Ex-CIA Director Petraeus Says He Opposed Torture

By Simon Clark 

David Petraeus, the former U.S. Army general who resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012, said he opposes torture of detainees and hopes the Senate report closes "a painful chapter" for the U.S.

Mr. Petraeus, who now works for New York-based private-equity firm KKR & Co., was speaking at a conference for Dutch pension fund trustees in Rotterdam on Thursday.

"If you want information from a detainee you become his best friend," he said.

KKR is led by cousins Henry Kravis and George Roberts and manages $96 billion. It has led some of the world's largest leveraged takeovers, including consumer goods company RJR Nabisco and Texas power company Energy Future Holdings Corp. KKR is expanding into new countries and continents, this year making its first investment in Africa, buying an Ethiopian rose farm.

Mr. Petraeus, 62, is chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a unit that advises KKR's executives on geopolitical and macroeconomic trends. He also oversees environmental, social and governance considerations in KKR's investments. He is among former politicians and military officers who have worked for private-equity firms after leaving public office. Former U.S. general Wesley Clark is a senior adviser at Blackstone Group.

The former four-star general led U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in a military career that spanned more than three decades. He resigned as director of the CIA after little more than a year in the post in November 2012, after the Federal Bureau of Investigation uncovered an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.

A Senate investigation into the CIA's detention and interrogation of terrorist suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was published on Tuesday. It concluded that the CIA's techniques weren't effective and that the program was "far more brutal" than the agency had acknowledged. A group of former CIA directors including George Tenet, but not including Mr. Petraeus, responded to the Senate report by writing that interrogations yielded information that saved lives

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