CIA lied to you

[Gob]

The CIA carried out "brutal" interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US, a US Senate report has said.

The summary of the report, compiled by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the CIA misled Americans about what it was doing.

The information the CIA collected this way failed to secure information that foiled any threats, the report said.

In a statement, the CIA insisted that the interrogations did help save lives.

"The intelligence gained from the programme was critical to our understanding of al-Qaeda and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day," Director John Brennan said in a statement.

However, the CIA said it acknowledged that there were mistakes in the programme, especially early on when it was unprepared for the scale of the operation to detain and interrogate prisoners.

The programme - known internally as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation programme - took place from 2002-07, during the presidency of George W Bush.

Suspects were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold and sleep deprivation.

line

Analysis: Frank Gardner, BBC security correspondent
This report makes deeply uncomfortable reading but it shines a much-needed torch into some dark places.

The fact that "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EIT), or torture by any other name, was stopped years ago or that some people at the top of the US administration may not have known its full extent, does not excuse the fact it took place at all.

After going through six million pages of documents, the authors concluded that in none of the cases they looked at did these brutal methods stop a terrorist attack. Meaning that America's reputation, and by extension that of the wider West, has been sullied for no tangible gain.

This will lay the US open to charges of hypocrisy, making it far harder for the West to criticise brutal and dictatorial regimes. It may also encourage terrorists to justify their atrocities by pointing to this past abuse.

It can only be hoped this report's publication means these practices will be consigned to history's dustbin.

[wesw]

dick cheney and don Rumsfeld are war criminals, in my opinion. Bush only gets a pass because I believe cheney was the instigator and Rumsfeld the cheerleader.

I would not have had as big of a problem with the whole thing if they had taken the bad guys out back and shot them. torture is different. it takes a special kind of creature to do that.

we are better than that, or should be.

[Lord Jim]

This report is partisan horseshit. They didn't even interview any of the CIA officials past or present in the process of putting it together.

Not worth the paper it's printed on.

[wesw]

I didn t even read the report, I formed that opinion years ago......

[Big RR]

This report is partisan horseshit. They didn't even interview any of the CIA officials past or present in the process of putting it together.

Not worth the paper it's printed on.

Jim--it does seem to me that they went through a lot of contemporaneous documentation, which certainly is a lot more probative of truth than the spin doctors they might have interviewed. I haven't seen how well documented it is, but even if it is partisan, it may well not be horseshit.

[Sue U]

John McCain stands behind the report. It's hardly "horseshit." It's a damning indictment of the CIA under GW Bush.

The only thing "partisan" about it is that it was released now, before the Senate changes to Republican control and the whole matter is deep-sixed for good.

There are a bunch of people who ought to be rotting in prison right now, starting with David Addington, Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

[wesw]

convenient how it was released as that weasel gruber and the lady weasel were being grilled by congress.

tit for tat, that ll make things better.....

[Big RR]

Well Sue, the accounts I read hardly seem like bullshit, and I respect McCain (a victim of torture himself) on this issue. there are a good number of persons that should be punished for what occurred, but I'll bet none will ever be punished.

[Gob]

Washington: One detainee simply froze to death while chained to floor of his cell in a secret CIA prison. Others were shackled standing – or at times swinging – from ceilings.

Some were dragged naked down corridors while being punched and slapped. Some held naked in baths while cold water was poured over them in air-conditioned cells.

They were waterboarded and sleep-deprived and held in darkened boxes.

One was told his children would be murdered, another that his mother would be raped, then have her throat cut.

As we were warned, the US Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture is chilling to read. But it is not just the clinical detail of the brutality of American agents that makes the report shocking, it is how chaotic and in the end, pointless, the entire program proved to be.

It was marked by sloppiness, blurred chains of command and crossed purposes.

According to the report the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" never produced the intelligence to "stop a ticking bomb", and it was often conducted by freelancers who had never been trained in even basic interrogation.

And soon after the program began, many of the agents conducting it went rogue. They were soon using techniques not authorised by even the most aggressive members of the Bush administration, against detainees that the CIA's senior staff did not even know existed.

There was little oversight and no methodology, according to the report, just a network of prisons in unnamed countries in which unnamed agents and contractors abused suspects of crimes for intelligence of questionable value.

The origins of the torture program can be traced to a memo drafted by president George Bush on September 17, 2001, before America had even finished counting its dead after the September 11 attacks. In it he directed the director of central intelligence to, "undertake operations designed to capture and detain persons who pose a continuing, serious threat of violence or death to US persons and interests or who are planning terrorist activities".

In late November a CIA lawyer wrote a memo saying the agency "could argue that the torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm."

The following January that memo appears to have been acted upon, with the CIA writing to Mr Bush arguing that the agency should be exempt from the Geneva Convention protocols on torture, saying they would "significantly hamper the ability of CIA to obtain critical threat information necessary to save American lives".

Just a month later Mr Bush declared that those suspected terrorists it detained were not legal combatants and were therefore not protected by the Geneva Convention.

But even granted this extraordinary latitude, the CIA was soon exceeding the boundaries set by the White House. Its headquarters instructed agents not only to detain high-level targets, but anyone that might have information leading to such a target.

Continues....

[Econoline]

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any prisoner I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. For by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”

- George Washington

[Lord Jim]

I'm absolutely appalled...

I'm appalled that not one single person with actual knowledge of the intelligence gained from the enhanced interrogation programs was interviewed for this report. (the reason is obvious; had they gotten their testimony they would never have been able to issue their pre-determined, completely unsupported conclusion that the program gained no actionable intel)

And I'm appalled that this "report" was released to the public at all, since the only possible "value" it has is to serve as a propaganda and recruiting tool for America's enemies...

Unless you see giving many domestic liberals an excuse to wax self-righteous as valuable...(like they need an excuse...)

Yes, this report is quite appalling...

[wesw]

so....

the ends justify the means? you kinda sound like that gruber guy....

[MajGenl.Meade]

Sorry to say LJ that I think you're riding the wrong horse on this one. It is not surprising that the CIA did any of this since most of it was bruited about (how appropriate) very soon after it began. The hiring of contractors was always to assist deniability and to keep certain hands "clean". None of us have seen and read the entire report (I suppose) and you can be sure that even this investigation chose to keep quiet about certain details. Perhaps it does not name the countries whose "secret police" the CIA contracted to receive and torture people away from US jurisdiction?

As to results, you can be absolutely certain that if any of these naughty things had prevented a major terrorist assault, there would be plenty of people claiming that fig leaf as justification. Even this Senate committee would hold it up as some form of mitigation.

By the way, how do you know they didn't interview anyone who knew if significant results had been obtained by extra-legal means? Perhaps you do know but apparently that makes you a lot smarter than a Senate committee - not impossible, granted. It's unlikely but not impossible.

As to releasing the information, it's pure conjecture that an honest revelation of unsanctioned "rogue" activities will cause even one raghead to go all 9/11. The nutters and the haters, my dear chap, need no incentive other than their own sadistic, evil, thoroughly rogue, cruel and vicious mental warpage.

I hope you 'get' that we (USians) just cannot do these kinds of things. What we should do is drop a large nuclear warhead on Mecca. That'l larn 'em!

[Lord Jim]

Ex-CIA Directors Say Interrogation Program 'Saved Thousands of Lives'

Six former Directors and Deputy Directors of the CIA fired back at the Senate Intelligence Committee with a vehemence almost never seen in the intelligence world.

The former CIA leaders -- including George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden -- blasted the Senate report as "one-sided and marred with errors" and called it "a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9/11 attacks."

Their 2,500-word rebuttal was posted as an op-ed on the Wall Street Journal website once the report was released. The former intel chiefs are also launching their own website to respond to the attacks on CIA's post-9/11 activities.

'Saved Thousands Of Lives'The former directors argue that the CIA interrogation program "saved thousands of lives" by helping lead to the capture of top al Qaeda operatives and disrupting their plotting.

"A powerful example of the interrogation program's importance is the information obtained from Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda operative, and from Khalid Sheik Muhammed, known as KSM, the 9/11 mastermind," the former directors write. "We are convinced that both would not have talked absent the interrogation program."

As for Osama bin Laden, the former directors outline the steps that led the Navy SEALs to the Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

"The CIA never would have focused on the individual who turned out to be bin Laden's personal courier without the detention and interrogation program," they write. "So the bottom line is this: The interrogation program formed an essential part of the foundation from which the CIA and the U.S. military mounted the bin Laden operation."

This is the first opportunity for these former intelligence chiefs to respond to the allegations made in the report: None of them - in fact no current or former CIA officials - were interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee for their report.

They argue that the report's release will do long-standing damage to the United States because it will make foreign intelligence agencies less willing to cooperate with the CIA, give terrorists a new reciting tool and make current CIA operatives fearful of future political attacks.[All of that is self evidently and obviously true.]

'Aggressive' Tactics 'Responsible' Success"Many CIA officers will be concerned that being involved in legally approved sensitive actions can open them to politically driven scrutiny and censure from a future administration."

The CIA, they insist, should instead be praised for protecting the United States.

"The al Qaeda leadership has not managed another attack on the homeland in the 13 years since, despite a strong desire to do so," they write. "The CIA's aggressive counter-terrorism policies and programs are responsible for that success."

Brennan: Committee 'Provided An Incomplete' PictureIn a statement, current CIA Director John Brennan agrees with his predecessors that the enhanced interrogation techniques on some of its detainees "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-Qa'ida and continues to inform our counter-terrorism efforts to this day." The Agency also plans to release the approximately 120 page response to the report it provided the committee in June, 2013.

He acknowledges that mistakes were made early on in the program's existence and says that was because it was ill-prepared to carry out a worldwide detention program. The CIA Director also disagrees with the Committee's "inference that the Agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program."

Brennan argues that the committee's investigation "provided an incomplete and selective picture of what occurred" because the committee did not interview officers involved in the program who could have provided what it says is the necessary context. In releasing the report on the Senate floor, committee chairperson Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., explained that no interviews were conducted because of a concurrent Justice Department investigation that might have limited potential comments from CIA officers involved.

"In carrying out that program, we did not always live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves and that the American people expect of us," said Brennan. "As an Agency, we have learned from these mistakes, which is why my predecessors and I have implemented various remedial measures over the years to address institutional deficiencies."

Brennan also agrees with his predecessors that the enhanced interrogation techniques led to the courier who began the trail that located Osama bin Laden. It points out that after undergoing some of the enhanced interrogation techniques, Ammar al-Baluch was the first detainee to reveal that Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti served as a courier for bin Laden.

That information led the CIA to re-question other detainees about the courier's role. "CIA then combined this information with reporting from other streams to build a profile of Abu Ahmad's experiences, family, and characteristics that allowed us to eventually determine his true name and location," said Brennan.

http://abc7news.com/news/ex-cia-directo ... es/428615/

Here's the link to the full rebuttal in the Wall Street Journal:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-interro ... 1418142644

Anyone who's seriously interested in this should read it.

[Guinevere]

The ends do not justify the means. Period.

The senator from Arizona agrees: http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/ind ... 8f984db996

Washington, D.C. ­– U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today delivered the following statement on the floor of the U.S. Senate on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA interrogation methods:

“Mr. President, I rise in support of the release – the long-delayed release – of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s summarized, unclassified review of the so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that were employed by the previous administration to extract information from captured terrorists. It is a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose – to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies – but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.

“I believe the American people have a right – indeed, a responsibility – to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values.

“I commend Chairman Feinstein and her staff for their diligence in seeking a truthful accounting of policies I hope we will never resort to again. I thank them for persevering against persistent opposition from many members of the intelligence community, from officials in two administrations, and from some of our colleagues.

“The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.

“They must know when the values that define our nation are intentionally disregarded by our security policies, even those policies that are conducted in secret. They must be able to make informed judgments about whether those policies and the personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values; whether they served a greater good; or whether, as I believe, they stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good.

“What were the policies? What was their purpose? Did they achieve it? Did they make us safer? Less safe? Or did they make no difference? What did they gain us? What did they cost us? The American people need the answers to these questions. Yes, some things must be kept from public disclosure to protect clandestine operations, sources and methods, but not the answers to these questions.

“By providing them, the Committee has empowered the American people to come to their own decisions about whether we should have employed such practices in the past and whether we should consider permitting them in the future. This report strengthens self-government and, ultimately, I believe, America’s security and stature in the world. I thank the Committee for that valuable public service.

“I have long believed some of these practices amounted to torture, as a reasonable person would define it, especially, but not only the practice of waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture. Its use was shameful and unnecessary; and, contrary to assertions made by some of its defenders and as the Committee’s report makes clear, it produced little useful intelligence to help us track down the perpetrators of 9/11 or prevent new attacks and atrocities.

“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.

“I know, too, that bad things happen in war. I know in war good people can feel obliged for good reasons to do things they would normally object to and recoil from.

“I understand the reasons that governed the decision to resort to these interrogation methods, and I know that those who approved them and those who used them were dedicated to securing justice for the victims of terrorist attacks and to protecting Americans from further harm. I know their responsibilities were grave and urgent, and the strain of their duty was onerous.

“I respect their dedication and appreciate their dilemma. But I dispute wholeheartedly that it was right for them to use these methods, which this report makes clear were neither in the best interests of justice nor our security nor the ideals we have sacrificed so much blood and treasure to defend.

“The knowledge of torture’s dubious efficacy and my moral objections to the abuse of prisoners motivated my sponsorship of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibits ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ of captured combatants, whether they wear a nation’s uniform or not, and which passed the Senate by a vote of 90-9.

“Subsequently, I successfully offered amendments to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which, among other things, prevented the attempt to weaken Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and broadened definitions in the War Crimes Act to make the future use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ punishable as war crimes.

“There was considerable misinformation disseminated then about what was and wasn’t achieved using these methods in an effort to discourage support for the legislation. There was a good amount of misinformation used in 2011 to credit the use of these methods with the death of Osama bin Laden. And there is, I fear, misinformation being used today to prevent the release of this report, disputing its findings and warning about the security consequences of their public disclosure.

“Will the report’s release cause outrage that leads to violence in some parts of the Muslim world? Yes, I suppose that’s possible, perhaps likely. Sadly, violence needs little incentive in some quarters of the world today. But that doesn’t mean we will be telling the world something it will be shocked to learn. The entire world already knows that we water-boarded prisoners. It knows we subjected prisoners to various other types of degrading treatment. It knows we used black sites, secret prisons. Those practices haven’t been a secret for a decade.

“Terrorists might use the report’s re-identification of the practices as an excuse to attack Americans, but they hardly need an excuse for that. That has been their life’s calling for a while now.

“What might come as a surprise, not just to our enemies, but to many Americans, is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise, since it contradicts the many assurances provided by intelligence officials on the record and in private that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in the war against terrorism. And I suspect the objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure – torture’s ineffectiveness – because we gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer. Too much.

“Obviously, we need intelligence to defeat our enemies, but we need reliable intelligence. Torture produces more misleading information than actionable intelligence. And what the advocates of harsh and cruel interrogation methods have never established is that we couldn’t have gathered as good or more reliable intelligence from using humane methods.

“The most important lead we got in the search for bin Laden came from using conventional interrogation methods. I think it is an insult to the many intelligence officers who have acquired good intelligence without hurting or degrading prisoners to assert we can’t win this war without such methods. Yes, we can and we will.

“But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said, and will always maintain, that 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.

“We have made our way in this often dangerous and cruel world, not by just strictly pursuing our geopolitical interests, but by exemplifying our political values, and influencing other nations to embrace them. When we fight to defend our security we fight also for an idea, not for a tribe or a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion or for a king, but for an idea that all men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights. How much safer the world would be if all nations believed the same. How much more dangerous it can become when we forget it ourselves even momentarily.

“Our enemies act without conscience. We must not. This executive summary of the Committee’s report makes clear that acting without conscience isn’t necessary, it isn’t even helpful, in winning this strange and long war we’re fighting. We should be grateful to have that truth affirmed.

“Now, let us reassert the contrary proposition: that is it essential to our success in this war that we ask those who fight it for us to remember at all times that they are defending a sacred ideal of how nations should be governed and conduct their relations with others – even our enemies.

“Those of us who give them this duty are obliged by history, by our nation’s highest ideals and the many terrible sacrifices made to protect them, by our respect for human dignity to make clear we need not risk our national honor to prevail in this or any war. We need only remember in the worst of times, through the chaos and terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering and loss, that we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us.

“Thank you.”

[wesw]

anyone who is seriously interested has been paying attention since Rumsfeld and cheney both defended, what I consider to be torture, on national television while still in office.. I don t need the report or rebuttal. this stuff hasn t been a secret exactly.

forget this crap, is Swamp People on TV????

[Lord Jim]

Unfortunately McCain's personal experience has blurred his judgement about the release of this report.

[Guinevere]

His personal experience gives him more credibility than anyone to analyze and comment on the report.

The report reviews the actual documents created by the CIA, which is pretty good evidence. As we say in the law "the documents speak for themselves." Here's a referenced to one I found particularly charming:

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 Powell out of concern that he would “blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on.”

[MajGenl.Meade]

"The CIA never would have focused on the individual who turned out to be bin Laden's personal courier without the detention and interrogation program," they write. "So the bottom line is this: The interrogation program formed an essential part of the foundation from which the CIA and the U.S. military mounted the bin Laden operation."

"Detention and interrogation" is not the issue. The issue is torture. Is it the CIA claim that the actual torture of persons led to useful information? If so, is it the claim that torture is justified by results?

"The al Qaeda leadership has not managed another attack on the homeland in the 13 years since, despite a strong desire to do so," they write. "The CIA's aggressive counter-terrorism policies and programs are responsible for that success."

The child migrant surge began in 2011 and al Qaeda has launched no successful attacks on the USA since then. Therefore, we should encourage more child migrants. Again, the issue is not aggressive counter-terrorism policies and programs, nor is it the good work of the CIA etc. The issue is the torture of human beings.

(C)urrent CIA Director John Brennan agrees with his predecessors that the enhanced interrogation techniques on some of its detainees "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-Qa'ida and continues to inform our counter-terrorism efforts to this day."

Enhanced and some... does that mean that torture of specific individuals by rogue agents and contractors 'did produce intelligence . . . that helped thwart . . ." etc.? Therefore that any means of torture is acceptable?

While the demise of Osama bin Laden is not exactly a world-shatteringly grief-inducing event, is killing one man justification for torture? No. It isn't. So all the mumbling aside, torture is wrong and should be exposed for what it is and called what it is.

Yes, people are going to use this event across the world to foment trouble. Even Feinstein acknowledged that. But in the same way that's happening in Ferguson and I don't see LJ blaming Wilson for it. (Nor do I). He blames the people doing the reacting. (So do I). OTOH, in the case of the NYC chokehold, did you not (LJ) express some understanding for people enraged by the apparent official whitewashing of the event? You and I would prefer an open trial to investigate and adjudicate the facts - publically.

Now I'll read the WSJ rebuttal (and recommend their wine club to everyone - you get some great deals)

[wesw]

I drew a political cartoon back then. it showed two little houses up on a hill, with a lane leading up to them. the , slightly askew mailboxes at the end said Rumsfeld and cheney, respectively (not (italics) respectfully). there was a rickety sign saying "no trespassing, violators may be tortured"

the caption read, "from an undisclosed location, near Vienna MD" where they had, or have their country estates