http://thehill.com/policy/defense/226847-cia-head-criticizes-flawed-senate-reportCIA head criticizes 'flawed' Senate report
By Julian Hattem - 12/11/14 02:49 PM EST
A landmark Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s past use of harsh interrogation techniques is “flawed” and incomplete, agency head John Brennan said Thursday.
Brennan, speaking in a rare press conference on the heels of the report’s release this week, aired new comments on the analysis, which was harshly critical of the George W. Bush-era tactics.
In particular, Brennan chided the Intelligence Committee’s years-in-the-making report for relying only on memos, records of communications and transcripts of previous conversations, not new interviews with CIA officials.
“I think it’s lamentable that the committee did not avail itself of the opportunity to interview CIA personnel,” Brennan said at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va.
“As you can well understand, everything that CIA officers did and said at the time was not memorialized in a document,” he added. “I think that by just doing a review of the documentary evidence ... you lose the opportunity to really understand what was taking place at the time.”
The public version of the report, which asserted that the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques at times amounted to torture and was justified under false pretenses, sent a shockwave through Washington this week and put the CIA under the microscope.
Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has tried for years to get the report completed and into the public's hands, denied that new interviews with CIA officials were necessary. She said those interviews would have been impossible to conduct.
The early stages of the Senate panel’s review were conducted at the same time the Justice Department was pursuing its own investigation into the use of the techniques, during the early years of the Obama administration.
The Justice Department refused to coordinate its work, she said on the Senate floor this week, so “possible interviewees could be subject to additional liability if they were interviewed.”
Additionally, the CIA refused to have its employees sit for interviews with the committee, due to the ongoing Justice Department probe.
The 6.3 million pages of documents reviewed by the committee shine more than enough light on the situation at the time to get a full picture of what went on, she has said.
