CIA chief claims agency ‘did a lot of things right’

The director of the CIA has defended his agency from accusations in a Senate report that it used inhumane interrogation techniques against terrorist suspects with no security benefits to the US.

John Brennan opened a rare news conference by recounting the horrors of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, his agency’s determination to prevent another such assault, and the fact that CIA officers were the first to fight and early to die in the Afghanistan war.

He conceded unauthorised and in some cases abhorrent methods were used against captives.

But Mr Brennan asserted the CIA “did a lot of things right” at a time when there were “no easy answers”

The Senate torture report this week said none of the techniques used against captives provided critical, life-saving intelligence.

Mr Brennan said that valuable intelligence did come from the interrogations but conceded that it is impossible to know whether the detainees provided that information because of the “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Mr Brennan would not say whether he considered some of the techniques torture.

His remarks were part of a campaign by the CIA and several of its past leaders to discredit a five-year Senate investigation into the CIA’s interrogation practices after 9/11, concerned the historical record may define them as torturers instead of patriots and expose them to worldwide legal action.

The Senate intelligence committee’s report does not urge prosecution for wrongdoing, and the Justice Department has no interest in reopening a criminal probe.

But the threat to former interrogators and their superiors was underlined as a UN special investigator demanded those responsible for “systematic crimes” be brought to justice, and human rights groups pushed for the arrest of key CIA and Bush administration figures if they travel overseas.

Current and former CIA officials determined to paint the Senate report as a political stunt by Democrats tarnishing a programme that saved American lives.

It is a “one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation — essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America,” former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

The CIA is now in the uncomfortable position of defending itself publicly, given its basic mission to protect the country secretly.

Challenging one of the report’s most explosive arguments — that harsh interrogation techniques did not lead to Osama bin Laden — the CIA pointed to questioning of Ammar al-Baluchi, who revealed how an al Qaeda operative relayed messages to and from bin Laden after he departed Afghanistan.

Before then, the CIA said, it only knew that courier Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti interacted with bin Laden in 2001 when the al Qaeda leader was accessible to many of his followers.

Al-Kuwaiti eventually led the US to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

The agency said it obtained legal authority for its actions from the Justice Department and White House.