PRESIDENT BARACK Obama has told the CIA not to be discouraged by the revelation last week of harsh interrogation techniques used by its operatives and promised to protect the identity of all intelligence personnel.
Mr Obama said he had ordered a halt to the use of torture because he believed that the United States was stronger when it held firm to its ideals.
“I understand that it’s hard when you are asked to protect the American people against people who have no scruples and would willingly and gladly kill innocents,” the president said. “Al-Qaeda’s not constrained by a constitution.
“I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means as if we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back or that those that would argue for a higher standard are naive. I understand that.”
Mr Obama made his remarks to CIA staff yesterday during his first visit as president to the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, yesterday.
“You are an indispensable tool, the tip of the spear in America’s international mission and our national security,” he said. “I will be as vigorous in protecting you as you are in protecting the American people.”“
The release of the justice department memos provoked protests from former intelligence officials, despite the president’s assurance that no CIA operatives who followed guidelines for harsh interrogation would face prosecution.
The president’s visit to Langley, aimed at boosting morale at the CIA, came as it emerged that the agency’s interrogators used waterboarding – a form of controlled suffocation with water – more often than it previously claimed.
The New York Timesreported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who claimed to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah, another alleged al-Qaeda figure, was subjected to the procedure at least 83 times in August 2002.
In 2007, a former CIA officer said in a number of interviews that interrogators had only subjected Mr Zubaydah to waterboarding for 35 seconds before he agreed to tell all he knew.
The revelation that waterboarding was used so many times against the two detainees could undermine the Bush administration’s claims about the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques employed by the CIA.
The information about the number of times waterboarding was used on the two prisoners was contained in one of the justice department memos released by the Obama administration last week but was redacted from most of the copies made available to the media.
Over the weekend, former CIA director Michael Hayden criticised the Obama administration’s decision to release the torture memos, warning that it would embolden terrorist groups.
“What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al-Qaeda terrorist.
“That’s very valuable information,” Mr Hayden told Fox News on Sunday.
“By taking techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine, more difficult for CIA officers to defend the nation.
“If you look at what this really comprises, if you look at the documents that have been made public, it says top secret at the top.
“The definition of top secret is information which, if revealed, would cause grave harm to US security.”
The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, has said the US is bound under the UN Convention against Torture to prosecute those who engage in it.
"The United States, like all other states that are part of the UN convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court," Mr Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.