Obama: ‘We Tortured Some Folks’

Looks like President Barack
Obama has wasted no time pulling out those
talking points about torture that got leaked to the Associated
Press earlier in the week. At a press conference today, which was
partly about
complaining about Republicans on border matters and other
things, the president acknowledged that the CIA tortured people in
the wake of Sept. 11. From
Reuters:

“We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured
some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values,”
Obama told a White House news conference.

Obama’s comment was a reaffirmation of his decision to ban the
use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding shortly after
he took office in January 2009.

The phrasing “contrary to our values” comes directly off the
very first “topline message” the State Department provided
to the White House to respond to questioning about the Senate’s
still-unreleased report on CIA torture.

He also, though, said he had “full confidence” in CIA Director
John Brennan just a day after the CIA admitted that it had
improperly spied on the Senate staff members who were preparing
the report critical of the CIA’s tactics. So stop holding your
breath if you thought anything was going to actually happen as a
consequence.