We previously discussed how CIA officials were accused of trying to intimidate Senate staffers working on an investigation into allegations of torture and lies by the agency officials. Now the details of that still classified report have been leaked to the media. For the Senate Intelligence Committee (long accused of being a rubber stamp for intelligence agencies), the report is quite damning. The Senate found a pattern of misinformation knowingly released by the CIA to convince the public that its torture program yielded valuable intelligence — and new forms of torture that have never been previously confirmed. What is most striking however is what is not in the report: a recommendation for criminal prosecution. Indeed, consistent with its past approach to intelligence abuses, the Committee does not recommend any action be taken against a single CIA official.
The investigation reportedly details how the CIA knowingly and methodically misled the government and the public about intelligence derived from torture. This was part of a concerted effort by CIA officials and Bush officials to claim that the killing of Osama Bin Laden and other intelligence victories only occurred due to the use of torture. Indeed, the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” was a disturbing revisionist film that directly linked torture derived information with the killing of Bin Laden despite an absence of any support for such a claim. The very persons who could have been prosecuted for the torture program have given countless interviews assuring the public that the torture was beneficial. Putting aside the question of why benefits from a torture program would accuse the crime, this report further confirms that these claims were untrue.
Notably, the report details how the CIA ordered the torture of cooperating captives and overruled officials who denounced the torture as immoral and ineffective. In one case, even CIA employees walked out of a torture session in Thailand in protest of the disgusting measures used by their government. These include new torture methods like the repeated dunking of a terrorism suspect in tanks of ice water at a detention site in Afghanistan while being beaten by a club and having his head slammed against the tank. The FBI repeatedly objected to the torture as unlawful and ineffectual. Indeed, former FBI agent Ali Soufan interrogated Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, the suspected al-Qaeda operative known as Abu Zubaida, after his capture in Pakistan in 2002. He said that Soufan was cooperating, gave valuable information, but the CIA insisted on torturing him anyway. The CIA later mixed the pre-torture evidence with the minor torture-derived evidence to suggest that torture was the reason for the intelligence.
The CIA is also accused of misrepresenting the value of prisoners to allow for torture when the prisoners were really minor captives. Thus, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was identified as the “mastermind” the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen when he was a minor captive.
In direct contradiction to the film, the report also conclusively states that torture did not produce the information that led to the location of Osama Bin Laden. Instead, the detainee had already volunteered the information before his torture. The torture produced nothing of value. Yet, for many years to come, movie viewers will watch this film and conclude that torture paid off for the United States. That is truly a dark legacy for director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter by Mark Boal, who were celebrated by Hollywood at the time of the movie.
Former CIA interrogator named Charlie Wise is identified (as he has before) of being one of those responsible for the most egregious forms of torture. He was forced to retire in 2003. However, he was never prosecuted under our binding obligations under treaties. The penalty for torturing people was early retirement – not exactly what is called for under our treaties and international law. Wise later died of a heart attack. His protection from prosecution can be traced directly to President Obama. Since Obama ran on a civil liberties platform, many expected an independent torture investigation as soon as he took office. After all, waterboarding is one of the oldest forms of torture, pre-dating the Spanish Inquisition (when it was called tortura del agua). It has long been defined as torture by both U.S. and international law, and by Obama himself. Torture, in turn, has long been defined as a war crime, and the United States is under treaty obligation to investigate and prosecute such crimes.
However, such a principle did not make for good politics. Accordingly, as soon as he was elected, Obama set out to dampen talk of prosecution. Various intelligence officials and politicians went public with accounts of the Obama administration making promises to protect Bush officials and CIA employees from prosecution.
Though the White House denied the stories, Obama later gave his controversial speech at the CIA headquarters and did precisely that. In the speech, he effectively embraced the defense of befehl ist befehl (“an order is an order”) and, in so doing, eviscerated one of the most important of the Nuremburg principles. Obama assured the CIA that employees would not be prosecuted for carrying out orders by superiors. This was later affirmed by Holder’s Justice Department, which decided that employees carrying out torture were protected because they followed orders.
Even this Senate report continues that policy in not demanding the prosecution of officials who carried out this torture program and then lied to the public and Congress. Previously, the Justice Department even refused to prosecute CIA officials who admitted to destroying tapes of torture to avoid their use against them in any criminal prosecution.
As surprising as it is for the Senate Intelligence Committee to reach any negative findings against the intelligence agencies under Chairperson Dianne Feinstein, it is the absence of the recommendations to how officials accountable that may ultimately send the strongest message to the intelligence ranks. The report suggests that even the commission of acts considered war crimes will not result in prosecution in the United States. It is further evidence of the corruption of our moral and legal values after 9-11. It has destroyed the credibility of this country in discussing human rights violations in other countries and contributed to various studies now identifying the United States as a menace rather than an advocate of civil liberties.
Source: Washington Post
Steve Fleischer
Further evidence that our government does not represent American values.
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they are not there to represent our values. they are there to represent us.
and if not the majority, then for a large minority, they do.
sucks don’t it
Ross, I am talking about prosecutions at the top of the food chain. That is where the rule of law is being destroyed and this is where we most need prosecutions. Since the top of the food chain has placed high level lackeys in every branch of govt. (such as Obama) this will be difficult. An independent judiciary is the thin line holding Canada from becoming exactly like the US. We don’t have an independent judiciary. We have lackeys at the top in the SC.
That is the truth and it is why I wrote what I did earlier. The fact that this govt. is run by a small group of people who are completely unaccountable to the rule of law has consequences. I am telling people to understand those consequences and what we the people have been willing to trade off for our supposed “safety”. Once you become willing to trade out the rule of law and the lives of others you are lost as a people. We need to find our way back.
Some say that waterboarding is not so bad. We need to have some of those folks volunteer for some televised waterboarding. Dick Cheney would be a good volunteer.
Jill,
I somewhat agree with you and if intelligence personnel receive “conditional immunity” from prosecution there is a tradeoff – major reforms – that is the only reason for “conditional” immunity.
Generally speaking when intelligence personnel betray thier oath of office to uphold the U.S. Constitution (which includes our Bill of Rights) – these subordinates are placed in “no win” situations. If they refuse orders it’s career suicide with no internal whistleblower channels for redress, if they follow orders they are violating the U.S. Constitution many times.
If the intelligence leadership and their OLC attorneys aren’t held responsible, locking up subordinates does nothing to prevent these betrayals in the future.
This stuff is never black & white!
No Ross, it didn’t start with Bush, but many voters thought it would end with Obama.
Now that we see the complicity of all three branches of government in torture, we must understand what that means for our nation. This means we do not have a democracy. It means it’s open season on any citizen, for any reason. Nothing will happen to anyone who commits torture. The only prosecutions will result from outing it to the public.
If anyone thinks this made them safe, they are simply not understanding what it means to have one’s own govt. be able to do anything it wants to you, with absolutely no consequences.
I hope this information will disturb enough people that they will start to question what this govt. is doing. More importantly, I hope we will stop choosing to follow along. “First they came…”
This slippery slope started when Jimmy Carter left office and the Reagan Administration used sadistic tactics against Noriega (Ex: playing loud Van Halen music to torment Noriega while under siege). This is when the American government started being sadistic and petty – unlike the greatest generation of World War Two.
The OLC attorneys and their superiors are the most culpable. Since Reagan it has gradually gotten worse and intelligence subordinates are the least culpable. It didn’t start with Bush or Obama.
Shoplift jeans from Walmart and spend hard time. Recklessly ignore the Constitution by using torture and lying to Congress gets a slap on the wrist. America must be following the lead of other nations such as China and Russia where crimes are only punished if you are a citizen. Government officials are given get out of jail free cards.
Gene,
It is good to see you here again, if only briefly! 🙂
Waterboarding is torture and it is illegal domestically and internationally. I wonder why anyone is surprised that the CIA lied to the American public. They have made a practice of it for decades and presidents and Congress have enabled them. Torture is a war crime and we have quite a few individuals who should be doing the perp walk.
“Confessions of a SERE Veteran: What It is, and What It Was Not”
http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/30/confessions-of-a-sere-veteran-what-it-is-and-what-it-was-not/
Excerpt:
A principle wingnut talking point is that we all attended SERE school, and somehow that makes the treatment of the detainees (and others who have been subjected to the gentle ministrations of the modern-day Torquemadas) in GITMO and other places around the world OK in some way. Well, as Aviators (Pilots and Naval Flight Officers and certain enlisted Aircrew), we had to go through SERE training if we were in communities that had a possibility of flying into places we could potentially be captured (we also had a few SEALs with us, because they could find themselves in that sort of situation, too), and thus needed the training to endure a place we might not want to be.
The name of the school, SERE, is most telling—and seems to be missed by the wingnuts. The acronym stands for Survival, Evasion, RESISTANCE, and Escape. Resistance was taught as part of the curriculum—an equal part of the SERE curriculum—and likely the part most remembered by every graduate. The Survival phase was exactly what you would imagine. In general terms, we were given instruction in survival in different environments in which we might find ourselves (hey, we were Navy, so think about where that could be. . . and Deep Water Survival was a separate course). Evasion sort of speaks for itself—the challenge that allowed us to use the mad skillz we got in classroom lectures to try to get away.
But in resistance—resistance to torture—we had lectures in the “ground school” part of the course (when we were all warm and dry and got to go to lunch and have a beer or two) about the Geneva Convention, and about different instances of things that were experienced by POWs that came from debriefs of men returning from different wars, back to WW the Second. All of this information was to give us a perspective of how far a lawless enemy (even signatories to the Geneva Convention) might be willing to go to try to break us down, and then extract information if they could. The instructors left us with no doubt that they could get us to say anything, and that being “John Wayne” in SERE school was sure to earn you a one-way ticket out of both the program and possibly out of Aviation altogether (the school was mandatory for certain Warfare Specialties). Their logic for that was that being “John Wayne” if captured would likely leave you being fitted for a pine box by your captors, sort of permanently “kicked out” of the program as it were. That point made pretty good sense.
The wingnuts all seem to think that the training we got was to “toughen us up” (¿quién es mas macho?), and, in a sense, it was, and that because the techniques that were used on us it was okay to use them on combatants/detainees who are in American custody. Nice argument but wholly specious. As I pointed out, we all had to go through the training and as others have pointed out in other places, we were all “volunteers” in the sense that we all joined the military and chose our career paths. We also knew what was coming, because the waterboard was legendary, and the other things that were done were handed down from one generation of Naval Aviators to the next… we all knew before we got there what was going to happen. The resistance training we got was not to turn us into mini-John Wayne’s, but to teach us how to do the best we could, and give up as little as possible while making the “enemy” put out the maximum effort, until we were threatened with death or our imminent demise. We were taught that we as individuals were more valuable than any intel we might have had when captured; we were American Fighting Men and the Code of Conduct was our touchstone to help us survive anything that might happen. I guess that the faux-macho chickenhawk wingnuts all figure that if we torture, they will talk. Except they won’t. We learned that we could endure, that passing on nonsense brought about a cessation of ill-treatment, and that we would survive because we believed in something (getting done with training, god, the flying spaghetti monster, whatever) and kept our focus there. And that was the point of the training, not to suffer the abuse and cry about it, but to suffer the abuse and use it to focus our minds on (wait for it…) RESISTANCE.
Dick Cheney (and his semi-literate boss, Short Bus George) watched too much 24, saw too many John Wayne movies, and really had no understanding of what they were asking for. His soulless directive to “get results” was what drove his band of mercenaries (Addington, Yoo, Bybee, et al.) to break the law, and drive our country’s reputation into the mud. The perception that blowing off someone’s kneecap would elicit the location of the Ticking Nuke was constantly reinforced by the chattering Village Idiots who also had no understanding what they were asking for—torture. The professionals inside the FBI, and even the CIA, pretty consistently pointed out that the interrogation techniques they used which involved not only no torture, but treating the detainees as human beings, yielded far better results than waterboarding and “walling” (yes, it hurts. but it leaves you no more disposed to talk about anything meaningful than does the waterboard). The torture done in our name is a shameful episode that puts us in the same category as the fascists we fought in the ’40s, the Asian adversaries we battled in the ’50s and ’60s, and every tin-pot dictator we have ever supported.
We were better than that before George W. Bush, and, hopefully, we will be again. An enemy who plants a “ticking bomb” has probably already realized that their life is forfeit anyhow, the threat of death no matter how unpleasantly implemented probably holds no fear for them, so strapping them to a waterboard, or blowing off their knees or whatever might make George and Dick feel better, but would probably do no more than that.
SERE was not about teaching us to torture, it was about teaching us to resist, and being able to forgive ourselves for what we might give up. I guess that subtle distinction escaped the man who wanted to put food on my family and let gynecologists practice their love with their patients. And it certainly escapes the Republicans and torture apologists (yes, Mr. Obama, I am looking at you) who seem to think it’s a required tool in the arsenal of democracy.
Rick Knowland
Waterboarding is not torture, it is something we use even on our own soldiers that attend seer training. I believe all this rhetoric is anti-bush politics. All of you need to grow up and realize the enemy we face, and although I don’t agree to severe physical pain being used ex. cutting off fingers. I do agree to enhanced interrogation techniques, period. So quit your whining and realize that all of you have been safe since 9/11.
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Rank, naked propaganda .
President Ronald Reagan put republicans in prison for water boarding.
May-1 is right about how a single individual citizen is facing prison and yet the senate gives prosecutionless cases against the CIA coverup. It’s becoming more injust every month.
The mantra of the jingoists “it is ok when we do it” destroys democracy by destroying accountability.
That is exceptionalism in a nut shell.
Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime
By Evan Wallach
Sunday, November 4, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html
Excerpt:
The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government — whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community — has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.
After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: “I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure.” He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. “Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning,” he replied, “just gasping between life and death.”
Nielsen’s experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan’s military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.
In this case from the tribunal’s records, the victim was a prisoner in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies:
A towel was fixed under the chin and down over the face. Then many buckets of water were poured into the towel so that the water gradually reached the mouth and rising further eventually also the nostrils, which resulted in his becoming unconscious and collapsing like a person drowned. This procedure was sometimes repeated 5-6 times in succession.
Waterboarding is not torture, it is something we use even on our own soldiers that attend seer training. I believe all this rhetoric is anti-bush politics. All of you need to grow up and realize the enemy we face, and although I don’t agree to severe physical pain being used ex. cutting off fingers. I do agree to enhanced interrogation techniques, period. So quit your whining and realize that all of you have been safe since 9/11.
Max, more like an Oligarchy. I think we are royally screwed.
Highlighting, repeating (from the Charles Pierce piece, posted by Elaine M.)
“Surely this can’t be the result of how we, as a nation, allowed the surveillance state to metastasize to the point at which it has corrupted almost every inch of our democracy. It will be easy to dismiss this, and the revelations about the NSA, as two different horses of two different colors, but the fact is, it is all of a piece. Once you accept one massive and ongoing violation of the Constitution in the name of security, whether or not it is obscured by a figleaf of legality provided by the government’s pet lawyers, you will find it difficult to get outraged about another one. Once you have allowed the surveillance state to grow, it will operate on its own imperatives, outside democratic norms.” – Charles Pierce
(Thanks, Elaine M.)
The situation is much worse than most Americans realize.
annie,
Are we a Republic, still?
Time for another call to House Representatives urging them to hold the White House accountable for the obstruction of Justice from the CIA.
What crimes are House Members protecting? TORTURE…
Well, all our credibility is gone when it comes to taking the high road and speaking of crimes against humanity. What a sad state of affairs.