Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) put CIA Director John Brennan on notice on Sunday after the intelligence chief gave a press conference defending the U.S. torture program.
“I want to give him the chance to end this culture of denial, to deal with these misrepresentations,” Wyden told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
“If he doesn’t do that, we’ll have to get somebody who will,” he said.
Wyden, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and advocated the release of its report on the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, was responding to Brennan’s remarks on Thursday, in which the director defended his agency’s program and refrained from using the word “torture.”
He said he did not feel comfortable with Brennan running the agency.
“Not at this point,” he said.
Wyden has been a vocal critic of those Bush-era intelligence-gathering tactics, which he maintains were not effective in producing information on suspected terrorists.
After a group of ex-CIA directors published a defense of torture in the Wall Street Journal last week, Wyden released a “corrected” verison of the op-ed, sprinkled with notes rebutting the claims of the former officers.
h/t Huffington Post
