The United States tortured al Qaida detainees captured after the 9/11 attacks, President Obama said Friday, in some of his most expansive comments to date about a controversial set of CIA practices that he banned after taking office.
“We tortured some folks,” Obama said at a televised news conference at the White House. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”
Addressing the impending release of a Senate report that criticizes CIA treatment of detainees, Obama said he believed the mistreatment stemmed from the pressure national security officials felt to forestall another attack. He said Americans should not be too “sanctimonious,” about passing judgment through the lens of a seemingly safer present day.
That view, which he expressed as a candidate for national office in 2008 and early in his presidency, explains why Obama did not push to pursue criminal charges against the Bush era officials who carried out the CIA program. To this day, many of those officials insist that what they did was not torture, which is a felony under U.S. law.
The president’s comments are a blow to those former officials, as well as an estimated 200 people currently working at the CIA who played some role in the interrogation program.
In 2009, Obama said he preferred to “look forward, not backwards,” on the issue, and he decided that no CIA officer who was following legal guidance—however flawed that guidance turned out to be —should be prosecuted. A long-running criminal investigation into whether the CIA exceeded the guidance—which is an allegation of the Senate report—was closed in 2012 without charges.
Still, Obama’s remarks on Friday were more emphatic than his previous comments on the subject, including a May 2009 speech in which he trumpeted his ban of “so-called enhanced interrogation techniques,” and “brutal methods,” but did not flatly say the U.S. had engaged in torture.
At an April 2009 new conference, he said, “I believe that waterboarding was torture and, whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake.”
In addition to water boarding, the CIA used stress positions, sleep deprivation, nudity, humiliation, cold and other tactics that, taken together, were extremely brutal, the Senate report is expected to say. Obama on Friday did not mention a specific method, but he said the CIA used techniques that “any fair minded person would believe were torture.”
“We crossed a line,” he said. “That needs to be understood and accepted…We did some things that were wrong, and thats what that report reflects.”
Obama on Friday did not address two other central arguments of the soon-to-be-released Senate report — that the brutal interrogations didn’t produce life-saving intelligence, and that the CIA lied to other elements of the U.S. government about exactly what it was doing.
The president also expressed confidence in his CIA director, John Brennan, in the wake of an internal CIA report documenting that the spy agency improperly accessed Senate computers. There have been calls for his resignation on Capitol Hill.
Obama said the internal report made clear that “some very poor judgment was shown,” but he seemed to say it wasn’t Brennan’s fault, and he praised his director for ordering the inquiry in the first place.
(AP)
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9 Responses
And if his two daughters were kidnapped, would he approve of torture to find their whereabouts ???? hmmmmmmm? Or if a terrorist hid his golf sticks ?????
What an idiot. No American cares that they tortured these murderous terrorists except Obama and his ilk. Still 2+ years of this fool.
Being that Obama is such a righteous man and is only interested in honesty, he should turn over these findings to the UN and have them prosecute those Evil Americans for war crimes! Maybe they’ll even get the death penalty!
Now Barry should turn himself in to the Pakistan Government to stand trial for the MURDER of Osama Bin Laden. He invaded the airspace of a foreign Nation and murdered a foreigner in a foreign land! This is unacceptable! Mr. Moon should arrange for Obamas transfer.
“red herring”.
And by “folks” he means very little children up to 100 year old ladies.
Also the word “tortured” is past tense, there’s a serious problem with that.
Where you taking all those torture testing/experiment results to Obama? What are you doing with it? little children? Old ladies?
I got your real “torture report” right here obama.
Just saw a new genetics post on Cuban and Guantanamo dna, your pretty sick. you racist.
I wonder how we found out where Bin Ladin was hiding…
Does anyone care? Quite the contrary. We’re all very happy that they were tortured as they gave up vital information that saved American lives. Stop this righteous indignation over what you perceive to be inhumane treatment. These cockroaches are anything but human.
all firemen agree that buildings on fire dont collapse into their blue print. it never happened since the creation of the world. and who collapsed building #7 of world trade center? no plane crashed into it. I wonder how much Bin Laden realy had to do with it.
They knew his location all the time. They showed him at the dinner right after the 9/11 attack bragging about the hijacked planes, they should have killed him then with the drones. Someone here knew the plan to attack America, they could have shot the other planes after they changed course even if they did not know the plane. This is an Air Defense SOB.
Bush wanted to attack Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11. Here we are with so many lost lives and 70,000 injured servicemen to support the rest of their lives, Good gift for our children and grandchildren.
Re comment no. 1: Yes, if Mr. Obama’s family were threatened, he might want to engage in inhumane conduct. That is the moral foundation of honor killings and revenge killings that are a part of certain cultures. But it is not the moral foundation of Torah or Western civilization. Maybe you are more of a Muslim than the US president.
Re comment no. 2: If nobody cares about torture except “Obama and his ilk”, then that would be a majority of Americans, judging by the results of the last 2 presidential elections. There are good reasons not to torture aside from the moral and humanitarian ones.