'Meet the Press' transcript for March 30, 2008

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me turn to the whole issue of the apprehension of a terrorist--or alleged terrorists and how they're treated.  The--as you know, several years ago the Army, in its manual, rewrote the sections about torture and interrogation.  "A new U.S. Army manual bans torture and degrading treatment of prisoners, for the first time specifically mentioning forced nakedness, hooding and other procedures that have become infamous since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.  ...

"It also explicitly bans beating prisoners, sexually humiliating them, threatening them with dogs, depriving them of food or water, performing mock executions, shocking them with electricity, burning them, causing other pain and a technique called water torturing--or `waterboarding' that simulates drowning, said Lieutenant General John Kimmons, Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence.  Officials said the revisions are based on lessons learned since the U.S. began taking prisoners in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the" U.S.

Now, that's the Army.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  Does not apply to the Central Intelligence Agency.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Correct.

MR. RUSSERT:  But John McCain, who will be the Republican nominee for president, a former POW, said this:  "All I can say is that" waterboarding "was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today.  ...  It is torture."

Do you believe that waterboarding's torture?

GEN. HAYDEN:  What's more important is what the Department of Justice believes, and, frankly, the question of waterboarding, I've, I tried to point this out in as many ways as I can publicly, is an uninteresting question for the Central Intelligence Agency.  We have not--and I, I made this public last month--we have not waterboarded anyone in now over five years, and only three people have been waterboarded in in the life of the CIA's interrogation program.

The issue with the Army Field Manual is not the false dichotomy that, that some people want to create, that on the one hand you've got the Army field manual and on the other hand you've got the licensing of torture.  That, that's not the choice at all.  The Army has listed--and by the way, the real debate, the real impact for us isn't on the list of things you've forbidden. That's fairly uninteresting to us.  What's critical for the Army Field Manual, were it to be applied to CIA, is what's authorized and limiting the CIA only to what's authorized.  No one claims that that list of authorized techniques in the Army Field Manual exhausts the universe of lawful interrogation techniques that the republic can draw on to defend itself.  And so the issue for us is, is, is not torture or licensing torture or licensing waterboarding. And to the best of my ability I've made it very clear that we don't do that. But to limit us to what America's Army thinks they can train young soldiers to do under minimal supervision against lawful combatants in a transient battlefield situation, when our circumstances are completely different, means we're undercutting our ability to defend the nation.

MR. RUSSERT:  As you know, many in Congress disagree.  They think the CIA should abide by...

GEN. HAYDEN:  I know.

MR. RUSSERT:  ...what's in the Army Field Manual.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  Because they don't want U.S. servicemen who are taken in captivity by others to be tortured.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Right.  Well, first of all, we're not talking about torture, all right?  I mean, torture is a legal term.  Now, there are some things that are illegal that are not, that are not torture.  And so we cloud the debate when, when we throw the word torture out there, I think, in a far too casual way.  But, but I understand the concerns of members of Congress.  And I've said this to them personally, I've said it to them publicly and I've said it to them in closed hearing sessions, that if you want to limit what CIA does, we'll live inside whatever box you create.  But to simply arbitrarily take a manual created for one population and one purpose and to just drop it on another organization with a different population of interrogators, a different population of detainees in completely different purposes flies in the face of logic.

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you believe now that the Justice Department allows the CIA to engage in waterboarding?

GEN. HAYDEN:  I don't--the real answer is--I'm going to be very candid--I have no idea.  And do you know why?  Because I've not asked.  And, and I know that previous opinions may no longer be extant because there have been a series of changes in American law since those opinions were issued.

MR. RUSSERT:  So anything the CIA would do would be approved and signed off by the Justice Department?

GEN. HAYDEN:  It would have to be approved and signed off as lawful, consistent with our Constitution and our international obligations.

MR. RUSSERT:  Dick, Dick Cheney, the vice president, was on MEET THE PRESS five days after September 11th, and we had a conversation about intelligence operations, and he offered this assessment.  Let's listen.

(Videotape, September 16, 2001)

VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY:  We also have to work, though, sort of the, the dark side, if you will.  We've got to spend time in the shadows in, in the intelligence world.  A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful.  That's the world these folks operate in.  And so it's going to be vital for us to, to use any means at our disposable--disposal, basically, to, to achieve our objective.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  "The dark side," "the shadows," "use any means at our disposal"--has the CIA changed since September 11th, 2001, in the way it conducts itself?

GEN. HAYDEN:  Sure.  We've learned a great deal.  You know, we're, we're a learning organization.  And I should add, you know, within the confines of American law, obviously.  But, Tim, we're America's secret intelligence service, and the wisdom of the republic for the last 60 years is that's a good thing for this nation to have.  Right?  So we are different.  You, you come into our, you come into our main lobby, and off to the left is the gospel of John, "You should know the truth and it shall make you free." But if you walk up the stairs and you look to the left down towards our museum--which some folks say it's the best museum you'll probably never see, right?--there's a quote on the wall that says, "We are the nation's first line of defense.  We go where others cannot go, and we accomplish what others cannot accomplish." This is a special and a unique rule--role that is performed by the good men and women, law-abiding men and women, your friends and neighbors, but operating somewhat in that space that the vice president described.

MR. RUSSERT:  "In the dark side, in the shadows."

GEN. HAYDEN:  "In the shadows."

MR. RUSSERT:  After September 11th, the NSA began to eavesdrop, wiretap Americans without court approval.  That has now stopped, you need approval by the FISA courts, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Administrative courts.  How many Americans were eavesdropped on after September 11th?

GEN. HAYDEN:  I can't get into, into the specific numbers, but I can tell you that every aspect of that program has now been briefed to every member of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee and the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.  And, and to make sure everyone understands precisely what we're talking about here because, again, this kind of casual use of language--you didn't use it, and I appreciate it--but, but a lot of folks have called it "domestic spying, domestic eavesdropping." In every case these were international calls.

MR. RUSSERT:  Was it hundreds or thousands?

GEN. HAYDEN:  No, I, I, I won't get into the numbers, Tim.  But I think if I, if I were able to, I, I, I'd think the numbers would, would cause you less alarm.

MR. RUSSERT:  Were any mistakes made?

GEN. HAYDEN:  How do you mean?

MR. RUSSERT:  Did you go too far?  Did--were, were innocent people targeted?

GEN. HAYDEN:  That's, that's a great question, and it brings up the whole purpose of, of intelligence, all right?  Intelligence isn't about guilt or innocence.  Intelligence is about learning things that can protect the American people.  So that, for example, if you're to go up on, on an intercept, on a communications path, on, on a communicant, and, and you cover that communicant, and after 30 or 45 days you haven't found anything of interest, OK, that doesn't say anything about the innocence of anybody.  It may say an awful lot about their operational security.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me turn to Iran.  In 2007, November, the National Intelligence Estimate came out, and this is what, what, what it concluded: "We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. ...  We assess with moderate confidence Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." Is that still operative?

GEN. HAYDEN:  Yeah, it is.  I mean, we, we stand by the judgment.  It's a very difficult judgment.  It was made--complex judgment, too, and it, it's one that, unfortunately, tends to get oversimplified in public discourse.  I mean, another part of the report that we emphasized is that program that stopped in 2003.  It was clearly they were weaponizing, building the actual device.  It remains a program that the Iranians continue to deny ever existed.  And the other aspects of the Iranian nuclear effort beyond the weaponization--the development of fissile material, the development of delivery systems--all continue apace.

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you believe the Iranians are trying to develop a nuclear program?

GEN. HAYDEN:  I--personal...

MR. RUSSERT:  Yes.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Personal belief?  Yes.  It's hard for me to explain.  And, you know, this is not court of law stuff.  This is, this is, you know, in terms of beyond all reasonable doubt, this is, this is Mike Hayden looking at the body of evidence.  OK.  Why would the Iranians be willing to pay the international tariff they appear willing to pay for what they're doing now if they did not have, at a minimum, at a minimum, if they did not have the desire to keep the option open to, to develop a nuclear weapon and perhaps even more so, that they've already decided to do that?  It's very difficult for us to judge intent, and so we have to work back from actions.  Why the continuing production of fissile material, and Natanz?  They say it's for civilian purposes, and yet the, the planet, the globe, states around the world have offered them fissile material under controls so they can have their, their, their civilian nuclear program.  But the Iranians have rejected that.  I mean, when you start looking at that, and you get, not just the United States, but you get the U.N.  Security Council imposing sanctions on them, why would they go through that if it were not to develop the technology that would allow them to create fissile material not under international control?

MR. RUSSERT:  I can hear a lot of listeners, viewers asking, "Well, then why did Saddam Hussein not cooperate more fully if he, in fact, did not have weapons of mass destruction?" Sometimes, people behave in strange ways that we don't understand.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Oh, yeah, I understand.  But, but, again, you've asked me for an assessment, you've asked me--and I can only work from the facts that I see. In Saddam's case, he had a nuclear weapon program, he had a weapons of mass destruction program.  He stopped it, but in--almost in a deathbed confession, he tells us that he maintained, he continued to maintain the illusion because he wanted the world, or at least the neighborhood, to think that he still had these, these weapons.

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you believe that the world and many in the United States would be suspect if the United States government came forward and said, "We now believe Iran has a nuclear program, based on our experience with mass destruction in Iraq"?

GEN. HAYDEN:  My community--and, and that judgment would be based on the work of my community, has additional burdens to carry because of the Iraq NIE in which we got so much of that estimate wrong.

MR. RUSSERT:  Fifty percent of the analysts at the CIA have been hired since September 11th.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  That's extraordinary turnover.

GEN. HAYDEN:  It's not turnover, it's addition.

MR. RUSSERT:  Addition.

GEN. HAYDEN:  It's expansion, all right?  In 2007, and we've got--we, we chart this because this is a very important matter for us, just in the management of the agency, not just for today but over the long term, and the portion of our work force that has five or fewer years of experience has been growing through 2007.  In 2008, it will be the first year in which it will not be growing.  And the, and the portion of our work force that now we begin to expand is now the five to 15 year group, which is actually the group you really want to have strength in.  Those are your shop stewards and floor bosses.

MR. RUSSERT:  You also made a decision a few weeks ago to provide insurance to about two-thirds of your employees.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT:  Explain that.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Yeah.  This is liability insurance.  It's, it's not all that expensive, but the private providers do pay for lawyers and damage claims against our officers who perform--who are, who are called into court because of questions about what they've done in performance of their duties.  I felt that was absolutely essential to do.  And let me make a point here, Tim, because I think it's very important as to what this is not and what it is. What it is not is looking backwards, as some people have suggested, in trying, trying to cover alleged sins or crimes in 2003, 2004.  Like an insurance policy, you can't buy it in 2008 and have it cover things that went on before.

MR. RUSSERT:  It's not retroactive?

GEN. HAYDEN:  It's not.  It's looking forward.  And, and here's, and here's the issue.  And actually, it's one of the reasons I'm here, is that the public discourse about CIA and CIA activities has become incredibly caustic, and there are real people, as I said before, friends and neighbors, very patriotic people who comprise the work for us of the Central Intelligence Agency.  And activities of the agency have been subject to, I think, some, some, some unfair, unbalanced criticisms even though the activities of the agency have been lawful and have been based on opinions coming out of the Department of Justice.  The last thing I need as director is to have a CIA officer, when I go and tell him to do something in the shadows and point out to him it is perfectly lawful, that the Department of Justice has reviewed it, our lawyers have reviewed it, it's lawful, justice says it's OK and it's clear on its face that will help protect the nation, I do not need that officer handicapping what he thinks the next set of election results might be.  I need him to have confidence in that DOJ opinion.  I can't have that officer weighing in his mind, "This could become an issue later" and beginning to balance his kids' college tuition account with his doing his lawful duty to defend the republic. So I'm taking that off the table.  We're going to pay for that.  We're going to give people this insurance policy so that they can focus on doing their lawful duty.

MR. RUSSERT:  General Michael Hayden, we thank you very much for coming and sharing your views on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Thanks.

MR. RUSSERT:  We hope you'll come back.

GEN. HAYDEN:  Thanks very much.

MR. RUSSERT:  Thanks, General.

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