(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) The head of the CIA has admitted that some of the enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) used on detainees after 9/11 were "harsh" and "abhorrent." The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency rarely makes an appearance to answer questions from the media, but on Thursday he held a press conference from the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia to comment on the Senate's recently released report detailing torture tactics used by American personnel during the Bush administration.
"When [President Barack Obama] came into office in January 2009, he took the position that these techniques were contrary to our values and he unequivocally banned their use," Brennan said. "He has consistently expressed the view that these techniques did significant damage to America's standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners, something I have experienced firsthand." He added the CIA was "unprepared to conduct a detention and interrogation program, and our officers inadequately developed and monitored its initial activities. The agency failed to establish quickly the operational guidelines needed to govern the entire effort. In a limited number of cases, agency officers used interrogation techniques that had not been authorized, were abhorrent and rightly should be repudiated by all. And we fell short when it came to holding some officers accountable for their mistakes." When asked if the torture helped extract information from prisoners that then saved lives, Brennan acknowledged, "There is no way... to know whether or not some information that was obtained from an individual who had been subjected at some point during his confinement could have been obtained through other means." However "there was useful intelligence - very useful, valuable intelligence that was obtained from individuals who had been at some point subjected to the EITs," he continued. "Whether that could have been obtained without the use of those EITs is something, again, that is unknowable." "I believe effective, non-coercive methods are available to elicit such information; methods that do not have a counterproductive impact on our national security and on our international standing," he affirmed. "It is for these reasons that I fully support the president's decision to prohibit the use of EITs." Brennan went on to highlight a set of reforms the agency is implementing, based on the issues identified in the nearly 600-page executive summary of a five-year investigation into torture conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"[The] CIA has taken steps to broaden the scope of our accountability reviews, strengthen the planning, management, oversight and evaluation of our covert action programs, systematically reexamine the legal opinions underlying our sensitive programs and improve our recordkeeping for interactions with the Congress," he said.
"We are not a perfect institution. We're made up of individuals. And as human beings, we are imperfect beings," Brennan stressed.
"I have spoken to many of my foreign counterparts over the past week to allow them opportunity to prepare for the release of this document in the event that there was going to be any implications for them as a result of either information that was contained in this document and then could be correlated with other information that's out there and which leads to speculation about what their countries, their governments, their services might have done," he noted on the question of US allies' reaction to the report.
"But what I've told them is that it's important for our partnership to move forward and to strengthen in the years ahead because of the nature of the national security challenges we face, and so I am interested in making sure that we're able to do that," he said.
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