CIA Director John Brennan said that if the next president ordered the CIA to resume waterboarding, he would resign, reports The Week.
Waterboarding was banned by President Obama in a 2009 executive order, but the order could theoretically be reversed by the next president.
It will be up to the CIA director and others in the spy agency to decide if they can carry out those orders "in good conscience," Brennan added, "and I can say that as long as I'm director of CIA, irrespective of what the president says, I'm not going to be the director of CIA that gives that order. They'll have to find another director."
Brennan did not mention Donald Trump by name, but Trump has publicly endorsed the use of waterboarding and interrogation techniques "much tougher than waterboarding," while the other likely next president, Democrat Hillary Clinton, opposes waterboarding. Brennan suggested he would resign if President Trump ordered the CIA to waterboard not just for moral reasons but also practical ones, saying "you cannot establish cause and effect between the application of these [techniques] and credible information that came out of these individuals."
The origins of the post-9/11 torture practices at the CIA, which included waterboarding, were revealed earlier this month as the result of an ACLU lawsuit. The CIA hired James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, Air Force Veterans without any expertise in interrogation, and spent $81 million to oversee the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in secret foreign prisons.
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