CIA 'Going to Cut Relations' With Foreign Services Over Rights Abuses

CIA Director John Brennan said he had spoken to foreign leaders and intelligence services demanding improvements on the issue of rights abuses.

WASHINGTON, (Sputnik) — Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan said on Wednesday he had spoken to foreign leaders and intelligence services demanding improvements on the issue of rights abuses by officers.

"I have spoken to presidents abroad, as well as heads of services about some of the abuses of human rights perpetrated by their offices," Brennan stated in a speech at the Brookings Institution. "I have told them ‘we are going to cut off relations with your service unless there are changes’."

The CIA director said the United States has "minimally acceptable standards" they insist other government’s intelligence services adhere to as well.

In 2014, the US Senate Intelligence Committee released the executive summary of a more than 6,000 page report, concluding that CIA detainees had been tortured under a program enacted between 2001 and 2007, at the early stages of the US War on Terror.

Human rights groups and other advocates have largely held that no one at CIA has been held responsible for the abuses.