Torture and the Bush White House

By Steve Coll, The New Yorker

02 January 13

.I.A. memoirs have become a well-populated genre. As with mysteries or science fiction, most entries are at least diverting, as long as you are willing, on occasion, to suspend disbelief. On the intelligence-memoir shelf, the best reads usually come from rogues—for example, "A Spy for All Seasons," by Duane (Dewey) Clarridge, of Iran-Contra notoriety, or Robert Baer's two volumes of notes on his black-sheep career in the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations. (Baer's work inspired the film "Syriana.") Later this month will arrive another volume, "Company Man," an often revealing and funny memoir by John Rizzo, who worked as a lawyer at the C.I.A. for thirty years. Like Clarridge and Baer, Rizzo writes in the acerbic, nothing-to-lose voice of a borderline scoundrel. In fact, he is a deeply loyal agency insider. Between 1976 and his retirement, in 2009, he helped nine different C.I.A. directors to paper over crises, manage Presidents and White House staffs, and outlast congressional inquiries.

"Company Man" is newsy on the legal underpinnings of American counterterrorism policy after September 11th, and on the subject of torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" (E.I.T.s), as Rizzo and others who endorsed or accepted their use prefer. Rizzo provides a clear, detailed account of his decision-making and his role in the C.I.A.'s interrogation program. It includes how he might have stopped the whole ugly business by objecting forcefully when the techniques were first proposed, in furtive meetings on the C.I.A.'s executive floor, in the spring of 2002; why he decided not to stand in the way; and how he induced (suckered is more like it) the Justice Department into writing the infamous "torture memos" that sought to legally justify the C.I.A.'s activity.

We don't yet have a reliable or full chronology of the use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques in C.I.A. prisons, but we do know that, beginning in the summer of 2002, several senior Al Qaeda prisoners were waterboarded or subjected to extensive sleep deprivation, or both, in an effort to extract intelligence from them about future plots. These prisoners included Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

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