Former attorney general: CIA report a ‘disaster’

Michael Mukasey, who served as attorney general under President George W. Bush, said on Sunday that a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee condemning harsh interrogation tactics used by the CIA is a “disaster.”

“From the standpoint of the intelligence community, I think [the report] is a disaster. It’s going to demoralize the CIA. It’s jam-packed with untruth,” he told John Catsimatidis, an AM 970 host in New York.

Echoing a criticism voiced by former senior Bush adviser Karl Rove, Mukasey argued that the Senate investigators did not interview senior members of the Bush administration who could have put internal CIA documents into context.

“They were cherry-picking, throwing away the cherries, and they printed the pits,” he said.

Mukasey said CIA officials did not go over the legal line to defend the nation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“They went to the line. And that was absolutely the right thing to do,” he said.

He argued that suspected terrorists and enemy combatants captured by U.S. military forces do not have any legal rights, unlike American citizens arrested for domestic crimes.

“We’re under no obligation to treat them as if they were people knocking off the local 7-Eleven,” he said.

Addressing the wave of protests in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., and the chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., Mukasey expressed doubt the Justice Department would charge the white police officers who killed them with civil-rights crimes.

“The Justice Department, in order to find a criminal civil rights violation, would have to find that not only was a crime committed, but it was committed by somebody who intended to deprive those people of their civil rights. And there’s just no evidence of that,” he said.