I have been listening to reporting on this all morning, from essentially every cable news outlet, and I have to say that I think I am going to have some trouble sleeping tonight.
I knew some of this, but to have it all laid out like this...well it's like being punched in the stomach.
Here are the most horrific revelations according to
TPM:
Torture didn't work, though the CIA told everyone it did.I knew this, but still........
The CIA used brutal and gruesome methods like 'rectal feeding' and 'rectal hydration' Coercive interrogation methods included waterboarding, sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, nudity, slaps, slamming detainees against a wall. At least three detainees were threatened with harm to their families, including the threat of raping a detainee's mother. And it gets worse. "At least five CIA detainees were subjected to 'rectal rehydration' or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity," the report reads, documenting in gruesome detail one such example involving detainee Majid Khan. The CIA once used harsh interrogation tactics on two of its own informants.Seriously?
The CIA was extremely secretive and fought congressional oversight.This part should not surprise anybody.
Potential congressional oversight scared the CIA into destroying its interrogation tapes. In late 2005, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) proposed an independent commission to investigate U.S. interrogation policies, which prompted interest within the CIA in destroying videotapes of its interrogations. Although Levin's amendment failed on Nov. 8 of that year and the committee was not yet aware that the tapes existed, the CIA went ahead and destroyed them one day later anyway.Yeah they clearly
broke the law here. Gee I wonder if anybody will be punished for it?
The
LA Times has more:
One detainee in CIA custody was “chained to a wall in the standing position for 17 days” and another looked like “a dog who had been kenneled,” according to a CIA description cited in the report. Some detainees were kept awake for nearly 180 hours, “usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.” Some were placed in ice water baths. At least five captives were subjected to painful rectal rehydration or rectal feeding, without documented medical necessity. In one case, the CIA put a captive’s lunch — hummus, raisins, pasta and nuts — into a blender and inserted the food into his colon through a tube. The CIA applied its methods “in near nonstop fashion for days or weeks at a time,” the document states. If you torture someone long enough, they'll confess to being Santa Claus. All people eventually break under torture, and the victims will do whatever the interrogators want in order to end the pain. Some of the agency officers responsible had “documented personal and professional problems of a serious nature — including histories of violence and abusive treatment of others — that should have called into question their employment,” let alone their suitability to run a sensitive CIA program, the report states. The most gruesome conditions described occurred at a site in a former brick factory north of Kabul, Afghanistan, that was used by the CIA for interrogations starting in November 2002. In the facility, referred to as “COBALT” in the Senate report but code-named Salt Pit by the CIA, conditions were so dungeon-like that interrogators wore headlamps to navigate pitch-dark passageways. “At times, detainees there were walked around naked and shackled with their hands above their head,” the report states. “At other times, naked detainees were hooded and dragged up and down corridors while being slapped and punched.” An Afghan militant named Gul Rahman died in the Salt Pit of suspected hypothermia in November 2002 after he was beaten, stripped naked from the waist down and left chained to a concrete floor in near-freezing temperatures.This thing reads like a Stephen King horror novel.
Make no mistake we did this. This is us.
Perhaps we were not the ones slapping the detainees, depriving them of sleep, or leaving them to die in the cold, but this is now how America is defined. And we are, after all, Americans.
We can shrug off the blame and claim we did not know what was going on, but we knew for quite some time that the US was using "enhanced interrogation techniques," what exactly did we think those were?
And though some of us spoke out back then we simply did not yell loudly enough, and others simply pretended that we were justified in doing ANYTHING so long as it made us safe at home.
Well it didn't. If anything it prolonged the risk, and has done much to help create terrorist groups that will continue to frighten the American people for many, many years to come.
Simply put the Bush Administration is an organized crime syndicate, who broke multiple laws, sent thousands to an early grave based on lies, and destroyed the very fabric of what makes us America by doing to these suspected terrorists what we have condemned others for doing for decades.
If this is not enough to keep Americans from electing another Bush in 2016, or ever again for that matter, I cannot imagine what will.
By the way as to the idea that the release of this report will inspire attacks against Americans, there was one analyst today who said "We are currently actively bombing ISIS. They already have plenty of reasons to want to attack us. It is unlikely that the release of this report will give them any more."
