[Flash Walken]

Kind of a big deal happened yesterday. The US Senate released their investigation report on torture abuses by the CIA.The Washington Post had this to say about it (the report summmary is located at this link as well)

The Senate released a 528-page executive summary of its study on the CIA’s detention program, more than eight years after the secret overseas prisons were shut down. The report rejected many of the agency’s claims on the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques.

An exhaustive five-year Senate investigation of the CIA’s secret interrogations of terrorism suspects renders a strikingly bleak verdict on a program launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, describing levels of brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence that at times brought even agency employees to moments of anguish.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee delivers new allegations of cruelty in a program whose severe tactics have been abundantly documented, revealing that agency medical personnel voiced alarm that waterboarding methods had deteriorated to “a series of near drownings” and that agency employees subjected detainees to “rectal rehydration” and other painful procedures that were never approved.

The 528-page document catalogues dozens of cases in which CIA officials allegedly deceived their superiors at the White House, members of Congress and even sometimes their peers about how the interrogation program was being run and what it had achieved. In one case, an internal CIA memo relays instructions from the White House to keep the program secret from then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell out of concern that he would “blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on.”

Washington Post

One of the most lengthy sections describes the interrogation of the CIA’s first prisoner, Abu Zubaida, who was detained in Pakistan in March 2002. Abu Zubaida, badly injured when he was captured, was largely cooperative when jointly questioned by the CIA and FBI but was then subjected to confusing and increasingly violent interrogation as the agency assumed control.

After being transferred to a site in Thailand, Abu Zubaida was placed in isolation for 47 days, a period during which the presumably important source on al-Qaeda faced no questions. Then, at 11:50 a.m. on Aug. 4, 2002, the CIA launched a round-the-clock interrogation assault — slamming him against walls, stuffing him into a coffin-size box and waterboarding him until he coughed, vomited, and had “involuntary spasms of the torso and extremities.”

The treatment continued for 17 days. At one point, the waterboarding left Abu Zubaida “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” CIA memos described employees who were distraught and concerned about the legality of what they had witnessed. One said that “two, perhaps three” were “likely to elect transfer.”

The Senate report suggests top CIA officials at headquarters had little sympathy. When a cable from Thailand warned that the Abu Zubaida interrogation was “approach[ing] the legal limit,” Jose Rodriguez, then chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, cautioned subordinates to refrain from such “speculative language as to the legality” of the interrogation. “Such language is not helpful.”

Through a spokesman, Rodriguez told The Washington Post that he never instructed employees not to send cables about the legality of interrogations.
Abu Zubaida, also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, was waterboarded 83 times and kept in cramped boxes for nearly 300 hours. In October 2002, Bush was informed in his daily intelligence briefing that Abu Zubaida was still withholding “significant threat information,” despite views from the black site that he had been truthful from the outset and was “compliant and cooperative,” the report said.

The document provides a similarly detailed account of the interrogation of the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who fed his interrogators a stream of falsehoods and intelligence fragments.

Waterboarding was supposed to simulate suffocation with a damp cloth and a trickle of liquid. But with Mohammed, CIA operatives used their hands to form a standing pool of water over his mouth. KSM, as he is known in agency documents, was ingesting “a LOT of water,” a CIA medical officer wrote, saying that the application had been so altered that “we are basically doing a series of near drownings.”

Washington Post

Mr. Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, said repeatedly that the detention and interrogation program was humane and legal. The intelligence gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of former C.I.A. officials have said more recently that the program was essential for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The Intelligence Committee’s report tries to refute each of these claims, using the C.I.A.'s internal records to present 20 case studies that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders, or even finding Bin Laden.

The report said that senior officials — including former C.I.A. directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — repeatedly inflated the value of the program in secret briefings both at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and in public speeches.

The New York Times

The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at least 26 were wrongfully held.”

It said, “These included an ‘intellectually challenged’ man whose C.I.A. detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign liaison services and were former C.I.A. sources, and two individuals whom the C.I.A. assessed to be connected to Al Qaeda based solely on information fabricated by a C.I.A. detainee subjected to the C.I.A.'s enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The New York Times

Canada had a role in the United States’ extraordinary rendition program, allowing the CIA to use its airspace and airports repeatedly after Sept. 11, 2001 for secret fights transporting detainees to prison sites outside the U.S. A total of 20 aircraft linked to the CIA made stops in Canada during 74 flights, according to reports. In addition, the RCMP provided inaccurate information about Canadian citizen Maher Arar to the United States, leading to his rendition to Syria in 2002 where he was held for a year and tortured. Mr. Arar was eventually awarded $10.5-million in a legal settlement.

Sukanya Pillay, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said the group has been concerned about information-sharing practices since the terrorist attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

“We are very concerned about new torture directives that were unveiled in the last few years,” Ms. Pillay said, adding that they appear to open a door for Canadian intelligence agencies to rely on information provided by countries known to torture.

“If one of our closest partners in the global counterterror effort engaged in practices that would run afoul of the legal obligations under the convention against torture, it does raise very serious questions about what the implications are for Canada and how Canadians may have been affected,” she said.

The Globe and Mail

Here are the report's biggest conclusions and revelations:
1. "Enhanced interrogation" includes torture
Sen. Dianne Feinstein writes in the report that the Committee's findings reveal that "CIA detainees were tortured."

"I also believe that the conditions of confinement and the use of authorized and unauthorized interrogation and conditioning techniques were cruel, inhuman, and degrading. I believe the evidence of this is overwhelming and incontrovertible," she writes.

Feinstein isn't alone. President Obama said over the summer that, in the past, "we tortured some folks." And Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured as a POW during Vietnam, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that the harsh interrogations described in the report amount to torture.

The CIA has claimed throughout its defense of the program that these coercive interrogations "saved lives" -- the most significant point the Senate committee refutes in its report.

CNN

The release of a U.S. senate report on harsh CIA interrogation techniques has elicited condemnation, a call for prosecution – and new revelations from the countries involved in the Americans’ global intelligence-gathering plans.

After denying the fact for years, a former Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, acknowledged Wednesday that Poland had let the CIA run a secret prison on its territory but insisted that Polish officials did not authorize the harsh treatment or torture of its inmates.

Globe and Mail/AP

The CIA hired two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to develop enhanced interrogation techniques to be used on terror suspects and other detainees. The pair did not have any experience as interrogators, specialized knowledge of al-Qaeda, backgrounds incounterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise. Their prior experience was at the U.S. Air Force survival, evasion, resistance and escape school, according to the report.

Despite that, the psychologists "carried out inherently governmental functions," including personally using techniques they designed on "some of the CIA's most significant detainees." The psychologists then formed a company specifically to work with the CIA.

By 2008, the CIA's Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Group (the lead unit for detention and interrogation operations) outsourced 85 per cent of its workforce to that company. The contractors were paid more than $80 million, along with an extra $1 million to protect the contractors from "legal liability arising out of the program."

CBC

We have come to a critical moment in the debate about torture. It’s no longer possible, as it was when the images of Abu Ghraib emerged in 2004, to pretend that these events were rare, exceptional or the work of a few rogue agents. Nor will it be easy to assimilate them into that beloved average image of our national goodness. We are confronted with our own barbarity, as we have been confronted with the barbarity of the Islamic State.
We torture, they behead. We beat men senseless, slam their heads into walls, strip them naked and leave them to die, while they march men into a field and put bullets in their heads. We might still cling to the idea that our crimes are not quite so bad as theirs. But to quibble over the degree of cruelty we tolerate is to acknowledge that cruelty is now standard practice. Unless we punish the guilty, we can have no more illusions that there is anything fundamental about who we are, how we are governed or what religion we practice, that distinguishes us from the worst in the world.

How does the national image survive this? The usual forces will struggle to resist the new information. Some will wear blinders; others will see things selectively. But what do the rest of us do, everyone one of us who woke up, yesterday, to a powerful feeling of helplessness and shame? If the report leads to no further investigation, no indictments or prosecution, does it then just lay there, on the side of history, as something that can’t be assimilated, while the national image slowly comes back to its usual, gauzy, soft focus on our own unquestionable goodness?

If no one in public life is capable of punishing the guilty, if nothing comes of this but more denials and obfuscations, if the CIA is indeed more powerful than the president, the Congress and the Constitution, what is left of our beloved and benign national image?

Washington Post

5. Mock Executions.
The report was pretty coy about this, but it mentioned that the CIA conducted "mock executions" on two occasions. No details were given about what exactly that meant, but ask Fyodor Dostoyevsky (who went through a pretty elaborate one at the hands of Tsarist torturers), it's an attention-getter.

The CIA also spent time threatening harm to family members (including threats to sexually abuse one detainee's mother), and/or promising detainees that they would never leave captivity alive. This passage, about Abu Zubaydah, who of course is not what one would describe as a good person, stood out:

Over the course of [an] entire 20-day "aggressive phase of interrogation," Abu Zubaydah spent a total of 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in the large (coffin size) confinement box and 29 hours in a small confinement box, which had a width of 21 inches, a depth of 2.5 feet, and a height of 2.5 feet. The CIA interrogators told Abu Zubaydah that the only way he would leave the facility was in the coffin-shaped confinement box.

I measured that out in my living room this morning and nearly needed diapers myself at the thought of being in one of those boxes for even ten seconds. Of course, they didn't just put people in these boxes, or promise them they would spend the rest of their lives there. They also put some guests in:

6. Insects.
The report only mentions insects twice and doesn't provide any details. There have been reports about many of these techniques before, of course, and some details about the insect idea have leaked out. It may be that they would tell a suspect like Zubaydah that a stinging insect is about to be placed in the box, and then they would put a non-stinging insect like a caterpillar in there. But who knows? We may have to wait for some future reporter to FOIA the unclassified version to find out exactly what species of vermin they dumped in there.

Putting someone in a coffin for 20 days with insects crawling all over him would be considered sadistic by any self-respecting third-world torturer. Then again, it's not clear that your average old-school torturer, lacking an American's inherent sense of industrial planning and organization, would have come up with stuff like:

7) The "Rough Takedown."
From the report:
At times, the detainees at COBALT were walked around naked or were shackled with their hands above their heads for extended periods of time. Other times, the detainees at COBALT were subjected to what was described as a "rough takedown," in which approximately five CIA officers would scream at a detainee, drag him outside of his cell, cut his clothes off, and secure him with Mylar tape. The detainee would then be hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched.
That detainee named Gul Rahman was said to have died after one of these choreographed scare-scenes. The report writes: "Rahman, after his death, was found to have surface abrasions on his shoulders, pelvis, arms, legs, and face."

Apparently the officers rushed him, shouted at him to "get down," did the bizarre routine of cutting his clothes off (there is an unmistakable obsession with nudity in these interrogations), ran him through a kind of gauntlet where "although it was obvious they were not trying to hit him as hard as they could, a couple of times the punches were forceful," then dragged him through the dirt outside the cell.

Here again, it's not so much the outrage that American citizens physically abused people, it's just the weirdness of this scripted attack: who thinks of this stuff? And who sat around coming up with ideas like hanging people by their arms for hours on end, or hanging them with just their toes touching the ground, or:

8) The Cordless Drill.
No commentary necessary for this description of the interrogation of suspected Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was:

Placed in a 'standing stress position' with 'his hands affixed over his head' for approximately two and a half days… Later, … while he was blindfolded, [a CIA officer] placed a pistol near al- Nashiri's head and operated a cordless drill near al-Nashiri's body.

The report blithely notes that Al-Nashiri did not provide any additional threat information during, or after, these interrogations, which brings up another point:

Rolling Stone

With this from a 2003 article:

The Bush administration edited the Army Field Manual on Interrogations, which for 50 years has provided guidance to soldiers on how to treat prisoners. The latest version, produced in 1992, specifically prohibited “abnormal sleep deprivation,” which the manual calls “mental torture,” and “forcing an individual to stand, sit, or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time” which it considers “physical torture.”

But in 2006, the Bush administration removed that language and added Appendix M, which authorized “separation,” isolating the detainee from others to prevent him from gathering information from others or learning new counter-interrogation techniques. The report found that the tactic “could inflict significant mental and physical stress” on a detainee and could technically allow him to be interrogated for 40 hours straight, with only four-hour rest periods on either end. Appendix M also forbids sensory deprivation, but allows goggles, blindfolds and handcuffs to “generate a perception of separation” for up to 12 hours, or longer if security necessitates it, the report said.

The Obama administration to date hasn’t re-edited the manual to remove Appendix M or restore the deleted language.

3. We Still Aren’t Sure about Renditions: The practice of kidnapping suspects and sending them to foreign countries to be interrogated began long before the Sept. 11 attacks. The first known incident was believed to have been authorized by President Bill Clinton, who seized Ramzi Yousef in Pakistan and put him on trial for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Later, the U.S. began sending suspects to other countries, not for trial, but interrogation.

There were about 70 renditions before 9/11, the report said. The number of renditions after 9/11 is in dispute, but the report cites a 2007 investigation by the European Parliament that found the CIA flew as many as 1,245 extraordinary rendition flights between 9/11 and February 2007. But former CIA director Michael Hayden told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007 that the actual number of rendition flights is “a tiny fraction of that,” and that most of the flights carried equipment or documents, not detainees.
More is known about how the detainees were treated. The foreign governments gave “diplomatic assurances” that they wouldn’t abuse the detainees, but those were “unreliable,” the report said. In fact, the report found that detainees were “more likely than not” to be tortured or subject to “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.”

The report cited examples such as hanging detainees from limbs, beating them with metal rods, or shocking their genitals. U.S. officials knew what went on because they sometimes were involved in interrogations, the report said.

PBS