The US brutalized scores of terror suspects with interrogation tactics that turned secret CIA prisons into chambers of suffering and did nothing to make the US safer after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, US Senate investigators said.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, years in the making, accused the CIA of misleading its political masters about what it was doing with its “black site” captives and deceiving US citizens about the effectiveness of its techniques.
The summary report released on Tuesday was the first public accounting of tactics employed after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it described far harsher actions than had been widely known.
Photo: AFP
Tactics included confinement to small boxes, weeks of sleep deprivation, simulated drownings, slapping and wall-slamming, as well as threats to kill, harm or sexually abuse families of the captives.
US President Barack Obama described some of the practices as “brutal.”
The practices “constituted torture in my mind. And that’s not who we are,” Obama told the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo in an interview.
Obama said releasing the report was important “so that we can account for it, so that people understand precisely why I banned these practices as one of the first acts I took when I came into office, and hopefully make sure that we don’t make those mistakes again.”
Former US president George W. Bush approved the program through a covert finding in 2002, but he was not briefed by the CIA about the details until 2006.
At that time, Bush expressed discomfort with the “image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.”
The report produced revulsion among many, challenges to its veracity from some lawmakers and a sharp debate about whether it should have been released at all.
Republican US Senator John McCain, tortured in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, was out of step with some fellow Republicans in welcoming the report and endorsing its findings.
“We gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer,” McCain said in a Senate speech. “Too much.”
The report catalogued the use of ice baths, death threats, shackling in the cold and much more. Three detainees faced the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Many developed psychological problems.
However, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” did not produce the results that really mattered, the report said in its most controversial conclusion.
It cites CIA cables, e-mails and interview transcripts to rebut the central justification for torture — that it thwarted terror plots and saved US lives.
The report also claims to debunk the CIA’s assertion its practices led to then-al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s killing.
In a statement, CIA Director John Brennan said the agency made mistakes and has learned from them.
However, he also said the coercive techniques “did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.”
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