A just-released internal CIA report reveals more instances of abuse of War on Terror detainees that seems to have clearly crossed the line to outright torture:
The Obama administration on Monday released additional portions of a long-classified CIA report on the agency’s interrogation of high-level Qaeda detainees. The document contains new allegations of detainee abuse at secret prisons around the world and seems likely to prolong a debate about the legality and effectiveness of employing coercive methods to elicit intelligence from terrorist suspects.
Describing the interrogation program’s evolution from its beginnings in early 2002, the report by the CIA’s inspector general said the agency’s efforts to provide “systematic, clear and timely guidance” to interrogators was “inadequate at first” but “improved considerably.”
The report, presciently, noted that “the agency faces potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the . . . program, particularly its use of [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] and the inability of the U.S. Government to decide what it will ultimately do with terrorists detained by the agency.”
(…)
In what Monday’s report describes as the “most significant” incident involving the unauthorized coercion of a detainee, a debriefer in late December 2002 used an unloaded handgun and a power drill to threaten Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a suspect in the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.
The same interrogator also threatened to bring Nashiri’s family to the secret prison. The “debriefer reportedly wanted al-Nashiri to infer, for psychological reasons, that the debriefer might be [redacted] intelligence officer based on his Arabic dialect, and that al-Nashiri was in [redacted] custody because it was widely believed in Middle East circles that [redacted] interrogation technique involves sexually abusing female relatives in front of the detainee,” the report stated.
The report also said that interrogators threatened to kill the children of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, who was captured in March 2003.
The inspector general determined that the repeated waterboarding of Mohammed was inconsistent with guidelines sanctioned by the Justice Department. But it noted that the attorney general told investigators that he was “fully aware of the repetitive use of the waterboard.”
“The Attorney General was informed the waterboard had been used 119 times on a single individual,” the report states. Mohammed was ultimately waterboarded 183 times, according to Justice Department memos.
And, there is still no evidence that any of these techniques resulted in actionable intelligence, never mind actually stopped an existing terrorist plot.
We ought to be ashamed of what was done in our name.
