WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 America safer after the 9/11 attacks, Senate investigators concluded Tuesday.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, years in the making, accused the CIA of misleading its political masters about what it was doing with its “black site” captives and deceiving the nation about the effectiveness of its techniques.
The report was the first public accounting of tactics employed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and it described far harsher actions than had been widely known.
Tactics included confinement to small boxes, weeks of sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, slapping and slamming, and threats to kill, harm or sexually abuse families of the captives.
The report produced revulsion among many, challenges to its veracity among some lawmakers, and a sharp debate about whether it should have been released at all.
GOP Sen. 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 in a Senate speech. “Too much.”
Five hundred pages were released, representing the executive summary and conclusions of a still-classified 6,700-page full investigation.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the Democratic committee chairman whose staff prepared the summary, branded the findings a stain on the nation’s history.
The report catalogued 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.
But the “enhanced interrogation techniques” didn’t produce the results that really mattered, the report asserts in its most controversial conclusion. It cites CIA cables, emails and interview transcripts to rebut the central justification for torture — that it thwarted terror plots and saved American lives.
President George W. Bush approved the interrogation program through a covert finding in 2002, but he wasn’t 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.”
After al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, the CIA received permission to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation, close confinement and other techniques. Agency officials added unauthorized methods, the report says.
At least five men in CIA detention received “rectal rehydration,” a form of feeding through the rectum. The report found no medical necessity for the treatment.
At least three in captivity were told their families would suffer, with CIA officers threatening to harm their children, sexually abuse the mother of one man, and cut the throat of another man’s mother.
Zubaydah was held in a secret facility in Thailand, called “detention Site Green” in the report. Early on, with CIA officials believing he had information on an imminent plot, Zubaydah was left isolated for 47 days without questioning, the report says. Later, he was subjected to the panoply of techniques. He later suffered mental problems.