White House adviser dodges question about whether torture worked

White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco said Tuesday that some things are “inherently unknowable” when asked whether the interrogation techniques detailed in a Senate report were effective. 

{mosads}“There is, I think, a question and debates about efficacy,” Monaco said in an interview at a Bloomberg conference when asked if the techniques work. “I think one thing that is true is some of these things are inherently unknowable. Proving a negative is going to be inherently unknowable.”

Monaco echoed President Obama in seeking to move past the issue, despite the release Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee of a report that says the CIA tortured prisoners and misled the Bush White House.  

“What the president said this morning is this is not a time to refight old battles or reopen old debates,” Monaco said. 

She said it is important to “put a period at the end of this chapter” and “acknowledge errors that happened in the past and move past it.”

She praised the work of the CIA in general: “There are more Americans who would have died as the result of terrorism but for the work of the CIA in this administration and in the last.”

CIA Director John Brennan’s statement on Tuesday seemed to go farther than Monaco in defending the effectiveness of the techniques, which the report described as including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and “rectal rehydration.”

“Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom [enhanced iterrogation techniques] were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives,” Brennan said. “The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qa’ida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.”