CIA chief defends terror response

CIA director John Brennan 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.

Mr 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 asserted that none of the CIA's 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”.

He said the cause-and-effect relationship is “unknown and unknowable.” In that respect, he stopped short of the claims of other defenders of the programme who said the tough methods saved thousands of American lives.

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