The CIA Torture Report Was Finally Released, and Boy, Is It Disturbing

The Senate Intelligence Committee has finally released a 500 page redacted version of the executive summary of its investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

The 6,300 page report took four years to produce and is based on more than six million internal agency documents. The full report was not released due to security concerns raised by the CIA. Earlier this year, a compromise between the committee and the White House was reached to release the redacted version.

The findings revealed that the CIA’s “interrogation techniques” were more brutal than we previously were told and were used more extensively. Torture methods the CIA operatives used went beyond what was authorized by the White House, CIA officials, and the Department of Justice.

Luis Martinez of ABC News provides the backstory of the CIA’s torture program:

In 2002, the CIA began a program to seize al-Qaeda members and hold them in secret prisons overseas that became known as “black sites.” At those locations, the CIA conducted interrogations of those detainees to learn more about al Qaeda, prevent future plots and eventually find Osama bin Laden. The list of detainees included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the 9/11 plotters.

In 2002, the Justice Department secretly authorized the use of specific “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would enable CIA interrogators to extract more information from uncooperative detainees. These techniques — or EIT’s as they became known — included the use of stress positions, waterboarding and prolonged sleep deprivation designed to coerce detainees into providing more information.

In September 2006, President Bush publicly revealed the existence of the CIA’s secret prison program and announced that detainees under the agency’s control would be transferred to the detention facility at Guantanamo. Upon taking office in January 2009, President Obama issued an executive order banning the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began their investigation into CIA detention and interrogation practices in March 2009. They only expected the research to take a year, but the magnitude of the task and alleged improper access of Senate investigators’ computer systems by CIA employees complicated things.

In September 2009, Republican members of the committee withdrew from the investigation. They are expected to release their own response to the findings.

Here are the key findings that are detailed in the report.

CIA interrogation techniques were far more brutal and more frequently used than reported

The CIA initially claimed they had only waterboarded three prisoners: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri.

But investigators believe the actual number was more. Their report references 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, reports The Daily Beast.

In the report, the committee describes extensive waterboarding as a physically harmful “series of near drownings” that often leads to convulsions and vomiting. Detainee Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth” during one session. And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded at least 183 times.

A “black site” detention facility in Afghanistan that is known as “Cobalt” or the “Salt Pit”didn’t keep many formal records, but the committee found that untrained CIA operatives conducted unauthorized, unsupervised interrogation there. Some of those employees had “histories of violence and mistreatment of others.”

The conditions at the Salt Pit were abysmal:

In Nov. 2002, a detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to the floor died, apparently from hypothermia. This case appears similar to the that of Gul Rahman, who died of similarly explained causes at a Afghan site known as the “Salt Pit,” also in Nov. 2002. The site was also called ‘The Dark Prison’ by former captives.

The aide said that the Cobalt site was was dark, like a dungeon, and that experts who visited the site said they’d never seen an American prison where people were kept in such conditions. The facility was so dark in some places that guard had to wear head lamps, while other rooms were flooded with bright lights and white noise to disorient detainees.

At the Cobalt facility, the CIA also forced some detainees who had broken feet or legs to stand in stress-inducing positions, despite having earlier pledged that they wouldn’t subject those wounded individuals to treatment that might exacerbate their injuries. (source)

Instead of trying to collect information from detainees via non-threatening methods, CIA operatives used harsh techniques right from the start. Interrogation was non-stop, sometimes continuing for days or weeks at a time:

The CIA instructed personnel at the site that the interrogation of Zubaydah, who’d been shot during his capture, should take “precedence over his medical care,” the committee found, leading to an infection in a bullet wound incurred during his capture. Zubaydah lost his left eye while in custody. The CIA’s instructions also ran contrary to how it told the Justice Department the prisoner would be treated. (source)

At least five detainees were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration,” which the CIA’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.”

Some were subjected to week-long sleep deprivation, sometimes while standing or with their hands shackled above their heads.

Others were forced to walk around naked, and some were hooded and dragged up and down corridors.

Detainees in one facility were shackled in completely dark, loud cells with only a bucket to use for waste.

The New York Times reports that “Conditions at one prison, described by a clandestine officer as a ‘dungeon,’ were blamed for the death of a detainee, and the harsh techniques were described as leading to ‘psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.'”

CIA operatives also threatened to harm detainees’ families:

CIA officers threatened to harm detainees’ children, sexually abuse their mothers, and “cut [a detainee’s] mother’s throat.” In addition, several detainees were led to believe they would die in custody, with one told he would leave in a coffin-shaped box.

Detainees wouldn’t see their day in court because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you,” one interrogator said. (source)

Some interrogators admitted to sexually assaulting detainees as well.

Lies, corruption, and lack of oversight

CIA claimed to have 100 detainees in custody, but the committee found that at least 119 were held.

“The fact is they lost track and they didn’t really know who they were holding,” the Senate aide said, noting that investigators found emails in which CIA personnel were “surprised” to find some people in their custody.

At least 26 people were wrongfully detained, according to the CIA. Of those, one was an “intellectually challenged” man who was used as “leverage” to obtain information from a family member. Others included two former intelligence sources and two individuals identified as threats by a detainee subjected to torture.

Considering the agency’s terrible record-keeping, the actual number of people who were detained – including those wrongfully so – could be higher.

The report states that intelligence officials were displeased with the level of competence and training interrogators had. Those who violated policy were “rarely held accountable.”

But the CIA “resisted congressional oversight, restricted access to information, declined to answer questions about the program and ‘impeded oversight’ by the agency’s inspector general by providing false information.”

Two outside contractors were hired to help develop, run, and assess the CIA’s interrogation program. Both were psychologists, but neither had experience with interrogations or specialized knowledge about al-Qaeda or terrorism. In 2005, the two contractors started a company, to which the CIA outsourced their interrogation program. The CIA paid them more than $80 million.

The CIA provided false and misleading information to Congress, the White House, and the director of national intelligence about the effectiveness of the interrogation program.

CIA officials also lied to their own peers and supervisors 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 going on.”

There are also cases in which questions posed to the CIA from the White House were not answered truthfully or fully.

And, a summary of an early briefing CIA officials gave the House Intelligence Committee included a line that said lawmakers “questioned the legality of these techniques.” But a lawyer deleted that line from the final version of the summary:

The Senate investigators found that Jose Rodriguez, once the CIA’s top spy and a fierce defender of the interrogation program, made a note on the draft approving of the deletion: “Short and sweet,” Rodriguez wrote of the newly revised summary that failed to mention lawmakers’ concerns about the legality of the program. (source)

Not only were the previously unpublicized torture methods barbaric, sadistic, and inhumane – they were ineffective in collecting intelligence that could not have been gathered by other means. The committee reviewed 20 examples of intelligence “successes” the CIA claimed were a result of the interrogation program. They found that the information gained during torture sessions wasn’t anything new – it matched intelligence that had already been gathered via other sources.

And of course, the CIA attempted to use the media to gain support for their program:

The report found that the CIA provided classified information to journalists but that the agency did not push to prosecute or investigate many of the leaks. CIA officials asked officers to “compile information on the success” of the program to be shared with the news media in order to shape public opinion. The CIA also mischaracterized events and provided false or incomplete information to the news media in an effort to gain public support.

Perhaps the biggest and most stunning lie the CIA told was that torture led the agency to Bin Laden:

The vast majority of the intelligence” about the Qaeda courier who led the agency to Bin Laden “was originally acquired from sources unrelated to the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program, and the most accurate information acquired from a C.I.A. detainee was provided prior to the C.I.A. subjecting the detainee to the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Senate report said.

It added that most of “the documents, statements and testimony” from the C.I.A. regarding a connection between the torture of detainees and the Bin Laden hunt were “inaccurate and incongruent with C.I.A. records.” (source)

Interrogators overruled and a whistleblower jailed

Some CIA employees were disturbed by the interrogation practices and expressed concern over the legality of the techniques being used:

In one instance, a senior official pushed back against concern over the “legal limit” of brutal interrogation techniques by stating that the “guidelines for this activity” had been “vetted at the most senior levels of the agency.”

The Senate report includes disturbing passages taken from internal CIA memos and emails from agency employees who described their reactions to interrogation scenes. In 2002, CIA employees at a secret site in Thailand broke down emotionally after witnessing the horrible treatment of Abu Zubaydah, the agency’s first prisoner. Zubaydah was badly injured when he was captured, and was cooperative with the CIA and FBI. When the CIA took over his handling, he was subjected to confusing and increasingly violent interrogation practices.

The Washington Post reports:

“Several on the team profoundly affected,” one agency employee wrote at the time, “some to the point of tears and choking up.” The passage is contrasted with closed-door testimony from high-ranking CIA officials, including then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who when asked by a senator in 2007 whether agency personnel had expressed reservations replied: “I’m not aware of any. These guys are more experienced. No.”

From the report:

Critiques, criticisms, and objections were expressed by numerous CIA officers, including senior personnel overseeing and managing the program, as well as analysts, interrogators, and medical officers involved in or supporting CIA detention and interrogation operations.

Examples of these concerns include CIA officers questioning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, interrogators disagreeing with the use of such techniques against detainees whom they determined were not withholding information, psychologists recommending less isolated conditions, and Office of Medical Services personnel questioning both the effectiveness and safety of the techniques. These concerns were regularly overridden by CIA management, and the CIA made few corrective changes to its policies governing the program. At times, CIA officers were instructed by supervisors not to put their concerns or observations in written communications.

In early 2003, a CIA officer in the interrogation program described it as a “train [wreck] waiting to happen” and that “I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” The officer, identified by former colleagues as Charlie Wise, subsequently retired and died in 2003. (source)

To date, former CIA officer John Kiriakou is the only person who has been charged with a crime related to the agency’s interrogation program. Kiriakou is currently serving a nearly three-year prison sentence, but not for torturing detainees.

Kiriakou is in prison for whistleblowing. He was the first person with direct knowledge of the program who exposed it publicly. Kiriakou was charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but he says that’s only what the government wants people to believe:

“In truth, this is my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program and for telling the public that torture was official U.S. government policy,” Kiriakou said in a letter last May from a prison in Loretto, Penn. “But that’s a different story.”

And, it appears that Kiriakou will remain the only person who was associated with the torture program who will serve time, because today the Justice Department said the Senate report didn’t provide new information that would lead them to reopen any of the old cases.

Bush and Cheney – how much did they know?
During his time as president, George W. Bush repeatedly said that the detention and interrogation program (which President Obama dismantled in 2009) was humane and legal. He claimed that the intelligence gained during the interrogations was crucial to stopping terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of al-Qaeda.

More recently, Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and a number of former CIA officials have said 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. We now know this is not likely to be true.

The report said that during secret briefings at the White House and in public speeches, senior officials (including former CIA directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden) repeatedly exaggerated the value of the program.

The report claims that Bush and Cheney were misled by CIA officials, but were they?

Nearly two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush signed a covert memo that “provided unprecedented authorities, granting the CIA significant discretion in determining whom to detain, the factual basis for the detention, and the length of the detention” of captives in the war on terror. But the memo made no mention of interrogations or what interrogation techniques would be used, the committee determined. In February 2002, Bush issues a memo that said al Qaeda and the Taliban were not prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, meaning that they didn’t need to be subjected to “humane treatment.” (source)

In 2008, Bush vetoed a bill passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress outlawing the techniques:

The president used the CIA information in explaining his veto, but the agency’s “representations to the White House regarding the role of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques in the thwarting of the referenced plots were inaccurate,” according to the committee.

Cheney was on board with the interrogation program, including waterboarding, and believed the CIA “was executing administration policy,” the committee found.

From The New York Times:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney added his voice to those of other Bush administration officials defending the CIA, declaring in an interview Monday that its harsh interrogations a decade ago were “absolutely, totally justified,” and dismissing allegations that the agency withheld information from the White House or inflated the value of its methods.

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

Mr. Cheney said he never believed the CIA was withholding information from him or the White House about the nature of the program, nor did he think the agency exaggerated the value of the intelligence gained from waterboarding and other techniques widely considered to be torture.

“They deserve a lot of praise,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticized.”

Why is this report being released now?

Some say the report is being publicized now because Republicans, who objected to the release of the report, will take control of Congress in January.

Republican lawmakers have been expressing fear that the brutal details of the report will incite violence and put Americans – especially those stationed in countries like Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya – at risk.

In response to those fears, the Pentagon has increased security at embassies and has bolstered the protection of its forces in Afghanistan. Intelligence agencies are increasing their monitoring of the communications of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the ISIS.

In a statement from the White House, Obama said the Senate report “documents a troubling program” and “reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests.” Obama praised the CIA’s work to degrade al-Qaeda over the past 13 years, but said its interrogation program “did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.” (source)

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), one of the intelligence committee members who strongly supports the report’s release, said:

“The whole point of that is to make sure it never happens again. … This report should have been out a long time ago. The full report has 38,000 footnotes. This is meticulously documented, and I think now now the point is to put this in front of the American people so that they can get the facts.”

The most disturbing thing about this is that conditions were probably far, far worse than CIA documents or the committee’s investigation revealed.