Michelle Shephard reports for The Toronto Star:
About 30 minutes into an interview on an outdoor deck aboard the “spy cruise,” the issue of Osama bin Laden arises.
“What can you do with him?” asks Porter Goss, the former head of the CIA, as he settles back in a padded lounge chair.
“Are we going to sit him on a deckchair and ask him to cooperate? Or are we going to put him in a place where he can’t leave?”
Goss’s point is this: Now that the Obama administration has outlawed harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, shut the CIA covert “black sites” around the world and frowned upon renditions, what are the options open to America’s intelligence service?
He insists the CIA “enhanced” methods worked.
“There are undeniable, provable, extraordinary successes,” Goss said when asked about waterboarding --- an interrogation technique that U.S. President Barack Obama denounced as torture.
For the first time since his retirement from the agency in 2006, Goss has come together with the man who replaced him, Gen. Michael Hayden, to mix tourism and terrorism aboard the MS Eurodam as it cruised the Caribbean this week.
About 130 passengers paid up to $2,000 for this privilege of unprecedented access to the former spy chiefs.
In rare and blunt interviews with the Toronto Star, the two retired leaders vehemently defended their records, Bush-era practices, and condemned the present administration for delivering what they say is an ambiguous national security policy.
For some, it may seem incongruous to discuss waterboarding when seniors graze on buffets and younger, scantily clad passengers gyrate to a Cher tune nearby.
But not for the cruise participants — a mix of former intelligence officers, students, retirees and private security consultants — who relish the chance to talk national security on their vacation.
“In the intelligence service it is difficult to retire,” said John Candor, who worked for the NSA for 25 years and attended the spy cruise with his wife, also a veteran of the electronic eavesdropping agency.
“This is an opportunity to touch the surface again, talk to old friends, see what the current mood is and then we can go back and play tennis for another year.”
The current mood among this group seems to be frustration — with challenges by the media and civil rights advocates as to how intelligence is gathered.
“We are a clandestine intelligence service,” Goss said. “Clandestine intelligence. What about that is it that the media doesn’t get?”
As the cruise moved through the choppy Atlantic Ocean this week, two important national security stories broke in Washington and New York.
The U.S. Justice Department concluded that there would be no criminal charges for the CIA destruction of videotapes that showed the waterboarding of two “high value” detainees — an investigation that enraged both Goss and Hayden.
A day later in a New York courtroom, the first ex-Guantanamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court was acquitted of all but one of 286 charges in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Tanzanian Ahmed Ghailani still faces a minimum of 20 years in prison for conspiracy, but the lack of a conviction on the murder charges has rekindled the debate on civilian trials versus indefinite detention, or military commission prosecutions for Guantanamo detainees.
The Obama administration has still not said publicly whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, would be tried in a civilian or military court, after a proposal to bring the case to New York created widespread outrage.
Hayden, who was the longest-serving director of the NSA and deputy director of the National Intelligence before he took the helm of the CIA from Goss in 2006, dismissed questions about whether the agency’s handling of terrorism suspects hindered chances of their prosecution.
“I don’t care. Why are you raising that with an intelligence officer? My job is to disrupt attacks against the homeland,” said Hayden, who retired from the CIA in February 2009.
“This is a war,” continued Hayden. “It’s about defence. It’s not about going through a judicial process.”
Hayden added that it was a “mistake” to immediately charge and read Miranda rights to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab after he failed to bomb a Detroit-bound plane in December.
“Within 50 minutes you treat him as a criminal? Not a prisoner of war and interrogate him? The first sentence is, ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ ” Hayden said of the Nigerian suspect with connections to Yemen.
“Does anyone believe the Detroit field office even had a map of Yemen with them in those first 50 minutes?”
Like Goss, Hayden supports indefinite detention — which Obama conceded may be the fate for some Guantanamo detainees despite his prior criticism of the practice.
When pressed on how the public can have confidence that they have detained guilty men, Hayden said in wartime there is the right to hold enemy combatants without trial.
“I have a moral obligation if I know this person is a combatant, if I have evidence he is a combatant, (and) if I would reveal information that deserves to be kept secret in order to prove to the Toronto Star or New York Times that he’s a combatant, I’m not going to reveal it.”
“I’ve had this question asked, ‘Well this war could go on for decades.’ My response is, ‘Yeah. Not my fault.’ ”