The full extent of the CIA’s interrogation and detention programmes
launched in the wake of the September 11 terror attack was laid bare in a
milestone report by the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday that
concluded the agency’s use of torture was brutal and ineffective – and
that the CIA repeatedly lied about its usefulness.
The report represented the most scathing congressional indictment of
the Central Intelligence Agency in nearly four decades. It found that
torture “regularly resulted in fabricated information,” said committee
chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, in a statement summarizing the findings. She called the torture programme “a stain on our values and on our history”.
“During the brutal interrogations, the CIA
was often unaware the information was fabricated.” She told the Senate
the torture program was “morally, legally and administratively
misguided” and “far more brutal than people were led to believe”.
The report reveals that use of torture in secret prisons run by the CIA across the world was even more extreme than previously exposed,
and included “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding”, sleep
deprivation lasting almost a week and threats to the families of the
detainees.
The “lunch tray” for one detainee, which contained hummus, pasta with
sauce, nuts and raisins, “was ‘pureed’ and rectally infused”, the
report says. One detainee whose rectal examination was conducted with
“excessive force” was later diagnosed with chronic hemorrhoids, anal
fissures and rectal prolapse. Investigators also documented death
threats made to detainees. And CIA interrogators, the committee charged,
told detainees they would hurt detainees’ children and “sexually
assault” or “cut a [detainee’s] mother’s throat”.
At least one prisoner died as a result of hypothermia after being
held in a stress position on cold concrete for hours. At least 17
detainees were tortured without the approval from CIA headquarters that
ex-director George Tenet assured the DOJ would occur. And at least 26 of
the CIA’s estimated 119 detainees, the committee found, were
“wrongfully held.”
Some CIA officers were said to have been reduced “to the point of tears” by witnessing the treatment meted out to one detainee.
The findings prompted a call from a UN special human rights
rapporteur for prosecutions of those in the CIA and the Bush
administration responsible for the torture programme.
Advertisement
Responding
to the report, Barack Obama said the US owed a “profound debt” to the
CIA but accepted that some of its techniques were “contrary to our
values”.
“These harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as
nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our
national security interests. Moreover, these techniques did significant
damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue
our interests with allies and partners. That is why I will continue to
use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those
methods again.”
The Senate report ignited a political storm as it was published by
the Democratic majority in its last few weeks before surrendering
control to the Republican-dominated chamber elected last month.
Loyalists of former president George W Bush, whose administration
presided over the torture programme, immediately launched a website
aimed at rebutting the report’s central findings.
The names of other countries – including Britain – who cooperated
with the US programme by assisting the rendition of suspects were
redacted from the published report.
Asked about British involvement, David Cameron said the question that
a parliamentary inquiry was “dealing with all those issues” and that he
had issued guidance to British agents on “how they have to handle these
issues in future”
“Torture is wrong, torture is always wrong. Those of us who want to
see a safer and more secure world, who want to see extremism defeated,
we won’t succeed if we lose our moral authority, if we lose the things
that make or systems work and countries successful,” the prime minister
said.
The Senate committee published nearly 500 pages of its investigation
into the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme during the Bush
administration’s “war on terror”. The full report is over 10 times
longer, but the declassified section is dense with detail and
declassified communications between the officials involved.
Advertisement
The
Senate report squarely rebuts CIA claims that the use of such methods
generated intelligence that prevented further terrorist attacks and
therefore saved lives. Feinstein said its investigators had not found a
single case where that was true. Detainees who underwent torture either
disclosed nothing, or supplied fabricated information, or revealed
information that had been already been discovered through traditional,
non-violent interrogation techniques.
The torture revealed in the report goes beyond the techniques already
made public through a decade of leaks and lawsuits, which had found
that agency interrogators subjected detainees to quasi-drowning, staged
mock executions and revved power drills near their heads.
At least 39 detainees, the committee found, experienced techniques like “cold water dousing” – different from the quasi-drowning known as waterboarding – which the Justice Department never approved.
Contractor psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a
critical role in establishing the torture program in 2002. In the
report, both Mitchell and Jessen are identified by the pseudonyms
Swigert and Dunbar. A company they formed to contract their services to
the CIA was worth more than $180m, and by the time of the contract’s
2009 cancellation, they had received $81m in payouts.
The committee’s findings, which the CIA largely rejects, are the
result of a four-year, $40m investigation that plunged relations between
the spy agency and the Senate committee charged with overseeing it to a
historic low.
The investigation that led to the report, and the question of how
much of the document would be released and when, has pitted chairwoman
Feinstein and her committee allies against the CIA and its White House backers.
For 10 months, with the blessing of President Barack Obama, the agency
has fought to conceal vast amounts of the report from the public, with
an entreaty to Feinstein from secretary of state John Kerry occurring as
recently as Friday.
Republican House intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers warned
America’s allies were predicting its release would “cause violence and
deaths”. After publication Rogers said: “Though it is wholly appropriate
for the congressional intelligence committees to conduct rigorous
review of classified programs, I fear that publicizing the details of
this classified program – which was legal, authorized and appropriately
briefed to the intelligence committees – will only inflame our enemies,
risk the lives of those who continue to sacrifice on our behalf, and
undermine the very organization we continuously ask to do the hardest
jobs in the toughest places.”
CIA director John Brennan, an Obama confidante, conceded in a Tuesday
statement that the program “had shortcomings and that the agency made
mistakes” owing from what he described as unpreparedness for a massive
interrogation and detentions program.
But Brennan took issue with several of the committee’s findings.
“Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom EITs
were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans,
capture terrorists and save lives. The intelligence gained from the
program was critical to our understanding of al-Qaida and continues to
inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day,” Brennan said.
Advertisement
“EITs”, or “enhanced interrogation techniques”, is the agency’s preferred euphemism for torture.
International condemnation was swift. Ben Emmerson, the United
Nations rapporteur for counter-terrorism, commended the White House for
resisting pressure not to publish the report but said action must now be
taken.
“The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in
today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal
penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes. The fact that
the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level
within the US government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it
reinforces the need for criminal accountability,” he said.
So far the only former CIA official in jail for the use of waterboarding, John Kiriakou, was prosecuted for disclosing information to reporters.
Obama banned CIA torture upon taking office, but the continuing lack
of legal consequences for agency torturers has led human rights
campaigners to view the Senate report as their last hope for official
recognition and accountability for torture.
Though the committee released hundreds of pages of declassified
excerpts from the report on Tuesday, the majority of the 6,000-plus page
classified version remains secret, disappointing human rights groups
that have long pushed for broader transparency. Senator Mark Udall, a
Colorado Democrat who lost his seat in November, has flirted with
reading the whole report into the Senate record, one of the only tactics
to compel additional disclosures remaining.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid weighed in to back the report.
“Today, for the first time, the American people are going to learn the
full truth about torture that took place under the CIA during the Bush
administration,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “The only way our
country can put this episode in the past is to confront what happened.”
“Not only is torture wrong but it doesn’t work,” said Reid. He said torture “got us nothing except a bad name”.
But Republican members of the intelligence committee questioned the
report in their own 100-page document. They wrote “procedural
irregularities” had negatively impacted the study’s “problematic claims
and conclusions” and accused Democrats of bias and faulty analysis.
The Republicans specifically disputed the report’s claim that torture
had failed to provide actionable intelligence and claimed “aggressive”
interrogation of Zubaydah led to the capture of al-Qaida associates and
the disruption of a plot aimed at hotels in Karachi, Pakistan,
frequented by American and German guests.
In a statement, James Clapper, director of national intelligence,
said he could not recall a report “as fraught with controversy and
passion as this one”.
He said the officers who participated in the program “believed with
certainty that they were engaged in a program devised by our government
on behalf of the president that was necessary to protect the nation,
that had appropriate legal authorization, and that was sanctioned by at
least some in the Congress.” But he said “things were done that should
not have been done”.
“I don’t believe that any other nation would go to the lengths the
United States does to bare its soul, admit mistakes when they are made
and learn from those mistakes. Certainly, no one can imagine such an
effort by any of the adversaries we face today,” said Clapper.
No comments:
Post a Comment