After banning and then publicizing controversial interrogation practices employed by the CIA, President Barack Obama called on the agency Monday to live up to its mission under new marching orders.
Obama said the CIA is “an indispensable tool, the tip of the spear” in national security as he addressed employees of the agency while standing before a marble wall with 89 stars representing, anonymously, agents who have died in the line of duty.
“We live in dangerous times,” Obama said at the CIA headquarters in Virginia. “I am going to need you more than ever.”
Obama last week released legal memos that had been written by the Bush administration’s Justice Department providing the CIA with authority to use harsh interrogation tactics on Al Qaeda operatives, including waterboarding, a technique that makes a person believe he is in imminent danger of drowning.
The release of the memos drew criticism from some current and former intelligence officials and from former Bush administration officials.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney continued to defend waterboarding and other banned tactics. Cheney demanded the declassification of information showing the results of the interrogations to prove the value of the techniques.
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Atty. Gen. Eric Holder Jr. has called waterboarding “torture.” Along with other methods, it is forbidden under orders Obama signed during his first week in office.
“I believe that our nation is stronger and more secure when we deploy the full measure of both our power and the power of our values — including the rule of law,” Obama told CIA employees.
The White House sought to show it is leaving the past behind by announcing that no CIA agents would be prosecuted. Obama’s advisers also have suggested that the highest-level officials who authorized the practices will be immune as well.
One of the released Justice Department memos shows the agency subjected prisoners to waterboarding at least 266 times in 2003.
The CIA used the method 183 times on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
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‘The tip of the spear’
Read the complete text of President Obama’s remarks to the CIA at chicagotribune.com/obamacia