The United States tortured al Qaida detainees captured after the 9/11 attacks, President Obama said Friday, in some of his most expansive comments to date about a controversial set of CIA practices that he banned after taking office, according to Reuters.
"We tortured some folks," Obama said at a televised news conference at the White House, Reuters reported. "We did some things that were contrary to our values."
Addressing the impending release of a Senate report that criticizes CIA treatment of detainees, Obama said he believed the mistreatment stemmed from the pressure national security officials felt to forestall another attack, according to Reuters.
Obama said Americans should not be too "sanctimonious," about passing judgment through the lens of a seemingly safer present day, Reuters reported.
That view, which he expressed as a candidate for national office in 2008 and early in his presidency, explains why Obama did not push to pursue criminal charges against the Bush era officials who carried out the CIA program, according to Reuters. To this day, many of those officials insist that what they did was not torture, which is a felony under U.S. law.
The president's comments are a blow to those former officials, as well as an estimated 200 people currently working at the CIA who played some role in the interrogation program, Reuters reported.
In 2009, Obama said he preferred to "look forward, not backwards," on the issue, and he decided that no CIA officer who was following legal guidance-however flawed that guidance turned out to be -should be prosecuted, according to Reuters.
In addition to waterboarding, the CIA used stress positions, sleep deprivation, nudity, humiliation, cold and other tactics that, taken together, were extremely brutal, the Senate report is expected to say, Reuters reported.
"We crossed a line," Obama said, according to Reuters. "That needs to be understood and accepted...We did some things that were wrong, and thats what that report reflects."
The president also expressed confidence in his CIA director, John Brennan, in the wake of an internal CIA report documenting that the spy agency improperly accessed Senate computers, though there have been calls for his resignation on Capitol Hill, Reuters reported.
Obama said the internal report made clear that "some very poor judgment was shown," but he seemed to say it wasn't Brennan's fault, and he praised his director for ordering the inquiry in the first place, according to Reuters.
