We Tortured Some Folks (disturbing but important to read) *UPDATED*
Eilonwy
Posts: 12,391Registered Users Curl Connoisseur
The CIA raped people so hard that at least one suffered rectal prolapse. Also torture doesn't work.
:usa2:
e: I've decided to keep updating the thread with passages from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report.
e2: The purpose of the report is to clear Bush, Obama, and Congress of blame and prevent the CIA from being sued.
Keep in mind that many European countries – including Poland, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and the UK – were to varying degrees complicit in the kidnap, detention, and torture of the victims. (Link.)
The European Court of Human Rights convicted Macedonia and ruled against Poland for their participation, while Italy prosecuted 25 people – including two Italians. (Same link.) We all know the US government will never face prosecution, except, perhaps, a couple of expendable scapegoats.
e3 The Senate report repeatedly stresses that the information extracted by torture was either false (including the phony WMDs on which the Iraq War was premised) or already known by the government.
The CIA also illegally leaked secret information to the press to make the torture seem effective.
:usa2:
e: I've decided to keep updating the thread with passages from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report.
e2: The purpose of the report is to clear Bush, Obama, and Congress of blame and prevent the CIA from being sued.
Keep in mind that many European countries – including Poland, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and the UK – were to varying degrees complicit in the kidnap, detention, and torture of the victims. (Link.)
The European Court of Human Rights convicted Macedonia and ruled against Poland for their participation, while Italy prosecuted 25 people – including two Italians. (Same link.) We all know the US government will never face prosecution, except, perhaps, a couple of expendable scapegoats.
e3 The Senate report repeatedly stresses that the information extracted by torture was either false (including the phony WMDs on which the Iraq War was premised) or already known by the government.
The CIA also illegally leaked secret information to the press to make the torture seem effective.
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Capitol Hill yesterday provided America with a classic set piece of partisan performance art: a pair of sanctimonious legislative events, one for each chamber, the two parties blaming each other for high crimes. On the House side, Republican Oversight Chief Darrell Issa emceed a Fox News reality show in which Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber was metaphorically burned at the stake. Issa had finally captured alive the most reviled demon of the Republican myth: a bespectacled coastal intellectual who not only collected millions ($5.9 million, to be exact) from the government helping institute redistributionist policies, but also snickered in his down time about how ordinary Americans are too dumb to govern themselves. If there's such a thing as conservative snuff porn, this was it.
Meanwhile, on the Senate side, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein released a controversial study about perhaps the worst chapter in the history of the Bush administration: the "Enhanced Interrogation" program, which the Senate in its last days of Democratic control has decided finally to call "torture" (see page 4 of the report).
Because of the way our media works, there will be a lot of hemming and hawing about the political implications of yesterday's events, while less attention will be focused on the fine print. Who can guess at the motive behind the release of the Feinstein report, but one clear objective is to place the end of the American "torture" regime in January of 2009. That was when Barack Obama came to office and signed Executive Order 13491, restricting interrogations to the techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual.
I'm not sure I'm buying that the U.S. government suddenly got religion about mistreatment of terror suspects once Obama took office, particularly since this government massively accelerated a drone-assassination program that years from now, when some Senate Republican releases a Feinstein-like report on that chapter of our history, will probably make the Bush torture regime look like pretty weak beer. (This is despite the hilarious protests from mainstream press commentators like this one claiming that having robots murder people from the sky is somehow more humane, and less of a moral and religious outrage, than torture).
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/neJws/10-craziest-things-in-the-senate-report-on-torture-20141210#ixzz3LavJzzsE
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They did bring up some of the uniquely American aspects of torture, along with the gruesome. Forbid someone to use the bathroom, but put diapers on them. Build a plywood wall for one method because concrete is too harsh. As they put it, any serious terrorist is going to laugh at the cushioning involved in some of the pratices. Sigh. War ain't pretty.
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Page 100 (126 of PDF) Page 488 (514 of PDF) Note that the person from the Office of Medical Services is talking like a tough guy in a gangster movie. The Office's approval of (and, I assume, participation in) the torture shouldn't come as a surprise.
Section: "Findings and Conclusions," page 4 (11 of PDF) Section: “Executive Summary,” pages 54-55 (80-81 of PDF) "CIA Officer 1" was certified based, in part, on killing Rahman. The CIA couldn't have been happy about the death, but they were willing to overlook it.
There has been talk of it before, over the years. I am not sure if it was anything quite so lengthy or specific. To be honest I have slept and not slept since then so I can't recall all details. I know the water boarding was discussed numerous times along with sleep deprivation and cold showers. If the rectal feeding was discussed, I blocked it out or something.
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It also gives a picture of what waterboarding is really like, which I'll be posting shortly. It ain't pretty.
The following passages are from the Executive Summary. The footnotes have been removed. I've added ellipses and page numbers (in brackets, with the internal number followed by the PDF number in parentheses), which are marked in blue. Any other brackets or ellipses are part of the original text. Black-bar redactions are represented as |||.
The cable was written by Dunbar and Swiggert, the two psychologists who were paid $80,000,000 to plan and directly implement the torture. They were recommending their own continued employment and spinning their failure as success.