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CIA Director Brennan 'lying' & 'openly hostile': Sen. Mark Udall on CIA Torture Report

733 views · Published 10 December 2014 · 8:56 · Indexed 27 October 2026

Channel: Public Enquiry · 2014 · News & Politics

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Mark Udall offers scathing condemnation of Obama’s CIA
10Dec14 By Zachary Roth
The CIA’s torture problem is a long way from being resolved, Sen. Mark Udall said Wednesday in a blistering speech that called the agency to account more directly than any Washington lawmaker so far.
“The CIA has lied to its overseers and the public, destroyed and tried to hold back evidence, spied on the Senate, made false charges against our staff, and lied about torture and the results of torture,” said Udall on the Senate floor. “And no one has been held to account.”
Speaking a day after the long-delayed release of a Senate report that detailed the CIA’s years-long use of harsh and shocking interrogation techniques, Udall offered a wide-ranging and uncompromising denunciation of the CIA and the Obama administration’s efforts to shed light on the program.
Sen. Udall calls for Brennan's resignation
Udall called for the resignation of John Brennan, the agency’s director, whom he accused of a “failure of leadership.” He said the White House must “purge” CIA officials involved in the program. The senator demanded accountability for the agency’s spying on the committee. He accused the White House of a “refusal to be open” during the process of making redactions to the report — and criticized President Obama for what he called a failure to offer “moral leadership” on the issue. Udall claimed the CIA willfully spread misinformation designed to promote the false idea that its torture program helped kill Osama bin Laden. And he slammed its leadership for a “persistent and entrenched culture of misrepresenting the truth to Congress and the American people.”
Since the release of the Senate report Tuesday, there has been no shortage of sharp criticism of the CIA from lawmakers. But nearly all of that of that outrage has focused on the torture program itself, which was most active a decade or more ago, and ended after President Obama came into office.
By contrast, Udall’s focus was squarely on issues that haven’t been resolved.
“This is not a problem of the past but a problem that needs to be dealt with today,” said the senator, who will leave office at the end of the year after losing his re-election bid.
High-level CIA officials who helped draw up and implement the program are still in their posts today, he said.
“It is bad enough not to prosecute these officials — but to reward or promote them and risk the integrity of the U.S. government to protect them is incomprehensible.”
“It is bad enough not to prosecute these officials — but to reward or promote them and risk the integrity of the U.S. government to protect them is incomprehensible,” he added. “The president needs to purge his administration of high-level officials who were instrumental to the development and running of this program.”
Some of Udall’s harshest words were directed at Brennan, who he accused of stonewalling Senate investigators. The CIA director, Udall said, was “openly hostile toward and dismissive of the Committee’s oversight and its efforts to review” the torture program.
Obama has backed Brennan during past disputes with Congress and has avoided taking sides in response to the release of the Senate report.
Udall also called for the declassification of the Panetta Review — an internal agency investigation begun under then-director Leon Panetta in 2009 that Udall called a “smoking gun.” Udall said the review identifies errors by the agency — corroborating many of the Senate report’s findings — and that it differs sharply from a response Brennan provided to the committee last year. That response defended the torture program and denied wrongdoing by the agency. As such, Udall said, the Panetta Review offers evidence that Brennan and his allies may have knowingly provided inaccurate information to the committee, which he called “a serious offense.”
“The refusal to provide the full Panetta Review, and the refusal to acknowledge facts detailed in both the Committee Study and the Panetta Review leads to one disturbing finding: Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture,” Udall said. “In other words, the CIA is lying.”
Senate investigators have seen portions of the Panetta Review, which were handed over unknowingly by the CIA amid thousands of other documents. It was out of concern that agency staff had been provided with the full Panetta Review that the agency conducted what Udall called an “illegal search” of Senate computers, revealed earlier this year.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/mark-udall-offers-scathing-condemnation-obamas-cia

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