Waterboarding, weeklong sleep deprivation and rectal feeding. All of it for nothing.
The report starts with the fact that torture was fruitless.
“The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees,” it declares in its opening line.
The report goes on to show how the CIA lied to the White House, Congress and the Department of Justice, claiming to have learned all kinds of essential information from tortured detainees.
However, the review of thousands of classified documents reveals another picture: All of the information that had supposedly been obtained from tortured detainees either came before the torture or was used only to corroborate information the CIA already knew.
The information, therefore, was obtainable through other means.
Even more concerning: the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” often elicited “fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.”
“Detainees provided fabricated information on critical intelligence issues, including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities,” the report notes.
The Central Mis-Intelligence Agency
This fact, of course, was not relayed to the White House, in an apparent effort to give the White House some duck-and-cover.
“The CIA provided extensive amounts of inaccurate and incomplete information related to the operation and effectiveness of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program to the White House, the National Council principals, and their staffs,” the report says.
The White House and Congress, therefore, had little opportunity to offer useful oversight.
The Central “See No Evil” Agency
Perhaps most damning, however, is the fact the interrogation tactics “were brutal and far worse” than the CIA had previously claimed.
Although the CIA had previously claimed waterboarding was not “torture,” the report found that the technique was “physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting.”
When the CIA’s first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, was subjected to the practice, he became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”
Zubaydah had been wounded by a bullet during his capture; the CIA decided that the interrogation should take “precedence” over his medical care. As such, the injury was exacerbated.
Such decisions became policy with future cases.
Then there was the sleep deprivation, in which CIA agents kept detainees awake for more than a week. At least five detainees reported hallucinating but were kept standing with their arms shackled overhead while standing naked.
In what will probably become fodder for late night comedy television, the CIA also engaged in “rectal rehydration,” a type of “rectal feeding.”
The Central Anal-Fixation Agency
At least one interrogator seemed to know that all of this was, at best, illegal, or, at worst, a violation of all human decency. He told a detainee he would never get out of the prison alive because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you.”
