Outgoing House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers said Sunday that he opposed releasing a critical Senate report on CIA interrogation techniques after foreign leaders warned the information would incite violence in their countries.
"We had foreign intelligence services say they believed it would incite violence in their countries, including attacks against U.S. embassies or U.S. interests or U.S. personnel," Rogers told CBS "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer Sunday. "And our own intelligence services issued an analytical report that believed it would cause and lead to violence, and likely death.”
The Michigan Republican said he does not know why Senate Democrats thought it was necessary to release the report at all, as President Barack Obama has already acted to ban many of the tactics, including waterboarding and other extreme methods, that were put in place after the 9-11 attacks.
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"When you looked at what the risks were, and remember we had done that, the Department of Justice found no criminal wrongdoing," Rogers said. "The fact that we had already debated this publicly in Congress and talked about what we weren't going to do and what our values were when it came to interrogation, passed a law that we'd use the Army Field Manual."
And as a result, he does believe that there will be a continued risk for harm to the United States with the report's release.
"The risk is ongoing and very real and it will take time," said Rogers. "I think we'll see a consequence of the release of this report.”
He also noted that there are growing calls from the United Nations and some in the European Union about further investigations and prosecutions, but the CIA's actions came "from a very, very difficult time when we were a nation at war."
Further, the report was released at a time when the United States is facing a growing threat from the Islamic State, posing even more problems, said Rogers.
Rogers, who is a former FBI agent, also disagreed with some who say the techniques did not yield any valuable information about criminal activities.
“I'm trained in rapport building, not a more enhanced interrogation technique, and I think rapport building works and it's effective,” he said, calling for there to be no judgment on people who engaged in interrogations ordered in hopes of stopping another terror attack.
"We didn't even know if there was another one planned or not," said Rogers, who does not think it was a good decision to go after the CIA and "ruin their lives over what we had already fixed."
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Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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