The US Senate Intelligence Committee released on Tuesday a redacted summary report on the CIA’s post 9-11 “enhanced interrogation techniques”, from sleep deprivation to ‘water boarding’, that were used against suspected terrorists. The approximately 500-page document has provoked a domestic furore in the US, but its biggest impact could yet be outside US shores. The ramifications are already rippling out internationally and are likely to inflame anti-Americanism in several Muslim-majority countries whose support is potentially the key to US success in the campaign against terrorism. This will only add to the massive public diplomacy challenge now confronting US President Barack Obama.
The summary publication, a condensed version of a still-classified 6,000-plus page study, makes a series of new claims. At least some of these may contradict an investigation into CIA activities by the US Justice Department in 2012 that ended with no criminal charges against agency staff. The publication’s first key assertion is that enhanced interrogation techniques, some of which Obama previously asserted amounted to torture, were more extensively and aggressively utilised than previously claimed. Secondly, that the public and policymakers were given inaccurate information about the programmes while the CIA’s own management of them was flawed. And thirdly, that the techniques were ineffective and did not deliver any major new intelligence breakthroughs.
While the full report has taken years to compile by the Democrat-led Intelligence Committee, the Republican members (who will take over control of the body from January, following the party’s victory in last month’s Senate elections) do not endorse it and are expected to issue their own separate study. Despite this, and other criticisms of the report, including from former president George W. Bush, it will nonetheless have key ramifications in the US and abroad.
Within America, for instance, there will be erosion of political trust and confidence in the CIA. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein has even called the agency’s actions a “stain on [US] history” and “morally, legally and administratively misguided”. The likelihood of tension between the CIA and Congress, especially some Democrats, is fuelled by the fact that this latest furore closely follows CIA Director John Brennan’s apology to Feinstein and the Intelligence committee in July, following the CIA Inspector General’s finding that agency officials had improperly monitored the computers of the committee’s staff members.
Important as these domestic consequences might be, the international ramifications could potentially be bigger. It is for this reason that the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, asked Feinstein, unsuccessfully, in recent days to once again delay the publication of the report. Firstly, the report’s publication will embarrass those foreign states, in Europe and beyond, which aided the Bush administration and CIA, even though their specific country names are redacted in the Senate publication. Secondly, although the findings are disputed by many ex-Bush officials, it is likely that publication of the summary report will inflame anti-Americanism in numerous countries. This despite the fact that the techniques are now a historical relic in as much as Obama ruled at the start of his term almost six years ago, that the CIA could no longer employ them.
In the immediate term, there are concerns that the disclosures could lead to attacks against US facilities and personnel abroad. According to Congressman Mike Rogers, the Republican Chair of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, warnings to this effect have already come from foreign governments about potential “violence and deaths” in their countries and additional US security measures have been introduced as a result.
Beyond this threat, this latest controversy will only intensify the huge international public diplomacy challenge that Obama still faces. Coming into office in 2009, the Obama team confronted a situation in which anti-US sentiment was at about its highest levels since at least the Vietnam War. Probably the key factor driving this was the unpopularity of the Bush administration’s foreign, security and military policies in the so-called “war on terror”, including so-called “extraordinary rendition”, the practice of apprehension and extra-judicial apprehension and extra-judicial transfer of persons from one state to another. While the Obama team has made efforts to turn around this climate of international perception, its progress has been uneven, as witnessed by the failure to close Guantanamo Bay, despite pledges to the contrary.
While Obama is generally more admired internationally than his predecessor, his administration has also encountered sizeable international opposition, for instance, towards increased US use of drone strikes since Bush left office. The scale of the public diplomacy task that Obama still faces is regularly highlighted in international surveys. For instance, the annual Pew Global Attitudes Survey shows that in key countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, exceptionally low numbers of the population (between 10-19 per cent in 2014) have favourable perceptions of the US. This public diplomacy problem, however, is not just restricted to Muslim-majority states, although there it is deepest and most widespread. Obama and his team know it is important to try to change this. This is because, in common with the Cold War, the challenges posed by the campaign against terror cannot be overcome by drone strikes and military might alone.
As Obama recognised in his well-received Cairo speech in 2009, the US must also redouble its efforts to win the battle for ‘hearts and minds’, especially in Muslim-majority countries. In turn, this will help create an enabling (rather than disabling) environment facilitating both covert and overt cooperation and information sharing with US officials.
Taken overall, the publication of the report will only intensify public diplomacy issues facing Obama internationally. To get even close to meeting this challenge, a key requirement in his last two years in White House will be significant new emphasis on international public diplomacy, especially in Muslim-majority countries, which will necessitate new resources and possibly a new strategy too.
Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics, and a former UK Government special adviser.
