The retired CIA officer who oversaw the tough terrorist interrogation program using waterboarding and other techniques says his methods saved lives by thwarting plots against the United States.
During an interview Sunday night on “60 Minutes” — just days before the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of Navy SEALs — Jose Rodriguez also lashed out at President Barack Obama for calling waterboarding torture and criticizing its use, and at congressional Democrats like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for dodging responsibility over the issues.
“I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled ‘torturers’ by the president of the United States,” Rodriguez, the former chief of CIA clandestine operations, writes in his book, “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”
The book is due out Tuesday. The highly charged interview came in the same week Republicans harshly criticized the administration for using bin Laden’s death as a campaign tactic. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden said that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney would not have made the tough call to kill bin Laden.
But Rodriguez criticizes many Democrats for not backing the tough tactics that he said eventually led to bin Laden.
“Pelosi said that we only briefly mentioned waterboarding and left the impression that it had not been used,” Rodriguez writes, insisting that the California Democrat was fully briefed — by Rodriguez himself — about waterboarding and its use. He says that Pelosi posed no objection to the technique. “I know she got it.”
“There is no doubt in my mind that she, like almost all Americans less than a year after, wanted us to be aggressive to make sure that al-Qaida wasn’t able to replicate their attack.” He writes that “Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth.”
Many members of Congress have “watched too many episodes of the old TV series Mission Impossible — the part they liked best was the opening, in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions,’” says Rodriguez.
