Former CIA Director James Woolsey attacked the agency’s current director John O. Brennan Monday night for comments the new leader made Sunday vowing to overrule a president’s policy on waterboarding.
“I think that’s really just completely unacceptable, but waterboarding is complicated and there is a legitimate argument on both sides of this, but I don’t think one legitimate argument is ‘I’m going to do what I say I’m going to do regardless of what the president orders me to do,'” Woolsey told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren.
Woolsey, who oversaw the intelligence agency in the mid-1990s, said although the country’s founding documents do not address the intelligence agency’s interactions with the Oval Office, leaders must respect the president’s power.
“When Madison and his colleagues were putting the Constitution together that hot summer in Philadelphia in 1787, I don’t remember anybody incorporating in Article 2 that the CIA director could overrule the president. They didn’t have a CIA director at that time,” Woolsey added.
Brennan had told NBC News that his agency would not engage in “enhanced interrogation” methods, including waterboarding.
“I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure,” Brennan said.
But Woolsey insisted the method was worth it and that Brennan’s attitude toward the practice was in need of change.
“If a terrorist is sitting on a knowledge about where nuclear weapon is in Manhattan and if it’s detonated can kill millions of people and the only way to get at him is to waterboard him, as was the case with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it seems to me Mr. Brennan ought to take another look at that,” Woolsey said.
