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Merged Senate Report on CIA Torture Program

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

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."
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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."
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Yeah, I would call that torture.
 
The CIA Flipped Out Behind The Scenes When Bush Said U.S. Would Ban Torture.


When is this country going to stop electing criminals? The article speaks for itself.
President George W. Bush marked June 26, 2003, the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, with a strong statement spelling out America's commitment to eliminating the scourge from the earth.

"Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere," he said, adding, "The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture."

Behind the scenes, however, the agency tasked with carrying out the Bush administration's torture program had no idea what the president was talking about.

The international community and human rights advocates cheered the president's forceful statement. But within the CIA, the statement set off a panicked response about the future of its program of secret prisons and so-called "enhanced interrogation."

The following day, after The Washington Post published a front-page article on the U.S. pledge to not torture terrorism suspects, then-CIA Deputy General Counsel John Rizzo called John Bellinger, the legal adviser to the National Security Council, to figure out what it meant for the U.S. government's own torture program. The answer that ultimately came back: Don't worry about it.
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Olowkow said:
The CIA Flipped Out Behind The Scenes When Bush Said U.S. Would Ban Torture.

When is this country going to stop electing criminals? The article speaks for itself.
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At the risk of a Godwin, which isn't a formal fallacy, I can't help but compare the actions of the Bush administration to the Wannseee conference in which top German officials discussed the final solution using euphemistic terms to discuss the systematic annihilation of Jews. How far removed is torture from murder? What are the implications of setting aside the humanity of a "war criminal" (in Vietnam American pilots were war criminals) in order to degrade, humiliate and cause great suffering?

Having started threads on this forum in favor of torture, I'm struck by how easy it is to trade away one's humanity for a hope of security.

If I could go back in time and confront myself when I defended atrocity on the basis of expediency, I would accuse me of cowardice.

Having been so accused, I find myself guilty.
 
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A declassified summary of the committee’s work discloses for the first time a complete roster of all 119 prisoners held in CIA custody and indicates that at least 26 were held because of mistaken identities or bad intelligence.
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Assuming the numbers cited are accurate, 26 divided by 119 equals 21.849 (rounding up that last decimal point). That means one in five of the prisoners was held in error, either from a case of mistaken identity or bad intelligence. One in five.

Hardly a proportion that inspires confidence.
 
It's going to be tricky deciding how high up the food chain the prosecutions should reach. I recall Bush himself openly mocking international law and the U.S. signalling to the Dutch that it would regard as an act of war any attempt to prosecute a US citizen in the ICC in The Hague. The US has also sought to redefine torture so as to widen the class of practises not so stigmatised.

Americans = perfectly normal set of people, good ones, bad ones and everything in between

The American state = a rogue entity engaging in illegal war, *********** up whole countries (Iraq, Syria) blowing the budget on arms, bullying friends and enemies alike, borrowing to shore up corrupt banks and passing the bill to the people and last but not least engaging in torture.

What should happen: prosecute Bush, Cheney and all the war criminals.
What will happen: find a few convenient scapegoats to salve the collective conscience of the masses.
 
anglolawyer said:
It's going to be tricky deciding how high up the food chain the prosecutions should reach. I recall Bush himself openly mocking international law and the U.S. signalling to the Dutch that it would regard as an act of war any attempt to prosecute a US citizen in the ICC in The Hague. The US has also sought to redefine torture so as to widen the class of practises not so stigmatised.

Americans = perfectly normal set of people, good ones, bad ones and everything in between

The American state = a rogue entity engaging in illegal war, *********** up whole countries (Iraq, Syria) blowing the budget on arms, bullying friends and enemies alike, borrowing to shore up corrupt banks and passing the bill to the people and last but not least engaging in torture.

What should happen: prosecute Bush, Cheney and all the war criminals.
What will happen: find a few convenient scapegoats to salve the collective conscience of the masses.
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Please don't forget Teflon Tony.
 
3point14 said:
Please don't forget Teflon Tony.
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Oh, don't worry about him. I'm not a superior Brit. Far from it. The UK occupies a cosy position somewhere up inside America's warm and protective anus. When America farts we get covered in **** but it's worth it because it allows us to 'punch above our weight', get invited to important meetings and cling to myths of former greatness. Let the lies continue. People are still buying.
 
I skimmed the document and kept running into things like: Detention Site Blue, Detention Site Violet, Detention Site Cobalt...

Anyhow there seemed to be a lot of them. I lost count.

I have a question though. On the classification line, where they have top secret and such like, there's a block blacked out. So it looks like this, all the way through the document:

TS//*************//NF

Any idea what kind of classification is itself classified? That seemed weird to me that they'd redact that bit.
 
anglolawyer said:
Oh, don't worry about him. I'm not a superior Brit. Far from it. The UK occupies a cosy position somewhere up inside America's warm and protective anus. When America farts we get covered in **** but it's worth it because it allows us to 'punch above our weight', get invited to important meetings and cling to myths of former greatness. Let the lies continue. People are still buying.
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Jings. And those of us who wanted out of this, wanted to sever ourselves from that ethos, were sneered at and derided.

Back to the occasional lurking now.

Rolfe.
 
It is good that we finally have a document that shows how to properly run a legal torture program in the US.

I hope this leads to the pardon for the Abu Graib convictions, they were after all just doing their job as they were supposed to, and their real crime was letting pictures get out, not any of the BS prisoner torturing which was perfectly ok.
 
Not back. Just occasional lurking visits. I wanted to see what the take was on the CIA torture report, and came across a comment that re-defined irony. Or maybe hypocrisy, I'm not sure. So the spirit moved me to comment.

See you later, maybe.
 
KDLarsen said:
WaPo has a explanatory graphic for those:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...ates-report-on-the-cia-interrogation-program/
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Thank you. Any idea on the other question? What sort of things might be between TS// and //NF that would be blacked out? Do they do that with program/department names or something?

I had in mind something like: TS//No DOJ//NF or TS//No Congress//NF. Even if we can't tell just what was redacted in all those sub-heads, any idea of what kind of info might be in a sub-head that would be?
 
Rolfe said:
Not back. Just occasional lurking visits. I wanted to see what the take was on the CIA torture report, and came across a comment that re-defined irony. Or maybe hypocrisy, I'm not sure. So the spirit moved me to comment.

See you later, maybe.
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Irony in this case. I hate hypocrisy with a passion. See you around then.
 
marplots said:
Thank you. Any idea on the other question? What sort of things might be between TS// and //NF that would be blacked out? Do they do that with program/department names or something?

I had in mind something like: TS//No DOJ//NF or TS//No Congress//NF. Even if we can't tell just what was redacted in all those sub-heads, any idea of what kind of info might be in a sub-head that would be?
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No idea. I'd imagine TS is Top Secret and NF is No Foreign (or variants there-of, saw it in an old monograph on the U-2 program).
 
KDLarsen said:
No idea. I'd imagine TS is Top Secret and NF is No Foreign (or variants there-of, saw it in an old monograph on the U-2 program).
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I think I found the answer on Wiki.
Top secret (TS)

The highest level of classification for information on a national level.[not in citation given] The information is further compartmented so that specific access using a code word after top secret is a legal way to hide collective and important information.[4] Such material would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security if made publicly available.[5]
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So the blacked out portion might be the "code word" used for compartmentalization.
 
RandFan said:
At the risk of a Godwin, which isn't a formal fallacy, I can't help but compare the actions of the Bush administration to the Wannseee conference in which top German officials discussed the final solution using euphemistic terms to discuss the systematic annihilation of Jews.
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This may actually be the most hyperbolic (and offensive) statement I've ever read on this forum. You are in serious need of some perspective.

How far removed is torture from murder?
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Well, everything lies on a continuum. There are some forms of torture which are worse than murder. Some which aren't as bad. And there are some forms which reasonable people might sincerely believe aren't actually torture.

What are the implications of setting aside the humanity of a "war criminal" (in Vietnam American pilots were war criminals) in order to degrade, humiliate and cause great suffering?
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Well, there's the problem of a slippery slope, and it appears that happened with the CIA to a certain extent. Where certain guidelines were stretched, or where the targets/victims went beyond those whose criminality was a certainty. Of course the inhumane treatment of US POWs during the Vietnam War just goes to show that arguments rooted in the concept of reciprocity are rather flawed.

Having started threads on this forum in favor of torture, I'm struck by how easy it is to trade away one's humanity for a hope of security.
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I'd be interested in understanding what changed your mind. Is it that the passage of time and the decline in fear has allowed your moral sanctimony to reach its current, inflated level? Or is that the tendentious and partisan Senate report produced by Democrats (conveniently released on the same day of Jonathan Gruber's deliciously awkward testimony in the House about Obamacare) convinced you that the enhanced interrogation program was ineffective? If the program had proven effective (and frankly, I take the Senate intelligence report's claims to the contrary with a large grain of salt, given how it reads more like an indictment than an investigative report), would you support it? I think if it is merely its ineffectiveness which changed your mind, then your moral outrage is misplaced.

If I could go back in time and confront myself when I defended atrocity on the basis of expediency, I would accuse me of cowardice.
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Actually, I think there is a certain kind of cowardice involved in denouncing people as moral monsters and as criminals without trying to put yourself in their shoes. Personally, I do not want such techniques (and some of them do qualify as torture in my mind) used except in the most extreme circumstances (i.e. the ticking time bomb scenario). At the same time, I am reluctant to judge the people who did use them at a time of great fear and panic.

I think many of the Senate Democrats driving this report are trying to cover their own complicity in the (at least tacit) approval of the methods that are now being denounced with such vehemence. That, to me, would be the epitome of moral cowardice. I'll further note that the Senate report, perhaps unavoidably, provides cover for Bush and Cheney as well. To their credit, though, they refuse to accept it.
 
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