The CIA tortured prisoners regularly and brutally, with little oversight and to little good effect
By D.K. | WASHINGTON, DC
JOHN MCCAIN, the senior Republican senator from Arizona, spent time in a Hanoi prison camp after fighting for his country in the 1960s and early 1970s. His speech, which followed the publication earlier today of the Senate intelligence committee’s report into torture by the CIA in the years after September 11th 2001, is thus worth paying attention to. Torture, he said, “compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies”; the CIA agents who used it “stained our national honour”.
That is a bold statement, but not necessarily a hyperbolic one. The Senate’s report, which looks into the use of torture roughly between the 9/11 attacks and the end of the Bush presidency in 2008, is devastating stuff for the agency. What is shocking is not only the sorts of things that CIA officers were apparently getting up to, but also the brazen way in which they recorded it, with limited oversight from either the Senate or the executive branch of government.
According to the report, which is based on thousands of internal CIA documents, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a particularly Orwellian term for torture) that the agency used included not just waterboarding, but tactics such as forced “rectal feeding”; placing detainees in ice baths; leaving them on cold concrete floors; and simply hitting them. A footnote suggests that one officer played Russian roulette with prisoners; other interrogators had apparently admitted to sexual assault. Some detainees were held simply to gain leverage over family members; others were told that their family members, even their children, would be harmed.
Bad things happen in war. But the report also alleges that these brutal techniques generated little useful intelligence. According to the study, “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.” Worse, the CIA apparently deliberately misled Congress, the president and other parts of the executive branch about the use and usefulness of torture. Says the report: “According to CIA records, no CIA officer, up to and including CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, briefed the president on the specific CIA enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006.” Some information produced by the CIA appears to have been simply false: for example, the Senate committee has obtained a picture of a man being waterboarded in a prison in Afghanistan where the agency had claimed never to have used the technique.
The key revelation of the report is not so much that the American government has been torturing people—that has been widely known for several years (as Barack Obama awkwardly admitted in a speech this year, after 9/11 the American government “tortured some folks”). Rather, it is the extent to which the CIA was able to act without oversight. Indeed, if the report’s conclusions are right, an unelected and deeply secretive arm of government deliberately misled the elected parts of government in an attempt to justify utterly reprehensible policy. One question which immediately presents itself is how much of this is legal? The report does not say—but presumably some of these tactics may be illegal, either under international or domestic law. Are the people responsible still working for the CIA? Will they now be punished?
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the report, however, is that it has taken this long to come out at all. Michael Glennon, an academic at Tufts University and the author of a book, "National Security and Double Government", about America's intelligence agencies, notes that the Senate intelligence committee has unique access to America’s intelligence agencies: they can subpoena documents; request to visit sites and interrogate staff. Yet in the years when these abuses were apparently going on, they did none of that. To an extent, they were complicit in being misled. Now, Mr Glennon points out, America appears to have a committee exercising “hindsight, not oversight.”
Still, hindsight is better than what some would have. When the report came out, two Republican senators, Marco Rubio from Florida and Jim Risch from Idaho, put out a statement arguing that the mere publication of the report “could endanger the lives of Americans overseas, jeopardise US relations with foreign partners, potentially incite violence, create political problems for our allies, and be used as a recruitment tool for our enemies.” Mitch McConnell, who in January will become the Senate Majority Leader, says that the study is an “ideologically motivated and distorted recounting of historical events”. On conservative talk-radio, callers argue that the report was put out by Barack Obama to distract attention from his health-care law and that it will inspire terrorists to attack Americans.
Certainly some of the report’s conclusions may prove less clear-cut when the dust settles. The CIA’s director, John Brennan, has put out a statement arguing that while the agency “did not always live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves”, the problems came from sheer pressure in the wake of 9/11. He says that the idea that the CIA misled the rest of the government, or that its use of torture was useless, is not fair. It is also true, as Republicans point out, that the Senate’s investigation is based entirely on documents, not on interviews with current and former CIA staff (some of whom have popped up in recent days to defend the agency).
But even the CIA's defenders are not denying that the CIA tortured lots of people in its attempt to defend Americans. And as Mr McCain argued in his speech, that is bad enough: “The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.”
