US Senate’s Torture Report waterboards CIA
10 Dec 2014 1:00 AM GMT
The report has gone on to allege that CIA’s methods were more brutal than the agency ever acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.
The report which is expected to set fireworks in the upcoming days took five years to be produced. Based on more than six million internal agency documents, the report is a sweeping indictment of the CIA’s operation and oversight of a programme carried out by agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The account of torture techniques used by the agency is gruesome.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report says the CIA’s rendition, interrogation, and detention programmes were even “more nightmarish than you could imagine”. “Interrogations that lasted for days on end. Detainees forced to stand on broken legs, or go 180 hours in a row without sleep. A prison so cold, one suspect essentially froze to death,” the report said. Near drowning, standing on broken legs, forced rectal feeding were among the torture methods used by the CIA to crack the detainees.
“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,” the report went on to say.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Obama administration and its Republican critics clashed over the wisdom of making it public, and the risk that it will set off a backlash overseas.
While the US has put diplomatic facilities and military bases on alert for heightened security risks, administration officials said they do not expect the report — or rather the declassified executive summary of it that was released on Tuesday morning — to ignite the kind of violence that killed four Americans at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. Such violent reprisals, they said, tend to be fueled more by perceived attacks against Islam as a religion than by violence against individual Muslims.
But some leading Republican lawmakers had warned against releasing the report, saying detailed account of the brutal interrogation methods used by the CIA during the George W Bush administration could incite unrest.
The report which is expected to set fireworks in the upcoming days took five years to be produced. Based on more than six million internal agency documents, the report is a sweeping indictment of the CIA’s operation and oversight of a programme carried out by agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The account of torture techniques used by the agency is gruesome.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report says the CIA’s rendition, interrogation, and detention programmes were even “more nightmarish than you could imagine”. “Interrogations that lasted for days on end. Detainees forced to stand on broken legs, or go 180 hours in a row without sleep. A prison so cold, one suspect essentially froze to death,” the report said. Near drowning, standing on broken legs, forced rectal feeding were among the torture methods used by the CIA to crack the detainees.
“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,” the report went on to say.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Obama administration and its Republican critics clashed over the wisdom of making it public, and the risk that it will set off a backlash overseas.
While the US has put diplomatic facilities and military bases on alert for heightened security risks, administration officials said they do not expect the report — or rather the declassified executive summary of it that was released on Tuesday morning — to ignite the kind of violence that killed four Americans at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. Such violent reprisals, they said, tend to be fueled more by perceived attacks against Islam as a religion than by violence against individual Muslims.
But some leading Republican lawmakers had warned against releasing the report, saying detailed account of the brutal interrogation methods used by the CIA during the George W Bush administration could incite unrest.
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