CIA report's most shocking passages

[Jamie_B]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/09/politics/cia-reports-shocking-passages/

 

Washington (CNN) -- Here's a look at some of the techniques the CIA used to interrogate detainees that were included in a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday.

 

1. The CIA conducted at least two mock executions -- among other techniques that went unreported in the agency's cables. Others included "nudity, dietary manipulation, exposure to cold temperatures, cold showers," and rough takedowns.

 

In another passage, the mock executions are included in a section that also mentions techniques like "placing pressure on a detainee's artery ... blowing cigarette or cigar smoke into a detainee's face, using cold water to interrogate detainees, and subjecting a detainee to a 'hard takedown.'"

 

2. Those "rough" or "hard" takedowns involved CIA officers rushing into a detainee's cell, stripping him naked and running him up and down a long hall while slapping and punching him. "As they ran him along the corridor, a couple of times he fell and they dragged him through the dirt," the report says.

 

3. The CIA often used sleep deprivation, which "involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads."

 

4. The CIA decided that interrogating Abu Zubaydah would take precedence over his medical care. He almost died as a result of waterboarding. In at least one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah "became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth." He remained unresponsive until medical intervention, when he regained consciousness and expelled "copious amounts of liquid."

 

5. The first prisoner at the COBALT detention facility, Redha al-Najar, was kept in "isolation in total darkness." The CIA gave him increasingly worse food, kept him in uncomfortably cold temperatures, kept him shackled and hooded and played music 24 hours a day. He wore a diaper and had no access to toilets. And he was described as being left hanging -- with one or both wrists handcuffed to an overhead bar so he couldn't lower his arms -- for 22 hours a day for two straight days in an attempt to "'break' his resistance."

 

6. The CIA threatened the families of detainees. It used that prisoner's "fear for the well-being of his family to our benefit," according to the report, by "using 'vague threats' to create a 'mind virus.'" In another section, the report says "CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families -- to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee and a threat to 'cut [a detainee's] mother's throat.'"

 

7. One detainee faced particularly rough treatment in late 2005. Per the report: "According to CIA records, Abu Ja'far al-Iraqi was subjected to nudity, dietary manipulation, insult slaps, abdominal slaps, attention grasps, facial holds, walling, stress positions and water dousing with 44 degree Fahrenheit water for 18 minutes. He was shackled in the standing position for 54 hours as part of sleep deprivation, and experienced swelling in his lower legs requiring blood thinner and spiral ace bandages.

"He was moved to a sitting position, and his sleep deprivation was extended to 78 hours. After the swelling subsided, he was provided with more blood thinner and was returned to the standing position. The sleep deprivation was extended to 102 hours. After four hours of sleep, Abu Ja'far al-Iraqi was subjected to an additional 52 hours of sleep deprivation, after which CIA Headquarters informed interrogators that eight hours was the minimum rest period between sleep deprivation sessions exceeding 48 hours. In addition to the swelling, Abu Ja'far al-Iraqi also experienced an edema on his head due to walling, abrasions on his neck and blisters on his ankles from shackles."

 

8. "At least five CIA detainees were subjected to 'rectal rehydration' or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity," the report said. More specifically, "Majid Khan's 'lunch tray' of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins was 'pureed' and rectally infused."

 

9. The CIA officers involved in the detention and interrogation program weren't the most savory bunch. The group "included individuals who, among other issues, had engaged in inappropriate detainee interrogations, had workplace anger management issues and had reportedly admitted to sexual assault," the report said.

 

10. Some of those who were interrogated didn't have the best thought-out plans. After reading a satirical web story called "How to Make an H-bomb," U.S. citizen Jose Padilla and his associate, Binyam Mohammed, conceived the "Dirty Bomb Plot."

The report says: "The article instructed would-be bomb makers to enrich uranium by placing it "in a bucket, attaching it to a six-foot rope, and swinging it around your head as fast as possible for 45 minutes. Padilla and Mohammed approached Abu Zubaydah in early 2002, and later [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed], with their idea to build and use this device in the United States.

"Neither Abu Zubaydah nor KSM believed the plan was viable, but KSM provided funding for, and tasked Padilla to conduct, an operation using natural gas to create explosions in tall buildings in the United States, later known as the 'Tall Buildings Plot.'"

 

 

[Jamie_B]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-torture-report-shows-cia-infighting-over-interrogation-program.html

 

Report Portrays a Broken C.I.A. Devoted to a Failed Approach

 

WASHINGTON — In January 2003, 10 months into the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prison program, the agency’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that the relentlessly brutal treatment of prisoners was a train wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” He said he had told his bosses he had “serious reservations” about the program and no longer wanted to be associated with it “in any way.”

 

The bitter infighting in the C.I.A. interrogation program was only one symptom of the dysfunction, disorganization, incompetence, greed and deception described in a summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report. In more than 500 pages, the summary, released on Tuesday, paints a devastating picture of an agency that was ill equipped to take on the task of questioning Al Qaeda suspects, bungled the job and then misrepresented the results.

 

On Tuesday morning, the C.I.A. acknowledged problems in the early months of the program but suggested that they had been fixed. “The study as a whole leads the reader to believe that the management shortcomings that marked the initial months persisted throughout the program, which is historically inaccurate,” the agency said.

 

The Senate report is the most sweeping condemnation of the C.I.A. since the Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, accused the agency in the 1970s of domestic spying, botched assassinations and giving LSD to unwitting subjects, among other misconduct. That report led to a series of new laws and restrictions on C.I.A. activities.

 

The protest from the chief of interrogations came amid weeks of torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a leading suspect in the bombing of two American embassies and a Navy ship. C.I.A. personnel working on the secret program had split into two camps. On one side were the chief of interrogations and nearly all of the personnel who had been questioning Mr. Nashiri. After two months of harsh questioning, the chief wrote, they believed that the prisoner had “been mainly truthful and is not withholding significant information.”

 

On the other side were James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two former military psychologists who had advised the agency to use waterboarding and other coercive methods. With the support of C.I.A. headquarters, they insisted that Mr. Nashiri and other prisoners were still withholding crucial information, and that the application of sufficient pain and disorientation would eventually force them to disclose it. They thought the other faction was “running a ‘sissified’ interrogation program,” the report says.

 

If those questioning Mr. Nashiri just had “the latitude to use the full range of enhanced exploitation and interrogation measures,” including waterboarding, Dr. Jessen wrote, they would be able to get more information. Such treatment, he wrote, after the two previous months of extremely harsh handling of Mr. Nashiri, would produce “the desired level of helplessness.”

Continue reading the main story

 

The report said the agency had evidently forgotten its own conclusion, sent to Congress in 1989, that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” The Democratic Senate staff members who studied the post-Sept. 11 program came up with an identical assessment: that waterboarding, wall-slamming, nudity, cold and other ill treatment produced little information of value in preventing terrorism.

 

In fact, it says, “C.I.A. officers regularly called into question whether the C.I.A.'s enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, assessing that the use of the techniques failed to elicit detainee cooperation or produce accurate intelligence.” Still, higher-ups ordered that the methods be continued and told Congress, the White House and journalists that they were having great success.

 

Just as striking as that central finding is the detailed account of C.I.A. mismanagement. Both factions in the fight over interrogations were led by people with histories that might have been expected to disqualify them.

 

The chief of interrogations, who is not named in the report, was given the job in fall 2002 even though the agency’s inspector general had urged that he be “orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques” in a training program in Latin America in the 1980s.

 

The report spends little time condemning torture on moral or legal grounds. Instead, it addresses mainly a practical question: Did torture accomplish anything of value? Looking at case after case, the report answers with an unqualified no.

 

And Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, identified by the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar in the report, had not conducted a single real interrogation. They had helped run a Cold War-era training program for the Air Force in which personnel were given a taste of the harsh treatment they might face if captured by Communist enemies. The program — called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — had never been intended for use in American interrogations, and involved methods that had produced false confessions when used on American airmen held by the Chinese in the Korean War.

 

The program allowed the psychologists to assess their own work — they gave it excellent grades — and to charge a daily rate of $1,800 each, four times the pay of other interrogators, to waterboard detainees. Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen later started a company that took over the C.I.A. program from 2005 until it was closed in 2009. The C.I.A. paid it $81 million, plus $1 million to protect the company from legal liability.

 

Early in the program, the report says, “a junior officer on his first overseas assignment,” who had no experience with prisons or interrogations, was placed in charge of a C.I.A. detention site in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. Other C.I.A. officers had previously proposed that he be stripped of access to classified information because of a “lack of honesty, judgment and maturity.”

 

At the Salt Pit, the junior officer ordered a prisoner, Gul Rahman, shackled to the wall of his cell and stripped of most of his clothing. Mr. Rahman was found dead of hypothermia the next morning, lying on the bare concrete floor. Four months later, the junior officer was recommended for a cash award of $2,500 for his “consistently superior work.”

 

A C.I.A. accountability board later recommended disciplinary action against one of the officers involved in the death at the Salt Pit. But in that instance and another, the board was overruled. The “director strongly believes that mistakes should be expected in a business filled with uncertainty,” an agency memo said.

 

In response to Mr. Rahman’s death at the Salt Pit, called “COBALT” in the report, George J. Tenet, then the C.I.A. director, signed the first formal guidelines for confinement and interrogation in the program in January 2003, according to the report.

 

In 2001, the agency had proposed meeting United States prison standards. But the guidelines approved by Mr. Tenet were so minimal that they were met even by the Salt Pit, where “detainees were kept shackled in complete darkness and isolation, with a bucket for human waste, and without notable heat” in the winter, the report says.

 

The agency even had trouble keeping track of the people it held. In a December 2003 cable to C.I.A. headquarters from a country with a secret prison, the station chief wrote, “We have made the unsettling discovery that we are holding a number of detainees about whom we know very little.” Most of the prisoners had not been questioned for months and seemed to have little intelligence value, the cable said.

 

But little of this kind of disarray came to the attention of the congressional oversight agencies, the White House or the public, which were repeatedly assured by a succession of C.I.A. directors that the program was professional and successful.

 

During the program’s later years, after a damning report in 2004 by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, much of the agency’s effort appears to have gone into public relations to counter dismal news coverage. In 2007, Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “all of those involved in the questioning of detainees are carefully chosen and screened for demonstrated professional judgment and maturity.”

 

In fact, the Senate report concludes, no such vetting took place. The interrogation teams included people with “notable derogatory information” in their records, including one with “workplace anger management issues” and another who “had reportedly admitted to sexual assault.”

 

Former C.I.A. officials have denounced the Senate review as inaccurate and unfair, and plan to mount a vigorous pushback. On the question of personnel vetting, however, as on many other issues, the most critical voices in the Senate report are those of agency officers who were offended by what they saw.

 

“I am concerned at what appears to be a lack of resolve at headquarters to deploy to the field the brightest and most qualified officers,” wrote a C.I.A. officer running one of the secret prisons in 2005. “More than a few are basically incompetent.”

 

He added: “We see no evidence that thought is being given to deploying an ‘A team.’ The result, quite naturally, is the production of mediocre or, I dare say, useless intelligence.”

 

[CincyInDC]

It's awesome what's being done in our names.

[Jamie_B]

It's awesome what's being done in our names.

 

What's deeply troublesome to me is that people are ok with it

[Jamie_B]

http://youtu.be/wR7qsQDWVPU

[|kennethmw|]

 

What's deeply troublesome to me is that people are ok with it

 

Agreed. 

[|High School Harry|]

:popcorn:

[Ben]

 

Agreed. 

 

 

What's deeply troublesome to me is that people are ok with it

 

 

According to my Dad, the muslims want to break into my house and cut all of my families heads off.  So we need to do the same and/or worse

 

He watches a lot of fox news. At least one tv in the house has it on at all times

[Jamie_B]

 

 

 

According to my Dad, the muslims want to break into my house and cut all of my families heads off.  So we need to do the same and/or worse

 

He watches a lot of fox news. At least one tv in the house has it on at all times

 

I got family like that too