WASHINGTON — A long-awaited Senate report condemning torture by the CIA has not even been made public yet, but former president George W. Bush’s team has decided to link arms with former intelligence officials and challenge its conclusions.
The report is said to assert that the CIA misled Bush and his White House about the nature, extent, and results of brutal techniques like waterboarding, and some of his former administration officials privately suggested seizing on that to distance themselves from the controversial program, according to people involved in the discussion. But Bush and his closest advisers decided that “we’re going to want to stand behind these guys,” as one former official put it.
Bush made that clear in an interview broadcast Sunday. “We’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the CIA serving on our behalf,” he told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base.”
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Former intelligence officials, seeking allies against the potentially damaging report, have privately reassured the Bush team in recent days that they did not deceive them and have lobbied the former president’s advisers to speak out on their behalf. The defense of the program has been organized by past CIA leaders like George J. Tenet and General Michael V. Hayden, two former directors, and John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy director who also served as acting director.
“Once the release occurs, we’ll have things to say and will be making some documents available that bear on the case,” McLaughlin said Sunday.
Although he could not discuss details because of a nondisclosure agreement, in general he said the report “uses information selectively, often distorts to make its points, and as I recall contains no recommendations.”
Hayden added that the former CIA team objected to the Senate’s characterization of their efforts. “We’re not here to defend torture,” he said by e-mail on Sunday. “We’re here to defend history.”
Hayden appeared earlier Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” to say that any assertion that the CIA “lied to everyone about a program that wasn’t doing any good, that beggars the imagination.”
Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who ran the CIA interrogation program, said Sunday that critics now assailing the agency were pressing it after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to do whatever it took to prevent a recurrence.
“We did what we were asked to do, we did what we were assured was legal, and we know our actions were effective,” Rodriguez wrote in the Washington Post.
A Senate official, who asked not to be named before the release of the report, said Sunday that its authors were saving their response to Hayden, Rodriguez, and others until the report was public so that they could review the facts they gathered and let Americans make up their own minds.
According to those familiar with it, the 6,000-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee takes a sharply critical view of the CIA’s interrogation of terrorism suspects in the first years after the Sept. 11 attacks, questioning the efficacy of torture and revealing more details about the program. It also suggests CIA officers may have misled officials at headquarters.
The former officials said neither Bush nor his advisers had been interviewed by the committee. William Burck, a former deputy White House counsel serving as a lawyer for Bush, was offered the opportunity to review the report on his behalf but only after it was written, at which point it was too late to offer meaningful input, former officials said.
The offer, they said, was declined.
The Senate official said the committee did not conduct interviews largely because of what was then a Justice Department criminal investigation, and said requests to coordinate interviews with the department had been rejected. But the official said the committee relied on transcripts of more than 100 previous interviews conducted by the CIA’s inspector general.
The offer to Bush’s administration to review the report before its release was made by the Obama White House, not the committee, the official said, but the committee did not object, other than to insist that whoever read it not disclose its contents before release.
The committee voted this year to release a declassified executive summary, and after months of negotiations over redactions, the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, had planned to finally make it public this week.
But Secretary of State John Kerry called Feinstein on Friday to warn that allies were concerned that its release could instigate violence and endanger Americans held captive by terrorist groups.