Ex-CIA officers defend their actions on torture

WASHINGTON - Former senior CIA officials instrumental in extracting information from al-Qaeda prisoners through what most Americans consider to have been torture have published a book defending their conduct.

The book, titled Rebuttal, takes aim at the Senate intelligence committee report released last year that revealed gruesome details of the once-secret CIA program while portraying it as ineffective, incompetently run, and rife with misrepresentations.

Published by the U.S. Naval Institute, the volume features essays from three former CIA directors and other retired senior officials. They argue that the Senate report, written by Democratic staff and opposed by Republicans, significantly distorted reality.

The staff of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, says the book has numerous inaccuracies. The result is a thick stew of charges and counter charges that have been characteristic of the torture debate.

The dispute has current implications, however.

Congress is considering legislation that would ban coercive interrogations. President Obama imposed a ban by executive order, but that could be undone by his successor. The measure has been attached to a defense bill, and has the support of Democrats and Sen. John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee and once a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

At least one Republican presidential candidate, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, has vowed to bring back the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, while another, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has declined to rule out doing so.

Polls, meanwhile, show that majorities of Americans believe the CIA engaged in torture - and was justified in doing so.

Porter Goss, who inherited the interrogation program as CIA director in the George W. Bush administration, wrote in the book that the Senate report was "polarizing and corrupted," and said it "drove the issue from the highway of discourse to the gutter of sniping."