A black-ops veteran of the Afghanistan war ripped the release of a Senate report detailing brutal CIA interrogation techniques used after 9/11, calling its publication "a treasonous act" and a partisan exercise in political "pornography" meant to gratify America's critics.
"We already knew that things which were considered torture happened. That should have been the end of the story," retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV Tuesday.
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Shaffer, who wrote about his special operations work in a 2011 war memoir,
"Operation Dark Heart," said that the 480-page summary of findings issued on Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee should have confined itself to explaining "who said 'yes' and when" to harsh interrogations.
"The rest of it is pornography," said Schaffer.
Schaffer singled out the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who received virtually no Republican support for the panel's $40 million investigation into harsh CIA treatment of detainees during President George W. Bush's war on terror.
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Schaffer called the report's release "a voyeuristic move by Sen. Feinstein," which he said is "designed to ingratiate herself to those forces who find problems with us" and who "justify … bad acts against us."
"We will see bad things come from this," he said.
Schaffer, a defense analyst with the London Center for Policy Research, said that waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other severe interrogation techniques were employed at the time with the knowledge and approval of executive- and congressional-branch leaders — including Feinstein herself.
"They were as responsible as the men in the field conducting whatever act they now find reprehensible," he said. "So this is not only insane, this is why they're doing this: This is basically their way of trying to get the stink off of them because they're as guilty as anyone else if there's guilt to be had."
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