Read the entire transcript of CIA Director, Gen.Michael Hayden, appearance this week on Meet The Press. Here are some excerpts:
MR. RUSSERT: I want to go back to '07 when Bob Woodward wrote a piece in The Washington Post about comments you made to the Iraqi Study Group, and have a chance to talk about that regarding Iraq.
"On the morning of November 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered ... in the ... Roosevelt Room of the White House. CIA Director Michael Hayden ... said, `the inability of the [Iraqi] government to govern seems irreversible,' adding that he could not `point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around,' according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.
"`The government is unable to govern,' Hayden concluded. `We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balance, and it cannot function.'"
Is that an accurate assessment of what you said?
GEN. HAYDEN: It's an incomplete assessment of, of what I said. What, what I said was inability to govern or turn this around in the short term is, is what I precisely said. And then I, I tried to use a sports metaphor. I talked about running a marathon, and what I, what I said to the, to the group there is I'd run a marathon in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh's pretty hilly, as you know, and at about mile 21 there's a two-mile downhill stretch. And as you get down to the bottom of that hill, it's only three miles to the finish and you run three miles before church on Sunday. So I knew if I got to mile 22, there was a natural break that would begin to turn things into my favor. What I was saying to the commission was, there were no longer any natural breaks lying ahead of us that would turn things in our favor. It had to be done with just slogging through hard work. There were no upcoming elections, for example, no upcoming changes in the political structure that would be natural breaks. That's what I was trying to say to the committee.
Doublespeak on waterboarding:
[Russert]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.
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