Ex-CIA chief: Torture kept Americans safe

The former CIA chief claims that the 'enhanced interrogation methods' used by the agency to drive intelligence out of suspects have been helpful. Michael Hayden, appearing on the "Fox News Sunday" program, said that the methods, which have been widely criticized as amounting to torture, have successfully worked in fighting terrorism and al-Qaeda and saving the American people. Hayden described methods such as extreme sleep deprivation, waterboarding and the use of insects to provoke fear. He characterized these techniques as effective in digging out information from top al-Qaeda leaders. "Most of the people who oppose these techniques want to be able to say: 'I don't want my nation doing this' -- which is a purely honorable position -- and 'they didn't work anyway'," Hayden said. "The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer, it really did," Hayden said, according to AFP. "It's what I'd call, without meaning any irreverence to anybody, 'a really inconvenient truth.'" Hayden specifically rejected a weekend report in The New York Times quoting CIA officials as saying that waterboarding and beating of a top Al-Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, yielded no more information than softer interrogation techniques. "We stand by our story. The critical information we got from Abu Zubaydah came after we began the EIT's, enhanced interrogation techniques," he said. Based on a March report by The Washington Post, the clues obtained through methods like waterboarding, which has a simulated drowning effect, have sent the US central Intelligence Agency's operatives on false errands around the world, says an unnamed former senior government official who closely followed the interrogations. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, says a CIA IG report.