WASHINGTON — CIA Director John Brennan threaded a rhetorical needle in an unprecedented televised news conference at CIA headquarters Thursday, acknowledging that agency officers did “abhorrent” things to detainees but defending the overall post-9/11 interrogation program for stopping attacks and saving lives.
At the heart of Brennan’s case is a finely tuned argument: that while today’s CIA takes no position on whether the brutal interrogation tactics themselves led detainees to cooperate, there is no doubt detainees subjected to the treatment offered “useful and valuable” information afterward.
Speaking to reporters and on live television— something no one on the CIA public affairs staff could remember ever happening on the secretive agency’s Virginia campus — Brennan said it was “unknown and unknowable” whether the harsh treatment yielded crucial intelligence that could have been gained in any other way.
He declined to define the techniques as torture, as President Barack Obama and the Senate intelligence committee have done, refraining from even using the word in his 40 minutes of remarks and answers. Obama banned torture when he took office.
He also appeared to draw a distinction between interrogation methods, such as water boarding, that were approved by the Justice Department at the time, and those that were not, including “rectal feeding,” death threats and beatings. He did not discuss the techniques by name.
“I certainly agree that there were times when CIA officers exceeded the policy guidance that was given and the authorized techniques that were approved and determined to be lawful,” he said. “They went outside of the bounds. … I will leave to others to how they might want to label those activities. But for me, it was something that is certainly regrettable.”
But Brennan defended the overall detention of 119 detainees as having produced valuable intelligence that, among other things, helped the CIA find and kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.