Details emerge in US torture report

World Today

Brutality, deceit and torture were the conclusions of a U.S. Senate report, slamming CIA tactics after the terror attacks of 9/11. CCTV America’s Jessica Stone reported the details of it from Washington, D.C.

Democrats on the committee spent $40 million and five years looking into “enhanced interrogation techniques” that U.S. President Barack Obama and many outside human rights groups call “torture.” The report said the 119 known detainees, 26 were wrongfully held.

The report concluded that the techniques were ineffective, and that the CIA’s “justification of them were based on inaccurate claims.” It revealed that CIA detainees were subjected to much harsher conditions than revealed to the U.S. government policymakers, and that the CIA “actively avoided oversight from the White House and Congress and even failed to evaluate its own program’s effectiveness.”

“The finding’s inclusions will make clear how this program was morally, legally and administratively misguided and that this nation should never again engage in these tactics,” U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein said.

The report detailed “brutal treatment” of detainees who were kept naked and in darkness, sleep-deprived and subjected to water-boarding, which simulated drowning. One even died of hypothermia.

According to the report, Khaled Sheik Muhammad, considered the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, was water-boarded 183 times. Al-Qaida’s former operative Abu Zubaydah’s repeated water-boardings left him “completely unresponsive and bubbles coming out of his mouth.” Alleged U.S. naval ship bomber, Abd al-Nashiri, stopped providing threat information altogether after being subjected to threats with a gun and a drill.

Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war for seven years in Vietnam, believed Americans were entitled to know the truth about the program. “I know, from personal experience, that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence,” he said.

Even before the report’s release, both former U.S. President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in. Cheney called the enhanced interrogation program: “justified,” and Bush said, “These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contribution to our country, it is way off base.”

The CIA pointed out that not a single agent was interviewed for the report and said its programs do work, and that the interrogation of detainees did “thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.”

The agency also rejected the notion that it intentionally misled the White House and Congress about its interrogation techniques.

Read full report, list of findings in Senate CIA torture report