Former acting Director of the CIA Mike Morell remained forthright during an interview Wednesday about the newly released CIA documents.
Morell served as Director of the CIA under the Obama administration from 2012 to 2013. When asked how he would characterize the CIA report, Morell said it contained many flaws.
"This is a deeply flawed report and it's flawed in two ways," Morell told Norah O’Donnell and Charlie Rose. "One is that many of its main conclusions are simply wrong. For example, 'not effective'? Not true. They lied to Congress, to the Department of Justice, simply not true. The Republicans agree with that."
Morell said Congress had been briefed on the techniques employed by the CIA, and that interrogators received authorization from the Department of Justice to employ their tactics.
"Second, it leaves out part of the story... The extensive discussions that the CIA had with the executive branch, and it leaves out the extensive discussions the CIA had with Congress at the time. And congressmen who were briefed on this program in 2002, 2003, and 2004 supported this program, and some even thought we did not go far enough."
"When you look at what was done was it torture as we define torture today?" Rose asked Morell.
"One of the reasons I react so strongly, as does George Tenet, to people calling it torture, was that the Department of Justice told us at the time ‘this is legal, this is not torture.’ So when people call it torture, I react strongly because it says my officers tortured people. They did not torture anybody."