[Flash Walken]

"MU" Is Mark Udall, Senator from Colorado who served on the intelligence committee that launched the investigation. He's the guy in the videos in my previous post. "SR" is Scott Raab, journalist for Esquire

SR: So you don’t just have the report, you have an agency that hacked the committee’s computers.

MU: Right. Four times. Four times.

SR: You called for CIA director John Brennan’s resignation.

MU: There are some that would like this report never to see the light of day. There are some that are running out the clock. There are some that are raising the specter that the CIA employees involved would somehow be subject to not only threats but potential action that would affect their personal safety. Those personnel, if they have that worry, can be given some legitimate security. . . .

The people who conducted these activities in the name of the CIA, in the name of the American people, have a right to be processed. They don’t have a right to [pause] push under the rug what happened.

SR: Right.

MU: What happened broke faith in the Constitution. It’s made our challenge much greater when it comes to facing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. And it is morally repugnant. When this report is declassified, people will abhor what they read. They’re gonna be disgusted. They’re gonna be appalled. They’re gonna be shocked at what we did. But it will lay a foundation whereby we don’t do this in the future. That’s been my goal. That’s been my mission.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mark-udall-0115


This article is from 2009.

On July 17, 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who later became secretary of state, said the CIA could proceed with "alternative interrogation methods," including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.

The decision was contingent on the Justice Department's determining the method's legality. A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined the "proposed interrogation techniques were lawful," the report said.

The same techniques also were used in the interrogations of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the first person charged in the United States in the 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Video Watch how Rice's role has emerged »

The release of the report, prepared by the attorney general's office at the request of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, details and declassifies the advice given to the CIA regarding its interrogation techniques.

The techniques again gained the endorsement of the Bush administration in spring 2003 when the CIA asked for a "reaffirmation of the policies and practices in the interrogation program."

In a meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, Ashcroft, Rice and their legal counsels, "the principals reaffirmed that the CIA program was lawful and reflected administration policy," the report said.

President Obama has called waterboarding -- which simulates drowning -- torture and last week released a series of Bush-era memos on interrogation tactics.

One memo showed that CIA interrogators used waterboarding at least 266 times on Zubaydah and Mohammed.

In a 2008 interview with ABC, Cheney defended the practice of waterboarding, now banned by the Obama administration, particularly in the case of Mohammed.

"Did it produce the desired results? I think it did," Cheney said.

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ... provided us with a wealth of information. There was a period of time there, three or fours years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source.

"So it's been a remarkably successful effort," he said. "I think the results speak for themselves."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/...ing/index.html