The Battles

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/five-revelations-about-the-cias-interrogation-techniques/article22017072/

NOTE:

1.   The article (below) does not name “the company” that took over the CIA torture program:

Two former military psychologists who had not conducted a single real interrogation were hired – at a daily rate of $1,800 (U.S.) each – to waterboard detainees. They later started a company that took over and ran the CIA program from 2005 until it was closed in 2009. The CIA paid the company $81-million.

2.   The New York Times article below is integrated with other information at:

2015-03-24   (U.S. Torture)  Lockheed Martin, Consolidated documentation, “Contract Interrogators”. Sytex. CIA Torture out-sourced. The disaster explained in U.S. Senate Committee Report on Torture, 2015.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Five revelations about the CIA’s interrogation techniques,  NY Times News Service

For four years, according to CIA records, no one from the CIA ever came to the Oval Office to give President George W. Bush a full briefing on what was happening in the dungeons of Afghanistan and Eastern Europe.

Brutal

The CIA’s interrogation techniques were “far more brutal” and employed more extensively than the agency portrayed.

AP Video Dec. 09 2014, 1:40 PM EST

Video: CIA Torture Report: Treatment of detainees far more brutal than thought

The report describes extensive waterboarding as a “series of near drownings” and suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three prisoners the CIA has acknowledged in the past.

The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit – a facility where the CIA had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in U.S. custody.

With the approval of the CIA’s medical staff, some CIA prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” – a technique that the CIA’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.”

The harsh techniques were described as leading to “psychological and behavioural issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.”

Deceptive

For four years, according to CIA records, no one from the CIA ever came to the Oval Office to give President George W. Bush a full briefing on what was happening in the dungeons of Afghanistan and Eastern Europe.

By the time the CIA director came in April, 2006, to give Mr. Bush the agency’s first briefing about the interrogation techniques it had been using since 2002, more than three dozen prisoners had already been subjected to them. And when told about one detainee being chained to the ceiling of his cell, clothed in a diaper and forced to urinate and defecate on himself, even a president known for his dead-or-alive swagger “expressed discomfort,” according to the report.

The report portrays a White House that approved the brutal questioning of suspects, but was kept in the dark about many aspects of the program.

“The CIA repeatedly provided incomplete and inaccurate information” to the White House, the report concludes.

Even to the extent that the president and his advisers understood the program, they kept other top administration figures out of the loop, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. An internal CIA e-mail from July, 2003, noted that the White House “is extremely concerned Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on.”

Dysfunctional

In January, 2003, 10 months into the CIA’s secret prison program, the agency’s chief of interrogations sent an e-mail to colleagues saying that the relentlessly brutal treatment of prisoners was a train wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” He said he had told his bosses he had “serious reservations” about the program and no longer wanted to be associated with it “in any way.”

The infighting in the CIA interrogation program was only one symptom of the dysfunction. The Senate report said interrogation teams included people with “notable derogatory information” in their records, including one with “workplace anger management issues” and another who “had reportedly admitted to sexual assault.”

The chief of interrogations, who is not named in the report, was given the job in the fall of 2002 even though the agency’s inspector general had recommended that he be “orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques” in a training program in Latin America in the 1980s.

Two former military psychologists who had not conducted a single real interrogation were hired – at a daily rate of $1,800 (U.S.) each – to waterboard detainees. They later started a company that took over and ran the CIA program from 2005 until it was closed in 2009. The CIA paid the company $81-million.

Ineffective

The Senate committee report spends little time condemning torture on moral or legal grounds. Instead, it addresses mainly a practical question: Did torture accomplish anything of value? Looking at case after case, the report answers with an unqualified no. In fact, it says, “CIA officers regularly called into question whether the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, assessing that the use of the techniques failed to elicit detainee co-operation or produce accurate intelligence.”

A case in point was the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Starting the day after the raid, agency officials in classified briefings to Congress stressed that information gathered from its disputed interrogation program had played a critical role in the hunt. But in page after page of previously classified evidence, the report discredits the notion that the agency would not have found Mr. bin Laden if it had not tortured detainees.

“The vast majority of the intelligence” about the al-Qaeda courier who led the agency to Mr. bin Laden, it said, “was originally acquired from sources unrelated to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, and the most accurate information acquired from a CIA detainee was provided prior to the CIA subjecting the detainee to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Dishonest

The report says that the CIA provided false and misleading information to members of Congress, the White House and the director of national intelligence about the extent and effectiveness of its brutal interrogation program.

The report also said that the CIA’s leadership for years gave false information about the total number of prisoners held by the CIA, saying there had been 98 prisoners when its records showed that 119 men had been held. In late 2008, according to one internal e-mail, a CIA official giving a briefing expressed concern about the discrepancy and was told by Michael Hayden, then the agency’s director, “to keep the number at 98” and not to count any additional detainees.

The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at least 26 were wrongfully held.”

The report found that the CIA provided classified information to journalists but that the agency did not push to prosecute or investigate many of the leaks. CIA officials asked officers to “compile information on the success” of the program to be shared with the news media in order to shape public opinion. It also mischaracterized events and provided false or incomplete information to the news media in an effort to gain public support.