A senior Democrat has fuelled an acrimonious row over a Senate report into torture by the Central Intelligence Agency, by blaming the abuses on former vice-president Dick Cheney.



Nancy Pelosi on Sunday raised the stakes over the landmark study by shifting responsibility from the agency to Cheney, who steered much of the Bush administration's response to the September 11 2001 attacks.

The House minority leader said Cheney, a Republican, set the tone of CIA actions during an era of harsh interrogation methods, a controversy which has flared anew in the runup to congressional elections in November.

"I do believe that during the Bush-Cheney administration, that Vice-President Cheney set a tone and an attitude for the CIA," Pelosi told CNN's State of the Nation.

"Many people in the CIA are so patriotic, they protect our country in a way to avoid conflict and violence. But the attitude that was there was very – I think it came from Dick Cheney. That's what I believe. I think he's proud of it.”

The attack on one of the most polarising figures in US politics drew an immediate rebuke from the House intelligence committee chairman, Mike Rogers, who accused Pelosi of dunking an already fraught issue into the mid-term election campaign.

Also appearing on CNN, Rogers said: “What worries me most about that more than any other statement is that it politicises this in a way that I think is horribly counterproductive and is likely to leap to the wrong conclusion.”

The Senate intelligence committee voted last Thursday to declassify portions of a study into CIA use of torture on terrorist suspects following years of inquiry, $40m (£24m) in expenses and an unprecedented clash with Langley. The landmark 11-3 vote put the Obama administration back at the centre of an inherited controversy and had implications for the military tribunals of the 9/11 defendants at Guantánamo Bay, several of whom were subjected to such abuse.

The Senate intelligence committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein of California, a public champion of the investigation, called its findings "shocking" and said the CIA's behaviour was "in stark contrast to our values as a nation".

Rogers, a national security hawk, said he was concerned not just by Pelosi's jab at a GOP grandee but by the methodology and timing of the Senate report.

“This is not the holy grail,” he said, “it doesn't answer all the questions, and again, why now, why in an election year bring this up and say this is all about Dick Cheney. Clearly when you say things like that it becomes highly charged politically.”

The Bush administration moved away from enhanced interrogation in 2006, said Rogers, and the CIA now needed to focus on today's security priorities, not least Russian intelligence services who were “cutting people's ears off and holding knives to throats of 85-year-old men”.

“The agency now has all sorts of challenges all over the world,” he added, “from al-Qaida to Russia. There are more KGB agents – I'm sorry, Russian intelligence agents in America – that's the old word, than we had at the height of the cold war. There are more Chinese intelligence gatherers.”

Asked about Pelosi's comments, Dutch Ruppersberger, the House intelligence committee's top Democrat, declined to weigh in.

“When Cheney was there,” he said, “and [Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, they did some things that I might not agree with. In order to criticise I've got to wait for the facts.”

The Senate committee voted to release the executive summary, findings, conclusions and dissenting views of a 6,200-page report that accuses the CIA of conducting an abusive regimen of interrogations, extralegal detentions and so-called "renditions" of suspected terrorists to partner countries, and then misleading the Bush administration and Congress about its effectiveness in providing good intelligence.

The agency, amid a public fight with the authors of the report that has featured accusations of criminal misconduct and even constitutional usurpation, has branded the report misleading and factually inaccurate.

With a tough battle to keep control of the Senate looming in November, Democrats may hope recent reminders of the Bush era will help rally their base.

Errol Morris's documentary about Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, has returned the controversial former secretary of defence, a hate figure for the left, to the limelight. Bush has also garnered headlines, with the opening at his presidential library this week of an exhibition of his portraits of world leaders.