In a serious blow to Bush administration officials, President Obama admitted that the United States tortured al-Qaeda detainees captured after the 9/11 attacks.
The admission made at a Friday press conference included some of the most expansive comments made by Obama about enhanced interrogation practices used by the CIA during the Bush administration, practices he banned shortly after taking office.
“We tortured some folks,” the president admitted during the televised news conference at the White House. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”
The president’s remarks were made in response to a recent study by the Senate regarding the CIA program that used “enhanced interrogations” and secret prisons to extract information from captured militants after the 9/11 attacks. According to the president, a “declassified version that will be released at the pleasure of the Senate committee.”
As reported by Reuters,
Over the last two weeks, former directors and deputy directors of the CIA have been invited by the Obama administration to review a still-secret version of the 600-page Senate Intelligence Committee summary at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Officials familiar with its contents say it concludes that the CIA’s use of harsh “enhanced interrogation” methods such as waterboarding, or simulated drowning, on a handful of prisoners, and other stress tactics on a larger set of captured militants, did not produce any significant counter-terrorism breakthroughs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
Reuters added that “officials said the report also alleges that CIA officials misstated or exaggerated the results of the program by claiming such methods had helped to foil terrorist plots.”
You can watch the relevant portion of the press conference, below, followed by a transcript of those remarks.
With respect to the larger point of the RDI report itself, even before I came into office I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.
I understand why it happened. I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.
But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And that’s what that report reflects. And that’s the reason why, after I took office, one of the first things I did was to ban some of the extraordinary interrogation techniques that are the subject of that report.
And my hope is, is that this report reminds us once again that the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard. And when we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line. And that needs to be — that needs to be understood and accepted. And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.
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