WASHINGTON - Former CIA director George Tenet heatedly denied Sunday allegations that US interrogators have used torture to extract information from prisoners in the so-called US "war on terror."
Tenet, speaking in a prime-time interview on the CBS television network, was questioned about persistent accusations of torture, many from terror suspects held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"The image that`s been portrayed is, we sat around the campfire and said, `Oh, boy, now we go get to torture people.` Well, we don`t torture people. Let me say that again to you. We don`t torture people. Okay?" Tenet said.
"I want you to listen to me," he said. "The context is it`s post-9/11. I`ve got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are gonna be blown up, planes that are gonna fly into airports all over again.
"Plot lines that I don`t know -- I don`t know what`s going on inside the United States. And I`m struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur.
"Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through. The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know," he said.
The interviewer questioned Tenet about "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as waterboarding, citing the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency`s new book "At the Center of the Storm," to be released Monday.
"You call it in the book,`enhanced interrogation,`" the interviewer says.
"I`m not having a semantic debate with you. I`m telling you what I believe," Tenet said.
Asked if anyone ever died in the interrogation program, Tenet said: "No."
Asked why enhanced interrogation techniques were necessary, Tenet replied: "`Cause these are people that will never, ever, ever tell you a thing. These are people who know whos responsible for the next terrorist attack. These are hardened people that would kill you and me 30 seconds after they got out of wherever they were being held and wouldnt blink an eyelash."
He said the interrogations, which he admitted never having attended, had uncovered networks and broken up plots in the United States.
Tenet, who led the CIA in the runup to and after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, has unleashed a media frenzy with his book in which he says there was no real debate in President George W. Bush`s administration about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein`s regime.
"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence about the Iraqi threat," he wrote.
"Nor was there ever a significant discussion about enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full out planning for overt and covert regime change."
04/30/2007 00:54 GMT