PRESIDENT BARACK Obama’s director of national intelligence has insisted that he shares the administration’s disapproval of the CIA’s use of torture, despite telling colleagues that harsh interrogations had produced valuable intelligence.
Admiral Dennis Blair had appeared to defend the use of torture in a letter that expressed sympathy for Bush administration officials making national security decisions in the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001, attacks.
“High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al- Qaeda organisation that was attacking this country,” he wrote.
Republicans in Congress seized on the letter as evidence that some of the president’s top advisers believe the Bush administration was right to authorise torture. In a statement yesterday, however, Mr Blair said that whatever intelligence was acquired through harsh methods, it was not worth the damage done to the country’s reputation.
Mr Obama has ruled out prosecuting CIA interrogators who used torture techniques that were approved by the Bush administration but he suggested this week that officials who drew up the legal authorisation of torture could be called to account.
“With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say it is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general, within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that,” the president said.
Mr Obama said the Bush administration’s legal memos authorising the use of torture, which were released last week, “reflected, in my view, us losing our moral bearings”. He suggested that an independent, bipartisan commission could look into the use of torture, although he held back from calling for such an inquiry to be established.
“If and when there needs to be a further accounting of what took place during this period, I think for Congress to examine ways that it can be done in a bipartisan fashion, outside of the typical hearing process that can sometimes break down and break it entirely along party lines, to the extent that there are independent participants who are above reproach and have credibility, that would probably be a more sensible approach to take,” he said.
Senior Democrats have promised to open congressional hearings on the torture memos after the justice department’s office of professional responsibility issues a report. It remains unclear what grounds attorney general Eric Holder might have to prosecute the former officials who drew up the memos. Lawyers have been prosecuted for constructing a case for illegal behaviour but prosecutors would have to show that the officials drafted the memos to justify the breaking of US law.
Testifying before a congressional committee yesterday, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said a non-partisan commission could be the best approach to investigating the torture memos.
“Those that formulated those legal opinions and gave those orders should be reviewed,” she said. Mrs Clinton defended Mr Obama’s decision to publish the memos but dodged a question about former vice-president Dick Cheney’s call for the release of documents showing that harsh interrogation methods had been effective.
“I believe that we ought to get to the bottom of this entire matter. I think it’s in the best interest of our country, and that is what the president believes, and that’s why he has taken the actions he did,” she said.
A Senate report published yesterday found that brutal treatment of prisoners by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Afghanistan was systematic and a direct result of the CIA’s early use of torture.
Senate armed services committee chairman Carl Levin said the report showed that abuse of detainees was widespread and not simply the work of a few “bad apples” as the Bush administration claimed. “Authorisations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment,” he said.