"a cash award of $2,500 for consistently superior work." [View all]

[kpete]

A prosecutor’s Eureka moment: I never got specifics because they didn’t exist

I spent five years prosecuting war crimes cases at Guantánamo Bay. While we could not use evidence in court derived from torture or abusive treatment, I questioned why maltreatment was used in the first place. The answer was always this: “Torture works. Torture saves lives.” As a prosecutor, I was never provided with any specifics. After reading the Senate’s report, I now understand why: they didn’t exist. No terror plot was stopped due to abusive interrogations. This was my Eureka moment after reading the report.

The very first Senate finding I stumbled across was right there on Page 9 – and it completely refutes the official justification for using torture. “[N]o intelligence while in CIA custody”? It is the first finding, and it is a blockbuster. If torture does not lead to actionable intelligence and does not stop terrorist acts, then why use it at all? Shouldn’t we have used traditional, rapport-based interrogation techniques such as the FBI agents who questioned Abu Zubaydah? The suspect was cooperating until the CIA’s contractors started waterboarding Abu Zubaydah in detention for 17 days, until he became “completely unresponsive”.


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This is a particularly despicable and illuminating look into how the CIA treated its officers who were carrying out torture techniques. After a detainee, Gul Rahman, was chained, nearly naked, to a concrete floor for an extended time and then froze to to death, no officer on-site nor at the CIA was disciplined – let alone prosecuted. In fact, the CIA officer in charge of the detention site was recommended to receive a bonus of $2,500 for his “consistently superior work”. Five pages earlier in the report, we are told that this particular CIA officer was already known for dishonesty and lack of judgment when he was sent on his first overseas assignment to head this detention site. Eleven years and one page in the report later, the CIA acknowledged it “erred” in not holding anyone accountable for Rahman’s death.

Eleven years.


from a few days ago, read it in a fresh light:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/09/redactions-cia-torture-report-experts