Monetary stimulus so i think the fed will not be raising rates for quite some time. One of the core dimensions is the fact that last year the economy grew 1. 9 with fiscal drag from higher taxes and Government Spending cuts reducing growth by 1. 3 Percentage Points so without that fiscal tightening the u. S. Economy would have been growing over 3 . Yes you know cbo does not make policy recommendations and thats very important. Policy choices depend not just on the analysis of the consequences of different courses of action but also in how one waives those consequences and what values one applies. Theres nothing special about our values. Its up to our elected leaders youre in my elected leaders to make those policy judgment. Our job is to help congress understand the consequences of alternative courses of action. I had a good job and i found the atmosphere of the treasurery to be not what i wanted. I was young and just restless. The Church Committee hearings were being televised at the same time. And this was the first congressional hearings that exposed adventures from the 50 and 60s. And big chunks of it were being televised, i believe on cspan. And i was watching it but i knew nothing about the cia. It occurred to me as i am watching the adventures that if the cia didnt have lawyers, it occurred to me they might need mew ones. I found this repeated throughout my career. Whenever cia would get into a pickle, the cry went out that the cia needed more lawyers. So i was hired in the first wave of new lawyers. Host so, believe it or not, people are still confused about why the cia is different than any other agency of the u. S. Government. So if you could, summarize why we need the cia and whose control is the cia under . The cia is a secret Intelligence Organization that has been existing since 1947. Its presence was a mystery for its first 25 years and of course it acquired this mystique over the years bias like the james bond movies and all of that. But it is unique among the federal departments in that it operates totally in secret. And two it is an instrument of the president. And that has always been the case. The president is always the master. I nexted in the book the president and i served under seven in the time. They can direct it to do things in secret. They dont have to worry about the normal congressional appropriations process. It is con convenient and attractive and overly seductive tool in the Foreign Policy arsenal. It has been and will continue to be, there has been times over the years after the scandals the cry the cia is going to be abolished but it will never happen because any party, regardless of party, wants the cia at their disposal. It can do things oversea like it can break the law of countries overseas in order to do what it needs to do. Guest yeah, week not break the u. S. Laws we can bought the spy stuff is violating International Law and all nations have intelligence agencies and are aware of that so everybody does it and it is understood. So, yeah, the cia does things a normal federal agency doesnt do and the key thing is not to get caught or screw something up. Host what i found surprising about your book was your role and how much responsibility you were given and how many times people just depended on you to make a decision they could not make or didnt want to make. I want to go back to the cold war actually where you told a story about sanko. Sanko was a defecter from the soviet union. He was a kbg operation guy really. And he defected to the cia station in moscow in early, i believe it was february of 1964, which was four months after the kennedy assassination. During the cold war, of course, defectives from the kbg were considered gold. They had a program to attract them. It is huge, sometimes vexing, but huge important part of the cia. Also has been. Here is this guy who walked in literally. He wasnt recruited. A and, you know, like a lot of defectives he had baggage. He was a heavy drinker, possible embezzlar. So he was no saint. But he came and fell into the agencies lap and he had access to the kbg file of Lee Harvey Oswald and at the time that was huge. What he said basically was that the kbg never can connection with oswald while he was in russia. Host which is what they wanted to here. Guest i was in high school then, so i wasnt under directive. I think there was some different schools of thought because some of the cia took his word, others, most notablely a legendary leader was convinced this guy was a devilish ploy by the soviet union and was dispatched to draw attention from what they thought was a kbg connection. So they decided not only that sanko was to be disbelieved, but he had to be broken. He was transported to the state and inprmplies in prison. His back story fell apart, but he never varied about this claims about oswald. Finally in 1967 after three years of this, the cia leadership decided enough was enough. And let him go and i say let him go to be in the custody of cia to resettle and try to put together an assemblance of a normal life. Fast forward from 67 to 1978 which is where i found him. And i had been in the agency two year and i was trying to figure out what was going on. I was dispatched by my bosses to go see him and he had a new identity and wife at this time. They shed their countries and shed their families in the old country when they come here and get remarried and defective divorce is a whole different story. I was dispatched to go see him in this southern town like out of mayberry. He had a nice bungalo near the water. He liked to fish. I was sent down there on a mundane issues. He was filing state papers with the local probate judge and he was using his new identity so a lot of stuff in the papers about his biography was false. So i was sent there to go to the judge and chambears and give the judge a sense of who he was and why he could not use his full name. So the kind of job you would get a kid lawyer. Host and they said dont talk about his detention. Guest that was my directions. The agency was still worried he might sue them. So i said okay, i got that. So my orders were to go fly into this little southern airport, get to my motel on the edge of town, spend the night, go in and see the judge and maybe do a call with him. So i get off the tarmac and there was sinko standing there. He is a physically opposing guy. He had a mug like ernest borg and had a gruff drawl. He was hulky as well. He is there and he says the hotel can wait, you are going to come to my house for dinner. So i said okay. I get in this big buick gaseating car he drives a million miles and we get to his car he breaks out a homemade vat of vodka and i proceed to get as drunk as ever. Host you say three decades later you can still taste it. After one shot, my hands were twingling. Then i was numb and couldnt feel my face. He was belting them down and then talked animated and he wants to talk about thing you are not supposed to talk about his detention. Guest he starts off on this. I violated my orders already. He met me at the plane, drove me to his house, pours me vodka and then goes on about his detention. Nothing i was supposed to be doing. But i was trapped and getting increasingly in etoxicated. And he started talking about what it was like to be in prison there and to be a subject to brutal depervations and all of which he his bottom line was he understood. He said i know the cia thinks i am going to sue them but i am not going to. I understood we were professionals and this is what you do to someone like me that comes over. Just tell them i am not going to sue them. I dont have hard feelings against anybody including ang angelton but the kicker was he said you go back and tell them i will never forget what they did. Host and that introduces you to the spy world and the characters that were different than other agencies you have worked for. Let me ask you about irancontra in which north was running his own shop with the help of some cia folks and exchanging arms from iran. Guest selling them. Host selling them to the contras in central america. And you had an important role, all of a sudden, in the hearings that were taking place on capital hill where the legislator was trying to figure out what happened and mow how this happen. Reporter this was 1987 and it has been ten years since sanko. I had acquired some experience. And i was put in charge of dealing with the irancontra committee which was this huge washington scandal theater with televi televised hearing gavel to gavel. And i was the guy who had to be the focal point to deal with documents provided, questions they had, or witnesses from cia they wanted to have testify. So i was the choke point. It consumed all of 1887 for me. Host at one point, you are sitting in your office next to the telephone as the hearing is on and as members need to ask the question they need to figure out if they will divulge by mistake classified information. So the aids are picking up the phone and calling you as it is being televised and you had to make the decisions. Guest i titled the chapter reality television. I decided at the onset i should stay back at Head Quarters, sit in my office, close the door and watch the live proceedings as they transpired. And it was at that post that i would look at the television the hearings went on for 40 days. I could look at the television, see a member about the to ask a question, and the aid would go off the screen and i would know what would happen in 30 seconds. I knew the aid was going to call. My guy wants to talk about this cia activity and wants to use the real name. Host you had to declassify information on the spur of the moment. Guest yeah, over the phone. And they were beyond my expertise and way beyond my pay grade but there was no time to talk about it. It happened constantly. Host talk about the prt250. Guest it was a fairly sophisticated Telephone Communication between cia Head Quarters, the command center, and cia stations around the world. Host so it would be something you would understand why you want it secure and secret in order to keep it secure. Guest it was certainly secret. A number of people used it obviously. So it was wellknown inside cia but it was never acknowledged to exist outside the cia. Not even at the whitehouse. This little tempus arose because the witness before the committee was john point dexter, the National Security advisor with reagan and he was clear he didnt know this machine existed. So what happened is if i had told the committees about it and given conversation pieces. It was between William Casey and john poindexter. Casey was overseas and calling and poindexter was at the whitehouse. So caseys ends was being recorded. During the testimony, poindexter was confronted by arthur lineman who is reading him a transcript and poindeckter is taken aback and says i have no idea i was being recorded or where it came from. And this set up a tempus at the hearing and in the media at the time because it was thought that William Casey who had a reputation of being devious had somehow constructed this tape system that no one knew about. It was huge. Host and you were being asked to tell the staffer if it was okay to tell the member they could continue asking questions and this is what you write, because i think this boils down a lot of things you were asked to do at the time you said holding the phone, i would take a breath, close my eyes and make the judgment call, heads i would agree to the disclosure of the secret, tails and i risked having the agency being accused of obstructing justice. I seemed to be alone without a ladder. Guest to me, that is what i was tempting fate now. Long story short, the committee, the committee staff, lineman, emplored me to declassified so they would say this is what the system was for. Host and the public didnt fall apart. Guest i said go ahead. And three minutes later they are reading the text they just ran by me for approval. I get a phone call from the cia director, who at the time was bob gates, he was acting direct director. I am walking down the hall and thinking this is it. I had just told the world about the system that had been in place 25 years. And gates was asking another question that had nothing to do with this. So at the end, he said did anything happen at the hearings today and i hesitated and said quitely as possible nothing much except i declassified the system and he shrugged. Dodged a bullet there. Host that sort of secrets and what happens when something is reveal said i heard you talk about before. You learned secrets dont stay secrets very long. So that is a good segway f9 11 and things that were supposed to be secret, some are, but a whole bunch are not. If you could tell me briefly, you were in the building, you could not get away from the building, there was a crowd of people trying to flee. So you started thinking like a lawyer. What are we going to need after that. You took your legal pad and started writing. Guest this is the morning of 9 11, probably an hour or two after the pentagon was hit and the world towers were already hit. They had a building line evacuation. The cia Head Quarters from langley has huge parking lots and people are streaming out. I look at the window and on the 7th floor, with a few of the sky through the big windows and i said i cannot get out and i figured the hell with it. I started trying to think and let my imagination run wild. Anything we had been doing in the Counter Terrorism field i knew was inadequate. So i started sketching out the kinds of things that if the president directed us to do we could do. And that is capturing and detaining high level terrorist, lethal operations against them, mess of Financial Assets to get into. Things we thought about at the cia but they are risky and aggressive so no president would authorize it. But this time i knew we were going to be asked to do things we had never done before so i was blue skying it. You were very much on the mark. The cia was the lead agency before the Defense Department in going into afghanistan and trying to pick up individual high value targets leaders of al qaeda. And within the couple weeks, the interrogators from the fbi mainly dont feel like they are getting anywhere with their bigtime terrorist suspects and they are asking to do enhanced techniques as we know them now. Guest and in the interim between 9 11 and late march, we constructed the first of what was known to be black slide. We constructed a secret prison overseas to put them there. Host can you tell us where that is . Guest that is one of the few remaining secrets of the program so i cannot. Anyway, so, the interrogators he was shot up badly when captured, we flew doctors from john hopkins over to patch him up. But he wasnt talking. The Interrogation Team was composed of cia and fbi interrogators. The fbi interrogators thought they were making progress i learned later. Our guys were convinced he was hol holding back and knew what we wanted to hear; about the next attack. But he wasnt going to tell us. So it was our people, not the fbi, that were committed to the stone walling and some new departure was needed in the interrogation regime host that is when you say tell me what you want to do and dont spare me details because you will have to make the decision on whether it is legal. They decribed holds, insult slap, cramped confinement which is a big box you can stand in or a small box for a fewer hours you cannot stand in, stress possessions, wall straining to strain muscles, sleep deprivation and most controversial is waterboarding and your description of how you felt after they explained those to you is what i found interesting. It left you speechless. Some of the techniques sounded something out of the three stooges like slap threats. And some were unthinkable and potentially transgress through the antitorture statutes. And then you go outside, smoke and take this in knowing you are responsible for the decision of is it legal, and if you were to decide otherwises, you would be the person whose shoulders this would rest on. What were you weighing at the time . Guest it is very hard. I probably didnt succeed in trying to describe what it was like back then and what i felt like bag then being god smacked with all of these new proposed techniques. I had no idea what waterboarding was before i was briefed by our Counter Terrorism people. But, you know, this is just a few minutes after 9 11, time was of the essence. The thought and fear around the country, and here in washington, was there wasnt a question of if there is going to be a Second Attack, as much as when. So it wasnt time for deliberation. So in my career, i never had to deal with the use antitorture statues so i had no idea what the legal line were. But the waterboarding and another technique described in the book, i would never implement this was it was, if anything, more terrifying than waterboarding. I had the process this. And right then and there this program germinated from the cia. I was chief legal officer. I had been there a long time, knew the people, i had credibility and influence. I know i could have stopped the more aggressive techniques at least. I had been at the agency to know when it was something it would get them in trouble and i knew sooner or later it would have gotten them in trouble. So i am confidant i could have stopped them. But i was Walking Around and thought to myself, we have this man in custody that if anyone compete knows anything about the seconds attack it is him. And we cannot make him tell us. I was playing out a scenario here and i could have stopped the idea that our experts and career operators thought that measures that were unpres unprecedented and there was a Second Attack on the homeland and bodies laying everywhere. And in the aftermath, i didnt know that because of me we didnt take the measures people that were essential and this is what happened as a result. And with keep in mind we had been accused by everybody of having been too risk averse and we were not aggressive enough and too timid. And here is me, the lawyer, being risk averse. Host and in a way responsible for the next talk. Guest it would have been me, i would have known that. And i am sure the investigation would have uncovered that. And in the final analysis, i couldnt take on the thought of having to live with that kind of scenario. Host had you looked up waterboarding you would find the United States hung japanese sold areas that used it because we considered it waterboarding and the spanish people thought it was torture. There is a history of using waterboarding overseas. Did you have a legal staff that you asked to look at the history of waterboarding . We did. And we did as Much Research as we could about the torture statutes. Host did they find anything . Guest i remember them coming back and saying waterboarding as the history they described, i remember it off the rouge where they are doing it. And that was one of the reasons i decided not to make the final call. It was too close given the precedents and i am not going to a approve it. So that is what led us to go to the department of justice to get a legal review of the entire program and especially waterboarding in the way the people proposed. Guest a host and they end up going to the whitehouse legal people and they approve it in memos to you and dod and others. Looking back now, so you are let me just ask one other question. So if you thought that there was a history in which this was considered torture, i can see how you might know worried your peop people, even if the whitehouse says okay, your people might be v v vulnerable at some point. What that a thought in your mind . Guest there was precedent for significant, new legal questions and for us to go to the office of Legal Council and justice department. The final legal arbitrator in the executive branch. So the Interrogation Program made everything build by comparison. I and thought, and i wanted something definitive and detailed especially if they approve the techniques. And to give the agency what i believe is maximum Legal Protection and especially mi mindful that the gs12s, 13s and 14s would carry out the programs in the prisons in the middle of nowhere. And experience taught me the opinions are finding and good as gold and would take our people secure. Host we talked about waterboarding a lot, but sleep depriving is a way they broke a deta detaine and you say that is what Collin Powell who was secretary of the state was the most concerned about. And rumsfield used to walk out not wanting to hear about it. Guest you are referring to the National Security Council Principle meetings that were held regularly during the course of the Interrogation Program. It wasnt just the cia doing. All of the policy makersf were briefed on what was going on. And i would go to the meetings with the cia director at the table and i would observe reactions. Host did it make you nervous . Guest water boring was lay laid out in detail on in how we were using it and i dont remember a lot of concerns or objections to waterboarding. But i was struck my Collin Powells demeanor. He gave off every vibe of not wanting to be in the room, but when he did speak up, i was struck my that. And given his military background he viewed the sleep depriving as the most brutal of the techniques. Rumsfield would try to ignore the meetings and the ones he couldnt, he didnt want to know about any of this. He didnt have moral objections but didnt want to be touched with it. Host which leaves you in the middle of it. You are still there representing the agency even though asking for approval. You have been out for four years. You have heard the debate about whether this constitutes i have to say that understanding your role as a client and to protect them but i get the impression, and this is my question, in the intervening years, you considered this torture. It is not something less especially in combination. And i am wondering, you know, if your people were protected, which they are, no body is going to go back and say the people that said this was okay to use, we are going to go cause them trouble now, but is there a reason that you think it is necessary to speak in the most honest way about these and do you think these techniques do amount to torture . Guest no, i dont. Torture is defined in a u. S. Statute. They were brutal. They were harsh. Some were scary. But i personal dont think they crossed the line into torture. I think some were close. I didnt think that back then. And once i got the opinions from the department of justice and there were a number of them over the years addressing the program that the techniques didnt cross the legal line into torture. And i still dont believe that. But, you know, one of things i tried to do in the book and not be a cheerleader for this program because, you know, it did get a lot of us in the agency in the kind of trouble i anticipated at the beginning. And i wasnt alone in this. No one who was deeply involved in the program was. It went on for six years. And we were never boosters of the program. If we thought that the program was not working, that it wasnt yielding results like critics have charged, we would not have done it. We would not have continued it. I certainly wouldnt have because it was growing toxic by the month. So i think i dont think it was torture and i also think it yielded benefits and listening to feedback from all of the analyst and cia, i was convinced because they were convinced it was providing worthwhile important intelligence. Host there is a body of work that suggest many people throughout the world think this amounts to torture and it has damaged our standing in the world in some important ways and they are not just what we would call human rights liberals, but they are people like Thomas Pickering who was involved in a study on this and said we need to address the world on this. Do you think value to that even though you didnt think it was torture, but so many others do believe it is, and maybe in the end it is a question of judgment . Should we somehow address this chapter in our history in the right way . Guest absolutely. All of those. There are a lot of eminent scholars, politicians, experts around the world certainly and also here in the United States who believe that and consider it being a moral stain. So, no, i dont reject th. But i mean, lets have the it all aired out. Host one of the ways that could happen is if the Senate Intelligence committee which has a very large voluminous report on this that is all classified. Do you think that should be released to air this in its entirety . Guest yeah, i do. I have no idea what is in it. Host you probably know pretty much because you know what wen on. Guest from what i read in the media, i gather it will conclude the program was worthless, largely worthless, and the information that derives from it, the stuff that was valuable could have been acquired without resorting to that. That is the story line. And it is 6,000 pages and 50,000 footnotes. A couple thinks about it. First of all, i think what they said was 6 million over four years. For whatever reason, they never interviewed anyone at the cia about the program. I dont know about or cia but i was out and i would have been happy to be do it. I dont see how you can do a review baste based just on the written record. And it is isnt bipartisan. It was done by the democratic members. Host and you can see the republican descent if they decline. Guest and i am told finally that the cia has drafted a lengthy and strong rebuttal to the premises and conclusion. So it is 6 million and the american taxpayers footed the bill for this so let make them have the appropriate action and at the same time release the cia rebuttal so people, who are inclined, can read the whole thing. If it isnt released, it is going to get leaked so lets release it. Host one of the reasons i can see it not being released is that someone in the government who has the power to say so says it will damage our relationship overseas because the secret prisons relied on relationships with other countries to keep the promises a secret. But the counsel of europe and other organization overseas have been investigating this and several countries name have repeated about the fact they did or didnt have these. You have been inside and watched these revelations about other countries come out and isnt it true the relationships repair themselves pretty quickly because they have a National Interest in work wilderness generation others guest i think that is right. We can see that with the snowden revelation and the federal government up in arms. Once the tension breaks in relations they get repaired over time. Intelligence service doesnt need to each other. And the houses of protest, when cia programs have been leaked, foreign governments and leaders get in high dutch. Behind the scenes, the Intelligence Services are reaching out to cia to say look, we have to say these things publically, this is a huge political issue, but we will keep working together. Dont take this too hard. It is just something we have to do. Host and why do they do that . Guest i think they know they have to work with the cia and the u. S. Intelligence committee. We are the source of much of the intelligence that these countries have with terrorist threats to their country. They dont want to shut off the spigot to the cia and not because love us, but because they need us. It is inevitable. Host so when you look and where you know where the prisons are, and you look at the ships, were any permanently ruined . Guest not that i know of. It is uncomfortable and embarrassing but i dont think damaging. Host and can you talk about the snowden documendocuments an that revealed. Some people are saying he should get a deal for telling the government what he released. First talk about what is your feeling about the revelations. Were you surprised to learn what the nsa was doing . The extent they were doing it . Guest it covered such a swath of activity and some of what has come out publically i wasnt surprised about. I knew what the nsa was doing. Host with the meta data collecting. Guest that wasnt a surprise nor was the electronic investigation overseoverseas. But the massive amount of
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