MOSCOW, September 10 (RIA Novosti) – The US Senate report on its investigation of interrogation techniques used during the George W. Bush administration’s war on terror, which is currently pending release, draws questionable conclusions, former Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey told RIA Novosti Wednesday.
“I find it interesting that they didn’t talk to anybody who was involved in the program. They didn’t talk to me, they didn’t talk to any former director of the CIA, they didn’t talk to any operator inside the CIA,” Mukasey said.
The people accused of masterminding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were not subject to torture, Mukasey stressed.
“Characterizing it as torture is in direct conflict with the law. As the memos drafted at OLC [the US President’s Office of Legal Counsel] prove, it’s not torture…we got a lot of valuable intelligence by not torturing them, but by subjecting them to intensive interrogation – intelligence without which a lot of us wouldn’t be alive today,” Mukasey said.
On Wednesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, announced that the long-awaited report on the use of harsh interrogation techniques by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Bush war on terror will not be released this week.
The report is expected to present a summary of a 3,600-page document, based on a review of several million classified CIA documents.
On April 3, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify the executive summary and the conclusions of its report, which describes the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program between September 2001 and January 2009.
Some members of the committee hoped to release the summary of the report before the US Congress left for its August recess, but the expected release date was postponed till September.
