The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on coercive tactics betrays intelligence officials and will erode their trust in future presidential administrations, a former CIA official who oversaw the agency’s enhanced interrogation program said Sunday.
Jose Rodriguez, who headed the CIA’s counterterrorism section and its clandestine service, said that the Senate report “throws the CIA under this bus.” He predicted that intelligence officials would be undercut by “second-guessing” from the White House and Congress and warned that allied nations that have cooperated with U.S. intelligence in the past might reassess their aid.
Rodriguez was among several former senior CIA and Bush administration officials who appeared on Sunday’s news shows and tried to cast doubt on the 525-page Senate report, which riveted the American public last week with accounts of brutal interrogations of terror detainees that ranged from simulated drowning to improvised enemas. Vice President Dick Cheney, long known for his blunt dismissal of critics of the harsh tactics, tossed off the report as “a crock.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of several congressional leaders who defended the document, said the detailed accounts justified the report’s public release. “What we need to do is come clean, move forward and vow not to do it again,” McCain said, adding: “We’re not a perfect nation, but we acknowledge our mistakes.”
The report spans the creation and four-year history of the CIA’s coercive interrogations and secret overseas prisons and has spawned media attention, international outrage and a carefully coordinated rebuttal that included an official CIA response and critiques from former senior agency officials. Among them is Rodriguez, a tough-talking agency veteran who micromanaged the interrogation program and ordered the destruction of videotapes of some waterboarding sessions, according to the Senate report.
Rodriguez, who authored a memoir of his CIA years and his role in the enhanced interrogation program, revived his previous claim that Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other top Democratic legislators were thoroughly briefed and approved the program that President Barack Obama now calls torture. Pelosi and other Democrats have denied Rodriguez’ claims.
“We came to know very gradually about it,” countered Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Ohio, who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Rodriguez and Whitehouse spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” Cheney was on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and McCain made his remarks on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
(AP)
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2 Responses
This article misrepresents McCain’s position. McCain pointed out that torture violates the Geneva Convention and the convention against torture, that waterboarding was used by the Spanish Inquisition and that after World War II the US executed Japanese officials for using it, and quoted Gen. David Petreaus as saying that torture is not effective, a conclusion supported by the detailed Senate report.
As far as trust in future Presidential administrations, the CIA officials should have refused the orders of the incompetent Bush officials who ordered this illegal torture. It is clear that Bush deserved the trust of nobody at any time during his Presidency.
Charliehall, do you really believe that torture is not effective? You can say you don’t believe in using it and you would have preferred thousands of people dying instead…