NEWS
EVENTS
CIA Torture Report To Be Published
Other | Tuesday 9th December 2014 | Matt
Attempts by the CIA to supress sensitive information over its use of torture at home in America and throughout its international "black sites" have apparently been thwarted, as Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein's team prepares to release its extensive report into historical torture allegations. Whilst the President has already condemned the CIA's post-9/11 interrogation practices as torture, fear of violent reprisals from various independent actors across the global stage has seen the Obama administration balk in the face of releasing the full report. Negotiations between the administration and the CIA over how much data to make public have been fraught, and judging from early leaks its easy to see why the agency is so keen to suppress the information. From the data so far released, it appears that the CIA witheld information as to the severity, diversity, and extent of the torture methods used. It has also emerged that the practices failed repeatedly to obtain life-saving intelligence, demolishing the Bush administration's justification for extensive coercion techniques, the 'Ticking Time Bomb' scenario.
Senator Feinstein has hit back at critics of the report, stating flatly that "harsh interrogations undermine societal and constitutional values", and hopefully the Senator and her democratic allies can instigate the long over-due top down overhaul of the Central Intelligence Agency that it has eluded for too long.
A redacted yet revealing enumeration of the Agency's 'enhanced interrogation techniques' is now available, and the revelations contained in the report are truly shocking. Among already established techniques as waterboarding and sleep deprivation, a plethora of barbaric practices have been uncovered that included routine beatings and humiliation. One detainee, Gul Rahman, was chained naked to a concrete floor for several hours until he eventually died from hypothermia. None of the officers involved in the case were reprimanded, and the mastermind of the incident reportedly received a $2,500 bonus for his "consistently superior work". There are reports of inmates throughout the CIA's detention sites being chained up in stress positions for hours, days, and in some cases even weeks. Some were forced to stand for extended periods of time on broken or fractured limbs.
Waterboarding seems to have been the central pillar of the Agency's use of torture. Defended by the Bush administration as being well within constitutional boundaries of cruel and unusual punishment, waterboarding has been described as 'simulated drowning'. This is, however, factually incorrect: the victim is drowning, albeit slowly. The perceived safety of the technique seems to have led to its ubiquity, however the subject of the technique is brought so close to the threshold of death that a number of deleterious physical and psychological effects are to be expected axiomatically, and it is testament to the callousness and caprice of the CIA's directors that these concerns were not addressed or apparently even questioned. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (ostensible mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing, and the murder of Daniel Pearl amongst a litany of other offences) was reportedly waterboarded around 80 times within a one month period to obtain this information. Likewise, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times during his confinement, as well as being subjected to almost all other forms of enhanced interrogation since revealed. Zubaydah lost his left eye in CIA custody, and tapes of his interrogation were destroyed by the Agency back in 2005, further raising suspicion of foul play. Senator John McCain noted that despite post 9/11 policy, America has long considered waterboarding to indeed be a form of torture, and the US miliatary was known to hang Japanese soldiers who waterboarded prisoners of war during WWII.
Watch former Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens undergo the practice below, and bear in mind that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is said to have been waterboarded for two whole minutes at a time:
