{"id":122075,"date":"2014-06-01T12:30:26","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T12:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=122075"},"modified":"2014-06-01T12:30:51","modified_gmt":"2014-06-01T12:30:51","slug":"cia-torture-program-exposed-100-detainees-rendered-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/cia-torture-program-exposed-100-detainees-rendered-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"CIA Torture Program Exposed: More Than a 100 Detainees \u201cRendered\u201d by U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

Asad Ismi<\/em><\/p>\n

With the National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal continuing to make news, another secretive U.S. agency is now the subject of its own public humiliation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0In early April, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC) voted to partially declassify a 6,600-page report on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) treatment of \u201cterror suspects\u201d during the George W. Bush administration (2000-2008). Only the 480-page executive summary of the report, which investigates the interrogation, detention, rendition and often torture of more than 100 CIA detainees, will be released to the public along with 20 conclusions and findings. The summary will be made public after the CIA has vetted it for declassification, which could take months.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Senate Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator from California, explained that the report \u201cincludes details of each detainee in CIA custody, the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy\u2013or inaccuracy\u2013of CIA descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Feinstein called the report\u2019s findings \u201cshocking\u201d and said the CIA\u2019s behaviour was \u201cin stark contrast to our values as a nation.\u201d The report accuses the CIA of engaging in widespread torture, illegal detentions and kidnappings or \u201crenderings\u201d of suspected terrorists to partner countries, and \u201cthen misleading the Bush administration and Congress about its effectiveness in providing good intelligence,\u201d which the Agency was unable to get much of from the detainees.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Failure and Incompetence<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Senate report is a scathing indictment CIA brutality and incompetence, and of the agency\u2019s failure in the U.S.-led \u201cGlobal War on Terror,\u201d just as the country\u2019s armed forces are now widely seen to have failed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n

Feinstein also accused the CIA of secretly removing classified documents from a computer system used by Congress to compile the torture report, which she warned may have violated \u201cthe constitutional principle of congressional oversight, as well as both the Fourth Amendment and a presidential executive order that prohibits the CIA from engaging in domestic search and surveillance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s a couple of stories [in the Senate report] that are so chilling that I can\u2019t repeat them now,\u201d said Republican Senator John McCain. One case he did mention was that of an agent reporting to CIA headquarters that he had \u201cgotten everything we can out of the guy\u201d through waterboarding. The message came back, \u201cWaterboard him some more.\u201d McCain called this \u201cunconscionable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Waterboarding is a form of torture in which a victim is held down on a table with a cloth covering his face while water is poured over the cloth. It causes the person to gag and think that they are drowning. Since gagging can cause the victim to vomit, this form of torture, or \u201cenhanced interrogation technique,\u201d as the CIA refers to waterboarding, can kill a person. McCain pointed out that the U.S. hanged Japanese soldiers accused of waterboarding during the Second World War.<\/span><\/p>\n

This \u201cexcruciating\u201d torture on terror suspects produced little valuable intelligence for the CIA. One U.S. official who was briefed on the Senate report said: \u201cThe CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives. Was that actually true? The answer is no.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The high-profile CIA prisoner known as Abu Zubaida was waterboarded 83 times by the agency after his capture in Pakistan in 2002. But according to a U.S. official quoted in the\u00a0<\/span>Washington Post, almost all of the important information from Zubaida was obtained by FBI agent Ali Soufan in conversations with the suspect at a hospital in Pakistan. This didn\u2019t stop the CIA from taking credit for getting this information in later communications with other U.S. intelligence agencies, the Justice Department and Congress.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cThe CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,\u201d a second U.S. official told the Post, adding that the \u201cpersistence of such misstatements\u201d was among \u201cthe most damaging\u201d of the report\u2019s conclusions. In other words, the CIA tortured blatantly and uselessly and then lied about the efficacy of its brutality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asad Ismi With the National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal continuing to make news, another secretive U.S. agency is now the subject of its own public humiliation. \u00a0In early April, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC) voted to partially declassify a 6,600-page report on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) treatment of \u201cterror suspects\u201d during the George […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1616,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-122075","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news","7":"category-usa-news","8":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}