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C.I.A. Director, Admitting Agency Mistakes, Calls for End to Interrogation Debate C.I.A. Director Defends Use of Interrogation Tactics, Avoiding Issue of Torture
(about 2 hours later)
WASHINGTON — John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, on Thursday acknowledged problems and misstatements during the agency’s former interrogation program as he called for an end to a rancorous debate over brutal interrogation tactics. WASHINGTON — John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, defended the agency’s use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation tactics on Thursday, sidestepping questions about whether agency operatives tortured anyone.
Mr. Brennan, in a rare news conference at C.I.A. headquarters, said agency leaders “still fundamentally disagree” with a Senate report that concluded that waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques produced no valuable intelligence. Mr. Brennan, responding to an excoriating Senate report detailing years of brutal interrogation tactics in secret C.I.A. prisons, criticized only those officers who he said went “outside the bounds” of the guidelines established by the Justice Department. Those guidelines allowed for waterboarding, a week of sleep deprivation, shackling prisoners in painful positions, dousing them with water, and locking them in coffin-like boxes.
“There was very valuable intelligence obtained from individuals who had been, at some point, subjected to E.I.T.'s,” Mr. Brennan said. “I will leave to others how they might want to label those activities,” Mr. Brennan said.
He would not say whether he believed that the agency tortured any of the terrorism suspects it held and questioned for years. A Senate report this week described instances of prisoners’ being chained to walls for days, waterboarded until they lost consciousness and locked in small boxes. President Obama has called some of the C.I.A.'s techniques torture, and Mr. Brennan’s comments Thursday stood in contrast to those he made years earlier as the president’s counterterrorism adviser. In 2009, Mr. Brennan criticized the agency’s techniques for having “led us to stray from our ideals as a nation.” He added, “Tactics such as waterboarding were not in keeping with our values as Americans.”
“I will leave to others how they might want to label those activities,” Mr. Brennan said. “For me it was something that is regrettable.” Mr. Brennan, a career C.I.A. analyst who served as a high-ranking agency official under President George W. Bush, said that after the Sept. 11 attacks, agency officers were summoned to perform a difficult task at a frightening time. He acknowledged that the C.I.A. was unprepared, but he offered no apologies for the decisions that led the country to embrace tactics it had previously regarded as torture.
Mr. Brennan’s speech came a day after Democratic members of the committee criticized him for the agency’s response to the report. They said the C.I.A.'s response is at odds with a separate, internal review overseen by a former director of the agency, Leon E. Panetta, which they claim is far more critical of the detention and interrogation program. President Obama halted the program in 2009.
“My fervent hope is that we can put aside this debate and move forward,” Mr. Brennan said.“My fervent hope is that we can put aside this debate and move forward,” Mr. Brennan said.
Mr. Brennan was a senior C.I.A. official in 2002 when the detention and interrogation program was put in place. He has said publicly that he opposed the brutal interrogation methods that C.I.A. interrogators used against Qaeda suspects, including the drowning technique known as waterboarding. Though he said the C.I.A. was out of the interrogation business, he offered no assurances that anything prevented the government from authorizing the same techniques in the face of another crisis. “I defer to the policy makers in future times,” he said.
Mr. Brennan would not say whether he ever raised objections to the interrogation techniques. “I was not in the chain of command,” he said. “This is a feature, I think, of our past” he added, “one that we have to come to terms with and deal with.”
The renewed debate over torture and interrogation put Mr. Brennan in a difficult position. Though most of the architects of the program have since retired, the agency’s counterterrorism unit is still filled with many officers who took part in it. The debate also renewed questions about whether Mr. Brennan objected to the techniques used in the program. Mr. Brennan would not address that Thursday. “I was not in the chain of command,” he said.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that so-called enhanced interrogation tactics produced no vital information that thwarted terrorist plots. Mr. Brennan said that prisoners did produce useful information after being subjected to those tactics.
While Mr. Brennan was speaking, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, offered a running commentary on Twitter. “'Useful information’ was not the legal policy standard for EITs,'” Ms. Feinstein wrote.
Mr. Brennan strongly disagreed with the Senate report’s conclusion that the techniques were not valuable in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
“It is our considered view that the detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided information that was useful — and was used — in the operation to go against bin Laden,” Mr. Brennan said.
He reiterated, however, that it was “unknowable” whether that information could have been elicited otherwise.