WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump's administration is preparing an executive order that would clear the way for the CIA to reopen overseas "black site" prisons, like those where terrorism suspects were detained and tortured before President Barack Obama ordered them shut down.
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In an interview Wednesday with ABC News, Trump said he believes torture works, adding that he would wage war against Islamic State militants with the singular goal of keeping the U.S. safe. Asked specifically about the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, Trump cited the extremist group's atrocities against Christians and others, and said: "We have to fight fire with fire."
Trump's three-page draft order, titled "Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants" and obtained by multiple news agencies, also would undo many of the other restrictions on handling detainees that Obama put in place in response to policies of George W. Bush's administration.
If Trump signs the draft order, he would revoke Obama's directive to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all detainees in U.S. custody. That would be another step toward reopening secret prisons outside of the normal wartime rules established by the Geneva Conventions, although statutory obstacles would remain.
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Obama tried to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and refused to send new detainees there, but the draft order directs the Pentagon to continue using the site "for the detention and trial of newly captured" detainees -- including not just more people suspected of being members of al-Qaida or the Taliban, like the 41 remaining detainees, but also Islamic State detainees. It does not address legal problems that that might raise.
The document stops short of instructing the CIA to rebuild prisons or resume interrogating terrorism suspects. Instead it calls for reviews leading to recommendations to the president on whether he should "reinstate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such a program should include the use of detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency."
'Within the bounds'
In his Wednesday interview, Trump said he would consult with new Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo before authorizing any new policy. But he said he had asked top intelligence officials in the past day: "Does torture work?"
"And the answer was yes, absolutely," Trump said.
He added that he wants to do "everything within the bounds of what you're allowed to do legally."
During the campaign, Trump had vowed to bring back waterboarding and a "hell of a lot worse" -- not only because "torture works," but because even "if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway."
A clip of Trump's interview was released after news outlets obtained copies of the draft executive order.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer cast doubt on the existence of the draft document Wednesday, saying that "it is not a White House document," and, "I have no idea where it came from."
House Speaker Paul Ryan told MSNBC that the draft order was not written by the Trump administration.
"My understanding is this was written by somebody who worked on the transition before. ... This is not something the Trump administration is planning on, working on," Ryan said.
The Pentagon didn't immediately comment.
The Associated Press obtained the draft order from a U.S. official who said it had been distributed by the White House for consultations before Trump signs it. The official wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.
The copy of the draft order obtained by The Washington Post contains editing marks and factual errors. At least one part referred to "the atrocities of September 11, 2011" instead of 2001, the actual year of the terror attacks against the U.S.
Some of the edits seek to distinguish the Trump administration from those of Obama and Bush. For example, Trump frequently accused Obama of being reluctant to call certain attacks "Islamic terrorism." Edits to the draft add references to "Islam."
The phrase "global war on terrorism," coined by the Bush administration, is struck out and replaced with "fight against radical Islamism."
There are other problematic assertions in the draft. It states, for example, that more than 30 percent of the detainees released from Guantanamo Bay "have returned to armed conflict." But statistics from the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which tracks detainee matters, suggest that figure is closer to 18 percent.
Reports about the coming order sparked alarm among Republicans and Democrats.
"The president can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the law is the law," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was tortured as a prisoner during the Vietnam War. "We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America."
CIA veterans have said the agency has no desire to return to an assignment that continues to have damaging repercussions. A lawsuit against the architects of the program has forced the agency to release documents, including internal memos showing that some employees were deeply troubled by the interrogation program from the outset.
"I just have to think there would be huge resistance and push-back," said John Rizzo, the former acting general counsel of the CIA.
Revoking orders
The draft order was accompanied by a one-page statement that criticized the Obama administration for having "refrained from exercising certain authorities" about detainees it said were critical to defending the country from "radical Islamism."
Specifically, the draft order would revoke two executive orders about detainees that Obama issued in January 2009, shortly after his inauguration. One was Obama's directive to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, and the other was his directive to end CIA prisons, grant Red Cross access to all detainees, and limit interrogators to the Army Field Manual techniques.
In their place, Trump's draft order would resurrect a 2007 executive order issued by Bush. It responded to a 2006 Supreme Court ruling about the Geneva Conventions that had put CIA interrogators at risk of prosecution for war crimes, leading to a temporary halt of the agency's "enhanced" interrogations program.
Bush's 2007 order enabled the agency to resume a form of the program by specifically listing what sorts of prisoner abuses counted as war crimes. That made it safe for interrogators to use other tactics, like extended sleep deprivation, that were not on the list. Obama revoked that order as part of his 2009 overhaul of detention legal policy.
One of the Obama orders Trump's draft order would revoke also limited interrogators to using techniques listed in the Army Field Manual. But in 2015, Congress enacted a statute locking down that rule as a matter of law, as well as a requirement to let the Red Cross visit detainees. Those limits would remain in place for the time being.
Still, the draft order says high-level Trump administration officials should conduct several reviews and make recommendations to Trump. One was whether to change the field manual, to the extent permitted by law. Another was "whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States" by the CIA, including any "legislative proposals" necessary to permit the resumption of such a program.
In written answers to questions by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pompeo said he would review whether a rewrite of the field manual was needed and left the door open to seeking a change in the law "if experts believed current law was an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country."
Information for this article was contributed by Charlie Savage of The New York Times; by Greg Miller, Karen DeYoung, Ellen Nakashima and Julie Tate of The Washington Post; and by Bradley Klapper, Desmond Butler, Deb Riechmann, Eric Tucker and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/26/2017