An Illustrated First-Person Guide to the CIA’s Torture Program | Hacker News Reader

An Illustrated First-Person Guide to the CIA’s Torture Program

enmnews.com

144 pointseplanit93 comments

This is literally cut and paste plagiarized from the New York Times article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-d...

Thank you for mentioning this. I was wondering about the credibility of this website after regretfully reading the comments section. Turns out they just scrape other websites and place a "source" link at the bottom of the article.

From their about us page:

"ENMNEWS.COM is a company that collects the most important news from around the world and stores them in one place to be easily and quickly available to our readers. All articles that are not ours have a source and was automatically downloaded."

And plaster it with invasive ads.

The site hasn't even existed for a year and appears to be based in Montenegro.

There was an amazing documentary on the fake news industry in Montenegro on YouTube. I think it was by AlJazzera. If you have time, give it a look - well worth watching!

You're thinking of Macedonia:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/12/1612271020...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190528-i-was-a-macedoni...

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/

You are 100% right. Sorr for the confusion

The images don't even load for me on the enmnews.com website, one of the whole points of the article.

plagiarized - To reproduce or otherwise use as one's own or without attribution.

The attribution is the "source" link at the bottom, and their about us explains that the content is not their own. This isn't plagiarism.

It’s a copyright violation.

That it is.

fwiw "enmnews" surfaced on news.google today (not logged in).

I'm wondering who owns them. It's speculation but I wonder if it is part of the Macedonian InfOps orchestrated by ex-FoxNews exec Ken LaCorte:

"A Former Fox News Executive Divides Americans Using Russian Tactics": https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/technology/LaCorte-editio...

I bet this site will eventually pivot from copy-pasting to putting their own spin on things or by amplifying radical messages from other websites part of the collective.

@dang Can you replace the URL?

This audio segment from The Intercept is highly relevant and illustrative of how this all came to be.

My favorite sound bites are "In one e-mail with the subject 'Torture Update'", and "We will not be briefing the president on this".

At one point, the CIA and Senate had mutually filed criminal prosecution referrals against one another over the cover up.

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/04/george-bush-barack-obama...

Somehow that was even more disturbing than the president orchestrating it. It indicates that the CIA is a rogue* agency that is insulated enough from the political system that it can basically do what it wants, and what it wants is rooted in base aggression devoid of even evidence based approaches (their own data showed torture didn't work).

If the president doesn't know, doesn't authorize programs that are this controversial, it means they are a decoration and the political system is a sham.

* rogue meaning autonomous from political control, not necessarily that it is doing anything to contradict the imperatives of the empire.

rouge meaning the powder you apply over foundation that makes it red.

One day I will learn to spell. Thank you.

Rogue is probably the most commonly misspelled 5 letter word, thanks to World of Warcraft.

I suppose, when one lacks the integrity to even blush, one fakes it.

I don't even know how Alfreda Frances Bikowsky still has a job .

To quote The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals:

… was reviled by some male colleagues for what they described as her aggression.

… Coworkers said she had no reason to be present during {Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s} interrogation. She was not an interrogator. “She thought it would be cool to be in the room” a former colleague said. But ironically her presence during Mohammed’s ordeal, sources said, seemed to anger and strengthen his resolve, helping him to hold out longer against the harsh tactics used against him.

Gina Haspel was made the Director of the CIA, and she was instrumental in the torture program.

I don't know her, and I'm not inclined to acknowledge her importance in being able to decide anything of value.

Edit: I also doubt how instrumental anyone can be in torture beyond the implements.

Haspel was present at one of the key extraordinary rendition black-sites in Thailand and was involved in the extralegal destruction of the video evidence.

It can't be extralegal if she wasn't prosecuted for it. I think she is just a very tiny cog in a very big machine, a figurehead to throw under the bus if something goes wrong.

She is no more responsible for torture than a janitor who may have also been present.

If you're ordered to do something illegal and you do it... you still were instrumental in doing something illegal...

Torture is illegal. Destroying records on torture with the permission of supervisors is not as there is no international requirement to preserve evidence of war crimes.

>Destroying records on torture with the permission of supervisors is not as there is no international requirement to preserve evidence of war crimes.

The act could be considered obstruction of justice making it a federal crime.

There could be some hidden complex series of pained logic to justify destruction of evidence, so I am hesitant to judge on the matter.

At this point the CIA is really best viewed as an organized crime syndicate with the blessing of the government and ruling class. The other thing to help understand the situation is that due to Epstein-style kompromat it possesses on that ruling class, the CIA sits above the POTUS in the US power structure.

It is alleged that the CIA was involved with Epstein. At the very least, the guy that got him his job teaching at Dalton, Donald Barr, [0] was ex-OSS, and the father of William Barr, ex-CIA [1] and the current Attorney General.

[0] https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/the-epstein-barr-proble...

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/who-is-william-barr-5-thing...

There are multiple incidents like this in Tim Weiner's opinionated history of the CIA Legacy of Ashes. It's not exactly a neutral presentation of the facts, but it's based on extensive research and newly declassified data, and to my knowledge no-one has disputed any of his facts.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/970488.Legacy_of_Ashes

If you only diagnose livestock from the mouth and don't bother to lift the tail to see what's coming out the backside because its too odious, then yeah, the expected outcome is going to be bad.

So I don't buy that the CIA was rogue. I just think they had don't ask/don't tell approval from Bush/Cheney during this time. IOW: "I won't ask what you're doing as long as you don't tell anyone."

Now imagine hypothetical scenario. Some innocent victim of the torture program or victim's relative decides to take revenge on USA by committing a mass murder or a terrorist attack. Wouldn't it be kinda justified? With an exception of kids, how many Americans are really blameless for these actions? They elected the leaders who allowed it (both Republicans - Bush and Democrats - Obama), they don't hold people who committed it accountable, they didn't try to make amends to victims or reimburse them. Many people go to BLM protest, but this torture was much worse than that and Americans just ... don't care.

Obama banned the use of torture.

Yet continued drone strikes, killing who knows how many innocent people. Not a huge improvement.

... but completely failed to prosecute anyone.

But the question is if it was meant to be real ban or just piece of paper to make the voters feel good. There is evidence pointing to the second possibility - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_jail . Also the failure to prosecute perpetrators or compensate the victims...

No need to imagine hypothetical scenarios.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver

I must not think bad thoughts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMbn3hGkpeo

>...and Americans just ... don't care.

I don't think that's fair. There's evidence that we have been placed in a system designed to not allow us to care, much less do anything about it.

> They elected the leaders who allowed it

I used to think that voting was useless, and I never voted until I was about 40 years old. This is the thing that made me change my mind. If I were to meet a victim of the torture program, could I tell them I'm blameless? The candidates I vote for will never get elected, but at least I actively dissociated myself from the worst ones.

How is it possible that people weren't held accountable for this? And how come the US government still hasn't tried to remedy the situation? Are those people going to be held in captivity with no charges until their death?

Simply put, in America the military is a cult/religion, and almost anything done in the name of "national security" can be excused. Look no further than the Navy SEALs that had their charges dropped for war crimes - as long as they're on "our" side Americans don't really care what atrocities the military complex commits.

I can think of one giant threat to national security that apparently they can do nothing about at the moment.

SEALs are backing that one.

The pardoning of Navy SEALs is not being excused at all. Trump has been receiving enormous and extraordinary amounts of backlash not just from both sides of the political spectrum, but also from inside the military itself.

How is it possible that people weren't held accountable for this? Because they work for the government.

And how come the US government still hasn't tried to remedy the situation? Because it's the government.

Are those people going to be held in captivity with no charges until their death? Probably, because of the government.

Note: Nothing was done during Obama's tenure. Neither a Republican nor a Democrat government is going to do anything about this.

At least Obama tried to bring them to them mainland and house them old prisons etc which would've brought the inmates under the jurisdiction of non military courts and thus they would've gotten their day in court, a fair trial not military court bs. Sadly no one wanted to do this, talks of "I'm not going to let terrorists anywhere near my home!" were prevalent and the plan was dead. There is no easy way of choosing Guantanamo Bay given the military industrial complex.

Wasn't it also because the republican senate stonewalled quite literally anything Obama tried to do, good or bad?

Because in the wake of 9-11, you would have been very pressed to find any US adult who didnt support torturing terrorists in custody to prevent more attacks. The Patriot Act passed almost unanimously.

You have to remember the _emotional_ impact of 9-11 to properly judge the people in charge at that time.

There were lots of people arguing against it, in public discourse.

That's called erosion of rights, and it only goes in one direction. That's why we should be very doubtful about these kind of laws/acts/&c.

I assume the guy who voted against the Patriot Act suffered the same emotional impact. It didn't prevent him seeing the long term deleterious impact of such laws, and he wisely voted against it.

Judgement lapses happened obviously, but emotional impact is a lame excuse for judgement lapses in any steward.

15ish percent voted nay in the House.

> Because in the wake of 9-11, you would have been very pressed to find any US adult who didnt support torturing terrorists in custody to prevent more attacks

That's quite a bold statement. Even among my conservative leaning co-workers in the mid-west at the time, quite a number continued to be against torture, though only a few of us were also against the (second) war in Iraq.

And, as others have said, it's pretty easy to find people standing against torture in the public discourse at the time.

> You have to remember the _emotional_ impact of 9-11 ....

We remember it well. Even so, many of us were not so blinded as to abandon our principles.

Also one has to acknowledge the simple fact another attack of 9-11 scale or even close never happened again on US soil.

That was the main mission during the 2000s and even well into Obama era (at least till Osama was killed). Another 9-11 like attack is ticket to one term presidency or political death.

We never had an event of that level of devastation BEFORE 9/11 either. They used the tragedy to push a surveillance and war agenda. In the end, most of the people in the countries we bombed to hell and back as a result didn't even know 9/11 had occurred.

first source on google - https://www.stripes.com/news/among-many-afghans-9-11-remains...

Nothing justifies torture.

> We never had an event of that level of devastation BEFORE 9/11 either.

I understand there's some nuance to what you're saying, so I'm not necessarily disagreeing with it, but I will bring up the attack on Pearl Harbor as an example of a surprise event with a similar loss of life.

Somewhat further afield are civil war battles where the losses were even higher.

I don't mean to minimize the gravity or impact of the 9/11 attacks, and I fully agree everything else you said.

You are correct, however, you're referencing conflicts between nations with nation-level resources to bring to bear for said conflict. 9/11 was particularly devastating because it was executed by so few, with so little resources, and harmed so many.

All true.

My country* was repeatedly bombed by terrorists, explicitly supported by Americans (but probably not the actual USA government). I always get incredulous at the hypocrisy when Americans talk about how 9/11 made them feel angry.

I'm not saying my country didn't do things to deserve this. Or that we were innocent victims of unprovoked foreign aggression. But then, can the USA say the same? Was 9/11 really unprovoked?

*England, bombed by the IRA for over 20 years, who raise(d) the vast majority of their funds from "patriotic" ex-pat Irish Americans.

>My country* was repeatedly bombed by terrorists, explicitly supported by Americans (but probably not the actual USA government). I always get incredulous at the hypocrisy when Americans talk about how 9/11 made them feel angry.

Really?!

You guys treated the Irish like crap for generations. It should come as no surprise that there was no shortage of ex-pats willing to send a buck to help them wage war on you.

>I'm not saying my country didn't do things to deserve this. Or that we were innocent victims of unprovoked foreign aggression. But then, can the USA say the same? Was 9/11 really unprovoked?

You can certainly make the argument that 9/11 is a response to our prior actions in the region but whether that is true or not will not make the people who feel attacked feel any less attacked. This is a complex issue about which reams upon reams have been written and I doubt anything we say here will do it justice.

I think both of your responses here apply to both situations. Your comment about how people who felt attacked won't feel any less attacked applies to the British as well when it comes to the IRA. Your comment about how the British treated the Irish poorly applies to the US in the Middle East as well. Maybe not quite to the same degree, but still.

You can excuse anything in the US if you scream "patriotism", "terrorism" or "freedom" loud enough.

Not enough upvotes for this comment. So true.

They can't be tried, because their torture would become an issue in the trial.

The United States should be better than this, makes me sad to be American.

You may not believe this, but humans are like that (and have been throughout the entire history). Makes me sad to be a human, but things are probably better than how they were, say, 300 years ago.

This is really true. It may be depressing for some people, but humans doing the wrong thing sometimes is never going to go away.

We may never be able to get rid of individual psychos that torture people, but it would be nice if we could get rid of large-scale state-sanctioned torture that everyone knows about.

Doubtful, at least anytime soon. The diffusion of responsibility that large organizations bring enables the organization to act however unethically it wants in pursuit of its goals without anyone feeling responsible for it. Clandestine "we have to stop this instance when it becomes known" torture is still better than "everyone winks and nods and the program goes on" torture though.

yes but we should focus on the ones done recently or still being done, and in that aspect America really takes the crown along China and a few other ones.

Reading all what has been done also makes me sad but on the other hand I remember lots of families who suffer and traumatised because of the terrorist attacks.

You're begging the question.

Then I remember the lack of any evidence that torture produces good information.

I agree with you. I am further saddened that when I look at our history, it is impossible to say "this isn't us". This is 100% the kind of deep evil the American state has sanctioned throughout our history from slavery, to genocide of native peoples, to imperialism in the Philippenes, to the more modern firebombing of entire cities, funding (through narco trafficking) death squads to overthrow elected governments, starting three wars based on lies (Spanish-American, Vietnam, Iraq) etc.

The security state is 100% antithetical to the aims, morality, and interests of the population as a whole.

Us meaning the USA or us meaning humanity? This kind of thing isn't exclusive to USA

It's common to systems that privilege the few over the many, and especially of colonial-settler societies, which is completely descriptive of the US political and economic system.

Don't just be sad. Get involved and get active.

I vote but often feel like my vote doesn't count for much.

There are a lot of other ways of getting involved, especially at the local level.

I'm still kind of figuring out as I go, but maybe the best bet is to find some like minded people who sort of know what they're doing in terms of 'activism'.

After all, a lot of politicians 'higher up the food chain' got their start locally. So that's a good place to help push things in a direction you'd like to see.

Yeah, welcome to how I feel every day since 2001.9.11. Granted I was in highschool at the time, and we tend to view our youthful years with rose-tinted glasses, but I remember that as a significant turning point where we went from torture being something only bad people in foreign countries would do to something that has its merits debated openly. Never again have I been able to hold any faith in my government or countrymen. Which is not to say that those things were worthy of my faith beforehand, only that my illusions were shattered.

A reminder of Christopher Hitchens' account of waterboarding:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/08/hitchens200808

Thanks; I hadn’t read that since it came out. Hitchens’ voice is missed. This article cuts through the noise to the heart of the torture conversation.

this seems to be just a copy-and-pasted article from the New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-d...

The USA is still sadly lacking a "gulag archipelago" book, that will expose to polite society the scale of these practices.

This website is barely usable on mobile. Slow, full of ads, and the entire page becomes dark as if a modal had been opened, yet it's nowhere to be found and closed. Won't read.

I got the same when I opened it using my browser. So I opened it in my "remote browser" (this is not a plug, just a help): https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz and it was much more usable.

Interesting. Is there a self-hosted version someone could deploy for private use?

Yes, friend: https://github.com/dosycorp/robot-head

If you wanna play audio (yer username, c'mon), see: https://boogeh.com (audio works but is like 20 seconds lag as we encode it)

There's docker image linked there as well.

Hit me up if you have any issues: cris@dosyago.com or @browsergap on twitter. X

If you are interested in the topic, i can highly recommend "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror" from Alfred McCoy for an analysis how torture changed and how it works today.

This source document was linked in the above article, and I found it pretty interesting. "Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative"

It describes in some detail the apparently authorized techniques and levels of torture. There's also a section about how the Navy already has some history with using waterboarding.

https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/legacy/2010/...

Five hours, 140 points later, and the link hasn't been updated to the CORRECT story: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-d...

In defence of "whataboutism" argument

The best phrase I heard about that is:

"A sum of two half-wrongs don't make one right"

Not as single country that went on torturing people can be a moral high mark.

Even if we have hard time finding countries who have not tainted themselves with torture over the last 2 decades, we should never accept torture as a norm.

Even if all major powers of the world were tainted by it, it just means that they all miss that high standard now.

Will not name countries here, but think yourself.

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