The “Senate Torture Report”—officially known
as The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “Study
ofthe Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation
Program”—is
finally out after years of delay.
Over 500 pages long, it covers CIA actions toward
prisoners in the war on terror from 2001 through about 2009 and it
is, at first blush, a truly devastating document on every possible
level. Not only did the CIA systematically and routinely lie to the
executive branch, charges the report, it did the same with the
legislatiive branch at essentially every opportunity. From the
executive summary:
Much of the information the CIA provided to the media on
the operation of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program and
the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques was
inaccurate and was similar to the inaccurate information provided
by the CIA to the Congress, the Department of Justice, and the
White House.
Lying to the media is the least of the problems the report lays
bare. To make matters even worse (and really, it’s hard
to know when we’ve reached bottom with this one), the report notes
that the CIA failed to consult either with its own experts or
outside ones on the efficacy of torture:
The CIA did not review its past experience with coercive
interrogations, or its previous statementto Congress that “inhumane
physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive
becausethey do notproduce intelligence and will probably result in
false answers.” The CIA also didnot contact other elements of the
U.S. Government with interrogation expertise.
And then there’s this. Between 2002 and 2009, says the
report,
…the CIA made a series of representations to officials
at the White House, the Departmentof Justice, and the Congress,
asserting that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were
uniquely effective and necessary to produce otherwise unavailable
intelligence that the U.S. government could not obtain from other
sources.
That need was the moral warrant used to coax reluctant
legislators and others to go along: Whatever you think of
torture, it works and we’re in a war for our very existence, don’t
you understand! A redacted 2003 email in the report spells out
the way the CIA talked about its needs:
“Simply put, detainee information has saved countless
American lives inside the US and abroad. We believe there is no
doubt al-Qa’ida would have succeeded in launching additional
attacks in the US and that the information obtained from these
detainees through the use of enhanced measures was key to unlocking
this information. It is our assessment that if CIA loses the
ability to interrogate and use enhanced measures in a responsible
way, we will not be able to effectively prosecute this
war.”
Yet in surveying 119 cases of prisoners held at various
places and looking at the “Eight Most Frequently Cited Examples of
Plots ‘Thwarted’ and Terrorists Captures Provided by the CIA as
Evidence for the Effectiveness of the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation
Techniques,” a very different reality emerges: “The
Committee found the CIA’s representations to beinaccurate and
unsupported by CIA records.”
Among the “thwarted” plots were Jose Padilla’s “dirty bomb”
operation, the Karachi plots, and the captures of Iyman Farris and
Hambali, among others.
Dick Cheney, who acknowledged he hadn’t read the report, has
already written it off as “a bunch of hooey,” a banal epithet to
characterize what reads like something approaching moral
monstrosity.
Whether the report sparks violence in the Middle East and
beyond—I’m betting that our actual foreign policy over even just
the past few years is the likelier culprit—it is a terrible but
necessary examination of what the United States has allowed to
happen under the name of making the world safe from terrorism.
Most accounts have the Senate Republicans dissenting from the
report’s conclusions. By all means, bring on the debate over what
actually was going on in an agency that has never been particularly
respectful of either the Constitution or respect for any
limitations placed upon it. We may well learn things that shed new
light on some of the report’s darkest passages.
But until that happens, it seems as if the Senate report is one
more reason to deeply, deeply question the government when it tells
you that it is being straight even with itself and asks that your
surrender any aspect of your freedom or skepticism in the name of
safety.
Read the full report here:
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