For years, supporters of the CIA's harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects have insisted the tactics were essential to preventing attacks and leading investigators to Osama bin Laden.
On Thursday, the agency's chief said he's not so sure.
In his first public appearance since Senate Democrats released a scathing assessment of the Central Intelligence Agency's "enhanced interrogation techniques," Director John Brennan simultaneously defended the measures while conceding they may not have been necessary.
"There was useful intelligence, very useful, valuable intelligence that was obtained from individuals who had been, at some point, subjected" to the harsh tactics, Brennan said yesterday in a press conference at the CIA's headquarters. "Whether that could have been obtained without the use of those EITs is something, again, that is unknowable."
Brennan's nuanced defence of the interrogation program, which ran from 2002 to 2007, struck a balance between defending his agency, appeasing congressional critics and aligning himself with President Barack Obama, who nominated him for the job.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat and chairman of the committee that released the report, said Brennan's comments were "a welcome change" from the agency position that detainees responded as a direct result of the harsh tactics.
'Coercive interrogations'
"It is an important development that Director Brennan does not attribute counterterrorism successes to coercive interrogations," Feinstein said in a statement.
"I disagree that it is 'unknowable'," she said. "The report shows that such information in fact was obtained through other means, both traditional CIA human intelligence and from other agencies."
The 500-page summary report released December 9 by Democrats on her Senate Intelligence Committee was the most comprehensive assessment of the CIA's so-called black site detention facilities and interrogation techniques following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Some interrogation tactics were "abhorrent" and produced false information, Brennan said. The techniques employed at secret facilities overseas included simulated drowning, known as waterboarding, rectal force-feeding and in one case leaving a partly naked man shackled to the floor for so long that he died of hypothermia.
False Information
"I tend to believe that the use of coercive methods has a strong prospect for resulting in false information," Brennan said. "If somebody is being subjected to coercive techniques they may say something to have those techniques stopped."
Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House intelligence panel, said Brennan was wrong and it is "knowable" that information obtained from harsh interrogations helped save lives and provided valuable intelligence on al-Qaeda.
"To me, it was clear by all the people we talked to who participated," Rogers said today at a media event sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington.
Obama issued an executive order in 2009 prohibiting the use of brutal tactics and requiring interrogators to follow procedures in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which Brennan said he supports.
20 Cases
The Senate committee reviewed 20 of the most frequent and prominent examples of interrogation cases that the CIA claimed produced valuable information. None of the cases showed that information was obtained that saved lives or that couldn't have been gleaned from other means, according to the findings.
Brennan said yesterday that harsh interrogations "provided information that was useful and was used" to find and kill al-Qaeda leader bin Laden.
After being subjected to enhanced interrogations, detainee Ammar al-Baluchi was the first to reveal that Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti served as a courier to bin Laden outside of Afghanistan, according to the CIA. The information was combined with other data to build a profile of the courier that eventually allowed the CIA to locate him, the agency said.
The Senate report said there's no evidence that torture was the only way to get to bin Laden, and that at least some information came from non-coercive means.
Tradecraft Standards
Brennan disputed the report's contention that the agency systematically misled Congress, White House officials and the American public about the nature and breadth of the interrogation program.
"To be clear, there were instances where representations that the program -- about the program that were used or approved by agency officers were inaccurate, imprecise or fell short of our tradecraft standards," he said.
Asked if CIA leadership had been lied to by employees in the field, he said: "I cannot say with certainty whether or not individuals acted with complete honesty."
Former CIA officials defended the agency, saying that officials were responding to a mission they weren't suited for - - interrogating terrorism suspects -- as they rushed to gather intelligence to prevent another attack.
Untidy Tasks
"You need an organization willing to do a variety of different things and take on tasks that aren't the cleanest or the neatest," Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director, said in a telephone interview.
"It's always been kind of a can-do organization that is responsive to direction from the president depending on the situation," he said. "To a considerable degree, people are trying to judge behavior without a sense of history, without a sense of time and place of when this occurred."
Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who had a 28-year career in the intelligence community, said the country and, by extension, officials working for the agency had a different mindset in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"This stuff was briefed to congressional leaders. It was subject to presidential control," Pillar said. "What more are you going to do? This was not an agency out of control."
Retired Army General David Petraeus, who resigned as head of the CIA in 2012, told a conference in Rotterdam yesterday that he opposes torture.
Petraeus, now working for KKR & Co., said a detainee is more likely to provide information if "you become his best friend," according to the Wall Street Journal.
In his 2011 confirmation hearing to become CIA director, Petraeus said he didn't support any techniques that violated the Army's Field Manual. The only scenario that could require more extreme measures is the threat of an imminent attack, he said.
