Video: Ex-CIA lawyer declares “my conscience is clear” over waterboarding

[Valin]

Hot Air:

Ed Morrissey

1/10/14

 

If Robert Gates thought his memoir would be the most explosive book published at the start of the new year, he could find himself disappointed. John Rizzo, who spent decades at the CIA and was involved in some of the most controversial issues of that era, has begun PR work for his memoir Company Man. Rizzo’s most controversial decision was to write a memo that got the Bush administration to approve waterboarding as a technique to break resistance to interrogation, a decision for which Rizzo expresses no regret — in the book or in this interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell:

 

 

Extraordinary measures had to be taken,” John Rizzo said about the now-illegal technique, which he asserts was not inhumane.

“No, if it had been torture, we wouldn’t have done it,” he told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

Rizzo recounts the genesis of the waterboarding program along with numerous other stories from his three decades at the spy agency in his memoir, “Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA.”

Waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, was front and center in a debate over the “enhanced” interrogation methods used on al Qaeda terrorist suspects following the attacks of September 11.

Rizzo won Justice Department approval for the practice but said the program originated from the CIA with him and a few others.

 

 

(Snip)

 

And the Clintons:

 

 

He repeatedly slammed President Clinton and said that after he was elected ‘it was increasingly apparent that President Clinton couldn’t care less about the Agency or the rest of the intelligence community’. …

His most damning critique came when he told how the Democratic President sent then-First Lady Hillary Clinton to attend the funeral for a fallen operative in his place.

Mr Rizzo called the move ‘the most hurtful presidential snub I witnessed in my entire career’.

‘Bill Clinton, our new president, couldn’t find the time to make the ten -minute trip from the White House to the CIA to pay his respects. He sent his wife instead. It was an unforgivable slight from a man who had famously told the American people during his just-completed campaign, “I feel your pain,”’ Mr Rizzo wrote.

 

(Snip)

 

 

[Valin]

If you (wisely) choose not to watch Andrea Mitchell....NBC News, try this

 

 

http://youtu.be/9416K3M9mEY

[Valin]