Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein unveiled the long-awaited, long-delayed report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA's now-discontinued "Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation" program this morning, calling it a "stain on our country and our values."
The controversial 6,700-page report describes, among other things, detainees being kept in a dark, freezing, dungeon-like prison, being kept awake for up to 180 hours at a time, and being subjected to "near-drowning" over and over. The three-year Senate investigation concluded the "brutal interrogation techniques in violation of US law, treaty obligations, and our values" were not effective in prying intelligence from detainees.
The report also found that the CIA misled the public, the White House and Congress on both the brutality of the program and its effectiveness.
"The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting," the report states. "Abu Zubaydah, for example, became 'completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.' Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving in to a 'series of near drownings.'"
CIA interrogators threatened detainees with broomsticks and power drills and threatened to rape and kill detainees' mothers. Other detainees with broken feet and legs were subjected to stress positions for extended periods of time.
"The two detainees that each had a broken foot were also subjected to walling, stress positions, and cramped confinement, despite the note in their interrogation plans that these specific enhanced interrogation techniques were not requested because of the medical condition of the detainees," the report states. "CIA Headquarters did not react to the site's use of these CIA enhanced interrogation techniques despite the lack of approval."
The Senate report also describes a photograph of a "well worn" waterboard, at a site where the CIA said it had never previously used the practice.
The results of the "enhanced interrogation techniques," especially at the dungeon-like CIA site known as "Cobalt" in the report, led to noticeable mental health deterioration among detainees, the report found. At least one detainee at the Cobalt site died of hypothermia.
"Throughout the program, multiple CIA detainees who were subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and extended isolation exhibited psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation," the report states. "Multiple psychologists identified the lack of human contact experienced by detainees as a cause of psychiatric problems."
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday that President Obama supported releasing the report "so that people around the world and people here at home understand exactly what transpired." However, more hawkish members of Congress, the intelligence community, and its allies said the report would inflame anger against the U.S. and its key allies and endanger American personnel abroad.
"We are concerned that this release could endanger the lives of Americans overseas, jeopardize U.S. relations with foreign partners, potentially incite violence, create political problems for our allies, and be used as a recruitment tool for our enemies," Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Jim Risch said in a statement on Monday.
Comment: It's a little late for all that. If the U.S. were so concerned with angering the world, maybe they shouldn't have brutally and horrifically tortured people.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed in a meeting with members of the Intelligence Committee over the weekend that the administration was concerned that the report could incite violence against Americans overseas, but said that he nevertheless supported its release. The US has been beefing up security at embassies, and administration officials have said that the Pentagon has strengthened protections for US forces in Afghanistan.
In the lead up to the report's release, defenders of the CIA's interrogation techniques launched an aggressive media campaign - a "prebuttal," one of Washington's more obnoxious neologisms - against the findings. Former Vice President Dick Cheney called the report's findings "a bunch of hooey" in the New York Times, and former CIA lawyer John Rizzo said on FOX News that the report is "absolutely unfair and preposterous." Former CIA officials even built a website, CIAsaveslives.com, to hit back at the report's findings.
Comment: That is a preposterous and ridiculous propaganda campaign. The CIA is one of the largest, most well-funded, and organized terrorist organizations on this planet. In fact, the CIA is probably orders of magnitude worse than this report suggests.
"It's a one-stop shopping place for the other side," Bill Harlow, a top CIA spokesman during the Bush administration, told Foreign Policy. "With the website ... we'll be able to put out newly declassified documents, documents that were previously released but not well read, and host a repository for op-eds and media appearances by various officials."
Feinstein called the pushback "a campaign of mistaken statements and press articles."
. . . just who were some of the first guys in what later become the CIA.
Well, there was 'Operation Paperclip' which, allegedly, imported only 'useful' ex-Nazi technical people, as this Wikipedia clip outlines:
"Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program in which over 1,500 German scientists, technicians, and engineers from Nazi Germany and other foreign countries were brought to the United States for employment in the aftermath of World War II.[1] It was conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), and in the context of the burgeoning Cold War. One purpose of Operation Paperclip was to deny German scientific expertise and knowledge to the Soviet Union[2] and the United Kingdom,[3] as well as inhibiting post-war Germany from redeveloping its military research capabilities.
Although the JIOA's recruitment of German scientists began after the Allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman did not formally order the execution of Operation Paperclip until August 1945. Truman's order expressly excluded anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism". However, those restrictions would have rendered ineligible most of the leading scientists the JIOA had identified for recruitment, among them rocket scientists Wernher von Braun, Kurt H. Debus and Arthur Rudolph, and the physician Hubertus Strughold, each earlier classified as a "menace to the security of the Allied Forces".[4]
To circumvent President Truman's anti-Nazi order and the Allied Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists. The JIOA also expunged from the public record the scientists' Nazi Party memberships and régime affiliations. Once "bleached" of their Nazism, the scientists were granted security clearances by the U.S. government to work in the United States. 'Paperclip,' the project's operational name, derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists' new political personae to their "US Government Scientist" JIOA personnel files.[5]"
Isn't that nice . . .
Now with all this gathering of talent might we reasonably ask if other sorts of 'talent' was collected; intelligence, espionage and subterfuge talent, with all that portends, for instance.
"This ain't over yet you know, there's a Cold War to get underway, and all those Red bastards to deal with. And, we need resources from all over the world. There's a lot of cheap labour 'over there,' and everybody's had the crap kicked out 'em these few last years so they're not up to speed with looking out for themselves. Yessir, we -need-some of that 'other' talent, and directly . . ."
Maybe this speaks to history, maybe not . . .anyone ? ?
Then there were operations 'Artichoke' and Bluebird' but they couldn't have had effects that linger to the present day, they 60 years ago:
"Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence.[1] A memorandum by Richard Helms to CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles indicated Artichoke became Project MKULTRA on April 13, 1953.[2][not in citation given]
The project studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction (and subsequent forced withdrawal), and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.
ARTICHOKE was a mind control program that gathered information together with the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. In addition, the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"[3][4][5][6][7]"
Again, from Wikipedia . . .
Isn't America just AWE-some . . . as some brain-dead little cutey pie blithered on US TV the other day