US probe details detainee brutality

CIA used small-box confinement, sleep deprivation and death threats

The United States brutalized scores of terror suspects with interrogation tactics that turned secret CIA prisons into chambers of suffering and did nothing to make the country safer after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, Senate investigators have concluded.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report, which has been years in the making, accuses the CIA of misleading its political masters about what it was doing with its "black site" captives, and deceiving the US people about the effectiveness of its techniques.

The report released on Tuesday is the first public account of tactics employed after the 9/11 attacks, and it describes far harsher actions than had been known previously.

Tactics included confinement in small boxes, weeks of sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, slapping and slamming, and threats to kill, harm or sexually abuse captives' families.

President Barack Obama declared some of the past practices to be "brutal, and as I've said before, constituted torture in my mind. And that's not who we are", he told the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo in an interview.

Obama said releasing the report was important "so that we can account for it, so that people understand precisely why I banned these practices as one of the first acts I took when I came into office, and hopefully make sure that we don't make those mistakes again".

Then-president George W. Bush approved the program in 2002, but was not briefed by the CIA about the details until 2006. At that time, Bush expressed discomfort with the "image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on himself".

Sharp debate

The report produced revulsion among many, challenges to its veracity from some lawmakers, and a sharp debate about whether it should have been released at all.

Republican Senator John McCain, tortured in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, was out of step with some fellow Republicans in welcoming the report and endorsing its findings.

"We gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer," he said. "Too much."

Five hundred pages were released, representing the executive summary and conclusions of a still-classified 6,700-page full investigation.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic committee chairman whose staff prepared the summary, branded the findings a stain on US history.

"Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured," she declared from the Senate floor as she gave an extended account of the techniques identified in the investigation.

The report catalogs the use of ice baths, death threats, shackling in the cold and much more. Three detainees faced the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Many developed psychological problems.

In a statement, CIA Director John Brennan said the agency made mistakes and has learned from them.

(China Daily 12/11/2014 page12)