WASHINGTON — The CIA’s use of torture failed to gain any intelligence on imminent terrorist threats, didn’t lead to any high-level terrorists — including Osama bin Laden — produced fabricated information and was far more brutal than the agency portrayed to policymakers and the public, according to a long-awaited Senate report released Tuesday.
In a foreword to the document, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said for the first time that CIA personnel had broken U.S. law and violated international treaties against torture, charges that weren’t in the report’s conclusions.
“CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations and our values,” she wrote. “It is my personal conclusion, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured.”
The findings by the Democratic-led committee painted a portrait of the nation’s premier espionage agency pursuing a cruel, ineffective and money-wasting interrogation operation that produced intelligence that could have been found elsewhere, whose results the CIA misrepresented to its political masters and the American public, and that seriously damaged the United States’ international standing.
It appeared unlikely, however, that the report would lead to reopening a Justice Department criminal investigation, which was shut down in 2012, into CIA officials and contractors who were involved in the program, in which suspected al-Qaida terrorists were abducted overseas and interrogated in secret “black site” prisons while being subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Findings of the report include:
—The agency assigned unqualified personnel to run the secret prisons where it held, in often-inhuman conditions, at least 119 detainees, at least two of whom died. Some were beaten, deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, sometimes with their hands shackled over their heads, and subjected to unauthorized interrogation methods, including death threats.
—At least 26 detainees were wrongfully imprisoned.
—Multiple detainees who were subjected to the interrogation techniques and kept in extended isolation developed “psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.”
—The CIA may have subjected more detainees to waterboarding than just the three who it’s publicly admitted underwent the simulated drowning procedure.
—Former President George W. Bush, who signed a secret order authorizing the detention program a week after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, wasn’t filled in on the interrogation techniques until 2006, although someone in the White House canceled a CIA briefing that was planned for him in 2002.
—The CIA paid more than $80 million to a firm founded by two psychologists who were contracted, despite a lack of qualifications, to design the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” and interrogated some of the agency’s most valuable detainees.
In an emailed statement summarizing a response it provided to the committee last year, the CIA acknowledged that the value of some of the intelligence collected during the program had been exaggerated. But it defended the program’s effectiveness in breaking up terrorist plots and providing information on al-Qaida that’s still valuable.
“Interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives,” CIA Director John Brennan said in a statement, referring to enhanced interrogation techniques. “The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qaida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.”
President Barack Obama, who’d previously described the CIA’s interrogation methods as torture, didn’t use the term in a statement that also indicated his administration doesn’t intend to reopen the criminal investigation into one of the darkest chapters in the U.S. war on terrorism.
Instead, he repeated a theme he’s sounded before, saying he hoped that the report “can help us leave these (interrogation) techniques where they belong — to the past.”
While praising the personnel of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies for the sacrifices they’ve made to keep the nation secure, Obama said some of the actions taken after 9/11 were “contrary to our values” and that he’d ordered them stopped when he took office.
The report “reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as a nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests,” he continued. “Moreover, these techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.”
Feinstein took to the Senate floor for about an hour to detail the findings of the $40 million, four-year investigation, which was based on a review of some 6.3 million pages of top-secret CIA cables, emails, records and other documents.
“History will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say, ‘Never again,’ ” Feinstein said. “The CIA’s actions a decade ago are a stain on our values and our history. The release of this report cannot remove that stain, but releasing this report tells the world that America is big enough to admit to its mistakes.”
At the same time, she released a 525-page declassified summary of the more than 6,700-page top-secret report.
In his statement, Brennan acknowledged that “the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the agency made mistakes,” which he said stemmed chiefly from how unprepared the CIA was to carry out what he described as an unprecedented mass detention and interrogation effort in the war to dismantle al-Qaida.
While the CIA found “common ground” with some of the Senate committee’s findings, Brennan said, “We part ways with the committee on some key points.”
He said the intelligence gleaned from the interrogations had been used to thwart attack plots, capture terrorists and save lives. And he balked at the committee’s conclusion that CIA officials had tried to hide the extent of the program from the Bush White House, Congress and the public.
In its summary of its 2013 response to the report, the CIA conceded that some of the exaggerated value of the intelligence collected by the program was reflected in a September 2006 speech in which Bush acknowledged its existence for the first time.
However, the CIA described the report as an inaccurate account of the interrogation program.
“There are too many flaws for it to stand as the official record of the program,” the agency said.
“We cannot vouch for every individual statement that was made over the years of the program, and we acknowledge that some of those statements were wrong. But the image portrayed in the study of an organization that — on an institutional scale — intentionally misled and routinely resisted oversight from the White House, the Congress, the Department of Justice and its own (inspector general) simply does not comport with the record,” it said.
The CIA maintained that the information collected during interrogations was crucial in detecting terrorist plots.
“The sum total of information provided from detainees in CIA custody substantially advanced the agency’s strategic and tactical understanding of the enemy in ways that continue to inform counterterrorism efforts to this day,” the agency said.
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(Hannah Allam, Anita Kumar and Lindsay Wise contributed to this report.)
Source: MSN
