Senate releases CIA torture report

[Drew Phipps]

Prior to the release of the torture report, the following comments were made:

(various sources, emphasis added)

Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that "we're going to want to stand behind these guys," as one former official put it. Mr. Bush made that clear in an interview broadcast on Sunday. "We're fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the C.I.A. serving on our behalf," he told CNN's Candy Crowley. "These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base." "These are "really good people and we're lucky as a nation to have them," he said. (Another former official, who remains close to Mr. Bush, said the former president did not believe that the C.I.A. had misinformed him.)


Former intelligence officials, seeking allies against the potentially damaging report, have privately reassured the Bush team in recent days that they did not deceive them and have lobbied the former president's advisers to speak out publicly on their behalf. The defense of the program has been organized by former C.I.A. leaders like George J. Tenet and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, two former directors, and John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy C.I.A. director who also served as acting director.


"Once the release occurs, we'll have things to say and will be making some documents available that bear on the case," Mr. McLaughlin said Sunday. Although he could not discuss details because of a nondisclosure agreement, in general he said the report "uses information selectively, often distorts to make its points, and as I recall contains no recommendations." General Hayden added that the former C.I.A. team objected to the Senate's characterization of their efforts. "We're not here to defend torture," he said by email on Sunday. "We're here to defend history." General Hayden appeared earlier on Sunday on "Face the Nation" on CBS News to say that any assertion that the C.I.A. "lied to everyone about a program that wasn't doing any good, that beggars the imagination." "The idea that George Tenet, John McLaughlin, Mike Hayden and Steve Kappes would knowingly mislead the president and the country is absurd," the former official said. Mr. Kappes was another deputy C.I.A. director during the Bush era. "This was not a rogue program. And nobody in our administration is going to throw the C.I.A. over the side on this."

Former Vice President Dick Cheney told the New York Times that claims that the CIA was out of bounds or that the interrogation program was a rogue operations were "a bunch of hooey." "The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program," Cheney said.


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Sounds like admissions to me, despite the "finding" in the Senate report that the CIA failed to inform the President. I'm looking forward to the new "disclosures."