End of Brennan Briefing; Analysis of John Brennan's Speech
JOHN BRENNAN, CIA DIRECTOR: It was one of the things that the WMD commission encouraged there to be a diversity of views within the intelligence community. So there wouldn't be single group thing. And so, there have been a lot of studies done over the years about the value of different types of interrogation methods and whether or not coercive methods can lead to useful information that couldn't be otherwise obtained. I tend to believe that the use of coercive methods has a strong prospect for resulting in false information because if somebody is being subjected to a course of techniques, they may say something to have those techniques stopped and I think this agency has said that individuals who are subjected to those techniques here provided useful information as well as false information. And as our experts try to pore through a lot of data and information, that job is made more challenging if you get more false information. Thank you.</s>WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: So spending about 45 minutes before the news media out at Langley, Virginia, the CIA Director John Brennan making a very strong case. Yes, the CIA made several major mistakes, but on the whole the CIA should be praised. The CIA Director John Brennan saying that, yes, the process was flawed. There were mistakes but they defended the overwhelming majority of the CIA personnel for doing the right thing in the days, weeks, months, years after 9/11. We want to welcome back our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington. Let's get some serious analysis of what's going on. First of all, Jake Tapper, what's your bottom line reaction when you heard what the CIA director had to say?</s>JAKE TAPPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's interesting. When you talk to CIA officials and CIA analysts about the torture program, the enhanced interrogation program, they say nothing is as clear cut as the media and perhaps even the public want it to be. Everything is very murky. There's a lot of ambivalence. You can't say you waterboard this guy and he gives you this information, ticking time bomb, the terrorist act is prevented. It's all a lot more complicated than that. It's little bits of information here and there. And you get a sense of that murkiness and a sense of that ambivalence from Director Brennan's remarks. One of the things he said was he said it was unknowable if any of the information gained from using these brutal techniques could have come from using non-brutal techniques. In fact, David Petraeus, the former CIA director is quoted in "The Wall Street Journal" just a few minutes ago saying he told a conference in Rotterdam "If you want information from a detainee, you become his best friend." That is another theory of having best information. But in any case, so he was saying it's unknowable. That doesn't mean that they then support the idea of using EITs unnecessarily, or torture. But it is very, very complicated and you can see why they don't put Brennan out there to explain these things very often. He doesn't speak in terms of right and wrong. He speaks in terms of the messy business of acquiring intelligence.</s>GLORIA BORGER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I think Brennan was also trying to really rally the troops here. Because he, you know, he made the case very strongly that the CIA does not intentionally mislead the Congress, which is a case Dianne Feinstein says very definitively, we were intentionally misled. We were uninformed. He also made the case these were a group of -- he didn't use the word rogue. My word rogue. Folks that did the torture and that this is not the way the CIA comports itself and he also admitted, quite frankly, that this was an agency post- 9/11 in his introduction that was unprepared for detainees and for interrogation and so he made it sort of clear like they were trying to find their way as they were doing this. But there is now a big difference and a big question because, Wolf, you pointed out some tweets from Dianne Feinstein or her staff, during that ...</s>TAPPER: Live tweeting.</s>BORGER: Live tweeting, you know, effectively saying that in fact the CIA ...</s>BLITZER: Let me read that - Let me read some of these tweets from Dianne Feinstein. "Covert authority did not include authorization to use coercive interrogation techniques."</s>BORGER: Right.</s>BLITZER: Another tweet, "coercive interrogation techniques don't work. Traditional intelligence collection, interrogation and law enforcement do." Let me read a third one. She said, "Executive summary backed up by 6700 page classified report, 38,000 footnotes, every fact based on CIA record, cables, et cetera, CIA says unknowable. If we could have gotten the intelligence other ways, studies shows it is knowable. CIA had info before torture." Let me bring in Jeremy Bash. He worked at the CIA, or actually we don't have Jeremy Bash, but we do have Bob Baer who is joining us who worked inside the CIA. This whole issue of what's knowable, unknowable. For example, let me play a little clip of what John Brennan said about the capture, the killing of Osama bin Laden. Whether or not the enhanced interrogation techniques, which so many people call torture played a role in that. Listen to this, Bob.</s>BRENNAN: It is our considered view that the detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided information that was useful and was used in the ultimate operation to go against bin Laden. Again, intelligence information from the individuals who were subjected to EITs provided information that was used in that.</s>BLITZER: Because the argument that you get from the Senate Intelligence Committee, at least the majority Dianne Feinstein and her colleagues there, the Democratic colleagues, is that the EITs, the enhanced interrogation techniques, really didn't play a role in the killing of bin Laden.</s>BOB BAER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, Wolf, I think he's backed away from the whole argument for torture that it's effective. He said it was used. What does that mean? It doesn't mean anything at all. I mean it was in context it may have been helpful. It may have disproved something. I think he didn't make a very strong case that this was justified using torture all these, you know, those five years and I think it was an extraordinarily honest speech in that sense and he's essentially apologized for that - for those five years where we did use torture. You know, I think that he's taking the same line as the president that it's ambivalent whether this stuff really worked or not and there's no point in going back to it, and he did admit the CIA made big mistakes. Which is good. We are getting - we need to do this to get over this.</s>BLITZER: Paul Cruikshank, there are people all around the world who've watching the CIA Director John Brennan make that speech. A 20- minute speech followed by extensive Q & A with reporters there in Langley, Virginia at CIA headquarters. And you monitor these jihadi websites. How are they likely to be impacted, if at all, by what we heard from the CIA director?</s>PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: I don't think there is going to be a huge impact. There's been a pretty muted response in the Middle East, a pretty muted response on these jihadi websites and social media. There have been some calls by English speaking radicals for retaliation. Those are Canadian ISIS fighter that called for the psychologist allegedly involved in the program to be beheaded. But by and large, this is sort of being met with indifference. It's old news. These people already have a very dark view of the United States. And there's some other controversies in the past which have created riots and attacks. But I don't think this is likely necessarily to be one of them.</s>BLITZER: Josh, I want you to just react - I want to play a little clip. This is John Brennan acknowledging that the CIA did make some major mistakes. Listen to this.</s>BRENNAN: There were times when CIA officers exceeded the policy guidance that was given and the authorized techniques that were approved and determined to be lawful. They went outside of the bounds in terms of their actions as part of that interrogation process. And they were harsh. As I said in some instances I consider them abhorrent and I will leave to others how they might want to label those activities. But for me it was something that is certainly regrettable but we are not a perfect institution. We're made up of individuals and as human beings we're imperfect beings.</s>BLITZER: He used the word abhorrent. Obviously, a very, very strong word in describing some of the mistakes that CIA officials made. But he was quick to point out that the Justice Department has investigated and there will be no criminal investigation, no criminal prosecution of any U.S. officials who were engaged in this process. Were you surprised to hear that?</s>JOSH ROGIN, BLOOMBERG VIEW COLUMNIST: I was not surprised that the director decided not to use the word torture. He did not go further than he did in his statement, which was issued a couple of days ago in the report's release. What he failed to talk about, which is what a lot of lawmakers, especially Senator Ron Wyden, have focused on is the CIA's role in choosing the people who ran and orchestrated this program. Some $80 million spent on contractors. These contractors according to the report had no experience in interrogations. They were actually experienced in resisting interrogations, which is not the same thing. So the director here is trying to portray these as isolated incidents rather than the fault of the CIA leadership for setting up this program in the first place and secondly, what he also fails to discuss is his own personal role. He says that he wasn't a major part of this program, but he was aware of it. My committee sources tell me that in the classified version of this report, there's a lot of evidence about what John Brennan knew, what he said, and what he wrote to people about this program when he was a senior official during the program's implementation. I think if John Brennan wants to move on as he said in his speech today, a lot of these questions will have to be answered.</s>BLITZER: Before the news conference, the White House issued a strong statement of support for John Brennan. We heard it from Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. Michelle Kosinski is our White House correspondent. Are you getting any reaction over there, Michelle, yet? I know it's only been a few moments since the news conference. What were you hearing during the course of his opening statement and his Q & A?</s>MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right, on the couple of points, I mean we didn't know at the time that we were questioning the White House press secretary what the director would say exactly, but we know from the CIA statement this week, the strong statement, really a rebuttal to the report in many ways. I mean strongly stating that usable intel did come as a result of these methods leading to saving lives. The killing of Osama bin Laden. Stating that in no uncertain terms. What we've heard the White House saying over the past few days is they will not agree with Brennan's statement on that. They won't even weigh in on whether they feel he is correct that intel came out of that. When asked, though, well, do you have any reason to disagree with Brennan or any reason to believe that he would not be truthful in that, the White House did concede no. Today, though, we see this alignment. We know that Brennan met with the president this morning. Now we hear Brennan saying what the White House has been saying. That it is ultimately unknowable whether that intel could have come from other methods. So, apparently, that meeting this morning worked. We're not seeing this kind of uncomfortable rift between what Brennan has been saying and what the White House would not say, but at least there's this coming together on what Brennan is now conceding that, well, it's impossible to truly know whether that intel could have been obtained through other legal means, Wolf.</s>BLITZER: All right. Good point. Jake Tapper, button this all up for us.</s>TAPPER: Well, I just want to say that, you know, breaking news politicians use slippery words and people who are in positions like Brennan's - Brennan is often use words very cleverly as well. For instance, he used to say that the drone campaign never killed any innocent people and that's because they defined anybody who was a fighting age male as automatically guilty. I think we heard some of that today as well when he was talking about whether or not any of the language gained through torture led to the killing of bin Laden. He was very clever in what he said. He said individuals who had been subjected to these techniques as he calls them, gave information that led to the tracking down of bin Laden. That's not to say that the torture itself was responsible. Just that the individuals themselves gave that information and in fact if you look at the timeline, it seems like a lot of that information came before they were subjected to the waterboarding. So, there's going to be some parsing going on that I think will be necessary by the press.</s>BLITZER: All right. I know you'll have a lot more coming up on "</s>THE LEAD" 4: 00 p.m. Eastern. We'll be watching that. I'll be back 5:00 p.m. Eastern in "The Situation Room." Much more coverage coming up. Brooke Baldwin will pick up our special coverage right after a quick break.