CIA Director Says They Won't Use Some Interrogation Techniques Even If Prez Tells Them To

CIA Director John Brennan was firm that his spy agency would refuse to employ controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, even if a future president ordered him to use them.

In an interview with NBC News released Sunday, he said: "I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure," he said. Brennan later added that he would "not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again."

Waterboarding is a technique in which a person is detained and made to feel that he is drowning.

Even though President Barack Obama had banned waterboarding after he took over in 2009, the Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, promised to revive it if he got elected, said foxnews. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/04/11/cia-director-says-agency-will-not-use-controversial-interrogation-techniques-again.html

Trump had said at a Republican debate in New Hampshire that he would "bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding".

His rival, the Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, had said during the debate that he would not make "widespread use" of the technique, yet he did not believe that it amounted to torture.

Last December 2014, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee had come out with a report pointing fingers at the interrogation methods by the CIA after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They were "brutal and far worse" than the agency had projected.

The report accused CIA of torturing a number of Al Qaeda detainees in Europe and Asia, even though officials said that they produced "valuable and actionable intelligence," with information taking U.S. forces to Usama bin Laden in 2011.

The assessment was indeed echoed by Brennan's remark on the report. He said: "The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of Al Qaeda and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day."

Still, in his confirmation hearings to  assume the CIA directorship in February 2013, he confirmed that the intelligence committee's report "raises serious questions about the information that I was given" about the usefulness of the enhanced interrogation techniques.

He later said: "I do not know what the truth is."