Leading Democrats sharply criticised a former CIA chief today for suggesting that a Senate panel's disputed torture report was motivated by the "emotional feeling" of the senator who chairs the committee, not by a desire for objectivity.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report examines the CIA's detention and interrogation program after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In an appearance on Fox News over the weekend, Michael Hayden, who was President George W Bush's CIA director from 2006 to 2009, questioned the motivations of committee chair Sen Dianne Feinstein.
Hayden said he motivation behind the still-classified, 6,300-page investigation "may show deep emotional feeling on the part of the senator, but I don't think it leads you to an objective report."
On the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Hayden's comments condescending and claimed they were representative of a broader Republican hostility for women. "Does this sound like a person or party that respects women?" Reid said. Of Feinstein, he said: "She has been fearless. She has been thorough and fair... She's being too emotional? I don't think so."
Sen Mark Udall, a Democrat who serves alongside Feinstein on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the reference to Feinstein's emotions a "baseless smear" that Hayden wouldn't make against a man.
The report was produced exclusively by Democratic staffers. It concludes among other things that waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to congressional aides and outside experts familiar with the document, who have spoken on condition of anonymity because the report is still classified.
And the report is also said to accuse the agency of misleading Bush and Congress about the successes of the program. The CIA disputes many of the findings.
Feinstein and other committee members voted 11-3 last week to declassify about 500 pages of the report. The CIA is reviewing those sections. The process coincides with a bitter, related dispute between Feinstein's committee and the spy agency over dueling allegations of illegal snooping and competing criminal referrals.
Feinstein said in a statement that declassifying the review of the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program "would ensure nothing like it happens again." She called Hayden's reference to her emotions "nonsense.
