The Sunday Mail
WASHINGTON – The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) acted more brutally and pervasively than it acknowledged to the White House and public about its torture of terrorist detainees after September 11 attacks, a U.S. Senate report said on Tuesday, drawing calls to prosecute American officials.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-year review of 6.3 million pages of CIA documents concluded that the intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing al Qaeda and other captives in secret facilities worldwide between 2002 and 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
The CIA interrogation program was devised by two agency contractors to squeeze information from suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The interrogations took place in countries that included Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.
Some captives were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads, and the report recorded cases of simulated drowning or “waterboarding” and sexual abuse, including “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” without any documented medical need.
It described one secret CIA prison, its location not identified, as a “dungeon” where detainees were kept in total darkness and shackled in isolated cells, bombarded with loud noise and given only a bucket in which to relieve themselves.
Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, speaking on the Senate floor after releasing the report, said the techniques in some cases amounted to torture and that “the CIA’s actions, a decade ago, are a stain on our values, and on our history.”
The U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, said the report revealed a “clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration” and called for prosecution of U.S. officials.
Civil rights advocates also called for accountability.
“Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York.
The CIA dismissed the findings, saying its interrogations secured valuable information. Many Republicans criticized the decision by Democratic lawmakers to release the report, which was put together by the committee’s Democratic majority, saying it would put Americans at risk.
The report found the techniques used were “far more brutal” than the CIA told the public or policymakers. Before the report’s release, the United States boosted security at its military and diplomatic facilities abroad.
The report said the CIA had tried to justify its use of torture by giving examples of what it called “thwarted” terrorist plots and suspect captures, but the “representations were inaccurate and contradicted by the CIA’s own records.” – REUTERS
