CIA fights back after torture report

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Top spies past and present campaigned Wednesday to discredit the Senate’s investigation into the CIA’s harrowing torture practices after 9/11, battling to define the historical record and deter potential legal action around the world.

The Senate intelligence committee’s report doesn’t urge prosecution for wrongdoing, and the Justice Department has no interest in reopening a criminal probe. But the threat to former interrogators and their superiors was underlined as a U.N. special investigator demanded those responsible for “systematic crimes” be brought to justice, and human-rights groups pushed for the arrest of key CIA and Bush administration figures if they travel overseas.

Current and former CIA officials pushed back, determined to paint the Senate report as a political stunt by Senate Democrats tarnishing a program that saved American lives. It is a “one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation — essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America,” former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

The intelligence committee’s 500-page release concluded that the CIA inflicted suffering on al-Qaida prisoners beyond its legal authority and that none of the agency’s “enhanced interrogations” provided critical, life-saving intelligence. It cited the CIA’s own records, documenting in detail how waterboarding and lesser-known techniques such as “rectal feeding” were actually employed.