WASHINGTON - CIA spymaster John Brennan was to confront his agency's legacy of torture head-on Thursday, staging a rare news conference to defend his officers' brutal response to the September 11 attacks.
Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan testifies before the House Select Intelligence Committee at the US Capitol in Washington, DC on February 4, 2014
This week's detailed revelations about the US intelligence agency's abuse of Al-Qaeda suspects in a network of secret prisons around the world has triggered global outrage and demands for justice.
It is also a political crisis for President Barack Obama, who halted his predecessor George W. Bush's torture program when he came to office but defends America's spies as patriots.
In inviting the press to the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Brennan faces the tricky task of defending his agency's reputation without breaking with a president keen to put the issue behind him.
Republican veterans of the Bush administration face no such dilemma. They have taken to the airwaves to argue the case, dismissed in this week's Senate report, that torture saved lives.
Far from denying allegations that have caused global revulsion, leaders like former vice president Dick Cheney insist "enhanced interrogation" led US spies to Osama bin Laden's hideout.
Obama has said the torture was contrary to American values, but has refused to say whether he agrees with the CIA argument that the program allowed them to identify Bin Laden's courier.
He was ambushed with a question on torture's effectiveness at the beginning of a meeting of his export council and dodged it, protesting: "We are talking about exports here."
Earlier, his spokesman Josh Earnest had refused a "yes or no" question as to whether Obama believes that torture saves lives.
"The most important question is: Should we have done it? And the answer to that question is 'no'," he said.
"The president does not believe that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques was good for our national security."
According to the long-delayed US Senate report released Tuesday, former president Bush only learned details of it in 2006, four years after it started in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
But, speaking to Fox News, Cheney denied Bush was kept out of the loop. He said the then-president "was in fact an integral part of the program and he had to approve it."
Detainees were beaten, waterboarded -- some of them dozens of times -- and humiliated through the painful use of medically unnecessary "rectal feeding" and "rectal rehydration".
Asked if Bush knew how specific interrogations were being conducted, Cheney was more vague, saying: "We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that."
Bush has yet to speak out publicly on the Senate report, into what the CIA has called "enhanced interrogation techniques," amid calls for those involved to face trial.
The CIA deliberately misled Congress and the White House about the value of the intelligence its interrogators were gathering, the report released by the Senate intelligence committee concluded.
- 'Full of crap' -
But Cheney did not mince his words in rejecting that.
"The report’s full of crap, excuse me. I said hooey yesterday -– let me use the real word," he thundered.
The investigation was "deeply flawed" and "didn’t bother to interview key people involved in the program," he said.
According to the 500-page declassified summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings, the first CIA briefing with Bush on the interrogation techniques was on April 8, 2006.
Some prisoners -- including Abu Zubaydah, allegedly a close associate of Osama Bin Laden, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who allegedly led Al-Qaeda operations in the Gulf -- were tortured in 2002.
That US interrogators tortured Al-Qaeda suspects in secret jails in allied countries was known. But the detailed report was seized upon by America's shocked friends and gloating enemies alike.
- 'Must not happen again' -
China and Iran, whose own human rights records have often been criticized by Washington, denounced the abuses -- but so did some close US friends like Germany.
"Such a gross violation of our liberal, democratic values must not happen again," German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, reflecting the embarrassment of Washington's European allies.
America's great power rivals China and Russia -- often on the end of US censure for its rights record -- was equally scathing.
"We believe the US side should reflect upon itself, correct its ways and earnestly respect and abide by the rules of international conventions," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.
"The published data is the latest proof of crude systemic violations of human rights by US authorities," the Russian foreign ministry's human rights envoy Konstantin Dolgov said in a statement.
"Such a state of affairs does not mesh with the United States' claims to the title of a 'paragon of democracy'," Dolgov said. "This is far from the reality."
In response to the report, Obama acknowledged that torture had been counterproductive and contrary to American values.
"No nation is perfect," he said. "But one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better."