Tuesday’s release by the Senate Intelligence Committee of its long-awaited report on the torture by the CIA of detainees in the so-called “war on terror” does not go far enough, according to major U.S. human rights groups.
While welcoming the report’s release, the subject of months of intensive and sometimes furious negotiations between the Senate Committee’s majority and both the CIA and the Obama administration, the groups said additional steps were needed to ensure that U.S. officials never again engage in the kind of torture detailed in the report.
“This should be the beginning of a process, not the end,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The report should shock President Obama and Congress into action, to make sure that torture and cruelty are never used again.”
He called, among other steps, for the appointment of a special prosecutor to hold the “architects and perpetrators” of what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) accountable and for Congress to assert its control over the CIA, “which in this report sounds more like a rogue paramilitary group than the intelligence gathering agency that it’s supposed to be.”
He was joined by London-based Amnesty International which noted that the declassified information provided in the report constituted “a reminder to the world of the utter failure of the USA to end the impunity enjoyed by those who authorised and used torture and other ill-treatment.
“This is a wake-up call to the USA; they must disclose the full truth about the human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable and ensure justice for the victims,” said Amnesty’s Latin America director, Erika Guevara.
The Senate Committee’s report, actually a 524-page, partially-redacted summary of a still-classified 6,300-page report on the treatment of at least 119 terrorist suspects detained in secret locations overseas, accused the CIA not only of engaging in torture that was “brutal and far worse” than has previously been reported, but also of regularly misleading the White House and Congress both about what it was doing and the purported value of the intelligence it derived from those practices.
Water-boarding, for example, was used against detainees more often and in more of the CIA’s “black sites” than previously known; sleep deprivation was used for up to a week at a time against some suspects; others received “rectal feeding” or “hydration’; and still others were forced to stand on broken feet or legs.
In at least one case, a detainee was frozen to death; in the case of Abu Zubayda, an alleged “high-value” Al Qaeda detainee who was subject to dozens of water-boardings, the treatment was so brutal, several CIA officers asked to be transferred if it did not stop.
While the CIA officers and former Bush administration officials, notably former Vice President Dick Cheney, have long insisted that key information – including intelligence that eventually led to the killing of Osama bin Laden — was obtained from EITs, the report concluded that these techniques were ineffective.
Seven of 39 detainees who were subject to the most aggressive EITs provided no intelligence at all, while information obtained from the others preceded the harsh treatment, according to the report, which relied on the CIA’s own cables and reports.
In some cases, detainees subjected to EITs gave misinformation about “terrorist threats” which did not actually exist, the report found. Of the 119 known detainees subject to EITs, at least 26 should never have been held, it said.
Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, who fought hard for months to release the report over the CIA’s fierce objections, wrote in its Forward that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks, “she could understand the CIA’s impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from the battlefield, and CIA was encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.”
“Nevertheless, such pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security,” according to Feinstein.
For his part, CIA director John Brennan, a career CIA officer appointed by Obama whose role in the Bush administration’s detention programme remains cloudy, “acknowledge(d) that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes.”
“The most serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact that the Agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required to carry out an unprecedented, worldwide program of detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorists.”
But he also defended the EITs, insisting that “interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” A fact sheet released by the CIA claimed, as an example, that one detainee, after undergoing EITs, identified bin Laden’s courier, which subsequently led the CIA to the Al Qaeda chief’s location.
With several notable exceptions, Republicans also defended the CIA and the Bush administration’s orders to permit EITs. Indeed, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican members released a minority report that noted that the majority of staff had not interviewed any CIA officers directly involved in the programme.
“There is no reason whatsoever for this report to ever be published,” said the Committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Saxby Chambliss. “This is purely a partisan tactic” which he said was designed to attack the Bush administration. Republicans also warned that the report’s release would endanger U.S. service personnel and citizens abroad by fuelling anti-American sentiment, especially in the Muslim world.
But Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam war, defended the report, calling it “a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose …but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.”
McCain has championed efforts to pass legislation outlawing torture, particularly because Obama’s 2009 executive orders prohibiting such practices could be reversed by a future president.
Passage of such a law – whose prospects appear virtually nil in light of Republican control of both houses of Congress for the next two years – is one of the demands, along with release of the full report, of most human-rights groups here.
“The Obama administration and Congress should work together to build a durable consensus against torture by pursuing legislation that demonstrates bipartisan unity and fidelity to our ideals,” said Elisa Massimino, director of Human Rights First.
Many groups, however, want Obama to go further by prosecuting those responsible for the EIT programme, a step that his administration made clear from the outset it was loathe to do.
“We renew our demand for accountability for those individuals responsible for the CIA torture programme,” said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented a number of detainees at Guantanamo, including Abu Zubaydah, in U.S. courts. “They should be prosecuted in U.S. courts; and, if our government continues to refuse to hold them accountable, they must be pursued internationally under principles of universal jurisdiction.”
“The report shows the repeated claims that harsh measures were needed to protect Americans are utter fiction,” according to Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth. “Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.”
Noting that health professionals, including doctors and psychologists also played a role in the EITs, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) also called for legal accountability. “For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been lying about its use of torture,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director.
“The report confirms that health professionals used their skills to break the minds and bodies of detainees. Their actions destroyed trust in clinicians, undermined the integrity of their professions, and damaged the United States’ human rights record, which can only be corrected through accountability,” she said.
This article was first published by IPS and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>by Derek Davison
The CIA and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) have been embroiled for several weeks in a dispute over the declassification of a sweeping Senate report, the product of an investigation into the George W. Bush-era CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program. The SSCI’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), has accused the CIA of [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
The CIA and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) have been embroiled for several weeks in a dispute over the declassification of a sweeping Senate report, the product of an investigation into the George W. Bush-era CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program. The SSCI’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), has accused the CIA of removing documents related to the investigation from the committee’s computers, and of attempting to intimidate committee staffers by requesting a Justice Department review into how the committee was able to obtain an internal CIA review of the program. Now, as the White House and CIA review the SSCI report for declassification, its major findings have been leaked to the public, and they reveal that the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and the conditions under which it held its detainees, were “brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.”
While the public still does not know what the committee’s report says (the committee voted 11-3 on April 3 to declassify its executive summary and conclusions, but the CIA and White House must conduct a final review before it can be released), members of the committee have talked openly about its findings. Senator John McCain said that the report “confirms…that the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.” Defenders of the program, like Fox News contributor Liz Cheney, argue that it produced important intelligence that helped the United States to thwart terrorist plots and to degrade Al-Qaeda’s capacity to sponsor further attacks, but what we know of the findings of the SSCI report contradicts that argument. Not that it should matter; any debate over the enhanced interrogation program must, as Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights has argued, reckon the morality of torture, not its effectiveness.
It is torture that we’re talking about, euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation” aside. In a remarkable editorial in the April 11 Washington Post, former contract interrogator Eric Fair described what he saw and did during his time in Iraq:
In April 2004 I was stationed at a detention facility in Fallujah. Inside the detention facility was an office. Inside the office was a small chair made of plywood and two-by-fours. The chair was two feet tall. The rear legs were taller than the front legs. The seat and chair back leaned forward. Plastic zip ties were used to force a detainee into a crouched position from which he could not recover. It caused muscle failure of the quads, hamstrings and calves. It was torture.
Fair concludes that the “stain” of the torture program demands a full accounting, for the sake of the nation as well as those who participated in the program directly.
History tells us that we should not be surprised by the Obama administration’s reluctance to fully investigate allegations of wrongdoing by its predecessor. Barack Obama made it very clear, even before he took office, that he preferred to “look forward as opposed to looking backward” when it came to the subject of investigating potential Bush administration crimes, and he has adhered to that position over the past five-plus years.
Obama is not the first president to turn a blind eye to possible transgressions by a former administration. The obvious example of this phenomenon was Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon for any crimes related to the Watergate scandal, in 1974. But Ford had been Nixon’s Vice-President, making his act somewhat understandable. Bill Clinton’s decision not to investigate alleged crimes that took place under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations was, as Robert Parry notes, motivated by the same desire to focus on advancing his own agenda, to “look forward as opposed to looking backward,” which Obama intimated as president-elect.
While it may behoove a particular administration to avoid the appearance of vindictiveness toward previous administrations, the decision not to investigate something as pernicious as the officially sanctioned torture of prisoners sacrifices the US’ credibility in the long run. It should not go unnoticed, for example, that while the US Ambassador to Kosovo is urging that nation to conduct a tribunal over the issue of organ trafficking by Kosovar Albanian militias in order to “build up its international credibility,” two branches of the US government are openly at odds over whether to even publicly acknowledge the past abuses of our “interrogation” program. It probably doesn’t go unnoticed that while the US refuses to reckon with its abuse of detainees, it is also refusing to issue a visa to Iran’s newly appointed UN Ambassador on the grounds that he was a background participant in the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran (he’s now part of Iran’s “reformist” camp). If the US can’t honestly reflect on its own past, how does it have the standing to demand the same of other nations?
The CIA’s resistance to a candid assessment of its torture program, even under an administration that firmly and officially disavowed that program upon taking office, speaks to an overall unwillingness to face accountability for any excesses wrought by the US’ ongoing “War on Terror.” While the Senate has investigated the failures in pre-war intelligence that led to the Iraq War, there has been no consequence to anyone involved in those failures. It is safe to say that there will be no consequences for anyone involved in the torture program as well, given the Obama administration’s deference to CIA efforts to stonewall even the release of a report detailing what actually took place.
It is impossible to imagine, then, that any future administration will have any interest in reckoning with other morally and legally questionable national security policies of this period, like the use of drones or the enlargement of the surveillance state. When it comes to the “War on Terror,” the rule seems to be “what’s past is past.”
]]>by Nick Turse
via Tom Dispatch Try to remain calm — even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race. Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt [...]]]>
by Nick Turse
via Tom Dispatch Try to remain calm — even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race. Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation. Try not to think about dying, because there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately. You’re helpless. You’re in agony.
In short, you’re a victim of “water torture.” Or the “water cure.” Or the “water rag.” Or the “water treatment.” Or “tormenta de toca.” Or any of the other nicknames given to the particular form of brutality that today goes by the relatively innocuous term “waterboarding.”
The practice only became widely known in the United States after it was disclosed that the CIA had been subjecting suspected terrorists to it in the wake of 9/11. More recently, cinematic depictions of waterboarding in the award-winning film Zero Dark Thirty and questions about it at the Senate confirmation hearing for incoming CIA chief John Brennan have sparked debate. Water torture, however, has a surprisingly long history, dating back to at least the fourteenth century. It has been a U.S. military staple since the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was employed by Americans fighting an independence movement in the Philippines. American troops would continue to use the brutal tactic in the decades to come — and during the country’s repeated wars in Asia, they would be victims of it, too.
Water Torture in Vietnam
For more than a decade, I’ve investigated atrocities committed during the Vietnam War. In that time, I’ve come to know people who employed water torture and people who were brutalized by it. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies regularly used it on enemy prisoners and civilian detainees in an effort to gain intelligence or simply punish them. A picture of the practice even landed on the front page of the Washington Post on January 21, 1968, but mostly it went on in secret.
Long-hidden military documents help to fill in the picture. “I held the suspect down, placed a cloth over his face, and then poured water over the cloth, thus forcing water into his mouth,” Staff Sergeant David Carmon explained in testimony to Army criminal investigators in December 1970. According to their synopsis, he admitted to using both electrical torture and water torture in interrogating a detainee who died not long after.
According to summaries of eyewitness statements by members of Carmon’s unit, the prisoner, identified as Nguyen Cong, had been “beat and kicked,” lost consciousness, and suffered convulsions. A doctor who examined Nguyen, however, claimed there was nothing wrong with him. Carmon and another member of his military intelligence team then “slapped the Vietnamese and poured water on his face from a five-gallon can,” according to a summary of his testimony. An official report from May 1971 states that Nguyen Cong passed out “and was carried to the confinement cage where he was later found dead.”
Years later, Carmon told me by email that the abuse of prisoners in Vietnam was extensive and encouraged by superiors. “Nothing was sanctioned,” he wrote, “but nothing was off-limits short of seriously injuring a prisoner.”
It turns out that Vietnamese prisoners weren’t the only ones subjected to water torture in Vietnam. U.S. military personnel serving there were victims, too. Documents I came across in the U.S. National Archives offer a glimpse of a horrifying history that few Americans know anything about.
“I had a ‘water job’ done on me,” one former American prisoner told a military investigator, according to a 1969 Army report. “I was handcuffed and taken to the shower… They held my head under the shower for about two minutes and when I’d pull back to breath, they beat me on the chest and stomach. This lasted for about 10 minutes, during which I was knocked to the floor twice. When I begged for them to stop, they did.”
Another said that his cellmate had rolled their cigarette butts together to fashion a full cigarette. When the American guards discovered the “contraband,” they grabbed him and hauled him to the showers. “Three of the guards held me and the other one held my face under the shower,” he testified. “This lasted quite a while and I thought I was going to drown.” Afterward, he said, the same thing was done to his cellmate who, upon returning, admitted that “he confessed” as a result of the torture.
Still another captive testified that handcuffed prisoners were taken to the showers. “The guards would hold the prisoner’s head back and make him swallow water,” he explained. “This treatment would cause the prisoner to resist which would give the guards an excuse to punch the prisoner.” He also testified that it was no isolated incident. “I have witnessed such treatments about nine times.”
“Cruel or Unusual”
This wasn’t, in fact, the first time Americans had been subjected to water torture while at war in Asia. During World War II, members of the Japanese military used water torture on American prisoners. “I was given what they call the water cure,” Lieutenant Chase Nielsen testified after the war. When asked about the experience, he answered: “I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.”
The same tortures were also meted out to American pilots captured during the Korean War. One described his treatment this way: “They would bend my head back, put a towel over my face, and pour water over the towel. I could not breathe… When I would pass out, they would shake me and begin again.”
For their crimes against prisoners, including water torture, some Japanese officers were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, while others were executed.
The legal response to torturers in Vietnam was very different. While investigating allegations against Staff Sergeant Carmon, for instance, Army agents discovered within his unit a pattern of “cruelty and maltreatment” of prisoners that went on from March 1968 to October 1969. According to an official report, Army agents determined that the evidence warranted formal charges against 22 interrogators, many of them implicated in the use of water torture, electrical torture, beatings, and other forms of mistreatment. But neither Carmon nor any of the others was ever charged, court martialed, or punished in any way, according to the records.
There was similar impunity for — in one of the more bizarre uses of water torture — Americans who tortured Americans in Vietnam. Although a 1969 Army Inspector General’s report into “alleged brutality and maltreatment” noted that “the water treatment was administered as a form of punishment and constitutes a form of maltreatment of prisoners,” those who water-tortured American personnel were never tried, let alone sentenced to long prison terms or executed for their crimes. In fact, those implicated — Army guards working at the American detention facility informally known as Long Binh Jail — apparently escaped any punishment whatsoever.
This record of impunity has continued in more recent years. While the CIA has acknowledged its use of waterboarding after 9/11 and President Obama has unambiguously stated that the practice is a method of torture, his administration declared that no one would be prosecuted for utilizing it or any other “enhanced interrogation technique.” As a CIA spokesperson pointed out to ProPublica last year, after reviewing the Agency’s treatment of more than 100 detainees, the Department of Justice “declined prosecution in every case.”
The 1969 Inspector General’s report on American torture of American prisoners unequivocally defined the “water treatment” meted out to jailed American military personnel as “cruel or unusual.” Bush administration lawyers in the post-9/11 years, however, attempted to redefine the drowning of defenseless prisoners as something less than torture, basically turning the clock back to the ethical standards of the Spanish Inquisition.
At least that 1969 report noted that water torture “was administered without authority” to those American prisoners. The current situation has been radically different. In recent years, it wasn’t merely low-level brutalizers and their immediate superiors who sanctioned and approved torture techniques, but senior White House officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney. From George W. Bush’s own memoir, we know that the previous president gave an enthusiastic order (“Damn right!”) to subject other human beings to water torture, just as we know that President Obama has made certain no one in the government involved in ordering or facilitating such acts would ever answer for any of them.
In 1901, an American officer was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor for waterboarding a Filipino prisoner. By the late 1940s, the centuries-old practice was so reviled that significant prison time or even death lay in store for those using it. In the late 1960s, it was still viewed as a cruel and unusual punishment, even if U.S. troops who tortured Vietnamese and American captives weren’t subject to prosecution for it. In the twenty-first century, as water torture moved from Southeast Asian prison showers to the White House, it also morphed into an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Today, the president’s pick to head the CIA refuses even to label waterboarding as “torture.”
What does it say about a society when its morals and ethics on the treatment of captives go into reverse? What are we to make of leaders who authorize, promote, or shield such brutal practices or about citizens who stand by and allow them to happen? What does it mean when torture, already the definition of “cruel,” becomes usual?
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in theLos Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). You can watch his recent conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here. His website is NickTurse.com. You can follow him on Tumblr and on Facebook.
[Note: I’m not the first to write about the American use of water torture on U.S. prisoners in Vietnam. See Cecil B. Currey’s 1999 volume, Long Binh Jail: An Oral History of Vietnam’s Notorious U.S. Military Prison. For an account, both gripping and harrowing, by a victim of water torture, see The Question, journalist Henri Alleg’s bite-sized account of his torture by French forces in Algeria during the 1950s.]
Copyright 2013 Nick Turse
Photo: Demonstrators from the group “World Can’t Wait” hold a mock waterboarding torture of a prisioner in Times Square 11 January 2008 to mark the sixth year anniversary of when the United States opened the camps at Guantanamo. AFP PHOTO / Timothy A. CLARY (Photo credit should read TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)
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