Bush Era Officials Claim Terrorist Torture ‘Necessary’ to Prevent Attacks

MOSCOW, December 11 (Sputnik) — After the Tuesday’s publication of the report on the alleged CIA torture of suspected terrorists, the most prominent figures of the George W. Bush Republican administration and some CIA leaders unite efforts in defending themselves from the risen wave of leftist criticism.

Bush administration and CIA officials, who allegedly devised or knowingly approved the CIA post-9/11 torture tactics toward the terror suspects, have taken a common stance against the criticism, widespread in the mainstream Liberal media after the publication of the 500-pages report summary.

“The report's full of crap, excuse me," ex- Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News. “We asked the agency (CIA) to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards that killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure that didn’t happen again. And that's exactly what they did and they deserve a lot of credit, not the condemnation that they’re receiving from the Senate Democrats."

The report states that CIA employees used torture techniques on suspected terrorists, held captive in secret locations outside the US. The techniques allegedly included ‘rectal feeding’, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, putting victims in ‘stress positions’, among others. A separate case of a CIA interrogator playing Russian roulette with a suspect is also reported.

"I don't know that the report that was released yesterday is that historically accurate," ex-CIA director Michael Hayden told NBC. "It reads like a prosecutorial screed rather than a historical document."

The Bush officials stress that the CIA tactics, albeit extreme in some cases, played a decisive role in tracking and eliminating the #1 terrorist Osama bin Laden.

"The al Qaeda leadership has not managed another attack on the homeland in the 13 years since, despite a strong desire to do so," Hayden told the Wall Street Journal. "The CIA’s aggressive counterterrorism policies and programs are responsible for that success."

Among other people, speaking in CIA defence, are John Yoo, who served as a senior Justice Department attorney after 9/11, and James E. Mitchell, one of two CIA psychologists, familiar with the matter.

"It's flat wrong," Mitchell told The Associated Press of the report. "I completely understand why the human rights organizations in the United States are upset by the Senate report," Mitchell said. "I would be upset by it too, if it were true."

Yoo, however, indirectly confirmed the torture allegation, having written in Time that “chief executive would reasonably give the green light to limited, but aggressive interrogation methods that did not cause any long-term or permanent injury”. He went on to elaborate that harsh measures in relation to suspected terrorists were necessary in order to obtain valuable intel and prevent future terrorist threats and attacks.