WASHINGTON — The release of internal Bush administration interrogation memos this week answered long-standing questions about the CIA's techniques for getting prisoners to talk, but left unsettled a debate in Washington over whether those methods worked.
The White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee are in the early stages of inquiries designed to address that issue, which nearly eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks remains one of the most divisive in the intelligence community.
In response to those efforts, the CIA has begun assembling thousands of classified cables that contain daily reports from the agency's secret prisons, tracking the interrogation methods used on high-value detainees and how much information was obtained as a result.
The outcome of the studies could influence whether the U.S. government ever returns to interrogation tactics that were depicted as crucial to intelligence collection under President Bush but banned by President Obama during his first week in office.
In a measure of how highly charged the issue has become, critics of the decision to release the Justice Department memos said that doing so sabotaged the White House task force's work almost before it had begun.
Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said that releasing the memos "moots the study that the president directed because it will take these techniques off the table because our enemy will know all our approaches." Hayden and others also questioned the purpose of continuing to examine the effectiveness of the CIA program if there is no prospect that even the least severe of the methods could be restored.
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Memo release
In a statement issued Thursday explaining his decision to release the memos, Obama suggested that the door was closed, saying his decision was driven in part by his desire "to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again."
The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have declined to provide details on the work of the task force, which Obama established in January to examine the interrogation issue.
The task force was charged with evaluating CIA interrogation methods and making recommendations about whether the agency should be granted authority to use techniques that go beyond the boundaries of the U.S. Army Field Manual on Interrogation. A spokeswoman for the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment except to say the work of the task force would continue.
