CIA’s bosses in Congress out of loop, Ex-Nebraska Rep. Bereuter says after release of report on inte

http://www.omaha.com/news/nebraska/cia-s-bosses-in-congress-out-of-loop-ex-nebraska/article_2d7cf555-3c59-57ff-b343-55f127a6411b.html

POSTED: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2014 1:00 AM
By Joseph Morton / World-Herald Bureau

WASHINGTON — Most members of the congressional committees that oversee the CIA were left in the dark about the brutal interrogation techniques that the CIA used after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, former Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., said Tuesday.

Bereuter, a senior member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence at the time, told The World-Herald that he was never informed about those enhanced interrogation techniques.

The methods were described in graphic detail in a report released Tuesday by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Detainees were dragged around naked, slammed into walls, deprived of sleep for many days at a time and waterboarded to the point of near drownings, according to the report’s unclassified portions.

“They constitute in anybody’s judgment — certainly mine — torture,” Bereuter said of the techniques. “And any time we begin to use those techniques, it is contrary to American law, it is contrary to our traditions, and it places our future prisoners in jeopardy. It gives an excuse to any terrorist group or any other nation which might be in an adversarial position with us to use the same kinds of techniques on our personnel that might be captured.”

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