'The gloves were off.' What America did to stay safe after 9/11

0:0025 years ago today, the world trade towers to tall, gleaming, dominating the New York skyline. The idea that airplanes could crash into them, that people would jump from upper floors, that the towers would collapse. Those were things that could only happen in an awful action movie. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed our understanding of what was possible, and changed the way the US government collected, analyzed, and acted on intelligence, which created new dilemmas for US officials wrestling with how far they were willing to go to keep American safe. We gathered four of those officials this week for a live taping of NPR's National Security podcast, Sources and Methods. Joining me, or Michael Morrell, who was president George W. Bush's CIA briefer, Jane Harmon, a Democratic member of Congress representing California, John McLaughlin, then Deputy Director of the CIA, and Stephen Hadley, Deputy National Security

1:02Advisor on 9-11, and in the days after, as the intelligence community worked frantically to prevent another attack. I think it's hard to understand the actions that were taken without a sense of the mood at the time. We had been attacked, we were surprised, we did not really know from whence it came, and the intelligence community was saying at the time that their thought it was likely, or at least highly probable, that this was a first of a wave of mass casually attacks, some of which might involve weapons of mass destruction from this enemy that we felt we did not know well enough. Mayor Louise, can I add something? Please, because I think Steve made a really important point. It is really hard to overstate how worried we all were in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 that we were going to be hit again. There were many days when George Tennett and I walked from the old executive office building across West Executive Avenue

2:06to the West Wing where we said to each other, I wonder if we're going to get hit today. And these weapons of mass destruction that Steve talked about, we learned an awful lot about Al Qaeda's efforts in that arena in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. We knew they were talking to Pakistani nuclear scientists trying to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. We had reporting that maybe they were going to sneak one into New York City. It is really hard to overstate the threat that we all felt. So I think it's easy to criticize some time that we might have overreach, tear overreach there, but that context is everything. I'm going to get to some of the overreach. But if I could just, I just want to quote you and then I invite you to get in here, John, because you and I have talked about this over the years in various interviews and you told me something I was pushing you on some of the actions that the CIA took after 9-11, which we're about to get to. You told me in 2018 something that will stay with me and I'm going to quote you. You said, if you were a CIA officer back in 2002, you were torn on the one hand by the

3:11sense you might be doing something in conflict with basic values that you hold dear. On the other hand, failure to get that information might put the blood of Americans on your hands, which is about as pure distillation I have heard of what y'all are describing. Yeah, listen, difficult decisions were taken in those days and we often say we hope that no one has to make those decisions again. What I can tell you is they weren't perfectly executed, but on the other hand, the United States was not attacked by El Cade again. The gloves did come off and we got new authorities from the President. That means that the President signs a piece of paper that gives you what they call a finding, which authorizes you legally to do certain things that we had not been authorized to do before. Among them was to capture terrorists to detain them

4:12and to kill them if we in certain cases if we had named individuals that we could use lethal action on. So I was a young journalist covering my intelligence beat in those years after 9-11 and I reported from Afghanistan on the war and then from Iraq on the subsequent war and on abuses at Abu Ghrib and on waterboarding. I remember when we finally got to see the 2005 Justice Department memo that documented the CIA waterboarding, Khala Sheikh Muhammad 183 times, prompting the famous question from Diane Feinstein if something works. Why do you have to do 183 times? We were debating in this newsroom and I imagine every other newsroom, what do we call this? Is it enhanced interrogation? Can we just call it torture? John, and Mike, can you just take me inside those conversations as they unfolded at Langley? How uncomfortable were you with what was happening? Well, I think you quoted

5:16me from 2018 which was the dilemma that we were struggling with. How do you get information that you know will protect the lives of Americans and if you don't, you've got the blood of Americans on your hands. I will say that there was excessive focus on the issue of waterboarding. Waterboarding occurred only a small number of times in the first year of the program and it stopped after that. Only three people. 183 times on one of them. If you look at the Red Cross interview with Khala Sheikh Muhammad and ask him how many times were you waterboarding, he says 10 times. So that's a whole theological argument about 183 versus 10. So the thing that kept us continuing on this program and there's controversy about this but I tell you where I stand. Day after day after day we saw that this program

6:19yielded results that allowed us to then capture other terrorists. Capturing a terrorist stops operations, it disrupts them even before you've talked to them. This is the point I want to make. The anticipation of further attacks was not made up. They were planning further attacks and we stopped a number of them. We stopped all of them in so far as I know. Jane. I certainly respect the fact that the CIA and our whole intelligence community was worried about a second wave of attacks but I would say as someone who was in the chairs in Congress, I became the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee during that time and who struggled to get information that the information was not adequate at the time. I remember being briefed finally after begging by the General Counsel of the CIA on the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques about which I knew nothing and I remember writing a letter. This

7:23is not classified because this has become public to him saying I want to know what the policy guidance was for using these techniques. It turned out that these techniques were in the so-called Army CIRM manual which is how we trained our people against tactics that could be used on them. So my bottom line is there were others who were trying to get on top of this story who really cared as everyone did about doing this the right way and I'm not sure we got there fast enough. I just want to say yes. You're going to get last word on this. We briefed the senior leadership of Congress. I remember one Democratic senator who would later become an opponent, a vocal opponent. His response when he was briefed on EITs was, is that all you're doing to protect the country? My constituents would expect you to do even more

8:26because he knew the context of the moment. Then fast forward to Dave Patreus' confirmation hearing which John McCain attended as the ex officio member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Patreus and McCain had a soliloquy about EITs. At the end of that they talked about the ticking time bomb situation. There's a nuclear weapon in New York and you've got the guy who knows where it is and he won't tell you what do you do. They agreed that in that moment you would do extraordinary things. The point is to all of us after 9-11 it felt like a ticking time bomb situation. Every day. Every day. I take the point of what the atmosphere was at the time but the enhanced interrogation techniques, the torture, whatever intelligence they produced of value.

9:27How do you weigh that against the damage to America's reputation as a country that believes in the role of law? I have to say one thing. Please. The president's guidance was, do everything you can do to protect the country within the law. We have an argument about whether the lawyers got it right in these opinions that were written. But the guidance was, we were going to stay within the law. But the law kept changing. We kept changing it. The law kept changing and that was an evolution as we decided what we were and were not comfortable in doing. That's a strength of our democracy. That's not a criticism of our democracy. I promised you last word, Mike. I was just going to say that Steve mentioned earlier our concern about how the American public would react at the end of the day. You know what? They supported everything that we did. The American public and every poll that's ever been taken. It was the elite who grabbed this as an

10:33issue. The American people thought that we did the right thing to protect the country. That was Michael Morrell. President George W. Bush's CIA, briefer on 9-11. You also heard Jane Harmon, John McGlockland and Stephen Hadley. On 9-11, they were serving respectively as a California Democratic Congresswoman, deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser in the Bush White House. They joined me live. Add NPR earlier this week for a special taping of sources and methods. You can hear our our long conversation wherever you get your podcasts or you can watch the discussion on NPR's YouTube channel.