Obama ‘concerned’ torture report could spark retaliation overseas

President Obama is “concerned about potential ramifications overseas” after the release Tuesday of a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing harsh interrogation techniques used by Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush. 

In an interview with Telemundo on Tuesday, Obama said his administration had taken “precautionary steps to try to mitigate any additional risks” that would arise following the release of the report. 

{mosads}But at the same time, the president said that he did not believe “there was ever going to be a perfect time to release this report” but that it was “important” to do so. 

“One of the things that sets us apart from other countries is when we make mistakes, we admit them,” Obama said. 

The report graphically details interrogation techniques employed by the CIA following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It finds that the agency employed waterboarding, physical abuse and threats of sexual abuse. 

The president said that tactics that were written about “were brutal” and “constituted torture” in his mind. 

“That’s not who we are,” Obama said. 

Earlier Tuesday, senior administration officials said that for months the White House had been working with the State Department and intelligence community to brace for the release of the report. That included a review of the security posture of every diplomatic post around the world, as well as diplomatic conversations with allies to prepare them for the release. Domestically, the federal government coordinated with local and state law enforcement to prepare for the possibility terrorists could seize on the reports to launch an attack. 

The report also suggests that the CIA misled the Bush White House about both what techniques were being used and how effective they were at gleaning information. 

But Obama said that he was not concerned that the CIA might be similarly hiding from him or Congress today. 

“No, because I’ve been very explicit about how our intelligence gathering needs to conduct itself, and explicitly prohibited these kinds of techniques,” Obama said. “And so anybody who was doing the kinds of things that are described in the report would not simply be keeping something from me, they would be directly violating the orders that I’ve issued as president and commander in chief.” 

He aded that he had been “pretty diligent” about creating “accountability systems” to keep track of his intelligence operations. 

Obama refused to answer a question about whether he might have agreed some of the harsh interrogation practices authorized by his predecessor were he president during the September 11 attacks. 

“I’m not going to engage in those hypotheticals,” Obama said. “What I’ve said in the past, and what I will repeat is that nobody can fully understand what it was like to be responsible for the safety and security of the American people in the aftermath of the worst attack — on our national soil.” 

But the president said that “panic and fear” did not “excuse all of us from recognizing our responsibilities to look squarely at what happened and to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”