Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has defended the controversial interrogation practice known as waterboarding, saying in a new interview that it helped "keep our nation safe" in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and was only used "when there was no other way to get information the was necessary."
"I believe that all of the evidence is very clear - that waterboarding was used in a very small handful of cases [and] was supervised by medical personnel in every one of those cases," the former Hewlett-Packard CEO told Yahoo! News in an interview published Monday.
"And I also believe that waterboarding was used when there was no other way to get information that was necessary," she added.
A 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report concluded that the CIA's "brutal" practice of waterboarding – which simulates drowning by pouring water over a cloth on a prisoner's face – led to false confessions, "extensive inaccurate information" and produced no useful intelligence about impending terrorist attacks, according to the Los Angeles Times. The United Nations has also said waterboarding qualifies as torture.
Fiorina, however, disagrees, calling the report "disingenuous" and "a shame" that "undermined the morale of a whole lot of people who dedicated their lives to keep the country safe," according to the Guardian.
Naureen Shah of Amnesty International told Yahoo! that Fiorina is "completely rewriting the history of what happened."
Fiorina also detailed how as chief of Hewlett-Packard she helped the NSA carry out its surveillance programs.
"I felt it was my duty to help, and so we did," she said. "They were ramping up a whole set of programs and needed a lot of data crunching capability to try and monitor a whole set of threats ... What I knew at the time was our nation had been attacked."
Concerning those surveillance practices revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Fiorina said she was "not aware of circumstances" in which the NSA "went too far" and violated Constitutional rights.
But she did say that she encouraged the agency to be more open about its activities. "One of the things that I advised the NSA and CIA to do is to be as transparent as possible about as much as possible - because transparency reassures people," she said.
