By Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent
The director of the CIA today gave the most extensive public accounting yet of the use of coercive interrogation methods, including waterboarding, and strongly urged Congress not to limit the range of methods available to U.S. intelligence agencies.
CIA director Michael Hayden told a Senate hearing that fewer than 100 people have been held by the CIA in its terrorist detention program. And of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to enhanced interrogation methods, he said.
Waterboarding admissions:
As for the controversial practice of waterboarding, Hayden told the senators it was used on only three people more than five years ago. For the first time, he named them in public - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, all accused of being al-Qaida leaders.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known to the intelligence community as "KSM," was one of the main architects of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Abu Zubaydah was believed to have been al-Qaida's top military strategist. And Al-Nashiri is believed to have been the main planner of the USS Cole bombing and al-Qaida's head of operations in the Persian Gulf.
Hayden says waterboarding was used "because of the circumstances of the time - the belief that additional catastrophic attacks were imminent at a time when the US had limited knowledge of how al-Qaida worked." All three of the men who were waterboarded are currently imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
If additional limits are placed on the CIA's interrogation rules, Hayden said, "We will play to the edges of the box that the political process gives us. Otherwise, we wouldn't be protecting America, though we may be protecting ourselves."
But whatever restrictions are imposed, he said, "We should not expect our operatives in the field to play outside the box when we enter a new period of threat. There will be no exceptions. There's no wink and a nod here." Hayden's own view, he said, is that the CIA should not be further limited in what interrogation techniques are permitted.
Congress is considering a bill that would restrict the CIA to only those methods authorized by the U.S. Army's field manual for interrogation. Hayden said that would make no sense. The Army's interrogators are young people with limited training, while the CIA's interrogators are highly trained. The Army interrogates a broad range of people, while the CIA's program is tailored to a specific group of terrorists, he said. It would make no more sense to apply the Army's interrogation manual to the CIA than it would to apply the Army's grooming standards or its rules on sexual orientation, Hayden said.
Worldwide threat:
Though al-Qaida remains a worldwide threat, its global image is beginning to lose some of its luster, Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, also said Tuesday at the intelligence community's annual threat assessment to the Senate. Nonetheless, McConnell said that "as we inflict significant damage on al-Qaida in Iraq, it may shift resources to mounting more attacks outside Iraq." So far, its terror export attempts are modest: Fewer than 100 terrorists from Iraq have left the country to establish cells elsewhere, he added.
On Iran, McConnell said the U.S. remains concerned about Iran's nuclear intentions. The intelligence community assesses "with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons," he said. It's still working on enriching uranium and developing ballistic missiles, both of which would be useful if it decides to move ahead on nuclear weapons. The earliest Iran would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon is late 2009, but that's very unlikely, McConnell said. More likely that date would be sometime between 2010 and 2015, he added.
Both McConnell and military intelligence officials said that despite the death or capture of three top leaders of the Taliban last year, its insurgent forces have expanded into previously peaceful areas of the west and around Kabul.
