By late September 2001, the CIA covert plan to conquer Afghanistan is in place but it needs the US military to work. CIA official Gary Schroen will later recall, “We were there for just about a month by ourselves in the valley. We were the only Americans in the country for almost a month.” According to a PBS Frontline documentary, at some point around the middle of October, “there was a fiery NSC [National Security Council] meeting. The CIA had been complaining [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld was dragging his feet in Afghanistan. It was said Rumsfeld didn’t like taking orders from the CIA.” Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong will later say, “Rumsfeld went to the president and said, ‘The CIA has to work for me, or this isn’t going to work.’” President Bush finally agrees and places Rumsfeld in charge of the Afghanistan war. A short time later, on October 20, the first US Special Forces are put into action in Afghanistan, calling in precision air strikes. The Taliban fold in the face of the attack and the capital of Kabul will fall in mid-November. But according to Schroen, “I was absolutely convinced that that would happen and that the Taliban would break quickly. That could have happened in October, early October,” had the US military arrived to assist the CIA sooner. [PBS Frontline, 6/20/2006]
June 2, 2003: CIA Is Concerned about Interrogation Techniques US Military Is Using on High-Ranking Detainees
In a secret memo, Gen. George Casey, Jr., director of the US military’s Joint Staff, warns Gen. Michael DeLong at Central Command (Centcom) that the “CIA has advised that the techniques the military forces are using to interrogate high value detainees (HVDs)… are more aggressive than the techniques used by CIA who is [sic] interviewing the same HVDs.” DeLong replies to Casey that the techniques being used are “doctrinally appropriate techniques” in line with Army regulations and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s direction. [New Yorker, 6/17/2007] It will later come out that the CIA was using techniques on these detainees widely considered to be torture, such as waterboarding. But little is known about military treatment of these detainees or the techniques they used.
