REACTION
“These techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.” — President Barack Obama
“Interrogations of detainees on whom [enhanced interrogation techniques] were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” — John Brennan, director of the CIA
“This nation should never again engage in these tactics … The CIA program was far more brutal than people were led to believe.” — Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
“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.” — James Clapper, director of national intelligence
“This question isn’t about our enemies. It’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.” — Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was tortured in a North Vietnamese prison during the Vietnam War
“The techniques in question are nowhere near what the enemies of this nation and radical Islam would do to people under their control. There is no comparison. The comparison is between who we are and what we want to be. In that regard, we made a mistake.” — Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina
Associated Press
REPORT CONCLUSIONS
— Enhanced interrogation techniques used on terror detainees, including simulated drowning and sleep deprivation, were ineffective in gaining useful intelligence.
— The prison conditions and harsh interrogations of detainees were more brutal than the CIA officials acknowledged.
— The simulated drowning technique of waterboarding was “physically harmful,” with effects that included vomiting and convulsions. At least one terror detainee died of exposure in an overseas prison.
—The agency’s use of coercive interrogations was based on a program developed by two psychologists who had no experience in interrogations or counterterrorism.
— The CIA actively impeded or avoided congressional oversight.
— CIA officials often gave inaccurate information about its interrogation program to Bush administration and legal officials.
Associated Press
The CIA’s use of torture failed to gain any intelligence on imminent terrorist threats, didn’t lead to Osama bin Laden or any other high-level terrorists, produced fabricated information and was far more brutal than the agency portrayed to policymakers and the public, according to a long-awaited Senate report released Tuesday.
The 499-page executive summary issued by the Democrat-led Senate Intelligence Committee contains new details so graphic that the State Department warned U.S. embassies to prepare for possible protests around the globe.
The report was the first public accounting of interrogation methods employed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Tactics included confinement to small boxes, weeks of sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, slapping and slamming, and threats to kill, harm or sexually abuse families of the captives.
But the “enhanced interrogation techniques” didn’t produce the results that really mattered, the report asserts in its most controversial conclusion. It cites CIA cables, emails and interview transcripts to rebut the central justification for torture — that it thwarted terror plots and saved American lives.
The report’s conclusions sparked sharp responses from the intelligence community and lawmakers.
In a statement, CIA Director John Brennan said the agency made mistakes and has learned from them.
But he also asserted the coercive techniques “did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.”
George Tenet, who was CIA director at the time, said in an interview: “We know that the program led to the capture of al-Qaida leaders and took them off the battlefield, that it prevented mass casualty attacks and that it saved thousands of American lives.”
The CIA received some backup from the six Republicans on the Senate panel, who issued their own “minority report.” It complained that the Democratic-driven probe had cost American taxpayers more than $40 million and “diverted countless CIA analytic and support resources.”
The Republican lawmakers also said the findings were riddled with errors and rife with political bias. Committee staffers never interviewed a single witness, they said, and failed to correct factual and analytical mistakes identified by a CIA review in June 2013.
But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was tortured in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, welcomed the report and endorsed its findings.
“We gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer,” he said in a Senate speech. “Too much.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the Democratic committee chairman whose staff prepared the summary, branded the findings a stain on the nation’s history.
“Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” she declared, commanding the Senate floor for an extended accounting of the techniques identified in the investigation.
President Barack Obama declared some of the past practices to be “brutal, and as I’ve said before, constituted torture in my mind. And that’s not who we are,” he told the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo in an interview.
The report catalogued the use of ice baths, death threats, shackling in the cold and much more. Three detainees faced the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Many developed psychological problems.
President George W. Bush approved the program through a covert finding in 2002, but he wasn’t briefed by the CIA about the details until 2006. At that time Bush expressed discomfort with the “image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.”
After al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, the CIA received permission to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation, close confinement and other techniques. Agency officials added unauthorized methods, the report says.
At least three in captivity were told their families would suffer, with CIA officers threatening to harm their children, sexually abuse the mother of one man, and cut the throat of another man’s mother.
Zubaydah was held in a secret facility in Thailand, called “detention Site Green” in the report. Early on, with CIA officials believing he had information on an imminent plot, Zubaydah was left isolated for 47 days without questioning, the report said.
He wasn’t alone. In September 2002, at a facility referred to as COBALT — the CIA’s “Salt Pit” in Afghanistan — detainees were kept isolated and in darkness. Their cells had only a bucket for human waste.
Redha al-Najar, a former Osama bin Laden bodyguard, was the first prisoner there. CIA interrogators found that after a month of sleep deprivation, he was a “broken man.” But the treatment got worse, with officials lowering food rations, shackling him in the cold and giving him a diaper instead of toilet access.
Gul Rahman, a suspected extremist, received enhanced interrogation there in late 2002, shackled to a wall in his cell and forced to rest on a bare concrete floor in only a sweatshirt. The next day he was dead. A CIA review and autopsy found he died of hypothermia.
Justice Department investigations into that and another death of a CIA detainee resulted in no charges.
During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth,” according to internal CIA records.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, received the waterboarding treatment 183 times. At one point, he was waterboarded for not confirming a “nuclear suitcase” plot the CIA later deemed a scam. Another time, his waterboarding produced a fabricated confession about recruiting black Muslims in Montana.
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