THE TELEGRAPH: President Barack Obama is to make his first visit to the Central Intelligence Agency in an attempt to calm an uproar among America's spies over his release of secret memos about interrogation techniques.
The White House said he would address staff at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia about the "importance of the CIA's mission".
His visit came as it emerged that the highly controversial technique of "waterboarding", a type of simulated drowning, was used 266 times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, two senior al-Qaeda prisoners.
Last week, Mr Obama released four memos, running to 126 pages, written by officials in President George W. Bush's administration and containing explicit details of the CIA's methods of extracting information from al-Qaeda suspects between 2002 and 2005.
Although Mr Obama said that neither CIA interrogators nor the authors of the memos should be prosecuted, civil liberties groups have demanded that charges be brought, arguing that the "Nuremberg defence" of following orders is unacceptable.
The methods, eventually prohibited by the Bush administration, included sleep deprivation for up to 11 days, forced nudity and stress positions as waterboarding, in which "water is continuously applied from a height of 12 to 24 inches" for "20 to 40 seconds". It was also revealed that Abu Zubaydah was placed in a box with an insect in order to exploit his fear of them.
Leon Panetta, Mr Obama's CIA chief, and four most recent former heads of the spy agency had all implored the US president not to release the memos, stating that doing so would damage national security and demoralise CIA operatives. >>> By Toby Harnden in Washington | Monday, April 20, 2009
