I wrote about the Feinstein report for Politico today:

The Senate Intelligence Committee spent roughly $50 million on its investigation into the CIA and apparently couldn’t find Michael Hayden’s phone number.
The committee portrays Gen. Hayden, the former CIA director, as a liar who deceived Congress about the agency’s interrogation program, yet the committee couldn’t be bothered to interview him.
That’s because it didn’t bother to interview anyone. The committee’s chair, Dianne Feinstein, says such interviews were made impossible by Justice Department investigations into the people responsible for the interrogation program, but those investigations ended years ago.
The reality is that the committee didn’t want to include anything that might significantly complicate its cartoonish depiction of a CIA that misled everyone so it could maintain a secret prison system for the hell of it.

I’ve been a defender of the CIA program all along, but, as I say in the column, the Feinstein report does add disturbing detail. It’s one thing to consider “walling” or keeping someone in a tight space in isolation; it’s another to consider these tactics when they are, as the report portrays them, continuously applied to someone for days, as we did with Abu Zubaydah or KSM. But even when we were doling out the worst we had, it’s striking how concerned the people involved were with the rules.

Consider KSM. He is, of course, the worst of the worst and we wanted to know what he knew as quickly as possible. As the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt recalled saying at the time, “I want to know what he knows, and I want to know it fast.” Who would have disagreed with that sentiment? The on-site medical officer wrote when KSM arrived, “The requirements coming from home are really unbelievable in terms of breadth and detail.”

So KSM was waterboarded. After his first session–there were 15 in total–he was put in a horizontal stress position not approved by CIA headquarters. The chief of Base, according to the report, “worried about the legal implications.”

Two days later, KSM was waterboarded twice more. He ingested a lot of water, so much that the medical officer present was “not concerned about regurgitated acid damaging KSM’s esophagus.” Here is supposedly an out-of-control government acting in utter defiance of its values–but worried about the legalities and potential harm to the terrorist being interrogated. The medical officer, meanwhile, was concerned about the dilution of KSM’s electrolytes and requested saline be used in the future.

The next day KSM was waterboarded repeatedly. When he was about to be subjected to a third session in one calendar day, the medical officer present worried that it would be the fourth in 14 hours, and thus exceed new draft guidelines setting out the limit as three in 24 hours. A debate ensued and after an assurance from a Counter Terrorism Center attorney and further authorization, KSM was waterboarded again.

Now, you can reasonably argue that we should never waterboard anyone in any circumstances. You can argue that this attention to bureaucratic detail makes it all even more horrible. But it seems to me this is intelligence officers trying as best they can to stay within the rules and the law while getting information as quickly as they can from a high-level terrorist in what they believed was, in essence, a ticking-bomb scenario. Maybe we got the balance wrong in the urgency of that moment, but it’s not cause for national self-flagellation.