Seeing the upside of interrogations

The Obama administration’s top intelligence official privately told employees last week that “high-value information” was obtained in interrogations that included harsh techniques approved by former President George W. Bush.

The result was “a deeper understanding of the Al Qaeda network,” Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, said in a memo, in which he added, “I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past.”

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the memo.

Critics of the harsh methods -- waterboarding, face slapping, sleep deprivation and other techniques -- have called them torture.

On Tuesday, President Obama said that the methods showed the U.S. was “losing our moral bearings,” and added that they would not be used while he was in office. But he did not say whether he thought the techniques worked.

Obama ordered the release of secret Bush-era documents on the subject last week. At the same time, Blair circulated his memo declaring that useful information had been obtained.

In a statement released the same day, Blair did not say that interrogations using the techniques had yielded useful information.

As word of the private memo surfaced Tuesday, a new statement was issued.

“The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” the statement said.

Blair, in his memo to employees, wrote: “Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing. As the president has made clear, and as both CIA Director Panetta and I have stated, we will not use those techniques in the future.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”