Torture debate returns after CIA report details practices
A Democrat-led Senate panel released a scathing report on CIA interrogation practices amid warnings from lawmakers that the findings could “endanger the lives of Americans” — a concern the Obama administration apparently shared as it put more than 6,000 Marines on high alert.
The report, from the Senate intelligence committee, claimed the interrogation techniques used were “brutal and far worse” than the CIA represented to lawmakers. Further, the report claimed the tactics were not effective and the spy agency gave “inaccurate” information about it to Congress and the White House. The report called CIA management of the program “deeply flawed” — though agency officials have staunchly defended the program and credited it with helping track down Usama bin Laden and other terror leaders.
Calls to close Gitmo seems likely following the new CIA report on torture
photo Joshua Sherurcij
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the head of the intelligence panel who ordered the release of the report, alleged on the Senate floor on Tuesday that the CIA techniques in some cases amounted to “torture.”
The White House and President Obama backed the decision to release the report, despite warnings from lawmakers and some inside the administration that it could lead to a backlash against Americans.
Below are some of the finding in the report.
The CIA has previously said that only three detainees were ever waterboarded: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri. But records uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee suggest there may have been more than three subjects. The Senate report describes a photograph of a “well worn” waterboard, surrounded by buckets of water, at a detention site where the CIA has claimed it never subjected a detainee to this procedure. In a meeting with the CIA in 2013, the agency was not able to explain the presence of this waterboard.
Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded at least 183 times, which the Senate report describes as escalating into a “series of near drownings.”
The Senate report refers to a detention facility as Cobalt, but details of what happened there indicate that it’s a notorious “black site” in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. Untrained CIA operatives conducted unauthorized, unsupervised interrogation there as the committee found that some employees at the site lacked proper training and had “histories of violence and mistreatment of others.”
Outrage is swirling across the Internet that prisoners were forced to stand on broken legs, chained to walls nude and at least five detainees were subjected to “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration.”
The CIA never fully disclosed most of this information to the White House, keeping the Bush administration in the dark on the truth.
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