Research, ideas, and leadership for a more secure, peaceful world
Former CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo will speak about the role of intelligence in making policy. Off the record. Open to Harvard ID cardholders on first come first served basis.
Former CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo will speak about the role of intelligence in making policy.
John Rizzo was the Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the War on Terror, during which the CIA held dozens of detainees in black site prisons around the globe and engaged in “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” such as water boarding and sleep deprivation.
Rizzo has defended the use of waterboarding and sleep deprivation as techniques approved by the Justice Department in 2002. But, he conceded that other practices, such as exposing prisoners to freezing temperatures and long periods of isolation in complete darkness, were not legally sanctioned. "I would characterize them as torture. Those were not among the approved ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ the Justice Department approved during the CIA's Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program.
Speaking about presidential candidates who have called for renewed water boarding, Rizzo told Newsweek, “I think certainly many of those who were connected to the EIT program over its six years’ span—and hundreds are still there [at the Agency]—would resign or retire rather than have to go down that perilous road again. Who could blame them?”
A Boston native, Rizzo attended college at Brown University, graduating in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Rizzo was hired at the CIA in 1976. By 1979, Rizzo became the staff lawyer for the Directorate of Operations, the CIA's clandestine branch. He served as the liaison between the CIA and the congressional investigators studying the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. Rizzo became Acting General Counsel of the CIA in November 2001. He is the author of the 2014 book, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA. He is currently Senior Counsel in Steptoe and Johnson LLP, where he provides legal advice and policy counsel to clients on matters related to national security.
This seminar is open to Harvard ID cardholders on a first come first served basis. The seminar is off the record, and none of the comments by the speaker or attendees can be published without their consent.
