It seems odd, then, that the officials running the CIA interrogation program kept things secret from the highest elected officials and thus, as the report puts it, “impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.” First, the history of these sorts of programs suggests they were carrying out White House decisions. Second, President Bush and especially Vice President Dick Cheney supported the program, and they still emphatically defend it. Bush wrote in his memoirs that he approved it.
The committee’s own account contains anomalies on this question. For instance, the report cites an internal CIA email noting that “the [White House] is extremely concerned [that Secretary of State Colin] Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on.” That was written in July 2003, nearly three years before Bush was supposedly first briefed on the program, yet someone in the White House not only knew about it, but knew enough to know that certain Cabinet secretaries—in this case, a former Army general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff well-versed in the Geneva Conventions and official manuals on interrogation—might object.
The report also cites a briefing by a CIA station chief to a government official in a foreign country where the agency had set up a secret detention center. “The presentation,” the report says of the briefing, “also noted that the president of the United States had directed that he not be informed of the location of the CIA detention facilities to ensure he would not accidentally disclose the information.”
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