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Obama Avoids Taking Sides on Effectiveness of C.I.A. Techniques Obama Catches Blame on Tactics of Torture That He Ended
(about 14 hours later)
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. maintains that the brutal interrogation techniques it used on terrorism suspects a decade ago worked. The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that they did not. And on that, at least, President Obama is not taking sides. WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday found himself caught in the middle of a collision between the Central Intelligence Agency and his own Democratic allies, who accused the White House of helping to cover up a legacy of torture and put the president on the defensive over an interrogation program he never supported.
Even as Mr. Obama repeated his belief that the techniques constituted torture and betrayed American values, he declined to address the fundamental question raised by the report, which the committee released on Tuesday: Did they produce meaningful intelligence to stop terrorist attacks, or did the C.I.A. mislead the White House and the public about their effectiveness? A day after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a blistering report on the C.I.A.’s interrogations of terrorism suspects a decade ago, Mr. Obama, who banned such methods when he took office, came under fire from Democrats on the committee for declining to endorse the report’s conclusion that they were ineffective and standing by the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan. Mr. Obama’s attempt to find a balance on a polarizing issue inherited from his predecessor was seen by those critics as a failure to hold the agency accountable.
That debate, after all, has left Mr. Obama facing an uncomfortable choice between two allies: the close adviser and former aide he installed as director of the C.I.A. versus his fellow Democrats who control the Senate committee and the liberal base that backs their findings. Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, a Democrat on the committee and a longtime critic of the C.I.A. interrogations, took to the Senate floor to excoriate the agency for failing to come to terms with its mistakes and the White House for enabling its deceptions. Mr. Udall repeated his call for Mr. Brennan to resign.
“We are not going to engage in this debate,” said a senior administration official close to Mr. Obama who briefed reporters under ground rules that did not allow him to be identified. “Director Brennan and the C.I.A. today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information to misrepresent the efficacy of torture,” Mr. Udall said. “In other words, the C.I.A. is lying.”
The written statement Mr. Obama released in response to the report tried to straddle that divide. He opened by expressing appreciation to C.I.A. employees as “patriots” to whom “we owe a debt of gratitude” for trying to protect the country after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Then he judged that the methods they used in doing so “did significant damage to America’s standing in the world.” He added that the president had failed to exercise his responsibility. “There can be no cover-up,” Mr. Udall said. “There can be no excuses. If there is no moral leadership from the White House helping the public understand that the C.I.A.’s torture program wasn’t necessary and didn’t save lives or disrupt terrorist plots, then what’s to stop the next White House and C.I.A. director from supporting torture?”
And finally, Mr. Obama asked the nation to stop fighting about what happened so many years ago before he took office. “Rather than another reason to refight old arguments,” he said, “I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past.” Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, another Democrat on the committee, echoed the sentiment. “I would hope there would be a bit of a housecleaning from the White House given the results of this report,” he said in an interview. “The fundamental problem here is not just what happened but the continued resistance of the leadership of this agency to the basics of oversight.”
Mr. Obama has struggled to find balance on this issue since taking office nearly six years ago. He made one of his first acts as president signing an order that banned the use of torture by the C.I.A. But he resisted pressure from activists to hold anyone accountable for the waterboarding of suspects. The White House defended Mr. Brennan, a career C.I.A. officer who served as Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser in the White House before the president sent him back to the agency last year as director. “John Brennan is a decorated professional and a patriot,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “And he is somebody that the president relies on on a daily basis to keep this country safe.”
The Justice Department under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. re-examined cases of prisoner abuse that were previously closed under President George W. Bush, but it did not prosecute anyone. Mr. Obama rejected the creation of a “truth commission” proposed by Democrats like Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. To this day, the president has resisted releasing photographs of harsh treatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his White House backed up the C.I.A. in seeking redactions of the Senate report. After Tuesday’s release of the executive summary of the report, Mr. Obama repeated his belief that the techniques used after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, constituted torture and betrayed American values. But he declined to address the fundamental question raised by the report: Did they produce meaningful intelligence to stop terrorist attacks, or did the C.I.A. mislead the White House and the public about their effectiveness as the committee asserted?
As a president who receives regular briefings on terrorist threats and is responsible for stopping them, Mr. Obama sees the situation differently than he did as a candidate denouncing the incumbent of the other party. In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Obama not only did not condemn Mr. Bush for authorizing the techniques, but he also sounded a note of empathy. That debate put Mr. Obama between two allies: the close adviser and former aide he installed as director of the C.I.A. versus Democrats on the Intelligence Committee and the liberal base that backs their findings. Instead, the president hoped to convince the public that the issue has now been confronted and resolved since he signed an order barring the controversial interrogation techniques shortly after taking office in January 2009.
“In the years after 9/11, with legitimate fears of further attacks and with the responsibility to prevent more catastrophic loss of life, the previous administration faced agonizing choices about how to pursue Al Qaeda and prevent additional terrorist attacks against our country,” he said. “He’s between a rock and a hard place,” said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at the Fordham University School of Law. “The intelligence agency has become the lead agency in national security, and therefore he’s beholden to it, and there’s no getting around that. It’s much bigger than before 9/11. It’s not just about Brennan.”
A major influence has been John O. Brennan, a career C.I.A. officer who has been at his side since the start of his presidency, first as his White House counterterrorism adviser and now as his C.I.A. director. Indeed, in a written statement and a pair of television interviews after the report was released on Tuesday, Mr. Obama stressed his respect for the “patriots” of the C.I.A. who worked to guard the nation in an uncertain and dangerous period, even as he concluded that the methods they used “did significant damage to America’s standing in the world.”
Both Mr. Brennan and the president’s first C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, have taken the position, contrary to critics, that the interrogations did yield useful intelligence at points but were nonetheless wrong and that Mr. Obama was right to ban them. While that frustrated critics of the C.I.A. who wanted a more unambiguous condemnation of torture and its architects, others said his comments struck a reasonable middle ground. “They seemed measured and responsible,” said Cesar Conda, an adviser to Republicans like former Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. “He’s walking a fine line between his base and his duties as commander in chief.”
Mr. Brennan did not back down on that position with the release of the committee report. Instead, Republicans and supporters of the C.I.A. saved their fire for the Senate Democrats who issued the report. Mr. Cheney, in his first public comments since its release, said he had read only summaries of it but denounced the report as “full of crap” and said it was a “flat-out lie” to suggest that President George W. Bush was kept in the dark about details of the program.
“Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom E.I.T.s were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives,” he said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to enhanced interrogation techniques. “The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of Al Qaeda and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.” “He knew certainly the techniques,” Mr. Cheney said on Fox News. “We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that.”
Mr. Brennan acknowledged that the program “had shortcomings and that the agency made mistakes,” especially because the C.I.A. was unprepared for its new post-Sept. 11 role. But he rejected the assertion that the agency deliberately deceived the public about the efficacy of the interrogations. Mr. Cheney scoffed at the suggestion that methods like waterboarding, nudity, slapping and sleep deprivation violated human rights. “How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 Americans?” he asked.
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the Democratic chairwoman of the intelligence committee, said the program was not just morally wrong but ineffective. The committee’s report argues that information gleaned from the interrogations was often false, duplicative or could have been obtained in other ways. For Mr. Obama, the report reopened a fight he had tried to avoid for nearly six years. Although he denounced torture during his 2008 campaign, he has resisted pressure from activists to hold anyone accountable. His Justice Department re-examined cases of prisoner abuse but did not prosecute anyone, and Mr. Obama rejected the creation of a “truth commission” and backed the C.I.A. in seeking redactions of the Senate report.
“It finds that coercive interrogation techniques did not produce the vital, otherwise unavailable intelligence the C.I.A. has claimed,” she said. Mr. Obama supported the release of the declassified summary and said it should help ensure that the country never again violates its fundamental values. But as a president receiving regular briefings on terrorist threats, he sees the situation differently than he did as a candidate, aides have said. In his statement Tuesday, he expressed empathy for the “agonizing choices” Mr. Bush faced, and in an interview with Telemundo, he declined to say what he would have done in the same circumstances.
In walking the line between those two poles, Mr. Obama has carefully measured his language and tone. Even though he denounced torture generally during his 2008 campaign, many involved in the issue were struck this summer when he directly stated that the United States had in fact tortured prisoners, interpreting that as a more forthright statement than he had made before. At his daily briefing, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Mr. Earnest, spent an hour deflecting questions about whether the president believed the interrogations were ineffective and whether anyone should be punished. He repeatedly referred the second question to the Justice Department. “That is not a question for the president of the United States,” Mr. Earnest said.
“We did a whole lot of things that were right,” Mr. Obama said about the post-Sept. 11 fight with terrorists, “but we tortured some folks.”   Mr. Udall argued that it was. His outcry on the Senate floor put the question of Mr. Obama’s support for Mr. Brennan squarely on the table. The senator said Mr. Brennan’s response to the Senate inquiry contradicted information in a review ordered by his predecessor, Leon E. Panetta, that mirrored the committee findings.
On Tuesday, he seemed at first to avoid such a straightforward assertion again. His written statement noted he had “unequivocally banned torture” but did not say the United States had actually committed torture. In discussing what had happened under his predecessor, Mr. Obama used phrases like “harsh methods” and even “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the phrase preferred by Mr. Bush and the C.I.A. It was that review that incited a battle this year between Mr. Brennan and the committee. When C.I.A. officers suspected that the committee had improperly gained access to the agency’s computers, they read the emails of committee investigators. Mr. Brennan ended up apologizing, but the incident exacerbated tensions between committee Democrats and the C.I.A.
Aides quickly said that Mr. Obama was not trying to hedge and that when the president sat down with José Díaz-Balart from Telemundo for an interview several hours later, he used a more direct formulation. “The C.I.A. has lied to its overseers and the public, destroyed and tried to hold back evidence, spied on the Senate, made false charges against our staff, and lied about torture and the results of torture,” Mr. Udall said. “And no one has been held to account.”
“Some of the tactics written about in the Senate intelligence report were brutal, and as I’ve said before, constituted torture in my mind,” Mr. Obama said. Other Democrats expressed more support for the president’s predicament. “You’re always going to have some tension even within an administration,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania said in an interview. “Sometimes the tension can’t be accommodated, but that’s a decision he’ll have to make.”
Yet as human rights and civil liberties groups called for prosecution of those responsible, the White House evinced no interest and aides made clear Mr. Obama had “complete confidence” in Mr. Brennan, as one put it.
Asked about the Senate committee’s judgment that the C.I.A. deceived the public, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said, “That’s something that we’re not passing judgment on.”