Senate torture report shows CIA misled public

After the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report was released, a group of former CIA directors published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending the Agency’s torture policy. In response, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote a new version of the op-ed — one that points out some pretty embarrassing flaws in the CIA directors’ argument.

For example, the CIA defenders claimed that detainees had “received highly effective counter-interrogation training while in al Qaeda training camps,” so they basically had to be tortured. Wyden’s staff notes that there’s no actual evidence of this training in CIA records. When the former directors say the report ignored intelligence of impending al-Qaeda attacks on America, Wyden’s team points out the pages of the report that talk about it.

Brennan’s comment on the question of whether the CIA would torture again, delivered in response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture, was quite cagey. Here’s the key passage:

Brennan says, quite clearly, that the CIA has no plans to restart torturing anyone anytime soon. “EITs” refers to enhanced interrogation techniques, better known as the torture methods greenlit by the Bush administration.

For example, when Brennan said it was “unknowable” whether torture was necessary to produce useful intelligence, Feinstein pointed out that the CIA’s own records show that the best intel was obtained without torture:

When Brennan said the CIA didn’t mislead Congress, Feinstein cited CIA sources saying otherwise:

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s Bush-era torture regime is an absolute outrage. The stark descriptions of exactly what the CIA did to its prisoners — “Majid Khan’s lunch tray, consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins was ‘pureed’ and rectally infused” — give the lie to the idea that the “enhanced interrogation” program was anything but institutionalized torture.

Just as outrageous, no one’s been held responsible. There’ve been low-level prosecutions, sure, but the torture regime’s architects almost certainly aren’t going to spend a single day in jail.

So it might be easy to dismiss the report as all bad news. But the mere fact of its release is actually a significant accomplishment, and for more than just symbolic reasons.

The answer is that, no, there probably will be no major prosecutions for torture, at least not in the US. While torture is illegal under US and international law, most of the legal avenues that could be used to hold CIA and higher officials accountable have been closed off, one by one — many by the Obama administration.

There are three main kinds of possible torture prosecutions: US prosecution for following the Bush administration’s rules for torture, US prosecution for going beyond those rules, and foreign prosecution for torturing at all. Here’s why none of those three is likely to result in any convictions.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report didn’t just find that the CIA carried out some pretty terrible abuses of human rights. The report also found that the agency repeatedly misled the public about the extent of its torture program.

This chart, compiled with information from the report, shows the discrepancies:

Beyond revealing the outrageous abuses of the CIA’s torture program, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report also confirmed the several countries where intelligence officials interrogated and tortured detainees in secret.

This map shows those locations, including the larger detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has released a report on the CIA’s torture practices, revealing that the CIA subjected detainees to horrifying abuses, including waterboarding multiple people so severely that they nearly drowned, forcing a detainee to stand on a broken foot, and forcing hummus and pureed food into a detainee’s rectum.

We know what arguments defenders of “enhanced interrogation techniques” will martial in response to the newly-released report: they will claim that the techniques used weren’t really torture, and that they were instrumental in acquiring valuable intelligence information that was used to prevent future terrorist attacks, capture dangerous people, and keep Americans safe.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s torture program is very, very clear: torture didn’t lead the CIA to Osama bin Laden. Citing a wealth of internal CIA documentation, the Senate report shows pretty conclusively that the most important intelligence about bin Laden was acquired by other means.

But that’s not stopping the CIA, or its allies in the press, from claiming otherwise. “Information that CIA obtained from detainees played a role, along with other streams of intelligence, in finding Usama bin Laden,” the agency’s “fact sheet” on the Senate report reads.

The CIA torture program was even bigger than the details released in the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report might suggest. The reason is that the CIA didn’t just have its own torture program, run out of its “black site” secret detention and torture prisons broad. It also used a vast network of other countries to help capture, detain, transport, and, yes, torture detainees.

That network is best shown by looking at the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. This is the program under which the CIA would detain and transport suspected terrorists with the help of foreign governments. In all, a stunning 54 countries participated in the CIA-run rendition program. Here they are:

Among the many abuses the Senate Intelligence Committee found in its report on the CIA’s torture program, perhaps one of the more embarrassing for the CIA is that the agency actually tortured its own informants at one point.

In short, the CIA shackled two detainees for approximately 24 hours in a standing position to deprive them of sleep — only to find out that the detainees were former CIA contacts who tried to let the agency know of their activities so they could provide intelligence. So the CIA tortured two people who not only were not terrorists, but had been trying to help the CIA fight actual terrorists.

Hypotheticals about detention and torture often involve imminent threats on America and terrorists who are obviously guilty. But this damning paragraph from the new Senate torture report describes how the program actually played out — in a way that led to the capture of people later determined to be “wrongfully held”:

There are several ugly bits here, not least that the CIA detained an “intellectually challenged” man to try to make a relative of his talk. But that highlighted part is particularly revealing. The CIA tortured a detainee, he then gave them some bad information, and they used that bad information to detain two more people. It shows how secret programs of torture and detention can become a self-perpetuating system, with little accountability, that spirals out of control.

Read more: The CIA torture report, summed up in four brutal sentences.

Put aside, for a moment, the very important and entirely correct point that torture is a moral abomination that the US should never have embraced, whether it worked or not. Even put aside the conclusions from the just-released Senate Intelligence Committee investigation that torture turned out not to have worked.

There’s something crucial we shouldn’t lose sight of: Torture was a terrible idea from the beginning because it was clear from the way the program came together that the CIA’s torture regime was never going to work, because it was based on copying Chinese torture methods designed not to elicit truth but to force false confessions.

The 525-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture is a deeply disturbing read. It documents, among other things, CIA officers forcing hummus into a detainee’s rectum, imprisoning an “intellectually challenged” man “solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information,” and hiding the truth about the horror from the rest of the government.

Perhaps the worst part of all of it is that the CIA should have known inflicting all that pain was pointless — because their own officers told them. This is, in some ways, the most telling sentence of the entire report:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has just released a massive report on its years-long investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture programs. Or, actually, it released a 525-page report that is just an executive summary of an even longer, full report.

Even with all that history and narrative and detail, though, it turns out that the conclusions can be summed up in four short bulletpoints that are just brutal in their clarity and simplicity. Here they are, as flagged by Rachel Kurzius of Sirius XM:

An executive summary of the long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee torture report was finally released to the public on Tuesday, after nearly two years of political fighting over how much of it would see the light of day — read it here. The report, written by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democratic staff, examines the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush administration: what specifically happened, and what the results were.

The release, held up for months by the Obama administration, casts the CIA in a terrible light, not just for what they did but how they sold the public on it. The report says the CIA misled the public, Congress, even the White House. “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others,” the report says. But possibly the most significant conclusion of the report is that torture was simply not effective at foiling terror attacks.

On Tuesday morning, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the executive summary of its report on the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush administration, which has been in the works for nearly six years. The full, much longer report remains classified, and even this 525 page executive summary is partially redacted, but it’s still fascinating reading. Read it for yourself below: