Doc. 11302 Report 2.3. The concept: the development of the “high-value detainee” (HVD) programme operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 51. For the sake of clarity reference should be made to the CIA’s covert programme using the correct terminology: among well-informed quarters, the programme is known as the “high-value detainee” programme, or simply the “HVD programme”. 52. The HVD programme has formed a very specific, narrow and unique strand of the United States’ counter-terrorist operations in the period since 11 September 2001. Indeed, one reason why it has been so successfully covered up is that one can easily lose sight of this programme among the sizeable and still growing tally of people detained in the course of the “war on terror”. 53. There have been scores of sites in which thousands of prisoners have been held for varying periods of time either by one or more agencies of the United States Government, or on its behalf by foreign allies. 54. Among the most highly-populated and well-known of these detention sites – and indeed, hosts to CIA detainees at one time or another – have been the various internment “camps” on the American Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, the Bagram Airfield in Kabul, Afghanistan and the Abu Ghraib facility in Baghdad, Iraq. The public has been able to get some sort of picture of these sites, not from transparent information provided by the competent authorities but rather from leaks, statements from former inmates and secretly filmed images of detainee abuse. 55. Even in this context, the HVD programme is different. One senior source in the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) told us: “If a guy is captured on the battlefield and sent to [Guantánamo], that’s got nothing to do with it. But I think there is a tendency in the media, in Europe and in America, to blend together what the FBI is doing, what the military is doing and what the CIA is doing – to attribute it all to the same programme. And frankly, you can’t do that. The HVD programme is a very structured, very rigorous programme.” 56. In my understanding, the narrative of the HVD programme has played out largely over a five-year period, from September 2001 to September 2006. CIA insiders told us that there was widespread surprise that it operated and remained secret quite as long as it did. From 2004 onwards, the President was being strongly advised to place a time limit on the programme because it was regarded as having been somewhat improvisational in its nature and therefore could not be sustained: “Every period in history has its bookends.” 57. The conception of the HVD programme can be traced to the days immediately after 11 September 2001, when senior CIA officials (including CIA Director George Tenet) worked with the political principals of the Bush administration (including President Bush himself) to conceive, debate and formulate strategies to “give some extra potency” to America’s “frontline officials” in combating and countering the global terrorist threat. 58. On 17 September 2001, President Bush signed a classified presidential finding15as a means of granting the CIA important new competences relating to its covert actions: new choices it could make and new ways it could respond if confronted with al-Qaeda targets in the field. On the day this document was signed – the Sunday after the 11 September 2001 attacks – senior members of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center and selected foreign counterparts were made familiar with its contents in a meeting in Washington DC.16 15. The United States Government finally conceded the existence of this classified presidential finding in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2006. Nonetheless, the precise scope and contents of the finding remain unknown and, according to Congressional staffers, even senior members of the relevant House and Senate select committees have not been allowed to access it. See ACLU press release, “CIA Finally Acknowledges Existence of Presidential Order on Detention Facilities Abroad”, 14 November 2006, available at: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/27382prs20061114.html; see also United States Senator Patrick Leahy, “Comments of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), incoming chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee on Department of Justice’s Response to Request for Documents relating to Bush Administration’s Interrogation Policies”, 2 January 2007, available at http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200701/010207.html. 16. The former Chief of CIA Clandestine Operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, recounts the meeting of 17 September 2001 in his memoirs: “Cofer [Black, then Chief of the CTC] presented a new presidential authorisation that broadened our options for dealing with terrorist targets – one of the few times such a thing had happened since the CIA was officially banned from carrying out assassinations in 1976. It was clear that the Administration saw this as a war that would largely be fought by intelligence assets. This required a new way of operating”. See Tyler Drumheller, On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence, Carroll & Graf, New York, 2006 (hereinafter “Tyler Drumheller, On the Brink”); at p. 35. 13