US spymaster John Brennan admitted Thursday that some CIA interrogators had used unauthorized and “abhorrent” tactics and said he believes torture tends to lead to false intelligence.
In a rare news conference, broadcast live from the agency’s Langley headquarters in what is believed to be a first in CIA history, Brennan mounted a stout defense of his officers.
But, in the wake of a damning Senate report into its treatment of Al-Qaeda suspects that triggered global revulsion, he confirmed that some had gone beyond their orders and abused prisoners.
Brennan said the Central Intelligence Agency had been too rushed to launch a detention and interrogation program for the suspects in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“We were not prepared,” he said, describing how then president George W. Bush had authorized the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” now denounced as torture.
President Barack Obama halted the program upon taking office and has since described the Bush-era use of torture by the CIA as counterproductive and an affront to American values.
“In a limited number of cases, agency officers used interrogation techniques that had not been authorized, were abhorrent and rightly should be repudiated by all,” Brennan admitted.
Amid a political row about whether Bush was right to order tough tactics in the wake of the attacks, Brennan said it is impossible to know whether harsh interrogations had won useful intelligence.
“I tend to believe that the use of coercive methods has a strong prospect for resulting in false information,” he said.
Brennan said information from detainees was indeed useful in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, but it was impossible to know whether the enhanced interrogation had been necessary.
“There’s no way to know if information obtained from an individual who had been subjected at some point during his confinement could have been obtained through other means,” he said.
Brennan said that the CIA was no longer involved in detaining and interrogating suspects and has instituted reforms to prevent such abuses from happening again.
But he was critical of this week’s Senate intelligence committee report that accused the CIA of having misled the US government and public for years about the success of its torture methods.
Committee chair Senator Dianne Feinstein, who released the report after a long wrangle with the CIA over what should be redacted, responded to Brennan point-by-point during his appearance.
“CIA helps keep our nation safe, strong. Torture does not. We must learn from our mistakes,” her staff wrote on Twitter.
She said the 500-page executive summary released on Tuesday was a small part of a 6,700-page report, and denied that lawmakers had cherry-picked damning material.
And she disputed the idea that it could not be known whether torture — known as enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs — had led the CIA to its quarry.
“Study definitively proves EITs did not lead to bin Laden. Page 378,” her staff tweeted.
Leave a Reply