about the use of unauthorized techniques on some of these detainees, including the use of a power drill and handgun to frighten Nashiri. And the inspector general raises concerns about waterboarding methodology, pointing out that the technique actually used differs from the method as it is described in OLC legal authorizations. (Legal analysis apparently comes down to subtle differences about how the detainees’ mouths and noses were covered, how much water was used, and how often.)

But the discussion of the “authorized” techniques is more redacted. Another major blacked-out section occurs at pages 31-35: From the context it appears to discuss issues at CIA black sites for HVDs. And two whole pages of background information on the capture of HVDs are redacted at pages 38-40. Why is so much about the HVD program blacked out?

The worst comes at pages 45-68: A full 23 pages of information about detention and interrogation at other CIA detention sites is entirely redacted, save one sentence, 23 pages of issues, observations, critiques, and other facts—information the CIA inspector general believed was important and relevant to mention in a review of CIA operations—all blacked out. The extent of the redactions is startling. It is difficult to see the release Monday as an exercise in transparency when the version of the report offers up pages and pages of inky, obsidian nothingness.

With that said, however, there are some striking new pieces of information. One of the most important parts of the report comes not with grisly details of waterboarding or the program’s excesses with power drills or threats of rape, but confirmations and new revelations about White House involvement in approving the expansion of the CIA interrogation program in the summer of 2003.

To review, it is already known that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) was initially approved for one detainee (and one detainee only): Abu Zubaydah. It appears that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in that approval in mid-2002.

Yet as the OIG report makes clear, EITs were also later used on other detainees: Nashiri in November 2002 and KSM in March 2003. (The techniques were presumably also used on CIA detainee Ramzi Bin al-Shaiba after his arrest in September 2002.) How could this EIT “expansion” occur, when there was no legal authorization for it?

The OIG report speaks of how the CIA general counsel, John Rizzo, “continued to consult with the [Department of Justice] as the CTC Interrogation Program and the use of EITs expanded beyond the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. This resulted in the production of an unsigned document entitled, ‘Legal Principles Applicable to CIA Detention and Interrogation of Captured Al-Qa’ida Personnel’” dated June 16, 2003. From another document released Monday, a 2004 letter to the CIA from Jack Goldsmith, then head of the OLC, it appears that the June 16 document was a set of “bullet points” representing a “concurrence” of views by the CIA and OLC.