Washington: A shocked America reacted with horror to a scathing Senate report detailing CIA's brutal interrogation techniques used in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that in the end yielded little actionable intelligence.
The spy agency's techniques detailed in a Democrat majority Senate intelligence committee report are "contrary to who we are", President Barack Obama said in an interview to a news channel
"We've got better ways of doing things" than resorting to the "brutal" tactics chronicled in the report, he told Telemundo/MSNBC when asked whether he agreed with then President George W. Bush's view that CIA interrogators should be considered "patriots".
Based on more than six million internal agency documents, the report details tactics like sleep deprivation, isolation in total darkness, rectal feeding and at least two mock executions.
The waterboarding of Shaikh Mohammed, the Pakistani mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is described as a "series of near drownings".
Amid a partisan divide, Republicans defended the CIA, which called the programme as "effective", and criticised the report's release, saying it puts US personnel at risk.
But Senator John McCain, 2008 Republican presidential candidate, commended its release, saying "the truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow", but the American people are "entitled" to it.
Dianne Feinstein, Democratic chairperson of the Senate panel that authored the report said the CIA's actions were "a stain on our values and our history".
The Washington Post agreed saying in an editorial, "The horrors in America's 'dungeon' should never have happened."
The release "might rouse anti-American sentiment in thenear terma", it said but in the long term, the US "will benefit by demonstrating a commitment to transparency and self-criticism -- and, most of all, by pledging never to repeat its post-9/11 mistakes".
The New York Times said the "report on the CIA's torture and lies" raised "again, with renewed power, the question of why no one has ever been held accountable for these seeming crimes".
Foreign Policy group's CEO David Rothkopf called it "a vital step toward bringing to an end the Age of Fear" saying the issue it "raises is not just what we did to these people, but what we became by doing it".
However, Council on Foreign Relations' Max Boot disagreed saying it "will only aid our enemies who will have more fodder for their propaganda mills".
The report "merely rakes up history and for no good purpose beyond predictable congressional grandstanding", he said.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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