WASHINGTON
(AP) -- The United States tortured al Qaida detainees captured after the
9/11 attacks, President Obama said Friday, in some of his most
expansive comments to date about a controversial set of CIA practices
that he banned after taking office.
"We
tortured some folks," Obama said at a televised news conference at the
White House. "We did some things that were contrary to our values."
Addressing
the impending release of a Senate report that criticizes CIA treatment
of detainees, Obama said he believed the mistreatment stemmed from the
pressure national security officials felt to forestall another attack.
He said Americans should not be too "sanctimonious," about passing
judgment through the lens of a seemingly safer present day.
That
view, which he expressed as a candidate for national office in 2008 and
early in his presidency, explains why Obama did not push to pursue
criminal charges against the Bush era officials who carried out the CIA
program. To this day, many of those officials insist that what they did
was not torture, which is a felony under U.S. law.
The
president's comments are a blow to those former officials, as well as
an estimated 200 people currently working at the CIA who played some
role in the interrogation program.
In 2009,
Obama said he preferred to "look forward, not backwards," on the issue,
and he decided that no CIA officer who was following legal
guidance-however flawed that guidance turned out to be -should be
prosecuted. A long-running criminal investigation into whether the CIA
exceeded the guidance-which is an allegation of the Senate report-was
closed in 2012 without charges.
Still, Obama's
remarks on Friday were more emphatic than his previous comments on the
subject, including a May 2009 speech in which he trumpeted his ban of
"so-called enhanced interrogation techniques," and "brutal methods," but
did not flatly say the U.S. had engaged in torture.
At
an April 2009 new conference, he said, "I believe that waterboarding
was torture and, whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake."
In
addition to water boarding, the CIA used stress positions, sleep
deprivation, nudity, humiliation, cold and other tactics that, taken
together, were extremely brutal, the Senate report is expected to say.
Obama on Friday did not mention a specific method, but he said the CIA
used techniques that "any fair minded person would believe were
torture."
"We crossed a line," he said. "That
needs to be understood and accepted...We did some things that were
wrong, and thats what that report reflects."
Obama
on Friday did not address two other central arguments of the
soon-to-be-released Senate report - that the brutal interrogations
didn't produce life-saving intelligence, and that the CIA lied to other
elements of the U.S. government about exactly what it was doing.
The
president also expressed confidence in his CIA director, John Brennan,
in the wake of an internal CIA report documenting that the spy agency
improperly accessed Senate computers. There have been calls for his
resignation on Capitol Hill.
Obama said the
internal report made clear that "some very poor judgment was shown," but
he seemed to say it wasn't Brennan's fault, and he praised his director
for ordering the inquiry in the first place.
