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cia torture report
Director John Brennan has defended the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation techniques but admitted some methods were “harsh” and “abhorrent”.
Speaking at CIA headquarters, John Brennan said some officers acted beyond their authority but most did their duty.
According to the Senate report, “brutal” methods like waterboarding were ineffective.
However, John Brennan asserted the CIA “did a lot of things right” at a time when there were “no easy answers”.
“Our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation programme produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives,” Brennan told a rare CIA news conference in Virginia.
“But we have not concluded that it was the use of <<enhanced interrogation techniques>> (EITs) within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees who were subjected to them,” he added.
“The cause-and-effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.”
While he was speaking, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who heads the committee that produced the report, was rejecting his arguments on Twitter.
One tweet said: “Brennan: <<unknowable>> if we could have gotten the intel other ways. Study shows it IS knowable: CIA had info before torture. #ReadTheReport.”
John Brennan was a senior CIA official in 2002 when the detention and interrogation program was put in place.
An outgoing Democratic Senator, Mark Udall, has called on John Brennan to quit, citing interference from the CIA in preparing the report.
A summary of the larger classified report says that the CIA carried out “brutal” and “ineffective” interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US and misled other officials about what it was doing.
The information the CIA collected using “enhanced interrogation techniques” failed to secure information that foiled any threats, the report said.
John Brennan described the actions of some CIA agents as “harsh” and “abhorrent” but would not say if it constituted torture.
He added an overwhelming number of CIA agents followed legal advice from the justice department that authorized some of the brutal methods.
“They did what they were asked to do in the service of their nation.”
The UN and human rights groups have called for the prosecution of US officials involved in the 2001-2007 program.
However, the chances of prosecuting members of the Bush administration are unlikely – the US justice department has pursued two investigations into mistreatment of detainees and found insufficient evidence.
On December 10, an unnamed justice department official told the Los Angeles Times prosecutors had read the report and “did not find any new information” to reopen the investigation.
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President George W. Bush was “fully informed” about CIA interrogation techniques condemned in a Senate report, his vice-president, Dick Cheney, says.
Speaking to Fox News, Dick Cheney said George W. Bush “knew everything he needed to know” about the program, and the report was “full of crap”.
The CIA has defended its use of methods such as waterboarding on terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks.
The Senate report said the CIA misled politicians about the program.
However, George W. Bush dismissed this, saying: “The notion that the committee is trying to peddle that somehow the agency was operating on a rogue basis and that we weren’t being told – that the president wasn’t being told – is a flat-out lie.”
In the interview on December 11, Dick Cheney said the report was “deeply flawed” and a “terrible piece of work”, although he admitted he had not read the whole document.
A summary of the larger classified report says that the CIA carried out “brutal” and “ineffective” interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US and misled other officials about what it was doing.
The information the CIA collected using “enhanced interrogation techniques” failed to secure information that foiled any threats, the report said.
However, Dick Cheney said the interrogation program saved lives, and that the agency deserved “credit not condemnation”.
“It did in fact produce actionable intelligence that was vital in the success of keeping the country safe from further attacks,” he said.
The UN and human rights groups have called for the prosecution of US officials involved in the 2001-2007 program.
“As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice,” Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, said in a statement made from Geneva.
He said there had been a “clear policy orchestrated at a high level”.
Correspondents say that the chances of prosecuting members of the Bush administration are unlikely, not least because the US justice department has said that it has already pursued two investigations into mistreatment of detainees since 2000 and concluded that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain a conviction.
None of the countries where the prisons were located has been identified in the report, but several countries suspected to have hosted so-called “black sites” reacted strongly to the publication.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is among the world leaders to have condemned how the agency imprisoned and questioned al-Qaeda suspects.
He said the program “violated all accepted norms of human rights in the world”.
President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that he hoped that the publication of the report would “help us leave these techniques where they belong – in the past”.
He banned harsh interrogation techniques after taking office in 2009, and has acknowledged that some methods amounted to torture.
Some Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee released a minority report, accusing the Senate of having a “flawed analytical methodology”, “inadequate objectivity” and “political considerations”.
However, influential Republican Senator John McCain argued that torture “rarely yields credible information” and that even in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden the most important lead came from “conventional interrogation methods”.
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Former President Aleksander Kwasniewski has acknowledged Poland let the CIA run a secret prison on its territory following 9/11.
Aleksander Kwasniewski insisted he had not known about the harsh treatment used by the CIA interrogators.
The former president had previously denied that Poland hosted a secret CIA prison.
The US Senate report into the CIA’s activities did not name the countries that hosted the prisons.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in July that Poland had allowed the CIA to torture two al-Qaeda suspects at a secret detention centre in 2002 and 2003, when Aleksander Kwasniewski was president.
In an interview following the publication of the CIA torture report, Aleksander Kwasniewski said Poland had agreed to strengthen intelligence co-operation with the US following the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
He said the Americans were very secretive about the way they conducted their activities, which aroused suspicions among Polish officials.
“Poland took steps to end the activity at this site and the activity was stopped at some point,” Aleksander Kwasniewski told Radio TOK FM in Warsaw.
He said he had been unaware of the methods they used which, he added, were totally unacceptable and unjustifiable.
Prosecutors opened an investigation into the claims in 2008, three years after Aleksander Kwasniewski left office. The investigation continues and has yet to publish any findings.
The CIA has defended its actions in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US, saying they saved lives.
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Human rights groups and the United Nations have called for the prosecution of US officials involved in what a Senate report called the “brutal” CIA interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects.
A top UN human rights envoy said there had been a “clear policy orchestrated at a high level”.
The CIA has defended its actions in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US, saying they saved lives.
President Barack Obama said it was now time to move on.
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism Ben Emmerson said that senior officials from the administration of George W. Bush who planned and sanctioned crimes must be prosecuted, as well as CIA and US government officials responsible for torture such as waterboarding.
“As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice,” Ben Emmerson said in a statement made from Geneva.
“The US attorney general is under a legal duty to bring criminal charges against those responsible.”
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said that the CIA’s actions were criminal “and can never be justified”.
“Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of officials, torture will remain a <<policy option>> for future presidents,” he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued that the attorney general should appoint a special prosecutor to conduct “an independent and complete investigation of Bush administration officials who created, approved, carried out and covered up the torture program”.
“The crime of torture has no statute of limitations when torture risks or results in serious injury or death, and the US government has the obligation under international law to investigate any credible evidence that torture has been committed,” an ACLU statement said.
“If there’s sufficient evidence of criminal conduct… The offenders should be prosecuted. In our system, no one should be above the law, yet only a handful of mainly low-level personnel have been criminally prosecuted for abuse. That is a scandal.”
CIA torture report key findings:
None of 20 cases of counterterrorism “successes” attributed to the techniques led to unique or otherwise unavailable intelligence
The CIA misled politicians and public
At least 26 of 119 known detainees in custody during the life of the program were wrongfully held, and many held for months longer than they should have been
Methods included sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, often standing or in painful positions
Saudi al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah was kept confined in a coffin-sized box for hours on end
Waterboarding and “rectal hydration” were physically harmful to prisoners, causing convulsions and vomiting
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According to a US Senate report, the CIA carried out “brutal” interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in the years after the 9/11 attacks.
The summary of the report, compiled by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the CIA misled Americans about what it was doing.
The information the CIA collected this way failed to secure information that foiled any threats, the report said.
In a statement, the CIA insisted that the interrogations did help save lives.
“The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qaeda and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day,” Director John Brennan said in a statement.
However, the CIA said it acknowledged that there were mistakes in the program, especially early on when it was unprepared for the scale of the operation to detain and interrogate prisoners.
Photo AFP/Getty Images
The program – known internally as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program – took place from 2002 to 2007, during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Suspects were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold and sleep deprivation.
Introducing the report to the Senate, Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein described the CIA’s actions as a stain on US history.
“The release of this 500-page summary cannot remove that stain, but it can and does say to our people and the world that America is big enough to admit when it’s wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes,” Dianne Feinstein said.
“Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” she added.
Earlier, President Barack Obama responded to the report, saying the methods used were inconsistent with US values.
“These techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners,” he said in a statement.
Reacting to the release of the report summary, the Senate Republican leaders insisted that the methods used helped in the capture of important suspects and the killing of Osama bin Laden.
“Claims included in this report that assert the contrary are simply wrong,” Senators Mitch McConnell and Saxby Chambliss said in a joint statement.
The Senate committee’s report runs to more than 6,000 pages, drawing on huge quantities of evidence, but it remains classified and only a 480-page summary has been released.
Barack Obama halted the CIA interrogation program when he took office in 2009.
Earlier this year, the president said that in his view the methods used to question al-Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.
Publication of the report had been delayed amid disagreements in Washington over what should be made public.
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