Rizzo's first job out of law school was at the Treasury Department, where he started work in the
Customs Service in August 1972. Rizzo became Acting General Counsel of the CIA in November 2001, a position that was traditionally filled by someone from outside the agency. Rizzo was the Acting General Counsel of the CIA from late 2001 to late 2002 and from mid-2004 until late 2009. He was Deputy General Counsel in the interim period from 2002 to 2004, while Scott Muller was General Counsel. Rizzo received the Thomas C. Clark Award from the
Federal Bar Association and the
Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the highest recognition awarded to a career CIA officer.
Enhanced interrogation techniques The
Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which ran the U.S. military's
SERE program to train U.S. personnel to resist harsh interrogation methods, issued a memo with an attachment written to the
General Counsel of the Department of Defense in July 2002. The memo, which was passed on from the Pentagon to Rizzo, referred to the use of extreme duress on detainees as "torture" and warned that it would produce "unreliable information." Due to concerns about potential exposure to criminal liability in connection with the mistreatment of detainees, Rizzo requested a letter from the
Department of Justice stating they would "declin[e] to prosecute future activity that might violate federal law." Rizzo's request was "flatly refused." It approved 10 techniques, including
waterboarding. In 2005, CIA lawyers reviewed copies of videotapes made during interrogation of detainees and expressed their concerns to Rizzo. He requested the OLC to issue new statements about the legality of the enhanced interrogation techniques. The
Los Angeles Times reported that Rizzo was becoming "increasingly anxious in the years after the
Sept. 11 attacks that agency employees were being pressured to use methods that might later place them in legal jeopardy." With the likely passage of the
Military Commissions Act of 2006, which authorized the administration's plan for a military court at Guantanamo outside the existing federal and military justice systems, the CIA transferred the fourteen high-value detainees to military custody at the
Guantanamo Bay detention camp. By the 2008 presidential election, considerable material had been revealed by the press, civil law suits brought by civil liberties organizations and a Congressional investigation about the interrogation practices of the Bush administration. During the campaign,
Barack Obama had vowed to change the government's approach, namely to prohibit torture, end the practice of extraordinary rendition and end the use of black sites. On January 21, 2009, one day before Obama was scheduled to sign
Executive Order 13491 prohibiting the torture of detainees (so-called "
enhanced interrogation techniques") and banning the use of CIA
black sites, Rizzo contacted the White House counsel,
Gregory Craig. Rizzo told Craig that the current language would not allow the CIA to hold people for a day or two in transit during
ordinary rendition. The language was changed so that CIA had authority to hold people "on a short-term, transitory basis." In 2015,
Human Rights Watch called for the investigation of Rizzo "for conspiracy to torture as well as other crimes."
Videotapes of early interrogation sessions at black site In early 2005, White House Counsel
Harriet Miers told Rizzo not to destroy the tapes without checking with the White House first. He says he saw one "request for approval for targeting for lethal operation" per month and that roughly 30 individuals were targeted at any given time. In April 2015, the
Islamabad High Court ordered police to open a criminal case against Rizzo and
former CIA Islamabad station chief Jonathan Bank for murder, conspiracy, terrorism and waging war against Pakistan. In November 2011, the
National Journal cited unnamed sources in reporting that the
Department of Justice had opened an investigation of Rizzo for improperly disclosing classified information about the CIA drone program. The probe was first opened by Rizzo's former office, the General Counsel of the CIA, in March 2011 after a detailed interview Rizzo gave
Newsweek. The General Counsel's office forwarded its collection of evidence to the DOJ that spring. ==Personal life==