bitter mideast greets us torture report with shrug.pdf

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Bitter Mideast greets US torture report with shrug


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Afghanistans President Ashraf Ghani speaks during a press conference at the presidential palace in Kabul,


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Afghanistan Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2014. Ghani said, The Afghan government condemns in the strongest

language the inhuman and unjustifiable practices detailed in the report. (Massoud Hossaini/AssociatedPress)By Associated Press December 10 at 1:07 PM

CAIROThis weeks revelations about the CIAs harsh treatment of terror suspects in the wake of theSept. 11 attacks have been met with a collective shrug in the broader Middle East, where they merelyreinforced a long-held view of American brutality rooted in decades of conflict.

The Senate Intelligence Committee reports revelations about the CIAs post-9/11 detention andinterrogation program shocked Americans and reopened debate over waterboarding and other practiceswidely seen as torture. In the region from which nearly all of the targets of such methods hailed, the U.S. haswarned of demonstrations or attacks in response to the reports findings but nothing immediatelymaterialized.

Here are a few reasons.

OLD NEWS

For many in the Middle East, the report merely fleshed out the brutal images of Americas War on Terrorfrom a decade earlierthe rows of orange-suited inmates at Guantanamo Bay and the naked detainees atthe Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, huddled before snarling dogs and stacked in crude human pyramids.

Arabs were angry about U.S. torture in Iraq 10 years ago, so if anything this seems rather quaint, that the

Americans are having a real public debate about this 10 years after the fact, said Shadi Hamid, a fellow atthe Brookings Institutions Center for Middle East Policy.

This seems like run-of-the-mill stuff in the sense that this is what people expect of the U.S. They would besurprised if it wasnt the case, and thats a product of years of deep anti -American sentiment, he said.

Abu Ghraib stoked outrage in part because the abuse there was captured in vivid images that were plasteredacross the covers of every major newspaper. The staid language of the Senate Report is less explosive, andthe descriptions of prisoners being waterboarded or confined to stress positions seems less shocking in aregion awash in horrific online images of beheadings and bombings in Syria and Iraq.

Over the long term, the report could feed into recruiting efforts by jihadi groups, which have long usedabuses at Guantanamo Bay as a rallying cry. The Islamic State group, for example, dressed its victims inGuantanamo-style orange jumpsuits when it beheaded a string of Western hostages in recent months.Already, the militant-monitoring SITE Intel Group reported several jihadi sympathizers tweeting calls forretaliation in reaction to the Senate report.

THOSE IN GLASS GUARD TOWERS

Arab governments might have been expected to seize on the report, but their reaction too was muted. Thatsin part because many U.S. allies in the region were directly complicit in the rendition and interrogation

programs. Also, nearly all Arab governments have long employed similar brutality against their ownpolitical prisoners.

Clearly everyones disgusted by it, and Im sure the extremists will leap on it as evidence of American

perfidy, said Theodore Karasik, a regional expert who serves as senior adviser to Dubai-based RiskInsurance Management. But at the same time its serving as a moment of self-reflection in the region ...

about how these kind of measures are used by particular states, which has been ongoing for decades.

In Syria, where tens of thousands of people have disappeared into prisons where rights groups say torture isendemic, the Senate report made the front page of the ruling Baath partys newspaper but was buried inside

other dailies. In Egypt, which has jailed thousands of Islamists and other activists in the wake of last


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summers overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi, local press coverage was focused more on a recent

closure of Western embassies than the findings of the report.

AFGHANISTAN OUTRAGE

At least one leader, newly-elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, spoke out against the shockingviolations documented in the report. The Afghan government condemns in the strongest language the

inhuman and unjustifiable practices detailed in the report, he said in a press conference.

But his decision to speak out says as much about todays Afghanistan as that of 13 years ago, when U.S. andallied forces snatched dozens of suspects, many of whom later wound up in the secret prisons described inthe Senate report.

Ghani, who faces a virulent Taliban insurgency, has signed security agreements to keep U.S. and NATOforces in Afghanistan past the official conclusion of the 13-year combat mission on Dec. 31. His politicalsurvival depends on convincing his increasingly fractured country that the brutality described in the Senatereport is a thing of the past.

MOVING ON

The Bush administration, its War on Terror and the 2003 invasion of Iraq ignited fury across the region andleft a legacy of deep mistrust among Arabs and Muslims. But in the years since President George W. Bushleft office, the region has been convulsed by Arab Spring protests, a bloodbath in Syria and the rise of theIslamic State group, which has gleefully released photos and videos of massacres far bloodier than anythingin the Senate report.

Egypt is today engaged in its own War on Terror, the slogan pro-government media have adopted todescribe its fight against jihadi insurgents in the Sinai Peninsula and its sweeping crackdown on Morsis

Muslim Brotherhood. Syria has invoked similar language to describe its fight against rebels, and Iraq todescribe its war on Sunni militants, including the Islamic State group. Gulf states have unveiled or expandedtheir own lists of groups banned for terrorism, which not only include al-Qaida and the IS group, but also theMuslim Brotherhood and more moderate Islamist organizations.

The United States for its part abandoned the practice of apprehending terror suspects and flying them aroundthe world to secret prisons. Nowadays U.S. drones strike them from the air in places like Pakistan andYemen, where such attacks have killed civilians and stoked far more discontent than the findings of theSenate probe.

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Associated Press writers Adam Schreck in Dubai and Lynne ODonnell in Kabul, Afghanistan contributed tothis report.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,rewritten or redistributed.

Senate report on CIA program details brutality,

dishonesty

The Washington Post's Greg Miller lists the important takeaways from the CIA interrogation report andexplains why it is being released now. (The Washington Post)ByGreg Miller,Adam GoldmanandJulie TateDecember 9
http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/greg-millerhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/greg-millerhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/greg-millerhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/adam-goldmanhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/adam-goldmanhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/adam-goldmanhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/julie-tatehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/julie-tatehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/julie-tatehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/julie-tatehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/adam-goldmanhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/people/greg-miller


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An exhaustive five-year Senate investigation of the CIAs secret interrogations of terrorism suspects rendersa strikingly bleak verdict on a program launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, describinglevels of brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence that at times brought even agency employeesto moments of anguish.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee delivers new allegations of cruelty in a program whosesevere tactics have been abundantly documented, revealing that agency medical personnel voiced alarm thatwaterboarding methods had deteriorated to a series of near drownings and that agency employees

subjected detainees to rectal rehydration and other painful procedures that were never approved.

[Read: Senate Intelligence Committees report on the CIA program]

The 528-page document catalogues dozens of cases in which CIA officials allegedly deceived their superiorsat the White House, members of Congress and even sometimes their peers about how the interrogation

program was being run and what it had achieved. In one case, an internal CIA memo relays instructions fromthe White House to keep the program secret from then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell out of concern thathe would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on whats been going on.

A declassified summary of the committees work discloses for the first time a complete roster of the 119

prisoners held in CIA custody and indicates that at least 26 were held because of mistaken identities or badintelligence. The publicly released summary is drawn from a longer, classified study that exceeds 6,000

pages.

The Senate Intelligence Committeesreport on the CIA s interrogation program listed, for the first time, thenames of the 119 detainees who went through the agencyssecret prison system. View Graphic

[View timeline: The CIAs use of enhanced interrogation]

The reports central conclusion is that harsh interrogation measures, deemed torture by program criticsincluding President Obama, did not work. The panel deconstructs prominent claims about the value of the

enhanced measures, including that they produced breakthrough intelligence in the hunt for Osama binLaden, and dismisses them all as exaggerated if not utterly false assertions that the CIA and formerofficers involved in the program vehemently dispute.
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In a statement from the White House, Obama said the Senate report documents a troubling program and

reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as [a]nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests. Obama

praised the CIAs work to degrade al-Qaeda over the past 13 years but said the agencys interrogationprogram did significant damage to Americas standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our

interests with allies and partners.

The CIA issued a 112-page response to the Senate report, acknowledging failings in the interrogation

program but denying that it intentionally misled the public or policymakers about an effort that it maintainsdelivered critical intelligence.

The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qaida and continues toinform our counterterrorism efforts to this day, CIA Director John Brennan, who was a senior officer at the

agency when it set up secret prisons for al-Qaeda suspects, said in a written statement. The program didproduce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives, he said.

The release of the report comes at an unnerving time in the countrys conflict with al -Qaeda and itsoffshoots. The Islamic State has beheaded three Americans in recent months and seized control of territoryacross Iraq and Syria. Fears that the report could ignite new overseas violence against American interests

prompted Secretary of State John F. Kerryto appeal to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of theSenate committee, to consider a delay. The report has also been at the center of intense bureaucratic and

political fights that erupted this year in accusations that the CIA surreptitiously monitored the computersused by committee aides involved in the investigation.

Many of the most haunting sections of the Senate document are passages taken from internal CIA memosand e-mails as agency employees described their visceral reactions to searing interrogation scenes. At one

point in 2002, CIA employees at a secret site in Thailand broke down emotionally after witnessing theharrowing treatment of Abu Zubaida, a high-profile facilitator for al-Qaeda.

Almost 13 years after the CIA established secret prisons to hold and interrogate detainees, the SenateIntelligence Committee released a report on the CIAs programs. The report lists 20 key findings. ViewGraphic


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Several on the team profoundly affected, one agency employee wrote at the time, ... some to the point of

tears and choking up. The passage is contrasted with closed-door testimony from high-ranking CIAofficials, including then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who when asked by a senator in 2007 whetheragency personnel had expressed reservations replied: Im not awareof any. These guys are moreexperienced. No.

The investigation was conducted exclusively by the Senate committees Democratic staff. Its release

Tuesday is certain to stir new debate over a program that has been a source of contention since the first

details about the CIAs secret prison network began to surface publicly a decade ago . Even so, the report isunlikely to lead to new sanctions or structural change.

The document names only a handful of high-ranking CIA employees and does not call for any furtherinvestigation of those involved or even offer any formal recommendations. It steers clear of scrutinizing theinvolvement of the White House and Justice Department, which two years ago ruled out the possibility thatCIA employees would face prosecution.

Instead, the Senate text is largely aimed at shaping how the interrogation program will be regarded byhistory. The inquiry was driven by Feinstein and her frequently stated determination to foreclose any

prospect that the United States might contemplate such tactics again. Rather than argue their morality,

Feinstein set out to prove that they did not work.

In her foreword to the report, Feinstein does not characterize the CIAs actions as torture but says the traumaof 9/11 led the agency to employ brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations,

and our values. The report should serve as a warning for the future, she says.

We cannot again allow history to be forgotten and grievous past mistakes to be repeated, Feinstein says.

The reaction to the report, however, only reinforced how polarizing the CIA program remains more than fiveyears after it was ordered dismantled by Obama.

Over the past year, the CIA assembled a lengthy and detailed rebuttal to the committees findings that argues

that all but a few of the panels conclusions are unfounded. Hayden and other agency veterans have for

months been planning a similarly aggressive response.

The report also faced criticism from Republicans on the Intelligence Committee who submitted a response tothe report that cited alleged inaccuracies and faulted the committees decision to base its findings exclusively

on CIA documents without interviewing any of the operatives involved. Democrats have said they did so toavoid interfering with a separate Justice Department inquiry.

The programs start

At its height, the CIA program included secret prisons in countries including Afghanistan, Thailand,Romania, Lithuania and Polandlocations that are referred to only by color-themed codes in the report,such as COBALT, to preserve a veneer of secrecy.

The establishment of the black sites was part of a broader transformation of the CIAin which it rapidlymorphed from an agency focused on intelligence-gathering into a paramilitary force with new powers tocapture prisoners, disrupt plots, and assemble a fleet of armed drones to carry out targeted killings of al-Qaeda militants.

The report reveals the often haphazard ways in which the agency assumed these new roles. Within days of

the 9/11 attacks, for example, President George W. Bush had signed a secret memorandum giving the CIAnew authority to undertake operations designed to captureand detain persons who pose a continuing,serious threat of violence or death to U.S. persons and interests.


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But the memo made no reference to interrogations, providing no explicit authority for what would becomean elaborately drawn list of measuresincluding sleep deprivation, slams against cell walls and simulateddrowningto get detainees to talk. The Bush memo was a murky point of origin for a program that is

portrayed throughout the Senate report as chaotically mismanaged.

One of the most lengthy sections describes the interrogation of the CIAs first prisoner, Abu Zubaida, whowas detained in Pakistan in March 2002. Abu Zubaida, badly injured when he was captured, was largelycooperative when jointly questioned by the CIA and FBI but was then subjected to confusing and

increasingly violent interrogation as the agency assumed control.

After being transferred to a site in Thailand, Abu Zubaida was placed in isolation for 47 days, a periodduring which the presumably important source on al-Qaeda faced no questions. Then, at 11:50 a.m. on Aug.4, 2002, the CIA launched a round-the-clock interrogation assaultslamming him against walls, stuffinghim into a coffin-size box and waterboarding him until he coughed, vomited, and had involuntary spasmsof the torso and extremities.

The treatment continued for 17 days. At one point, the waterboarding left Abu Zubaida completely

unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth. CIA memos described employees who weredistraught and concerned about the legality of what they had witnessed. One said that two, perhaps three

were likely to elect transfer.

The Senate report suggests top CIA officials at headquarters had little sympathy. When a cable fromThailand warned that the Abu Zubaida interrogation was approach[ing] the legal limit, Jose Rodriguez,

then chief of the CIAs Counterterrorism Center, cautioned subordinates to refrain from such speculative

language as to the legality of the interrogation. Such language is not helpful.

Through a spokesman, Rodriguez told The Washington Post that he never instructed employees not to sendcables about the legality of interrogations.

Abu Zubaida, also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, was waterboarded 83 times and kept incramped boxes for nearly 300 hours. In October 2002, Bush was informed in his daily intelligence briefingthat Abu Zubaida was still withholding significant threat information, despite views from the black site

that he had been truthful from the outset and was compliant and cooperative, the report said.

The document provides a similarly detailed account of the interrogation of the alleged mastermind of the9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who fed his interrogators a stream of falsehoods and intelligencefragments. Waterboarding was supposed to simulate suffocation with a damp cloth and a trickle of liquid.But with Mohammed, CIA operatives used their hands to form a standing pool of water over his mouth.KSM, as he is known in agency documents, was ingesting a LOT of water, a CIA medical officer wrote,saying that the application had been so altered that we are basically doing a series of near drownings.

The CIA has maintained that only three prisoners were subjected to waterboarding, but the report alludes toevidence that it may have been used on others, including photographs of a well-worn waterboard at a blacksite where its use was never officially recorded. The committee said the agency could not explain the

presence of the board and water-dousing equipment at the site, which is not named in the report but isbelieved to be the Salt Pit in Afghanistan.

There are also references to other procedures, including the use of tubes to administer rectal rehydration

and feeding. CIA documents describe a case in which a prisoners lunch tray consisting of hummus, pastawith sauce, nuts, and raisins was pureed and rectally infused. At least five CIA detainees were subjected

to rectal rehydration or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity.

At times, senior CIA operatives voiced deep misgivings. In early 2003, a CIA officer in the interrogationprogram described it as a train [wreck] waiting to happen and that I intend to get the hell off the train

before it happens. The officer, identified by former colleagues as Charlie Wise, subsequently retired and


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died in 2003. He had been picked for the job despite being reprimanded for his role in other troubledinterrogation efforts in the 1980s in Beirut, former officials said.

The agencys records of the program were so riddled with errors, according to the report, that the CIA often

offered conflicting counts of how many prisoners it had.

In 2007, then-CIA Director Hayden testified in a closed-door session with the Senate panel that in thehistory of the program, weve had 97 detainees. In reality, the number was 119, according to the report,

including 39 who had been subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

Two years later, when Hayden was preparing to deliver an early intelligence briefing for senior aides tonewly elected President Obama, a subordinate noted that the actual count was significantly higher. Haydeninstructed me to keep the detainee number at 98, the employee wrote to himself in an e-mail, pickwhatever date i needed to make that happen but the number is 98.

Hayden comes under particularly pointed scrutiny in the report, which includes a 38-page table comparinghis statements to often conflicting agency documents. The section is listed as an example of inaccurate CIAtestimony.

In an e-mail to The Post, Hayden said the discrepancy in the prisoner numbers reflected the fact thatdetainees captured before the start of the interrogation program were counted separately from those held atthe black sites. This is a question of booking, not a question of deception, Hayden said. He also said hedirected the analyst who had called the discrepancy to his attention to confirm the revised accounting andthen inform the incoming CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, that there was a new number and that the figureshould be corrected with Congress.

Hayden said he would have explained this to the committee if given the chance. Maybe if the committee

had talked to real people and accessed their notes we wouldnt have to have this conversation, he said,

describing the matter as an example of [committee] methodology. Take a stray fact and claim its meaning

to fit the desired narrative (mass deception).

The report cites other cases in which CIA officials are alleged to have obscured facts about the program. In2003, when David Addington, a lawyer who worked for Vice President Richard B. Cheney, asked whetherthe CIA had videotaped interrogations of Abu Zubaida, CIA General Counsel Scott Muller informed agencycolleagues that he had told him that tapes were not being made. Muller apparently did not mention that theCIA had recorded dozens of interrogation sessions or that some in the agency were eager to have themdestroyed.

The tapes were destroyed in 2005 at the behest of Rodriguez, a move that triggered a Justice Departmentinvestigation. The committee also revealed that a 21-hour section of recordings which depicted the

waterboarding of Abu Zubaidahad gone missing years earlier when then-CIA Inspector General JohnHelgersons office sought to review them as part of an inquiry into the interrogation program.

Helgerson would go on to find substantial problems with the program. But, in contrast to the Senate panels

findings, his report concluded that the agencys interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that hasenabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for theUnited States and around the world.

Intelligence claims

A prominent section of the Senate report is devoted to high-profile claims that the interrogation program

produced unique and otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped thwart plots or led to the capture ofsenior al-Qaeda operatives.

Senate investigators said none of the claims held up under scrutiny, with some unraveling becauseinformation was erroneously attributed to detainees subjected to harsh interrogations, others because the CIA


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already had information from other sources. In some cases, according to the panel, there was no viableterrorist plot to disrupt.

A document prepared for Cheney before a March 8, 2005, National Security Council meeting noted in asection titled Interrogation Results that operatives Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed planned to buildand detonate a dirty bomb in the Washington DC area.

But according to an April 2003 CIA e-mail, Padilla and Mohammed had apparently taken seriously a

ludicrous and humorous article about building a dirty bomb in a kitchen by swinging buckets of uraniumto enrich it.

KSM dismissed the idea, as did a government assessment of the proposed plot: CIA and Lawrence

Livermore National Lab have assessed that the article is filled with countless technical inaccuracies whichwould likely result in the death of anyone attempting to follow the instructions, and definitely would notresult in a nuclear explosion, noted another CIA e-mail in April 2003. The agency nonetheless continued todirectly cite the dirty bomb plot while defending the interrogation program until at least 2007, the reportnotes.

The report also deconstructs the timeline leading to the identification of Padilla and his alleged accomplice.

It notes that in April 2002, Pakistani authorities who detained Padilla suspected he was an al-Qaeda member.A few days later, Abu Zubaida described two individuals who were pursuing what was described as acockamamie dirty-bomb plot. The connection was made by the CIA immediately, months before the useof harsh interrogation on Abu Zubaida.

Some within the CIA were derisive of the continuing exploitation of the dirty-bomb plot by the agency.Well never be able to successfully expunge Padilla and the dirty bomb plot from the lore of disruption,

but once again Id like to go on the record that Padilla admitted that the only reason he came up with so-called dirty bomb was that he wanted to get out of Afghanistan and figured that if he came up with

something spectacular, theyd finance him, wrote the head of the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and

Nuclear group at the CIA Counterterrorism Center. Even KSM says Padilla had a screw loose.

In the CIAs rebuttal, which was delivered in 2013 to the Senate but released publicly on Tuesday for the

first time, the agency acknowledged that it took too long to stop making references to his infeasible Dirty

Bomb plot but said Padilla was a legitimate threat and a good example of the importance of intelligence

derived from the detainee program.

In another high-profile case, the CIA credited the interrogation program with the capture of Hambali, asenior member of the Southeast Asian militant group Jemaah Islamiah and the suspected mastermind of the2002 Bali bombing, which killed more than 200 people. In a briefing for the presidents chief of staff, for

instance, the CIA wrote, During [KSMs] interrogation we acquired information that led to the capture of

Hambali. But the Senate found that information from KSM played no role in Hambalis capture and that, infact, information leading to his detention came from signals intelligence, a CIA source, and investigations bythe Thai authorities.

Similarly, the CIA said the interrogation program led to the discovery of the Second Wave attacks, a plan

by KSM to employ non-Arabs to use airplanes to hit targets on the West Coast. Associated with this in CIAreporting was the identification of al-Ghuraba, a cell of Jemaah Islamiah.

In a November 2007 briefing for Bush on Plots Discovered as a Result of EITs, or enhanced interrogation

techniques, the CIA said it learned about the Second Wave and al-Ghuraba after applying thewaterboard along with interrogation techniques. But the Senate report says the plot was disrupted by a

series of arrests and interrogations that had nothing to do with the CIA program.

Even the hunt for bin Laden was accompanied by exaggerations of the role of brutal interrogationtechniques, according to the report. In particular, the committee found that the interrogations played no


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meaningful role in the identification of a courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who would lead the agency to binLadens compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The CIAs document reiterates its claim that coercive measures helped, saying the tactics led two de taineesin agency custody, Ammar al-Baluchi and Hassan Ghul, to provide important clues to the courier. Baluchiwas the first to identify Kuwaiti as bin Ladens messenger, and did so only after undergoing enhanced

interrogation techniques.

Ghul, who was captured in Iraq, went even further, confirming under coercive pressure that Kuwaiti haddelivered a letter from bin Laden to another al-Qaeda operative and had vanished along with the al-Qaedachief in 2002.

But the committee cited CIA records showing that Ghuls revelations came before he was subjected to harshmeasures. In an interview with the CIA inspector generals office, a CIA officer familiar with Ghuls case

said that he sang like a tweetie bird. He opened up right away and was cooperative from the outset.

Steven Rich and Swati Sharma contributed to this report.

Greg Miller covers the intelligence beat for The Washington Post.

The 10 most harrowing excerpts from the CIA

interrogation report

By Washington Post Staff December 9 at 3:08 PM

Five years after President Obama endedthe CIA's rendition and interrogation program,the SenateIntelligence Committee released its report on the agency's methods. Here are samples of some of the moreharrowing passages about the program.Read about the key findings hereandtake a look back at the roots ofthe program.

1.Of the 119 CIA detainees, 26 should not have been apprehended.Among them was Abu Hudhaifa,who was "subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation" before the CIAdiscovered that he was probably "not the person he was believed to be."
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2. President Bush received his first briefing on enhanced interrogation techniques in 2006, about four

years after the program started. According to CIA records, Bush expressed discomfort with an image of adetainee "chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper."


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3.The CIA used rectal feeding and rectal rehydration on at least five detainees. Even though detaineeMajid Khan was cooperating with feedings, for example, the CIA subjected him to "involuntary rectalfeeding and rectal hydration" and would puree his lunch tray, which was then "rectally infused."

4. CIA interrogators threatenedto harm the family members of at least three detainees.In one case, adetainee was told that his mother's throat would be cut.
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5.The CIA apprehended two foreigners working for a "partner government" allied with the agency .They were subjected to sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation. The two detainees were trying to givethe CIA information on possible future al-Qaeda attacks. It took them months to get released.

6.Abu Zubaida, the CIA's first detainee, spent 266 hours in a coffin-size confinement box.Zubaida,who was born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, often "cried, begged, pleaded, and whimpered" and wastold that the only way he would leave the facility was in the coffin-shaped box.
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7.When Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, tried to breathe during the

procedure,interrogators held his lips and poured water over his mouth.
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8.The Senate committee found a photo of what looked like a well-used waterboarding stationat a sitewhere there was no reported use of the technique. The CIA could not explain the presence of the waterboard.

9.Of the at least 26 detainees who were wrongfully held, one was "intellectually challenged."Interrogators taped this detainee crying and used it as leverage against one of his relatives.

10.CIA officers would "strip a detainee naked, shackle him in the standing position for up to 72

hours,and douse [him] repeatedly with cold water."

UNCLASSIFIED

chief interrogator.322 As late as June 2003, SWIGERT and DUNBAR, operating outside

of the direct management of the Renditions Group, were deployed to DETENTION SITE BLUE

to both interrogate and conduct reviews of detainees.323 The dispute extended to
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interrogation practices. The Renditions Group?s leadership considered the waterboard,

which

Chief of Interrogations was not certified to use, as ?life threatening,? and

complained to the OIG that some CIA officers in the Directorate of Operations believed

that, as a

result, the Renditions Group was ?running a ?sissified? interrogation program.?324 At

the Same

time, CIA CTC personnel criticized the Renditions Group and - for their use of painful

stress positions, as well as for the conditions at DETENTION SITE COBALT.325

(M) There were also concerns about possible con?icts of interest

related to the contractors, SWIGERT and DUNBAR. On January 30, 2003, a cable from CIA

Headquarters stated that ?the individual at the interrogation site who administers the

techniques

is not the same person who issues the assessment of record,? and that only a staff

a contractor, could issue an assessment of record.?326 In June 2003, however,

SWIGERT and DUNBAR were deployed to DETENTION SITE BLUE to interrogate KSM, as

well as to assess stability? and ?resistance posture.?327 As described later

in this summary, the contractors had earlier subjected KSM to the waterboard and other

CIA

enhanced interrogation techniques. The decision to send the contract to

DETENTION SITE BLUE prompted an OMS to write to OMS leadership that

322 Interview of by and Office of the Inspector General, April

3, 2003. February 21, 2003, interview report, Office of the Inspector General. Hammond

DUNBAR told the Of?ce of Inspector General that there was ?intrigue? between the RDG

and him and SWIGERT,

and ?there were emails coming to SITE that questioned [his] and

qualifications.? See Interview of Hammond DUNBAR, by and Office of the

Inspector General, Februar' 4, 2003.

DG Tasking for IC

323 Email from:

MS expressed concern that ?no

cc:

subject: Re:

and date: June 20, 2003, at 5:23:29 PM.

professional in the ?eld would credit and later

'udgrnents as cholo ists assessin the

sub'ects of their enhanced measures.? See email from: ;cc:

Re: RDG

Tasking for IC DUNBAR and date: June 20, 2003, at 2:19:53 PM.) The June 2013

Response states that CIA ?Headquarters established Renditions and Detentions Group as

the

responsible entity for all CIA detention and interrogation sites in December 2002,

removing any latent institutional

confusion.?

324 Interview of by and Office of the Inspector General,

February 21, 2003. The chief of interrogations, told the Inspector General that the

waterboard was

overused with Abu Zubaydah and KSM and was ineffective in the interrogations of KSM.

(See Interview of

-, by and of the Office of the Inspector General, March 27, 2003.) One doctor

involved in CIA interrogations using the waterboard interrogation technique stated that

- ?has a huge bias

against the waterboard b/c he?s not approved to use it. The reverse is true of the

contract guys and


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who haVe a vested interest in favor of it.? See email from: d; to:

cc: subject: re: More; date: A ril ll, 2003, at 08:11:07 AM.

325 March 10, 2003, interview report of Office of the Inspector General. Interview of -

and Office of the Inspector General, February 27, 2003. Interview

of ,by and Of?ce of the Inspector General, April 3, 2003. March

24, 2003, interview re ort of Office of the Inspector General.

336 DIRECTOR (3018352 JAN 03)

327 12168 (3013222 JUN 03)

Page 65 of 499

UNCLASSIFIED

Senate report on CIA program details brutality,

dishonesty

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

In Afghanistan, the largest CIA covert prison was code-named the Salt Pit, at center left above. (Space Imaging Middle East)

By Dana PriestWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, November 2, 2005

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-eracompound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at varioustimes has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies inEastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current andformer intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. Itdepends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the

system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeingthe CIA's covert actions.


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The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA,Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the UnitedStates and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, havedissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about theconditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, whatinterrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be

detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detentionpractices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA hasnot even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program,could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of

political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- whichoperates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern amonglawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns

escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress toexempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degradingtreatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency'sapproach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to holdand interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S.legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covertprogram, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt

counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terroristretaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001,attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concernlingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolationand secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing twoyears ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former seniorintelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything wasvery reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld anddon't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' "

t is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, whichis why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and otherU.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practicesalso would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to havea lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or DegradingTreatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permittedto use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N.


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convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner ismade to believe he or she is drowning.

Some detainees apprehended by the CIA and transferred to foreign intelligence agencies have alleged aftertheir release that they were tortured, although it is unclear whether CIA personnel played a role in thealleged abuse. Given the secrecy surrounding CIA detentions, such accusations have heightened concernsamong foreign governments and human rights groups about CIA detention and interrogation practices.

The contours of the CIA's detention program have emerged in bits and pieces over the past two years.Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIAoperations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and transferred them to the agency's prisons.

More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system, according to currentand former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based oninformation from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does not include

prisoners picked up in Iraq.

The detainees break down roughly into two classes, the sources said.

About 30 are considered major terrorism suspects and have been held under the highest level of secrecy atblack sites financed by the CIA and managed by agency personnel, including those in Eastern Europe andelsewhere, according to current and former intelligence officers and two other U.S. government officials.Two locations in this category -- in Thailand and on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay --were closed in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

A second tier -- which these sources believe includes more than 70 detainees -- is a group considered lessimportant, with less direct involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value. These prisoners,some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan,Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries, a process sometimes known as "rendition." While the first-tier

black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these countries are operated by the host nations, with CIAfinancial assistance and, sometimes, direction.

Morocco, Egypt and Jordan have said that they do not torture detainees, although years of State Departmenthuman rights reports accuse all three of chronic prisoner abuse.

The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimesunderground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk withor even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreigngovernment and intelligence officials.

Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the WhiteHouse has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees'chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities.

The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies thathave embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been tryingto cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others -- mainly Russia andorganized crime.

Origins of the Black Sites

The idea of holding terrorists outside the U.S. legal system was not under consideration before Sept. 11,2001, not even for Osama bin Laden, according to former government officials. The plan was to bring binLaden and his top associates into the U.S. justice system for trial or to send them to foreign countries wherethey would be tried.


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"The issue of detaining and interrogating people was never, ever discussed," said a former senior intelligenceofficer who worked in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, during that period. "It was against theculture and they believed information was best gleaned by other means."

On the day of the attacks, the CIA already had a list of what it called High-Value Targets from the al Qaedastructure, and as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attack plots were unraveled, more names were addedto the list. The question of what to do with these people surfaced quickly.

The CTC's chief of operations argued for creating hit teams of case officers and CIA paramilitaries thatwould covertly infiltrate countries in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe to assassinate people on thelist, one by one.

But many CIA officers believed that the al Qaeda leaders would be worth keeping alive to interrogate abouttheir network and other plots. Some officers worried that the CIA would not be very adept at assassination.

"We'd probably shoot ourselves," another former senior CIA official said.

The agency set up prisons under its covert action authority. Under U.S. law, only the president can authorizea covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and

are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers.

Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush signed a sweeping finding that gave the CIA broadauthorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of alQaeda anywhere in the world.

It could not be determined whether Bush approved a separate finding for the black-sites program, but theconsensus among current and former intelligence and other government officials interviewed for this articleis that he did not have to.

Rather, they believe that the CIA general counsel's office acted within the parameters of the Sept. 17 finding.The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers andofficials, according to several former and current U.S. government and intelligence officials.

Deals With 2 Countries

Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold the captives. One early idea wasto keep them on ships in international waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons.

CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They considered the virtually unvisited islandsin Lake Kariba in Zambia, which were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary

conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides, they wondered, could the Zambiansbe trusted with such a secret?

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

Still without a long-term solution, the CIA began sending suspects it captured in the first month or so afterSept. 11 to its longtime partners, the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan.

A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were captured on battlefields inAfghanistan. A short-term solution was improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into

metal shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was surrounded with a tripleperimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban.


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"I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?" said a senior CIA officer. "I kept saying,where's the help? We've got to bring in some help. We can't be jailers -- our job is to find Osama."

Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargocontainers had died of asphyxiation. The CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millionsof dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of which would be used for CIA

prisoners.

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and wasfirst housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officerallegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor andleave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials.The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.

The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan guards, but the road leading to it wasnot safe to travel and the jail was eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated offthe base.

By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with two countries, including Thailand and one

Eastern European nation, current and former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside theclassified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation.

Then the CIA captured its first big detainee, in March 28, 2002. Pakistani forces took Abu Zubaida, alQaeda's operations chief, into custody and the CIA whisked him to the new black site in Thailand, whichincluded underground interrogation cells, said several former and current intelligence officials. Six monthslater, Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh was also captured in Pakistan and flown to Thailand.

But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIAshut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officialsinvolved in the matter. Work between the two countries on counterterrorism has been lukewarm ever since.

In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. Oneof these sites -- which sources said they believed to be the CIA's biggest facility now -- became particularlyimportant when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of

prisons.

Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at GuantanamoBay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of themilitary. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees,and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.

In hindsight, say some former and current intelligence officials, the CIA's problems were exacerbated byanother decision made within the Counterterrorist Center at Langley.

The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believedto be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of thelarger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and thecapacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whoseintelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.

The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said.

"They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.

Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials withknowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence


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community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue inits current form, or be replaced by some other approach.

Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom alsoargue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.

"It's just a horrible burden," said the intelligence official.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Holder Hires Prosecutor to Look Into Alleged CIA

Interrogation Abuses

John Durham (Bob Child - AP)

By Carrie Johnson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

In appointing a prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA interrogation abuses, including episodes that resulted

in prisoner deaths, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday shook off warnings from PresidentObama to avoid becoming mired in past controversies.

Holder said that he realizes the move is controversial but that it was the only responsible course to take.

The decision does not reflect a sharp division between the Justice Department and the White House,government officials said, given the limits of the preliminary review and the respect that Obama says hemaintains for the role of an independent attorney general. But it could mark the beginning of a painstakinginquiry that tests the boundaries of the Justice Department's discretion and its ability to evaluate incompleteevidence collected on the world's battlegrounds.

Holder has named longtime prosecutor John H. Durham, who has parachuted into crisis situations for bothpolitical parties over three decades, to open an early review of nearly a dozen cases of alleged detaineemistreatment at the hands of CIA interrogators and contractors.
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The announcement raised fresh tensions in an intelligence community fearful that it will bear the brunt of thepunishment for Bush-era national security policy, and it immediately provoked criticism from congressionalRepublicans.

Legal analysts said the review, while preliminary, could expand beyond its relatively narrow mandate andensnare a wider cast of characters. They cited U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation of the leakof a CIA operative's identity, which culminated with the criminal conviction of then-Vice President RichardB. Cheney's chief of staff.

In a statement Monday afternoon, Holder cautioned that the inquiry is far from a full-blown criminalinvestigation. Rather, he said, it is unknown whether indictments or prosecutions of CIA contractors andemployees will follow. Lawyers involved in similar reviews said that any possible cases could take years to

build because of challenges with witnesses and evidence.

"I fully realize that my decision to commence this preliminary review will be controversial," Holder added."As attorney general, my duty is to examine the facts and to follow the law. In this case, given all of theinformation currently available, it is clear to me that this review is the only responsible course of action forme to take."

Obama and White House officials have said that they want to look ahead on national security; White Housepress secretary Robert Gibbs said last week that the administration is eager to keep "going forward" and that"a hefty litigation looking backward is not what we believe is in the country's best interest."

But the White House voiced support for Holder in a news conference held Monday on Martha's Vineyard,Mass., where deputy press secretary Bill Burton told reporters that "ultimately, the decisions on who isinvestigated and who is prosecuted are up to the attorney general. . . . The president thinks that Eric Holder,who he appointed as a very independent attorney general, should make those decisions."

But nearly as important in the high-stakes analysis will be Durham, 59, an assistant U.S. attorney inConnecticut who has investigated Boston mob kingpins, corrupt FBI agents and his state's GOP governor.Durham rarely speaks publicly, but in private he cracks jokes, follows the Boston Red Sox and regularlyattends Mass with his wife of several decades. One of his four sons followed in his father's footsteps andnow serves as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn.

Though a registered Republican, Durham generally is regarded as apolitical, and attorneys general from bothparties -- including Janet Reno, Michael B. Mukasey and Holder -- have tapped him for their most difficultassignments.

he Justice Department released a raft of documentsyesterday related to the Bush-era CIA's interrogationprogram as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announcedthat he had asked a prosecutor to investigate

possible abuses by the agency interrogators. At the same time, the White House announced steps to form anew interrogation unitunder the aegis of FBI.

In addition, the ACLU received several other documents late yesterday as a response to its Freedom ofInformation suit: Office of Legal Counsel Documents and Memos from 2002-2005and 2006-2007.

Here are a few reactions from the blogosphere to the documents and Obama administration's actions.

Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent asks if Justice Department lawyers could be prosecuted fordeliberately writing vague guidelines on interrogation.

Although the inspector general's report isheavily redacted,33 out of 105 pages in all, it strongly suggeststhat all of the guidelines governing the detention and interrogation of detainees were approved by JusticeDepartment lawyers. Yet the report also suggests that the way the guidelines were written and approved wasso vague as to encourage their violation.
http://washingtonindependent.com/56340/cia-reports-suggest-broad-probe-of-interrogation-policy-neededhttp://washingtonindependent.com/56340/cia-reports-suggest-broad-probe-of-interrogation-policy-neededhttp://mobile.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/24/ig_report/http://mobile.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/24/ig_report/http://mobile.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/24/ig_report/http://mobile.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/24/ig_report/http://washingtonindependent.com/56340/cia-reports-suggest-broad-probe-of-interrogation-policy-needed


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Of course, vagueness isn't a crime. It may be just bad lawyering. But if Justice Department lawyersdeliberately wrote or approved the CIA's guidelines in a way that was vague and left "substantial room formisinterpretation" so as to encourage their violation, then they were not acting in good faith. And if theyknew that the guidelines, as written, were likely to lead to illegal conduct, then they could be liable forconspiracy to commit torture.

Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheelpicks up on a reference in the 2004 CIA inspector general reportto an"undated and unsigned document entitled, 'Legal Principles Applicable to CIA Detention and Interrogation

of Captured Al-Qa'ida Personnel'" that has yet to appear to the public.

"One of the most important--but least sexy--passages revealed in yesterday's release of the IG Report is thisone, on page 22," Wheeler writes on Emptywheel.

[The unsigned document] is important for several reasons. First, it explains how CIA decided it was okay totorture detainees without first--as they had done with Abu Zubaydah--assuring DOJ that the detainee wastruly a High Value Detainee and was "fit" to be tortured. It explains how a memo authorizing the torture ofone person came to authorize an entire regime of torture.

It also explains why the CIA continued to claim that its torture program did not violate CAT [ConventionAgainst Torture]....For years, Congress kept pushing CIA to get OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] to do a realassessment of whether the torture program violated CAT's prohibition on cruel and inhuman treatment... Butit turns out all this time there was an undated, half-official document declaring the Fifth, Eighth, andFourteenth Amendment invalid for this program. And, at the same time, dismissing the War Crimes statute.Poof! One unsigned, undated document, and there go several critical laws governing detainee treatment.

Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly's Spy Talk blogidentifies another agency that has lost influcence nowthat The Obama administration has shifted interrogation oversight from the CIA to the White House, as thePost's Ann Kornblut reported yesterday.

What will become of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI], which was "set up after9/11 to put the 16 intelligence agencies into a harness"? Stein asks.

It's hard to find any clear winners in the new interrogations set-up confirmed by the White House onMonday, but it's easy to spot the losers: Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair....The CIA director's nose hadalready been out of joint ever since Blair, the navy admiral who heads the uber-spook Office of NationalIntelligence, decided to terminate the CIA's longtime prerogative of naming station chiefs, the top U.S.intelligence official in American embassies....But now Blair has reason to be unhappy, too: If the ODNIdoesn't deserve the HIG, what's its role in this world?

Salon's Glenn Greenwaldgoes through various interrogation practices detailed in the IG report that he says

every American should know about.

Perhaps worst of all, the Report notes that many of the detainees who were subjected to this treatment wereso treated due to "assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence" -- meaning there was no realreason to think they had done anything wrong whatsoever. As has been known for quite some time, many ofthe people who were tortured by the United States were completely innocent -- guilty of absolutely nothing.

CIA Report Calls Oversight of Early Interrogations Poor


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Obama Admin. Release 2004 CIA DocumentsThe Obama administration released newly declassified 2004 CIA documents detailing the Bushadministration's policy of capturing suspected terrorists and interrogating them in overseas prisons. Video byAPBy Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie TateWashington Post Staff WritersTuesday, August 25, 2009

A partially declassified CIA report released Monday by the Obama administration describes the earlyimplementation of the agency's interrogation programin 2002 and 2003 as ad hoc and poorly supervised,leading to the use of "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented" techniques.

Interrogators lifted one detainee off the floor by his arms while they were bound behind his back with a belt.Another interrogator used a stiff brush to clean a detainee, scrubbing so roughly that his legs were raw withabrasions. And another squeezed a detainee's neck at his carotid artery until he began to pass out.

Authorized techniques such as waterboarding were applied in a manner that exceeded the language of JusticeDepartment memosthat authorized their use. Interrogators "continuously applied large volumes of water,"explaining afterward that they needed to make the experience "more poignant and convincing," the reportsaid.

In releasing the 2004 report and other documents, President Obama continued to confront the legacy of hispredecessor's counterterrorism policies while attempting to move beyond them.

On Monday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed a prosecutor, John H. Durham, to investigateallegations of detainee abuse by the CIA. The administration also unveiled an elite interagency interrogation

team designed to break high-value suspects without coercion.

Cumulatively, the newly released documents provide a forensic accounting of some of the Bushadministration's most closely held secrets and deepen public knowledge of a program whose scope anddetails have emerged piecemeal ever since the first suspected high-level al-Qaeda detainee was questioned in2002 at a hastily assembled "black site" in Thailand.

The Obama administration was forced to release the CIA documents because of a wide-ranging Freedom ofInformation Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Unionfiled in 2003. "The report underscores the needfor a comprehensive criminal investigation that reaches not just the interrogators who exceeded authority butthe senior officials who authorized torture and the Justice Department lawyers who facilitated it," said

Jameel Jaffer, director of the organization's national security program.

The releases Monday follow the earlier dissemination of Justice Department memos sanctioning the use ofharsh interrogation techniques, as well as the Obama administration's decisions to end the CIA program andclose the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where high-value detainees are now held.


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'Inadequate' Guidance

The inspector general's report said that the CIA's efforts to provide "systematic, clear and timely guidance"to interrogators were "inadequate at first" and that that failure largely coincided with the most significantincidents involving the unauthorized coercion of detainees. Significant portions of the report were not made

public, including the inspector general's recommendations.

Interrogators menaced a detainee with a handgun and a power drill, staged mock executions to convince

suspects that they too could be killed, and threatened to punish the family of another detainee.

"We're going to kill your children," one interrogator told Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimedmastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, if there was another attack.

As carried out by CIA interrogators, waterboarding was far more aggressive than anything used in militarysurvival schools, whose training programs formed the basis of the harsh techniques. The CIA's use ofwaterboarding eventually drew a rebuke from the agency's Office of Medical Services, which said the"frequency and intensity" with which the technique was used could not be certified as "efficacious ormedically safe."

But the report, noting the steady accumulation of guidelines from agency headquarters, said discipline andsafeguards within the program "improved considerably" over time. Still, the report pointed to ongoingtensions between interrogators in the field and officials at the CIA Counterterrorism Center as to whendetainees were compliant and when the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" was appropriate.

None of the material, however, is likely to resolve the debate over the effectiveness of such techniques,including waterboarding.

The CIA's first high-value detainee -- Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, better known as Abu Zubaida --was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. Although he provided more information after the technique wasapplied to him, "it is not possible to say definitively that the waterboard is the reason" for his increased

cooperation or if other factors, "such as the length of detention, was a catalyst," the inspector general's reportconcluded.

The inspector general determined that the repeated waterboarding of Abu Zubaida and Mohammed wasinconsistent with guidelines promulgated by the Justice Department. But it noted that the attorney generaltold 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," thereport states. Mohammed was ultimately waterboarded 183 times, according to Justice Department memos.

The report found that "there is no doubt" that the detention and interrogation program itself prevented furtherterrorist activity, provided information that led to the apprehension of other terrorists, warned authorities offuture plots, and helped analysts complete an intelligence picture for senior policymakers and militaryleaders. But whether the harsh techniques were effective in this regard "is a more subjective process and notwithout some concern."

Reports Cited by Cheney

The CIA also released two documents that then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney had invoked to assert thatthe harsh tactics worked and "kept us safe for seven years."

One of the reports said "detainee reporting has become a crucial pillar of US counterterrorism efforts, aidingintelligence and law enforcement operations to capture additional terrorists, helping to thwart additional

plots, and advancing our analysis of the al-Qaeda target."


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The triangulation of intelligence led to the capture of a succession of key operatives, and the report notedthat Walid bin Attash, now charged in a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, "was captured on theverge of mounting attacks against the US Consulate in Karachi, Westerners at the Karachi Airport, andWestern housing areas" in Pakistan, according to the report, called "Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the WarAgainst Al-Qa'ida."

A second report, describing Mohammed as a preeminent source on al-Qaeda, said that "he has providedinformation on Al Qa'ida strategic doctrine, probable targets, the impact of striking each target set, and likely

methods of attacks inside the United States."

Panetta Message to CIA

CIA Director Leon Panetta, in a message to agency employees Monday morning, described the release of thedocuments as "in many ways an old story" and said that "the challenge is not the battles of yesterday, butthose of today and tomorrow."

"My emphasis on the future comes with a clear recognition that our Agency takes seriously properaccountability for the past," Panetta said in the message, which was released by the CIA. "As the intelligenceservice of a democracy, that's an important part of who we are."

Panetta said the interrogation program obtained intelligence from high-value detainees at a time when thecountry had little hard information on al-Qaeda's structure and plans, but he noted that "whether this was theonly way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute, with Americans holding a rangeof views on the methods used."

Almost from its beginnings, the interrogation program generated concern inside the CIA.

The 2004 report by then-Inspector General John L. Helgerson noted, presciently, that "the agency facespotentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the . . . program, particularly its useof [enhanced interrogation techniques] and the inability of the U.S. Government to decide what it will

ultimately do with terrorists detained by the agency."

The report said CIA personnel "are concerned that public revelation" of the program will "seriously damage"personal reputations as well as "the reputation and effectiveness of the agency itself." One officer said hecould imagine CIA agents ending up before the World Court on war crimes charges.

"Ten years from now, we're going to be sorry we're doing this," said one CIA officer. But "it has to be done."

Staff writer Dana Priest contributed to this report.

Guantanamo prisoners moved early than disclosedTOOLBOX

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By Adam Goldman and Matt ApuzzoSaturday, August 7, 2010

Four of the nation's most highly valued terrorist prisoners were secretly moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in2003, years earlier than has been disclosed, then were whisked back into overseas prisons before theSupreme Court could give them access to lawyers, the Associated Press has learned.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080605828_pf.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080605828_pf.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/emailafriend?contentId=AR2010080605828&sent=nohttp://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/emailafriend?contentId=AR2010080605828&sent=nohttp://help.washingtonpost.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=15080&task=knowledge&questionID=302?nav=globebothttp://help.washingtonpost.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=15080&task=knowledge&questionID=302?nav=globebothttp://help.washingtonpost.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=15080&task=knowledge&questionID=302?nav=globebothttp://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/emailafriend?contentId=AR2010080605828&sent=nohttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080605828_pf.html


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The transfer allowed the United States to interrogate the detainees in CIA "black sites" for two more yearswithout allowing them to speak with lawyers or human rights observers or to challenge their detention inU.S. courts. Had they remained at the Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have

been afforded those rights.

"This was all just a shell game to hide detainees from the courts," said Jonathan Hafetz, a Seton HallUniversity law professor who has represented several detainees.

Removing them from Guantanamo Bay underscores how worried PresidentGeorge W. Bush's administrationwas that the Supreme Court might lift the veil of secrecy on the detention program. It also shows howinsistent the Bush administration was that terrorists be held outside the U.S. court system.

The arrival and speedy departure from Guantanamo were pieced together by the AP using flight records andinterviews with current and former U.S. officials and others familiar with the CIA's detention program. Allspoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the program.

Top officials at the White House, Justice Department, Pentagon and CIA consulted on the prisoner transfer.

CIA spokesman George Little said: "The so-called black sites and enhanced interrogation methods, which

were administered on the basis of guidance from the Department of Justice, are a thing of the past."

The detainees moved to Guantanamo in September 2003 were Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, RamziBinalshibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

Binalshibh and al-Hawsawi helped plan the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Al-Nashiri was the mastermind ofthe 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Zubaydah was an al-Qaeda travel facilitator.

The admitted terrorists had spent months overseas enduring some of the harshest interrogation tactics in U.S.history. By late summer 2003, the CIA needed somewhere to hold them but no longer needed to conduct

prolonged interrogations.

The U.S. naval facility at Guantanamo Bay seemed a good fit. Military tribunals were to be held there, and afederal appeals court ruled unanimously that detainees could not use U.S. courts to challenge theirimprisonment.

But not long after the men arrived, things began unraveling. In November, over the administration'sobjections, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether Guantanamo Bay detainees could sue in U.S.courts.

On March 27, 2004, just as the sun was setting on Guantanamo, a Gulfstream IV jet left Cuba. The plane

landed in Rabat, Morocco, the next morning. By the time the Supreme Court ruled June 28 that detaineesshould have access to U.S. courts, Zubaydah and the others were once again scattered throughout the blacksites.

-- Associated Press
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