WASHINGTON: The US Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on Tuesday on the CIA’s use of torture for coercing information from terror suspects after the attacks of Sept 11, 2001.

“The Senate report is the most sweeping condemnation of the CIA since the Church Committee,... (which) charged the agency in the 1970s with domestic spying, botched assassinations and giving LSD to unwitting subjects,” the New York Times observed.

The report “renders a strikingly bleak verdict” of CIA’s interrogation programme launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, “describing levels of brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence,” noted the Washington Post.

‘The methods never yielded any information about imminent attacks’

At times, the techniques “brought even agency employees to moments of anguish,” the Post added.

The committee classified its findings into four central themes.

The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not effective. The agency provided extensive inaccurate information about the operation of the programme and its effectiveness to policymakers and the public.

The CIA’s management of the programme was inadequate and deeply flawed. The programme was “far more brutal than the agency represented to policymakers and the American public.”

The review began in March 2009 and on April 3, 2014, the committee voted 11-3 to release the report.

Several senators objected to the programme. Senator John McCain informed the CIA that he believed waterboarding and sleep deprivation were torture, and other senators including Feinstein, Hagel, Wyden and Feingold, expressed concerns in writing.

Nonetheless, the CIA informed the Justice Department in classified settings that no senators had objected to the enhanced interrogations techniques.

The CIA had previously said that only three detainees were ever waterboarded: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri. But records uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee suggested there were many more.

Contrary to CIA’s description to the Department of Justice, the Senate report noted that waterboarding was physically harmful, leading to convulsions and vomiting.

During one session, detainee Abu Zabaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth”. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded at least 183 times, which the Senate report described as escalating into a “series of near drowning”.

THE SALT PIT: Started in Sept 2002, this “poorly-managed” detention facility was the second site opened by the CIA after 9/11. The Senate report referred to it by the pseudonym Cobalt, but in Afghanistan it was known as the “black site” or the Salt Pit. Although the facility kept few formal records, the committee concluded that untrained CIA operatives conducted unauthorised, unsupervised interrogation there.

In Nov 2002, a detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to the floor died, apparently from hypothermia. This case appears similar to that of Gul Rahman, who died of similarly explained causes at an Afghan site known as the Salt Pit, also in Nov 2002.

At the Cobalt facility, the CIA also forced some detainees who had broken feet or legs to stand in stress-inducing positions.

NON-STOP INTERROGA­TION: Beginning with Abu Zabaydah, the CIA deployed the harshest techniques from the beginning without trying to first elicit information in an “open, non-threatening manner”, the committee found. The torture continued nearly non-stop, for days or weeks at a time.

At least five detainees were subjected to “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration”, without any documented medical need. Others were deprived of sleep, which could involve staying awake for up to 180 hours — sometimes standing, sometimes with their hands shackled above their heads.

Some detainees were forced to walk around naked, or shackled with their hands above their heads.

In other instances, naked detainees were hooded and dragged up and down corridors while subject to physical abuse.

At one facility, detainees were kept in total darkness and shackled in cells with loud noise or music, and only a bucket to use for waste.

While the CIA has acknowledged holding about 100 detainees, the committee found that at least 119 people were in the agency’s custody. The CIA also determined that at least 26 of its detainees were wrongfully held.

The report noted that the CIA’s interrogation techniques never yielded any intelligence about imminent terrorist attacks.

The committee rejected the CIA’s contention that information came from the programme that couldn’t have been obtained through other means.

In developing the enhanced interrogation techniques, the report said, the CIA failed to review the historical use of coercive interrogations.

The resulting techniques were described as “discredited coercive interrogation techniques such as those used by torturous regimes during the Cold War to elicit false confessions”.

The CIA told the committee that it never properly reviewed the effectiveness of these techniques, despite the urging of the CIA inspector general, Congressional leadership and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

LIES TO THE PRESIDENT: An internal report by the CIA, known as the Panetta Review, found that there were numerous inaccuracies in the way the agency represented the effectiveness of interrogation techniques — and that the CIA misled the president about this. The Senate’s report also concluded that there were cases in which White House questions were not answered truthfully or completely.

Published in Dawn, December 10th, 2014