CIA Director Defends Use of Interrogation Tactics, Avoiding Issue of Torture

WASHINGTON - John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, will deliver a rare public speech at the agency's headquarters on Thursday afternoon to address a storm of criticism over revelations about the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration.

Mr. Brennan is expected to offer a forceful defense of the C.I.A. and to make a case that the detention program provided valuable intelligence in the hunt for senior Qaeda leaders, while at the same time criticizing some of the specific interrogation methods and the grisly details of torture revealed this week in a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Brennan's speech comes a day after Democratic members of the committee criticized him for the agency's response to the report. They said the C.I.A.'s response is at odds with a separate, internal review overseen by a former director of the agency, Leon E. Panetta, which they claim is far more critical of the detention and interrogation program. President Obama halted the program in 2009.

'The C.I.A.'s formal response to the study under Director Brennan clings to false narratives about the effectiveness of the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program,' Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said Wednesday. 'And I believe its flippant and dismissive tone represents the C.I.A.'s approach to oversight - and the White House's willingness to let the C.I.A. do whatever it likes - even if its efforts are aimed at actively undermining the president's stated policies.'

Mr. Brennan was a senior C.I.A. official in 2002 when the detention and interrogation program was put in place. He has said publicly that he opposed the brutal interrogation methods that C.I.A. interrogators used against Qaeda suspects, including the drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The so-called Panetta Review has not been made public. Those who have seen it describe it as a series of internal C.I.A. memos summarizing the documents that the agency gave to the committee in 2009, when the Senate investigation began.