CIA relieved by Bush statement on "secret" prisons overseas

WASHINGTON--Employees at CIA headquarters stood transfixed at television sets Wednesday in a moment one senior official called "electric" as President Bush told the nation about the agency's covert prison system--a program once considered so secret that even Bush did not know the details.

"I know it's going to make a lot of people sleep well at night," one counterterrorism officer said of the disclosure. The feeling of relief by the very people carrying out the program was a striking indication of how deeply attitudes have changed within the government about the administration's unorthodox counterterrorism tactics and the need to shroud them in secrecy.

"Finally the burden of this program will not rest only on the shoulders of the CIA," said James Pavitt, who headed CIA covert operations when the program was put in place, with White House approval, after Sept. 11, 2001. "This was a tough world and we were asked to do some tough things," he said, adding that such efforts were always within the law.

Although it was a recent Supreme Court ruling that forced the program into legal limbo and likely pushed the president into going public, the administration had begun debating whether to suspend the CIA's so-called black sites at least a year ago. European allies as well as senior officials at the departments of State and Justice and the CIA, along with a handful of lawmakers, lobbied to abandon the program for something more transparent and with more legal protections of detainees.

In the last year, the CIA has studied more closely the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques it and other agencies have used and concluded that some of those were worth discarding. CIA officials have eliminated some of those techniques and, within the last two months, begun to consult for the first time with the full Senate and House intelligence committees about creating a new list of techniques.

But the rules for a new CIA prison system are still unsettled.

"Although there is no one in CIA custody today, it's our intent that the CIA detention program continue," said a senior intelligence official. "It's simply been too valuable in the war on terrorism to not allow it to move forward."

The idea, said several administration officials, is to get Congress's political buy-in to a program that is fraught with some of the most difficult questions facing the government: how a country steeped in the rule of law should treat suspected terrorists it believes has valuable information.

When it set up the program, the CIA--at the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney and a White House general counsel's office with an unconventional view of what constituted torture asserted that it needed to hide prisoners in secret locations around the world and to harshly interrogate them to extract time-sensitive information about possible terrorists attacks.

Government professionals worried about the program's effectiveness and legality. As controversy spread within Congress and around the world through media reports, some argued the program was becoming counterproductive.

Some CIA employees refused to sit in meetings where the prisons or interrogation methods were being discussed. Others consulted lawyers.

Administration officials said Wednesday that the need for secret CIA prisons continues, but that they will seek legislation immunizing CIA employees from prosecution for anything they may have been asked to do that might now be considered illegal. At the same time, the administration will ask the intelligence

committees to give it guidance to draw up a separate, shorter list of harsh techniques it might still employee under certain circumstances.

The point, said one senior official, "is to make the program more durable" and not "subject to the pendulum swings" of Congress or the president. Several officials interviewed requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the program. Others were permitted by the administration to talk to reporters but not to disclose their identities.

Part of the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, the prison system grew to include eight countries, including several in Eastern European democracies, according to current and former intelligence officials. A senior intelligence official said Wednesday that the system held nearly 100 people over the life of the program, but no more than a couple of dozen at any one time.

The prisons were made legal under U.S. law with a presidential finding allowing the agency to set them up. But they were illegal in the democratic countries in which they operated. Only a small handful of foreign intelligence officials--and usually one or two top political leaders ever knew of their existence. Only CIA personnel were allowed on the sites, one of which was located on a Sovietera compound in Eastern Europe. Others were once located in Thailand and Afghanistan.

A written defense of the program issued by the administration Wednesday said it would be "practically impossible" to act quickly on "information from one detainee in the questioning of another" if they were all in the custody of different foreign governments. But the statement did not explain why that couldn't also have been accomplished if the detainees had been held together at Guantanamo Bay.