During a rare televised press conference, CIA Director John Brennan said that his agency’s Bush-era enhanced interrogation techniques used on Guantanamo detainees are a “feature of our past” that the U.S. needs “to come to terms with.”
“This is a feature, I think, of our past, and one that we have to come to terms with and deal with.”
He continued, “This agency is determined to move forward.”
The recently released 500-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, otherwise referred to as the “Torture Report,” has sparked a heated debate on both sides of the aisle regarding America’s use of interrogation in the name of national security.
Questions central to the debate concern the effectiveness of the report-documented interrogation techniques, the nation’s stance on human rights, and the plausible national security ramifications of releasing such a report for all eyes around the globe to see.