Obama: 'We Tortured Some Folks'
Looks like President Barack Obama has wasted no time pulling out those talking points about torture that got leaked to the Associated Press earlier in the week. At a press conference today, which was partly about complaining about Republicans on border matters and other things, the president acknowledged that the CIA tortured people in the wake of Sept. 11. From Reuters:
"We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values," Obama told a White House news conference.
Obama's comment was a reaffirmation of his decision to ban the use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding shortly after he took office in January 2009.
The phrasing "contrary to our values" comes directly off the very first "topline message" the State Department provided to the White House to respond to questioning about the Senate's still-unreleased report on CIA torture.
He also, though, said he had "full confidence" in CIA Director John Brennan just a day after the CIA admitted that it had improperly spied on the Senate staff members who were preparing the report critical of the CIA's tactics. So stop holding your breath if you thought anything was going to actually happen as a consequence.