CIA Director John Brennan said in a Sunday interview with NBC News that his agency would ignore waterboarding orders from any future president.
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Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has been vocal about wanting to reinstate waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse” techniques to get information out of terrorists.
Republican rival Ted Cruz said he would not implement waterboarding “across the board”, but did not view it as torture and would not rule out using the procedure if needed.
The practice has received condemnation ever since the release of the long-awaited Central Intelligence Agency memo on torture, which revealed waterboarding to be in widespread use in the US War on Terror during the Bush Jr. administration.
Both presidential candidates have said they will do whatever they believe is necessary to protect the United States from terrorist attacks – even if that requires torture techniques like waterboarding.
But he vowed if elected to use “use whatever enhanced interrogation methods to keep this country safe”.
In an interview with NBC News set to air Monday, Mr. Brennan said that enhanced interrogation techniques would not be worth the damage to the agency.
That waterboarding was cruel and ineffective was not an opinion shared by the former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who cited the opinion of three U.S. attorneys-general.
As LawNewz.com reported in early March, Trump said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.
But Brennan’s threat to refuse to obey an order from the commander in chief calls into question his fitness for the position he holds.
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CIA Director John Brennan participates in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing on worldwide threats, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
