Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle slammed the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture, insisting that 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden is dead thanks, in part, to information gained through the CIA's use of brutal interrogation techniques.
And Perle believes Democrats who prepared the 6,000-page report at a cost of $50 million, knew exactly what conclusions they were going to reach from the get-go.
"Some of the information that was crucial in locating Osama Bin Laden was in fact achieved through enhanced interrogation," Perle said Thursday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"You have to understand how pictures are put together, how dots are connected in order to appreciate that a fragment of information, the name of a [bin Laden] courier in this case, can be the key to deciphering the whole complex set of facts.
"The idea that no actionable intelligence was achieved through this program is complete nonsense."
Perle, who was also chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, said he wouldn't defend every aspect of the program.
"[Like] any government program, like any human activity, [it] is bound to have shortcomings and failures and oversights and in some cases irresponsible elements," he said.
"You have to look at the program as a whole and one of the things that’s quite striking in this report, which is tendentious … is that after all these thousands of pages they’re talking about a very small number of instances.
"Thousands of people were detained for one period of time or another in conjunction with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and what this came down to was a handful. So even if you take the position that it was wrong or that it could’ve been done differently the magnitude of the problem is small."
According to the report released by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, the CIA misled Congress and White House officials about interrogation techniques used on al-Qaida terror suspects.
The report also said the CIA engaged in much more brutal enhanced tactics than publicly portrayed, including waterboarding, mock executions, rectal hydrations and sexual threats.
The report was solely the work of Democrats. Republicans bowed out early on when they concluded it was a partisan witch hunt intended to damage the Bush administration.
"This is a 6,000-page report, it’s 10 times the length of the 9/11 Commission report itself," Perle said.
"Nobody in Washington writes a 6,000-page report that they want to be read. They produce 6,000-page reports for other reasons."
He said the Senate committee did not interview any former and current CIA officials for the report, and instead relied on documents, emails and other evidence, because its conclusions were already in the bag.
"You don’t necessarily want to see evidence that contradicts your thesis, so you don’t ask for it," Perle said.
"You may choose not to ask … because you’d rather not know.... The staffers who wrote this knew what they were going to conclude before they began the process and they didn’t want to learn anything that would undermine their case."
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