CIA chief to face down pressure over torture report

[umbertino]

John Brennan to attempt to limit damage over damning findings as calls grow for those responsible to face justice

 

• Mark Tran and agencies
• Follow @marktran Follow @guardian
• The Guardian, Thursday 11 December 2014 10.39 GMT

 

CIA director John Brennan has sought to tread a fine line on the torture report. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

 

 

The head of the CIA is to mount a damage-limitation exercise in response to a damning senate intelligence committee report on torture.

 

As the agency faces its gravest crisis in decades, John Brennan is expected to address growing pressure on the White House and the CIA to hold individuals to account for covering up the torture of terrorist suspects. Mark Udall, a Democratic senator, has called for a purge of top CIA officials, and a row has developed over whether the agency kept both Congress and the previous administration sufficiently informed of the programme.

 

Brennan, one of President Barack Obama’s most trusted security advisers, has sought to tread a fine line since the report was released on Tuesday. He said then that intelligence gained from enhanced interrogation techniques helped to “thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives”. However, the CIA no longer argues that torture works, with Brennan and the agency instead saying the efficacy of torture is “unknowable”.

 

Brennan will speak at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Thursday.

 

The Senate’s report does not urge prosecution for wrongdoing, but the threat to former interrogators and their superiors was underlined when a UN special investigator demanded that those responsible for “systematic crimes” be brought to justice. Human rights groups have pushed for the arrest of key CIA and Bush administration figures if they travel overseas.

 

Current and former CIA officials have poured scorn on the report, describing it as a last gasp from Democrats who are about to lose the Senate. It was a “one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation, essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America”, the former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

 

The intelligence committee’s 500-page report concluded that the CIA inflicted suffering on al-Qaida prisoners beyond its legal authority and that none of the agency’s “enhanced interrogations” provided critical, life-saving intelligence. It cited the CIA’s own records, documenting in detail how waterboarding and lesser-known techniques such as “rectal feeding” were actually employed.

 

Former vice-president **** Cheney was among the most vociferous critics of the Senate report. Photograph Charles Dharapak/AP Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP

 

 

**** Cheney, the former vice-president, was among the most vociferous critics of the Senate report. In a Fox News interview, he dismissed the report as being “full of crap”. Cheney said the CIA’s approach to interrogating terror suspects was necessary after the 9/11 attacks, and the people who carried them out were doing their duty.

 

“We asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programmes that were designed to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it didn’t happen again, and that’s exactly what they did, and they deserve a lot of credit,” he said, “not the condemnation they are receiving from the Senate Democrats.”

 

Former top CIA officials created a website pointing out decade-old statements from senators Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller in apparent support of agency efforts. The two Democrats led the Senate investigation.

 

The intelligence committee’s Republicans issued their own 167-page “minority” report, which said the Democratic analysis was flawed, dishonest and, at $40m, a waste of taxpayer money.

 

Feinstein’s office said most of the cost was incurred by the CIA in trying to hide its record.

 

Udall, an outgoing member of the intelligence committee and a leading congressional critic of intelligence overreach, called for a clean sweep of the CIA leadership implicated in the report, and argued that the agency was continuing to mislead, with White House support.

 

“Director [John] Brennan and the CIA are continuing to wilfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture. In other words, the CIA is lying,” Udall said in what may be his final major Washington address after he was defeated in November’s midterm elections.

 

But the White House strongly defended Brennan on Wednesday, denying that he had lied about any aspect of the torture inquiry.

 

“He is somebody who, I think, adheres to the highest ethical standard that you would expect of a government official, and I don’t think there’s any reason for anybody to question that,” said Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman.

 

Obama has acknowledged that torture had proved counter-productive by damaging the country’s moral authority, although he stopped short of agreeing with the Senate report that no useful intelligence was gathered that could not have been obtained elsewhere.

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/11/cia-chief-face-down-pressure-torture-report

 

 

 

Torture report: CIA interrogations chief was involved in Latin American torture camps

 

Senior agent in torture programme was recommended for censure decades earlier for “inappropriate use of interrogation techniques”

 

By Peter Foster, Washington

7:00AM GMT 11 Dec 2014

 

 

US Army Sgt. Fernando Diaz blind folded has ice-cold water dumped over his head during a mock interrogation simulating water boarding at Schofield Barracks in Wahiawa, Hawaii Photo: Alamy

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11286727/Torture-report-CIA-interrogations-chief-was-involved-in-Latin-American-torture-camps.html

Edited December 11, 2014 by umbertino

[new york kevin]

When you break no laws, there is no crime! Therefore, no criminal penalty to be paid. The Dems merely put out a Obama sanctioned propaganda smear article. Nothing more. This fact may not stop them from trying to place some patriots on trial, but I predict there will never be a conviction. There also may be a long gap in the CIAs ability to recruit qualified candidates if there will the possibility that what they do because they are ordered to do it will lead to their jailing 5-10 years after the fact.

Feinstine, you and your ultra socialistic beliefs suck. If I am wrong, which I am not, why did you not interview the 3 former Directors of the CIA, or the 3 former Deputy Directors of the CIA, or the former lead of the CIAs Enhanced Interrogation Program. They were all available for interviews, but no one from your Democrat Only staffed review panel called them. Why is that fact true?

[Shabibilicious]

“He is somebody who, I think, adheres to the highest ethical standard that you would expect of a government official, and I don’t think there’s any reason for anybody to question that,” said Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman.

 

I might lean to the left, but not when it comes to those defending our nation.  Leave the CIA alone.  Thwarting terrorism is an ugly business...there are no rules.  Only by leveling the playing field with our enemies, will we ever be able to win the fight.  As always, just my opinion.  

 

On a side note:  I found the above highlighted comment somewhat comical.    

 

GO RV, and NO BV

[DiveDeepSix]

NYK and Shabs, agree 100%!  The public knows what is going on in the back of their minds, but they won't acknowledge it, and it's for the best.  Most couldn't handle what goes on behind the scenes to keep us safe, and they don't want to know.  Whenever something like this comes out the FAKE outcry is pathetic!

 

I agree the public has no business messing with the CIA or it's operations to protect the security of the US.  Everyone of these people calling for justice sleeps better at night knowing the CIA is out there getting their hands dirty so they don't have to and can deny knowing about it, while the fact is they sanctioned it all along.

[pattyangel]

Right on Shabs and Dive.  Let things be, when its for the protections of the people of the United States.

 

Feinstone, Hillo and Pelosissy just a bunch of petrified wood/clueless witches. 

Edited December 11, 2014 by pattyangel