CIA torture program: Senate report details abuse of detainees – as it happened

If you prefer to take your news aurally, this is an informative WBEZ news spot, with commentary by Katherine Hawkins, a national security fellow at @openthegov:

The Senate didn’t get to look at everything. The White House invoked executive privilege to block staffers from seeing thousands of documents potentially related to torture, the report says:

Here’s a key to the color code in the Senate report, via the Washington Post:

The CIA gave inaccurate information to journalists in order to mislead the public about the efficacy of its interrogation program, the Senate report reveals. The report also details how the CIA competed with the FBI over how much credit each agency would receive in the media for their achievements, real or imagined, the Guardian’s Nicky Woolf (@nickywoolf) reports:

“In seeking to shape press reporting … CIA officers and the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) provided unattributed background information on the program to journalists for books, articles and broadcasts, including when the existence of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was still classified,” the report said. [...]

Many of the inaccuracies the CIA fed to journalists, the report says, were consistent with inaccurate information being provided by the agency to policymakers at the time. The deputy director of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center explained to a colleague, according to the report, that “when the Washington Post or the New York Times quotes a ‘senior intelligence official’, it’s us.”

Read the full piece here.

We asked the experts – terrorism prosecutors, former spies, doctors and human rights lawyers – to comb through hundreds of pages and expose the new truths that matter most to history:

Here’s some of what they highlighted:

• A prosecutor’s Eureka moment: I never got specifics because they didn’t exist
  
• Human rights violations, rewarded with CIA cash
  
• Doctors were used to create a fiction of safe, legal and effective
  
• Anal probes as punishment for hunger-striking? So how is force-feeding not torture now?

Read the full piece here.

Video: CIA interrogation techniques were not effective. Here’s further footage of Dianne Feinstein’s address this morning on the Senate floor:

[The report] finds that coercive interrogation techniques did not produce the vital otherwise unavailable intelligence the CIA has claimed”:

More graphic detail from the report on the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

The Senate report poses a challenge for Europe to come clean about its own complicity in CIA-managed torture, Natalie Nougayrède writes in Comment Is Free:

As the world awaited the US Senate report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme under the George W Bush administration, there was very little introspection in Europe. As if European countries had nothing to do with what went on in the hunt for al-Qaida in the years after 9/11. In fact, many of America’s European allies were deeply involved in the CIA programme. And they have managed to stay very quiet about it. Could this change now?

Under President Bush the CIA used a web of European airports and bases for its extraordinary rendition flights, secretly transferring terror suspects across borders for interrogation. Some European states helped the CIA to carry out kidnappings. Others hosted CIA “black sites” – in effect, torture chambers – on their territory. The 600-page redacted summary of the 6,000-page report, published on Tuesday by the Senate intelligence committee, will no doubt be scrutinised to see what it may reveal of the continent’s involvement in these abuses.

In 2007 a special investigator for the Council of Europe, Dick Marty, concluded that there was “enough evidence to state” that American secret prisons existed in Poland and Romania. He added that the “illegal deportation of suspects by CIA kidnapping teams in Europe” amounted to “a massive and systematic violation of human rights”.

Read the full piece here.

Things Michael Hayden says in public don’t seem to age well.

A web site rebutting the Senate report went live today at the URL ciasavedlives.com. The site doesn’t identify its authors except to say “This website was created by a group of former CIA officials with hundreds of years of combined service. They all have first-hand knowledge that the CIA’s interrogation program was authorized, legal and effective. They also have in common that during its 5+ year investigation, the SSCI did not bother to contact them and seek their views.”

The web site offers a timeline purporting to show how the legal framework for the law evolved. It links to documents puporting to show that torture was effective, including books by former CIA director George Tenet and former CIA counter-terrorism chief Jose Rodriguez.

The site also repeatedly asks why Senate staffers did not seek to interview CIA officials about the program:

We, as former senior officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, created this website to present documents that conclusively demonstrate that the program was: authorized by the President, overseen by the National Security Council, and deemed legal by the Attorney General of the United States on multiple occasions. None of those officials were interviewed either. None. CIA relied on their policy and legal judgments. We deceived no one. You will not find this truth in the Majority Report.

The CIA extracted false information about terrorist plots against Heathrow airport and London’s Canary Wharf business district from al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and then used it to justify its use of waterboarding, the US Senate intelligence committee report on the CIA’s use of torture concluded.

The Guardian’s Ian Cobain (@iancobain) and Richard Norton-Taylor (@nortontaylor) report:

While a different prisoner said there had been a fledgling plan to attack each of the London targets, this had not been developed because those responsible had been apprehended, the report says.

Despite this, Mohammed began to deliver up elaborate details of the plots once his interrogators began to subject him to waterboarding, according to the committee’s examination of secret CIA files. The agency then decided to increase the number of times that Mohammed was subjected to the torture technique in order to induce him to confess to supposed plots within the US.

The CIA then began to highlight the “intelligence” about the London attacks to argue that waterboarding had not only proved invaluable, but must be allowed to continue. [...]

Once the waterboarding ceased, Mohammed felt able to admit that the details he had provided about the plots against London had been false.

Read the full piece here.

‘So he thanked us for bringing him to that point’: