US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program | Hacker News Reader

US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

intelligence.senate.gov

879 pointsuptown551 comments

> Interrogation techniques such as slaps and "wallings" (slamming detainees against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity. Records do not support CIA representations that the CIA initially used an "an open, non-threatening approach," or that interrogations began with the "least coercive technique possible" and escalated to more coercive techniques only as necessary.

> The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example, became "completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth." Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving into a "series of near drownings.

> Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. At least five detainees experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation and, in at least two of those cases, the CIA nonetheless continued the sleep deprivation.

> Contrary to CIA representations to the Department of Justice, the CIA instructed personnel that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would take "precedence" over his medical care, resulting in the deterioration of a bullet wound Abu Zubaydah incurred during his capture.

> CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families— to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to "cut [a detainee's] mother's throat."

The list goes on.

I have no words. This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud. I can only hope more people read this report. Worse imaginable crimes are committed in the heat of passion or because of madness. Those are scary. What is more scary to me is cold institutionalized, calculated, torture, which is what this is.

Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost. Torture should be like rape. Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot. Torture should be the same in any civilized country. We are not only debating it, we have also done it, we have institutionalized it, and make no mistake, Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives".

Some of these things are clearly off the deep end. But some of them, especially threats, seem like pretty basic/standard interrogation...

There are many techniques, but it seems like we have forgotten it is fundamentally manipulative and abusive. I mean, we are surprised to find that threats are used? What?

It's been shown that torture is among the least effective way of extracting information from unwilling informants.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an_fbi_interrogator_on_the_...

I'm not talking about waterboarding or what have you. I guess I'm just puzzled that things like threats & slaps are being rolled in with waterboarding. Maybe threats & slaps are not the most effective method, sure- that doesn't really matter.

It just seems like people are shocked to find fundamentally abusive/manipulative behavior going on at all. Virtually any form of extracting information from an unwilling informant is going to be. Feeding them lies to make them lose hope ("We've captured your co-conspirators") is abusive. Cozying up to them with donuts and backrubs is manipulative. Practically by definition, interrogation on unwilling informants cannot be some friendly, respectful thing.

Hanns Scharf would disagree.

"Scharff was opposed to physically abusing prisoners to obtain information. Learning on the job, Scharff instead relied upon the Luftwaffe's approved list of techniques, which mostly involved making the interrogator seem as if he is his prisoner's greatest advocate while in captivity."

And this guy was successful as well.

"Scharff's approach has been admiringly cited by top US interrogators, such as Ali Soufan"

Those are still abusive relationships, that he established with his prisoners. Just not physically abusive.

What is the most effective?

Anyway, that's really counter-intuitive. I mean, I guess I could deal with pain, but losing body parts, skin or eyes? I would talk pretty fast.

Torture has been shown to be a reasonably good (though not always effective) means of getting people to tell torturers things that they think the torturers want to hear -- whatever the tortured person thinks is most likely to lead to the present cessation of the torture.

Its also been shown to be a fairly poor technique, compared to other alternatives, to get accurate, actionable information.

As the Senate report itself notes, this was the conclusion of the CIA's own work on interrogation techniques prior to 9/11, which was disregarded in the aftermath of 9/11.

The White House is apparently not taking a side in the debate over whether it works or not.

Which frankly makes me think they believe it does. The easy political win is to say it doesn't, and they aren't taking it.

https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/542382617711370240

"Obama official: White House won’t take sides between CIA, which says interrogations worked, and Senate, which says they didn’t."

Sure wish Obama could just grow a pair already.

Basically, the most effective means is to create a rapport with the subject, and if treated with compassion and respect, eventually some will come around to their captor's side and reveal whatever information they have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff

http://www.k-state.edu/actr/2010/12/20/suspect-interrogation...

People will say anything to get torture to stop. The interrogators will get the information they want, but they will get so much more bad information made up on the spot to stop the suffering, it's impossible to distinguish between actual intel and the subject telling the interrogator what they want to hear.

It gets even worse when the subject doesn't actually know anything useful. Waterboard most people and they will confess to anything they think will make it stop.

We know that people confess to crimes they didn't commit - even if they're not being tortured.

http://nymag.com/news/crimelaw/68715/

Sure, it worked great during the Inquisition. Evidently they killed a lot of Satanists, witches and wizards. It must've worked -- there don't seem to be any around.

It depends on what you define as a prisoner, too.

> I mean, we are surprised to find that threats are used?

We are, if not surprised, rightfully offended that our government does not obey its own laws, which define and punish torture -- acts "intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control", where "severe physical or mental pain or suffering" is defined as:

---[quote]---

(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;

(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;

(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and

---[end quote]--- (18 USC Sec. 2340)

(And its worth noting that this interpretation enshrined into law has often been criticized itself as an attempt to minimize the scope of US limitations on torture and for the government to shirk obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment by limiting the understanding of torture to something much narrower than the international understanding underlying the convention, so that can enhanced the degree to which it is disturbing that having narrowed the definition of torture, the government still isn't serious about combatting it, or even just not actively engaging in it, under the narrowed definition.)

> Lack of heat at the facility likely contributed to the death of a detainee.

Causing the death of a detainee is not a threat. Perhaps negligence which should have consequences for those who were responsible for this person while in their custody.

It is if you have more than one detainee.

I wouldn't say that any of these techniques are "basic/standard", and I used to work in the field.

You can get plenty of information out of someone without laying a finger on them.

In my opinion the question is the extent to which it's OK to play with people's psychology through isolation and misinformation, while still giving them 3 hots and a cot. The important thing to note here is that you can still damage people this way if you take it too far; solitary makes people go crazy especially when they're being fed false info about what's going on outside the walls.

Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads. We're not going to beat it out of them, but how far are we willing to go? Should they get the same rights and protections as suspects in the US judicial system? This is the conversation we should be having in my opinion.

> Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads.

According to the report, "Of the 119 known detainees, at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard in the September 2001 Memorandum of Notification (MON). These included an "intellectually challenged" man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign liaison services and were former CIA sources, and two individuals whom the CIA assessed to be connected to al-Qa'ida based solely on information fabricated by a CIA detainee subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.

"Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads."

Why does terrorism frighten people so much that they're willing to throw away basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty"? Honest question. I see comment after comment after comment in this thread that indicates the commenters are unbelievably frightened of terrorism, to the extent that they're willing to sanction anything, even acts that they admit are otherwise reprehensible, to prevent it. Why are apparently intelligent people so frightened of it?

I'm just not seeing a lot of comments in this thread saying that the commenters sanction anything to prevent terrorism.

The condemnation of torture seems to be far more widespread here.

The "anti" side is far more prevalent, but the "pro" side is significantly more present than the "not at all" I'd expect/hope for.

> Why does terrorism frighten people so much that they're willing to throw away basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty"?

Great question, and one we should always keep in mind. The death toll from terrorism on US soil since 9/11 is indeed very low. That said, the people plotting against us are intelligent and adaptive and wish to do us harm. If they succeed, they might destroy the free society which we've built for ourselves.

Put another way, I'm scared of the physical consequences of a nuclear weapon going off in midtown Manhattan and even more scared of what would happen to our society in the wake of it. You think we'd be having these conversations about which techniques may or may not be torture if there were half a million dead in NYC and the entire tri-state region were irradiated?

Remember the Cold War, when the threat wasn't that someone might figure out a way to smuggle a small weapon into NYC, but that we'd have fifteen minutes' warning before NYC was subject to multiple megaton-class detonations, along with every other major city in the country?

There isn't even any evidence that the threat of nuclear terrorism is credible. Nukes aren't something you pick up at the local Safeway on your way home from the daily jihad. Compare to 30 years ago, where the threat was absolutely, 100% credible. Literally hundreds of missiles ready to go at a moment's notice. One bad decision or bad hangover away from a billion deaths. And yet, we weren't having debates like this then.

That's not to say that the US was all innocent and pure. But at the very least, torture was secretive, hidden, not defended in public as being a worthwhile and justifiable act.

And then combine all that with the simple fact that torture doesn't even work. All it does is make their friends angry. Do you really think that torturing suspected terrorists reduces the chances of a future terrorist nuclear detonation in Manhattan? I don't see how.

Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot to point out that those hundreds of missiles and hundreds of nuclear warheads are still there and still ready to go at a moment's notice and we are still one person's bad decision or bad hangover away from total annihilation. We just manage to pretend it's not there.

What do you mean we weren't having debates like this then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion

Planned and carried out in secrecy and universally decried afterwards. When it came to light, the President more or less wanted the CIA's head on a pike. Quite different from ongoing secret-but-not-secret torture with a ton of defenders in the public eye and two Presidents who either defend it or try their best to ignore it.

I feel like they've already done that far more effectively than they probably dreamed. Look at what's happened to the US after 9/11 and tell me we're still adhering to our principles and possess any moral high ground in the world. This report is a pretty obvious indication that the powers that be have given up on following the rules.

They won. They won when the US gave itself the license to enter into a perpetual state of universal war, three days after 9/11.

Look at what the US has done. Really, look at all the things it has done -- the surveillance, the drone strikes, the infiltration of civil protests, the use of military equipment by the police force, the lies to justify the war in Iraq, the lies to justify the torture, the violations of international human rights, the targeted killings of "enemy" US citizens, the re-definition of every single one of these words -- and then tell me how the US has upheld its values against terrorism.

Then look at countries like Iceland where the nation apologizes over a single justified death at the hands of a police officer, or Norway where after a killing spree and bomb attacks the first consideration by government officials is not about how to punish the murderer, but how to guarantee due process for someone evidently guilty of such heinous crimes.

The United States are not the good guys. I'm sorry, but you're not. No matter how much you want it to be true.

You're cherry picking examples. Every country in the world has done horrible things. I'm certainly not excusing the torture the US has committed, but it's not alone in the world.

The intelligent people who support the government actions aren't afraid of specific terrorist acts. They're afraid of what a failure to stop terrorist movements could lead to. I imagine there were a lot of people sitting in the cafes of Rome who said: "I can't believe you think those germanic barbarians could possibly ever pose a threat to us!"

And of course, it doesn't help that the folks who are captured are mostly objectively bad people. There are some people who can muster a lot of moral outrage for the rights of bad people, and there are ones who can't. This isn't a new phenomenon.

That really doesn't answer my question at all. I asked why so many people are terrified of terrorism, and all you tell me is that they're afraid of some nebulous future. Well yes, obviously they're afraid of the potential future, as it would be pretty odd if they were afraid of the past. But why does terrorism get so much emphasis compared to other potential dangers?

Partly it's the immediacy. In the long term, China poses a threat to American hegemony, but they're not actively trying to blow things up at this very moment. The other part is the narrative. Environmental disaster should rank higher in peoples' minds, but people are intrinsically drawn to narratives that involve other people. Terrorists are like comic book villains as far as narrative goes. Not only do they behead people, but they brutally oppress women!

Terrorist groups are nothing like the barbarians that eventually brought down Rome, and I think you know it.

You've spent this entire thread making poor excuses for completely irrational behaviors and trying to justifying sickening, ineffective actions on the part of US personnel.

Just stop.

> Terrorist groups are nothing like the barbarians that eventually brought down Rome, and I think you know it.

No, I don't know it. Care to explain it to me?

> Terrorist groups are nothing like the barbarians that eventually brought down Rome, and I think you know it.

I beg to differ.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2868419/Thrown-roof-...

> You can get plenty of information out of someone without laying a finger on them

Can you give examples? Do they work against hardened interogees? Do they involve threats of violence?

>Should they get the same rights and protections as suspects in the US judicial system?

Geneva Convention states clearly - either POW status or suspect in the judicial system. There is no 3rd option.

> This is the conversation we should be having in my opinion.

there is no conversation to have. Only charges (of crimes against humanity which torture is) to bring in.

> Geneva Convention states clearly - either POW status or suspect in the judicial system. There is no 3rd option.

None of the Geneva Conventions actually say this. OTOH, torture is subject to a universal prohibition under international law independently of the status of the tortured person, whether a protected person under the any of the Geneva Conventions, a regular criminal suspect in a domestic court system, or any other status that may or may not exist.

>> Geneva Convention states clearly - either POW status or suspect in the judicial system. There is no 3rd option.

>None of the Geneva Conventions actually say this.

One way or the other it is mentioned in various places through the Conventions. In particular http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Geneva_Convention :

for internal conflict

" The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised peoples. "

for international:

"It also specifies that when there is any doubt whether a combatant belongs to the categories in article 4, they should be treated as such until their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."

I wonder when the UN will stand up and impose trade bans on the US for such deeds.

The UN does not impose trade bans. You know why the Secretary General, the UN's leader, is called that? Because he is a secretary for the people who actually have power, the leaders of nation-states.

> You know why the Secretary General, the UN's leader, is called that? Because he is a secretary for the people who actually have power.

Secretary is essentially another word for Minister, and NATO's Secretary-General is its supreme commander in wartime. The UN's leader is called the Secretary General because he is in essence its Prime Minister, not because you get confused between a Secretary and his/her secretaries...

Unless you think General Secretary Joseph Stalin was a powerless functionary, of course.

>NATO's Secretary-General is its supreme commander in wartime

>The UN's leader is called the Secretary General because he is in essence its Prime Minister

Both are wrong and wildly imaginative.

>General Secretary Joseph Stalin

Yes, but there's also a historic reason behind that title. The leader (like Chairman Mao) of the Soviet Union was supposed to be a sort of secretary for the workers. "Soviet" actually means "council"; the "chairman" and "secretary" names are communist propagandaspeak to give the impression that the workers are the ones in charge.

You're getting down voted, but your comment is true. The UN itself has no power, it relies on the member states to enforce decisions.

The US has veto power in the UN.

> The US has veto power in the UN.

Strictly speaking, the US has veto power in the UN Security Council, which usually has primary responsibility for binding actions on matters of international peace and security, including, inter alia, taking binding action in response to threats to the same such as by grave breaches of international law by a nation-state.

However, its worth noting that -- at US urging in the context of the Korean War -- the UN established a mechanism (under the "Uniting for Peace" resolution [0]) by which the General Assembly can step in when the Security Council is unable to act because of deadlock among the veto powers.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly...

You think the US is alone in torture? This is child's play compared to what happens in China or Russia. You are mistaken if the US is the only one.

Cool, comparing the US to developing countries.

That's setting the bar low.

Obviously if we aren't as bad as someone else we don't need to worry about our own misdoings.

The saving grace is that we have a country that was able to admit that it did this. For me, that's hope that we're still in a position to learn from our wrongs, and that the checks-and-balances are still somewhat in-tact.

There is no "saving grace".

Saying sorry afterwards doesn't do anything for those wronged. Admission doesn't take away pain, humiliation and fear.

As you can see in the examples of China and Japan [0], a national apology can help ease tensions between peoples and countries and not apologizing can exacerbate already strained relations.

Admitting wrong doing and offering solutions to prevent this from ever happening again are the first steps towards rebuilding what is undoubtedly going to be a much damaged world wide reputation.

Even releasing this report was a step forward.

[0] - http://www.tealeafnation.com/2012/12/has-japan-ever-apologiz...

Necessary, but not sufficient.

Who has said sorry? Cheney? Bush? Rice? The people who put this system into place continue to defend it and have suffered no consequences.

Before you get on your Liberal high horse, you might want to check yourself. Extraordinary Rendition began under Clinton:

https://www.aclu.org/national-security/fact-sheet-extraordin...

Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism

The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically,

Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.

Yeah, but right wing media says it's right.

> Yeah, but right wing media says it's right.

Well, in the past they've said that. Mostly now, they seem to be more avoiding commenting on the substance at all, and just saying that its wrong to publish the report.

> Before you get on your Liberal high horse, you might want to check yourself. Extraordinary Rendition began under Clinton

This is not about extraordinary rendition -- which certainly is an extremely disturbing practice, and by all accounts seems to have included instances where prisoners were tortured by other countries with the knowledge and at least tacit consent of the US in violation of US obligations under international law.

This is about systematic torture directly executed by an agency of the United States government, under false pretenses, and while making damaging deceptions about the program to other entities within the US government.

There is certainly an extent to which it fits in with a common pattern with extraordinary rendition, but its not the same thing.

>> There is certainly an extent to which it fits in with a common pattern with extraordinary rendition, but its not the same thing.

You must have missed this part of my post:

Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.

Sure glad all the downvoters actually read my ENTIRE post before they started getting trigger happy with their downvotes.

How do you know they didn't read the whole post? In other words, how do you know that you're not being downvoted for refusing to acknowledge the world of difference between black ops as practiced before and after 9/11 (or more precicely, before and after Vice President Dick Cheney said "it's time to take off the gloves")?

That's what we're talking about here: the actual meaning of "gloves off". And no, this was categorically NOT something that started on Clinton's watch. It's started on Bush's watch, specifically at the direction of Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington, using legal justifications drafted by John Yoo.

Bush, not Clinton, got it?

And just so you're clear, this is not a defense of Democrats. After all, nobody has done more to forestall this report than the Democrat Barack Obama. In many ways, he's the worst offender here as it was his administration that elected to protect the people involved instead of punishing them, which serves to normalize something that absolutely should not be normalized. After all, the deepest institutional damage is done not by those who abuse their authority, but by those who allow the abusers to get away with it (see the systematic sexual abuse of children and the problems the Catholic Church caused itself by concealing it for another case in point).

I should add that the Obama Administration's conduct would be slightly less galling if it weren't part of a pattern, but the fact that James Clapper suffered no consequence for lying to Congress about the NSA's constitutional violations means that this is bigger than the CIA. If you get to the root of it, it's really about the goddamn nightmare of a lawless and amoral security state given big budgets and free reign stemming from the insane over-reaction to 9/11 that has since been enshrined in the Patriot Act.

That's the real heart of darkness here. Well, that and the cowering bedwetting chickenshits who don't support the whole "land of the free home of the brave" thing, and would rather hand the country to people like Cheney, Addington, Yoo, etc. and not think twice about the damage they're doing.

And those people? The fear driven chickenshits? Overwhelmingly Republican. It's the FOX News demographic, essentially. (FOX News, not coincidentally, has been a big supporter of torture. Like Cheney, they consider it evidence of "toughness", not idiocy.)

Extraordinary rendition began before Clinton. The rules around it began with Bush I and presidential decision directive 39.[1] The practice began before that.

[1] http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd39.htm

We haven't apologized, we haven't made restitution, and we sure as heck haven't prosecuted the guilty (as required by the convention against torture). I'm struggling to see any saving grace.

Good point, and we might even be in worse position if action is not taken. If there is lack of outrage, it will send a message up the chain that "this is not that bad, nobody really minded this much, let's use harsher techniques next time".

So here's an ethical question-

If the report leads to no action, where is the good in releasing it?

Real risk for real people has been created. It's not theoretical. Actual innocent people have been placed in danger.

If there's no good coming from the report, was it worth placing those people in danger?

Yes because it produced the opportunity to do good. At the time of publication it couldn't be known whether good would be done or not.

You can't make moral judgements from a viewpoint that assumes knowledge of the future.

I don't disagree with your point, but:

> You can't make moral judgements from a viewpoint that assumes knowledge of the future.

Actually, you can. It's one of the main categories of normative ethics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics#Normative_eth...

"Consequentialism (Teleology) argues that the morality of an action is contingent on the action's outcome or result", this particular category includes one of the most famous theories of ethics, utilitarianism.

Your problem with it is valid, however. As far as I've understood from my study of the subject matter, no ethical theory is perfect, not even utilitarianism.

Check out the wiki page for the other categories. Personally I like virtue ethics, keeps me on my toes and critical. I wouldn't recommend it though, I'd prefer if the rest of the world was utilitarian :-P cough

> Real risk for real people has been created. It's not theoretical.

Risk of what?

> Actual innocent people have been placed in danger.

Who?

I'm not attempting to argue the point. I haven't read the report. It just seems a strong statement to make that innocent bystanders (with no connection to torture) have been put at risk (of what?).

I'm curious how legitimate this claim is since to be honest it reads a bit like FUD (that's just how it comes off; but I'm just looking for a rationale).

Risk of revenge attacks leading to severe injury and death.

People working for the US government overseas. Or just Americans. Or even just westerners in general.

Security is heightened, units are on alert worldwide. The risk is real and serious.

Remember, radical elements killed people over a silly video on youtube. This is much more inflammatory.

McCain: Everyone knows we waterboarded. [1]

[1] http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/12/09/lv-mcc...

Would this revenge be unjustified?

Absolutely unjustified.

Like going to war with two nations over an unrelated terrorist attack?

Making the information public reduces the excusability of the people responsible. It may lead to no action, but that inaction will now be complicity.

Yes, you're absolutely right. This report is making me want to kill people in cold blood. It's probably better to keep it secret so nobody finds out about it until it's too late.

I heard on npr radio that the purpose of torture is to intimidate, not extract information. Which makes it all clear.

Incentives for information: 1.) Extract information. 2.) The information should be useful.

Incentives for intimidation: 1.) Information extraction is of no concern. 2.) The torture should be so shocking, and awesome, that George Carlin style many extra syllables need to be added to the word "tor-ture" like when Diane Feinstein says the supersized Orwellian phrase that "tor-ture" has become. 3.) The details of the torture should be made public.

Right. And the only one sitting in prison so far is former CIA operative John Kiriakou who blew the whistle on the torture program. Go figure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou

Holy shit this is infuriating.

What an awesome person. I met his sister this year at NHLF - she was pretty rad as well. I'm excited for him to get out of prison and become a leader.

This makes my blood boil.

And the happened well into the Obama administration.

The Kiriakou story is not as straightforward as this thread makes it. You can go to FAS.ORG to see the actual case files.

Kiriakou was charged with using numerous forms of classified information about foreign intelligence operations in order to promote a book, and, in doing so, outing a still-undercover foreign operative involved in the Zubaydah case. That operative had allegedly been under cover for over 20 years.

If you read the filings, you'll also see that Kiriakou claims to have outed the program accidentally --- in other words, that the leak didn't occur because he was deliberately blowing the whistle on the program, but instead by accident (or, as the USG would have it, negligence).

However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network.

The case files are not themselves dispositive; I merely comment to suggest that it's harder to judge the Kiriakou case than it immediately seems.

I share the prevailing sentiment that our failure to prosecute CIA employees at all levels for torture is frustrating, and a miscarriage of justice. Though I'm not particularly interested in discussing that on HN.

> However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network.

Is that supposed to be a rationalization for his treatment?

No, that's a shitty thing to accuse someone of, and if you read my entire comment you can see I don't believe that.. What's at issue in this subthread is Kiriakou's culpability in exposing intelligence programs for his own personal benefit.

Then I do not get the purpose of that sentence in your post since it reads like "Yes we did shitty stuff to him but remember they thought he was a bad guy at the time."

I'll assume that's because you're unfamiliar with the Kiriakou case, in which Zubaydah plays an important role.

You could sum that case up by saying that Kiriakou is accused of two major harms to the USG: first, outing a 20-year undercover operative, and second, potentially compromising the Zubaydah case. It would be an easy message board rebuttal to say, "well, it turns out Zubaydah was a pawn with virtually no value to the USG or Al Qaeda, so compromising him was not a big deal". But, at the time when Kiriakou was alleged to have leaked secrets to promote his book, nobody believed that about Zubaydah. He was instead believed to have a key operational role in Al Qaeda, and compromising him to promote a book would have been a grave matter.

It is hard to explain the nuance of this case without sounding like I'm taking a side in it. CIA is also accused throughout the Senate report of leaking secrets to polish its own reputation. The only issue I'd have a problem with is the idea that Kiriakou's actions were heroic. By his own stipulations that appears not to be the case.

I'll say this again: I'm may be more ambivalent than most of HN when it comes to surveillance and law enforcement and regulation, but I am not ambivalent about torture or, for that matter, the CIA, or criminal liability for the CIA.

I should have to make that disclaimer, but obviously I do.

I am not in disagreement with your assesment of Kiraikou and I don't see how any of that ties into your original statement

"However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network."

which seems totally unrelated to anything you have posted above, which was what make it stand out in the first place.

I cannot see any other way of interpreting it than the way I mentioned in my previous post, could you clarify what you meant by this since I am obviously not getting your meaning?

No.

Ok then, end of thread.

Nope and the DOJ is standing by their decision not to indict anyone after performing an investigation five years ago [0].

Doesn't seem shocking these days. Can't prosecute the good ol boys club.

[0] - http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cia-torture-report/doj-stan...

> The saving grace is that we have a country that was able to admit that it did this.

"The country" doesn't admit that "the country" did this. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence "admits" that the Central Intelligence Agency did this, while at the same time insulating everyone else -- even in the Executive Branch -- from involvement, based on "the CIA was lying to everyone, including the White House, who totally didn't mean for this to happen."

> For me, that's hope that we're still in a position to learn from our wrongs, and that the checks-and-balances are still somewhat in-tact.

Checks and balances aren't admitting after the fact that actions which meet the definition of torture and war crimes in both US domestic law and international law which the US has treaty-based obligations to uphold occurred (while, except for the "personal opinion" of the chair in the introduction, not actually admitting the legal conclusions demanded by those facts), checks-and-balances is actually imposing some accountability on the perpetrators of those crimes.

AFAICT, there are no "checks-and-balances" in evidence yet.

"The country" doesn't admit that "the country" did this."

And there's the problem.

Imagine, if you will, that your son is taken against his will by say, Iran, because your son has ties to someone who threw a grenade that killed an Iranian. Your son is tortured in much the same way the report states.

Do you care which committee didn't do a thing, or who voted for a thing, or lobbied another? You blame the country. The voting public, the non-voting public, their philosophies, culture, politicians, their military. They collectively represent the individuals who did that despicable stuff to your son.

And it's what perpetuates the hate, the wars, the fear.

> Imagine, if you will, that your son is taken against his will by say, Iran, because your son has ties to someone who threw a grenade that killed an Iranian. Your son is tortured in much the same way the report states.

It's much worse than that, we'll just flat out kill you with a drone strike, even if you're an American citizen[1][2].

[1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/23/obama-anwar-al-awla...

[2]UPDATE - found the better article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-team...

Until the next 9/11 or Pearl Habour and then everyone just looks the other way for the next ten years.

Japanese internment is still rarely talked about and in some states rarely taught in schools(!).

At least you'll find few people willing to defend Japanese internment in public, and public opinion is such that it's unlikely anything similar would happen again.

Compare to this memo, where you have roughly half of the politically involved population of the country criticizing its release as if the memo itself is somehow reprehensible, and not saying one word about the activities it describes.

In 40 years you'll find the same thing, that whatever is happening 'now' was deplorable, and that whatever is happening 40 years from now is 'freedom'.

I don't doubt it.

From what I understand (from talking to now very old Japanese-American men who were in the camps as young adults) it was unpleasant and caused significant hardship, but not even remotely similar to what's in this report.

It's important to teach about what happened in those camps and to understand why they were wrong. Drawing inappropriate comparisons between those camps and the absolute atrocities in this report isn't helpful.

> Drawing inappropriate comparisons between those camps and the absolute atrocities in this report isn't helpful.

Nobody did. I said that Americans looked the other way. Nothing more, nothing less.

You're clearly reading more into what I said than what I actually said verbatim.

The difference, of course, is that those in the internment camps were Americans, while most of these guys are terrorists captured on the battlefield. I do think the comparison is inappropriate, but internment was the atrocity, not this.

How do you know all these detainees were "captured on the battlefield"? Because we've been told that? By the same people who said we were not using extraordinary rendition and not using torture?

I'm surprised that you think torture is not an atrocity. The US claims to be "giving the gift of democracy" and "spreading freedom". Ignoring international conventions on the rights of prisoners of war (and do not start the weaselly bullshit about whether these people are POWs or not) doesn't seem to be a good way of liberating a nation.

> How do you know all these detainees were "captured on the battlefield"? By the same people who said we were not using extraordinary rendition and not using torture?

Because if the CIA was just ignoring the rules, they wouldn't be trying to lawyer their way around what's "enhanced interrogation" versus "torture." They'd just be pulling out fingernails.

> Ignoring international conventions on the rights of prisoners of war

You fundamentally misunderstand the rationale behind these conventions. The reason we don't torture the soldiers of civilized nations is because we assume that they will reciprocate when it comes to our soldiers. Stateless militants can't be expected to do that, so the rationale for following those international conventions disappears.

We generally try to uphold high moral standards even if they won't be reciprocated. Many of those conventions provide additional incentive of reciprocation, but that's not the only relevant factor.

Disagree: For a lot of us (non-Americans at least) we used to think that the reason why why don't do those kinds of things (torture, use chemical weapons etc) was because they were more cruel than necessary.

Also the fact that these conventions were valid for any war the signing country was involved in, not only those against other who signed (correct me if I'm wrong) seems to point in the same direction, no?

Also, downvote brigade: Fine, I totally agree that rayiner was downvoted and flagkilled twice. rayiner deserved that IMO.

However stop downvoting when he or others are providing insights, even if that insight is uncomfortable, OK?

You fundamentally misunderstand the rationale behind the conventions, and particularly the parts of them that apply specifically in conflicts that are not conflicts between state parties (e.g., Common Article 3.)

Anyhow, there is also the Convention Against Torture isn't even related to conflict or POWs, but applies universally, and obliges parties to it (including the US) to prosecute (not merely avoid engaging in) torture, whoever does it, wherever they do it, and in whatever context they do it. Torturers are hostis humani generis, the common enemy of all mankind.

In your view, it's OK to torture people as long as they're not American?

More legal argument. Given that the current US legal system doesn't apparently protect me, a US citizen, from administrative assassination, I'm worried that I can be administratively shipped off for torture.

That is: the actions outlined in this summary of a report, and in other tacit admissions by US elected leaders, go way beyond arguing that the actions are "legal" or "illegal". The actions outlined in the summary speak to a government that does not care about most human beings at all.

All of morality is not contained within the law. Segregation was legal for a while. Apartheid was legal for a while.

It's not a legal argument at all. Go up to a random person on the street (not in San Francisco), and tell them that the rights of people caught fighting against the U.S. in Afghanistan are just as important as those of law-abiding immigrants trying to build a life in the U.S.

To the contrary. I think you have to have a very legalistic dedication to procedural due process to assert that people abroad advocating the violent overthrow of the United States should have the same rights as ordinary accused in the United States.

I have to disagree: the instant that something becomes a privilege, and not a right, is the instant that some administrator can decide that I personally don't deserve that privilege. There goes my personal protection against our police force, and my personal ability to speak my mind.

Beyond that, if it's good policy for US citizens to have freedom of speech, or right to a fair trial, or to not be tortured, then it's good policy for all humans to have those rights.

By asserting the "random person in the street" argument, you're asserting a tyranny of the majority. You should know better. Shame on you.

"but internment was the atrocity, not this."

I never was fond of you, but this confirms that you're truly a vile human. I cannot believe that there is an actual torture apologist on HN.

In your follow-up comment, you rationalize it by saying that they are not worthy of the same treatment as those from civilized nations.

I don't know if you're a sociopath or you harbor a lot of hate and anger, but in either case, I hope you get the help you need before you hurt someone.

> rarely talked about

I really wish there was a way for to accurately evaluate these statements. I learned about this by age 10 from my mother, it was mentioned multiple times in high school, it is occasionally referenced in conversation online and in person, and comes up on my Fort Minor pandora station about once every 4 hours of playtime. But I live in a liberal social circle that places a high value on learning history.

As another datapoint, the only time I learned about Japanese internment in school was in my high school Supreme Court elective.

It took a long time for the torture to be officially recognised -- we've had a lot of denial until now.

And even now there will be people who say that this was too much, but a little bit of torture is necessary.

Just look at what people were saying a out water boarding - "it's not really torture".

How many detainees are still held without trial?

>Just look at what people were saying a out water boarding - "it's not really torture".

Let's put it this way: unless you're not horrified to have such a procedure happen to you, your wife, child, etc, it IS torture.

We'd be less likely to use interrogation methods that went too far if the officer in charge was subjected to the same methods concurrently. Then the officer would be in the correct position to judge what was reasonable and what was not. Like Jubal was talking about on Firefly.

Jubal Early: You oughta be shot. Or stabbed, lose a leg. To be a surgeon, you know? Know what kind of pain you're dealing with. They make psychiatrists get psychoanalyzed before they can get certified, but they don't make a surgeon get cut on. That seem right to you?

It's a step... It's worth something but it's not like there wasn't a ton of resistance to it.

The question on my mind, were their CIA operatives that refused to comply with orders? Take the various police brutality cases, what's lost in the echochamber about it all is that these guys volunteer to be police, nobody is forced to, some of them want to carry guns, that really changes the situation a bit when an unarmed person ends up dead. The CIA has the same problem here, I know there are people in the CIA that "want to kick some terrorist ass." I'd feel better if there were some outspoken CIA operatives who were coming out saying that they refused to take part. If not, it's not just an ugly stain but the whole organization is broken, they have no respect for law..

There were CIA officers that disagreed, protested, and withdrew from the situations. It's mentioned in the report.

And if things like this become public without anyone being held accountable -- signalling public approval for the abuses -- that will happen less the next time.

Remember Abu Ghraib? there was only ONE guy not ok with what was happening. It usually takes only one man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg

in case of US concentration camps there also was one man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou he is still in prison, because ratting on your fellow men is against the law

There usually are no 'good cops' either, because doing something in the face of evil marks you as a traitor

The Kiriakou case is not that straightforward.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8726344

>The saving grace is that we have a country that was able to admit that it did this.

It's mostly able to admit it because nothing will change, that is: such exposes are inconsequential.

If those kind of reports could change things, they wouldn't happen at all.

This would end with a few questions, some pats in the back, and business as usual.

That's like a perfect example of selection bias. The programs you haven't heard about... well you haven't even heard about them.

> The saving grace is that we have a country that was able to admit that it did this.

Pft. You're not getting off that easy.

The "saving grace" for Germany was going to international trial for the crimes committed, something the US actively refuses to do, AND hanging their heads in collective national shame for the atrocities they allowed happen in their name, scared shitless what a country is capable of when not kept in check by its people, fearing and strongly dismissing anything remotely reeking like nazism, even up to the point of partially giving up their own freedom of speech, ever since. I don't see the US doing anything similar any time soon. "It's our FREEDOMS! We must have our FREEDOMS!"

Sorry I'm just really angry and sad.

This. Admitting you did wrong is not enough; you're not really sorry if you don't make sure it can never happen again, if you don't try to make whatever repairs can be made, if you don't make sure the culprits end up in prison.

I hope the US is truly sorry about this, but they will have to show how sorry they are. Words are not enough.

Germany, has gone out of its way to punish the guilty, and to change their national culture, and imprint their new culture with the taboos necessary to ensure those atrocities can never happen again. No country in the history of the world has ever been so sorry as Germany, and their reaction to the shameful things they did deserves admiration and respect.

If the US wants to deserve similar admiration and respect, they have to show it. They have to prove it, by putting all these people behind bars at the very least.

I recently read 'When Hell Was in Session', the self-written account of a pilot imprisoned during the Vietnam war.

Based on these descriptions of techniques, I suspect that the CIA officers responsible for this have also read the same book.

The torture techniques they're using/have used/pretended to have stopped using but definitely did not have been known and used for decades; read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_and_CIA_interrogation... .

A quote of a quote: "The Baltimore Sun reported that, former Battalion 3-16 member Jose Barrera said he was taught interrogation methods by U.S. instructors in 1983, used this technique: "The first thing we would say is that we know your mother, your younger brother. And better you cooperate, because if you don't, we're going to bring them in and rape them and torture them and kill them."

In summary, not only does the CIA torture, it exports the vast knowledge of torture that it has so that other people (usually horrid regimes) can torture just as effectively.

The USA has a long, disgusting, and utterly unforgiveable history of practicing and teaching torture. The latest "war on terror" was yet another excuse for the endless parade of terrorism which the CIA inflicts on people.

You say that this stuff would make the Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi proud. Of course it would; the CIA is one of their classmates, and always has been.

Do we have figures about how many people have been tortured? Even if 1 is too much for me, many people think in terms of "It's ok because it's a remote risk".

39 people were subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques", according to this report.

Is that a total number? Because this isn't the whole report, this is just the executive summary. The full (classified) report goes on for over 6,000 pages.

It's the number the executive report gives as the total. There's no reason to believe they're not counting them all.

I just checked, that isn't what the report says at all. They say "at least 39" and say that there are at least 17 other people who were tortured without central office even being notified. Also, these numbers are from one CIA program, not all CIA programs. And it specifically does not include people where the interrogators did anything outside guidelines, so the worst atrocities are not counted on this list at all.

This list does not include examples in which CIA inten-ogators were authorized to use the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, but then implemented the techniques in a manner that diverged from the authorization. Examples include Abu Zubair^®^ and, as detailed, KSM, whose intenogators developed methods of applying the waterboard in a manner that differed from how the technique had previously been used and how it had been described to the Department of Justice. This count also excludes additional allegations of the unauthorized use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.

Where's that quote from? I can't find it in the report.

What I did find, on page 101 is this:

"Over the course ofthe CIA program, at least 39 detainees were subjected to one or more of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.CIA records indicate that there were at least 17 CIA detainees who were subjected to one or more CIA enhanced interrogation techniques without CIA Headquarters approval. This count includes detainees who were approved for the use of some techniques, but were subjected to unapproved techniques, as well as detainees for whom interrogators had no approvals to use any of the techniques"

This passage indicates that those 17 tortured outside the approval process are accounted for. I don't see anything showing there were others outside the 39.

at least 39 detainees

I don't see anything showing there were others outside the 39

Rather than give my honest opinion here, which would no doubt end up in a kindly word by dang, may I just ask you to run a basic boolean check over your posts before hitting 'reply'.

edit - the part you have such difficulty locating is from the exact same section you quoted, just a little further on, page 104.

Your snark aside, "at least 39" doesn't indicate there are more than 39.

Also, the bit you quoted from page 104 is in reference to a list of the 17 tortured without authorization. So it also doesn't indicate there were more than 39 total

It starts with: This list does not include examples in which CIA inten-ogators were authorized to use the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, but then implemented the techniques in a manner that diverged from the authorization.

How can it be referring to the 17 where no authorization was sought, when it specifically states it is talking about authorized interrogations?

And in common meaning, if you say 'at least 39', you are giving a low-end estimate, not a known total.

The list starts on page 101 and is prefaced by this:

"The 17 detainees who were subjected to techniques without the approval of CIA Headquarters were: (...)", and then it lists them by name.

Then there's the part you're quoting, which is quite clearly stating that the list of 17 isn't counting cases where EIT was authorized, but the techniques were not implemented as authorized. This isn't surprising since the list of 17 is of people who weren't authorized for EIT at all.

If they were authorized, they're not listed as being unauthorized, even if the techniques used went beyond the authorization.

It's really very simple if you read the document. There's no question that section you quoted is referring to the list of 17.

Thousands and thousands

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/03/torture-victims-in-el-salvado...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9551.htm

I'm in total agreement with your sentiment and those (so far) in this thread. But I want to question the pretext of the interrogations: the assumption that Americans will support any action that keeps America safe, the "safety first" assumption.

While the importance of safety is reflected in bulk of our public discretionary expenditures, Americans have other values. Americans value liberty. Americans value humanity. Many value these above safety (e.g. N.H. state motto). Sadly most people I know choose safety first and close their eyes to the corollaries, which leads us to where we are now.

Even the "safety first" argument, from the summary I read of the report, doesn't hold, since the value of intelligence gained by torture is clearly debatable. So it's both cruel and inefficient.

>The list goes on.

It sure does.

> At DETENTION SITE COBALT, detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or refrigerated water was poured on them. Others were hosed down repeatedly while they were shackled naked, in the standing sleep deprivation position. These same detainees were subsequently placed in rooms with temperatures ranging from 59 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

> two detainees that each had a broken foot were also subjected to walling, stress positions, and cramped confinement, despite the note in their interrogation plans that these specific enhanced interrogation techniques were not requested because of the medical condition of the detainees.

> CIA records indicate that Majid Khan cooperated with the feedings and was permitted to infuse the fluids and nutrients himself. After approximately three weeks, the CIA developed a more aggressive treatment regimen "without unnecessary conversation." Majid Khan was then subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration, which included two bottles of Ensure. Later that same day, Majid Khan's "lunch tray," consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was "pureed" and rectally infused. Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed.

edit: And I mean those are just the emotive gut-wrenching things. Skimming the rest of it, it's filled to the brim with the CIA lying about the extent, efficacy and importance of the program. To me, that is the more worrying part. Anyone who's studied basic psychology gets taught Zimbardo and knows what happens when you run an unregulated prison. While disgusting it's not surprising.

But what is really surprising is the extent to which the CIA was willing to lie and obscure the truth even to their superiors.

That last one is special. Add "anal rape" to the list of the CIA's torture accolades. Certainly didn't hear about THAT on the news.

Oh, it happens even within the states, to legal citizens. http://www.loweringthebar.net/2013/11/do-not-clench-your-but...

Fuck the police.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner...

> These violations included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.

> In 2004, Antonio Taguba, a major general in the U.S. Army, wrote in the Taguba Report that a detainee had been sodomized with "a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick."[30] In 2009, Taguba stated that there was photographic evidence of rape having occurred at Abu Ghraib.[31] An Abu Ghraib detainee told investigators that he heard an Iraqi teenage boy screaming, and saw an Army translator having sex with him, while a female soldier took pictures.[32] A witness identified the alleged rapist as an American-Egyptian who worked as a translator. In 2009, he was the subject of a civil court case in the United States.[31] Another photo shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner.[31] Other photos show interrogators sexually assaulting prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube, and a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

> In other instances of sexual abuse, soldiers were found to have raped female inmates, and senior U.S. officials admitted that rape had taken place at Abu Ghraib.[33][34] Some of the women who had been raped became pregnant, and in some cases, were later killed by their family members in what were thought to be instances of honor killing.[35]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST the third point, there is a second half to it that shows what he tried to do to him self after being put through that

> Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed. In addition to his hunger strikes, Majid Klian engaged in acts of self-harm that included attempting to cut his wrist on two occasions, an attempt to chew into his arm at the inner elbow, an attempt to cut a vein in the top of his foot, and an attempt to cut into his skin at the elbow joint using a filed toothbrush.

Page 115

This man literally tried to chew through his own body, to bleed out, to avoid having his food forcefully shoved up his ass, for no reason whatsoever. He further attempted to kill himself on several occasions to avoid this as well.

That is the cold truth of that statement. This is fucking disgusting, and someone needs to be held accountable.

> and someone needs to be held accountable.

The citizens of the United States need to be held accountable. Sorry, someone has to start looking at the root of the problem.

I don't understand, how can you blame the citizens for this, when they were ignorant, against their will, about this?

When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.

At best, the citizens are ignorantly complicit by lack of attention. What did the people do about MK ULTRA? Who was punished? Oh, that's right, the CIA got off with paying their victims off and no-one was held "accountable". The republic has been dead. What's left is just the populace of the most financially successful country, and those people don't want to be told how complacently evil they and their country have become. I've argued with enough people that will reject the truth up until it's completely ill-refutable, the reason being, they like their lifestyle and make-believe country.

Abu Ghraib was a big fucking clue that something was going terribly wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner...

>I don't understand, how can you blame the citizens for this, when they were ignorant, against their will, about this?

>When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.

because the institutions and individuals doing it know that they will go unpunished once the truth gets discovered. Whenever stuff like this surfaces nobody gets punished and thus the citizens/society give clear approval to the actions that have already been perpetrated and to perpetrate it in the future as long as visibility of convenient "ignorance" is maintained.

Is this a democracy, or isn't it? And yeah, sure, we're all "ignorant" in the sense that we ignore everything that isn't spelled out in black and white, and then posted at eye level in our line of sight.

Yes. We can't just keep whining "come on, guys, you really ought to stop" to our leaders. This is happening in our names, and our hands are dirty. Stopping this is our own responsibility.

And how shall we proceed?

A start would be to stop looking to someone else to show you the way. What have you tried?

Working in groups is what makes it so damn easy to discredit, re-brand and dilute movements. Protesting? C'mon, we're way past the useful application of protesting.

That's not 100% true. A good organizer is vital to an effective protest. http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/disruption-time/

The US is legally required by the Geneva Convention Against Torture, signed into US law by Ronald Reagan, to prosecute the torturers and their chain of command.

This.

It requires voting. and being informed. voting for publicly funded limited campaigns. and being active in the courts

..but on the other hand, the US is not part of the ICC (it hasn't signed the 1998 Rome Statute of the ICC), and it also has this jolly federal law in place (2002): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...

    The new law authorizes the use of military force to
    liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied
    country being held by the court, which is located in
    The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion
    clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies
    around the world [...]

http://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-bec...

This is not entirely correct; the US is not a party to the Rome Statute, true, but it in fact Bill Clinton did sign the Rome Statute, but it was never submitted for ratification, and George W. Bush's administration sent a note purporting to retract the signature (as a means of avoid obligations that attach to signatories to treaties even prior to ratification under the Vienna Convention on Treaties, specifically, the obligation not to work to undermine the treaty's purpose.)

The US has engaged more positively (but without any moves toward ratification or even retracting the purported retraction of its signature) with the ICC under the Obama Administration.

Thanks for providing these details. (I didn't even know that Bill Clinton did actually sign the statute, even though it was effectively retracted (if only via (GWB) sending a note purporting to retract the signature, as I take it.))

I'm not sure what the president's signature, or retraction of signature, should be expected to mean. The key is its ratification by the Senate.

You don't have to be signatory to the ICC for torture to be illegal. The ICC is fairly recent. We didn't need the ICC at Nuremberg. We don't need it now. It can be prosecuted within the US justice system, or a new tibunal can be created for it.

The first step is telling your representative(s) that you think torture is bad. They genuinely don't know if you approve of it or not, and they've got the CIA and associated lobby telling them how necessary it is and that if they try to stop it, they're hurting america and in fact they're basically terrorists themselves.

Start by phoning your representative's office. Today. Tomorrow. The day after that. Every day, ask for your representative's statement on CIA torture. Ask why they haven't condemned it more thoroughly; are they in favour of torture? What exactly are they going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Really? Just that? That's not enough. What else? Talk to your neighbours, friends, family, colleagues. Ask them to do the same. Send letters. Send eMails. Visit in person. Don't stop.

Politics will not get us out of this mess, but it sure is an easy ride if that's the limitations of your efforts.

Given that effecting a change in government policy is what politics is, and that's the aim, what exactly would deal with this situation that isn't politics? You've got a snappy attitude, denigrating the idea of politics; do you have anything that isn't politics, or are you just a smug soundbite?

I'm sure all the previous people who used politics to change things did indeed find it an easy ride. Martin King basically phoned in his efforts, didn't he? And I recall Pankhurst effected her changes with a single stern letter to the London Times.

you tell me about politics

this that

you speak of rats.

---

geese. a world of peace

you stumble stammer

pound your fist

an’ i tell you there are no politics

you swear

tell me how much you care

---

you cheat the lunch counter man

out of a pack of cigarettes

an’ i tell you there are no politics

you tell me of goons’

graves. ginks an’ finks

an’ of what you’ve read

---

an’ how things should be

an’ what you’d do if . . .

an i say someone’s been

tamperin’ with your head

you jump

raise your voice

---

an’ gyrate yourself

t’ the tone of principles

your arm is raised

an’ i tell you there are no politics

in the afternoon you run

t’ keep appointments

---

with false lovers

an’ this leaves you

drained by nightfall

you ask me questions

an’ i say that every question

if it’s a truthful question

---

can be answered by askin’ it

you stomp

get mad

i say it’s got nothin’ t’ do with

gertrude stein

you turn your eyes

---

t’ the radio

an’ tell me what a

wasteland exists in television

you rant an’ rave

of poverty

your fingers crawl the walls

---

the screen door leaves black marks

across your nose

your breath remains on

window glass

bullfight posters hang crooked above your head

an’ the phone rings constantly

---

you tell me how much i’ve changed

as if that is all there is t’ say

out of the side of your mouth

while talkin’ on the wires

in a completely different

tone of voice

---

than you had a minute ago

when speakin’ t’ me about something else

i say what’s this about changes?

you say "let’s go get drunk"

light a cigarette

"an’ throw up on the world"

---

you go t’ your closet

mumblin’ about the phoniness of churches

an’ spastic national leaders

i say groovy but

also holy hollowness too

yes hollow holiness

---

an’ that some of my best friends

know people that go t’ church

you blow up

slam doors

say "can’t no one say nothin’ t’ you"

i say "what do You think?"

---

your face laughs

you say "oh yeeeeeaah?"

i’m gonna break up i say

an’ reach for your coat

‘neath piles of paper slogans

i say your house is dirty

---

you say you should talk

your hallway stinks as

we walk through it

your stairs tilt drastically

your railing’s rotted

an’ there’s blood at the

---

bottom of your steps

you say t’ meet bricks with bricks

i say t’ meet bricks with chalk

you tell me monster floor plans

an’ i tell you about a bookie shop

in boston givin’ odds on the presidential

---

race

i’m not gonna bet for a while i say

little children

shoot craps

in the alley garbage pot

you say "nothin’s perfect"

---

an’ i tell you again

there are no

politics

----

Bob Dylan - some other kinds of songs.

What other option is there? Revolution? If you can't get enough people together to vote the current crooks out of office, you certainly have no hope of staging a revolution.

In the end, these people need to be prosecuted in order to lock them up. That means the DoJ needs to do its job, but in the corrupt system of the US, it also means that Congress needs to understand the gravity of the situation.

Maybe people don't vote because they are disenchanted with the system they don't believe works as it was supposed to? Where the heck do you get off saying if people aren't capable of the desire to vote, a revolution isn't possible?

Consider for a moment: you can vote for spam or canned tuna.

Hilarious.

Do you think people are more likely to take up arms against the government than to vote? You're a fool if you do.

How do you think you can stage a revolution with a minority of the population behind you, while the powers that be are as well-armed and as eager to use violence as they are in the US?

You've got a better chance of voting both parties out of office with a minority vote, and fixing the broken system that people are so disenchanted with.

Your mistake is that you believe that the options they're giving you are the only ones. You can make a third option. If you can get enough people behind you to stage a credible revolution, you can easily get enough people to vote for your third option.

It's totally true that the US electoral system is broken and corrupt and doesn't do justice to the vote of the people, but it's not yet to the point that the vote doesn't matter at all. People do still need to vote, and alternatives to the two ruling parties are still legal. You can take advantage of that to stage a much more peaceful revolution through the ballot box.

Demand also that everybody who has been involved in this in any way be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

And not even just the US law. I'm sure what the Nazis did was totally legal by their own laws, and yet they were still punished. Some crimes supercede local laws.

While I disagree in particular (because it is believed the agents of the US using this torture practices acted in secret) there is an overarching logic that is sound: to the degree a society is democratic is the same degree its citizens are ultimately responsible for the actions of their government officials.

We as a country allow whistle-blowers to be called traitors, imprisoned, character assassinated, assassinated and exiled from our country. The only people that don't or didn't know are those that wished to continue living the 'American dream' in denial.

The only way to avoid being responsible for this, is to take the responsibility you have: to condemn this, and demand justice. Pay reparations to the victims of these sadists (preferably out of the pockets of the culprits, but out of the US treasury if necessary), and put the culprits behind bars.

Anyone not doing that, is guilty of condoning this crime, and ensuring that it can and will happen again in the future.

This makes no sense.

The root of the problem didn't start at the voting booth, "Oh I'll check yes to torture those terrorist", or "I'm going to write my Congressmen telling them to torture some folks". In fact Congress voted to outlaaw waterboarding: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/14/us-security-usa-wa... (although it was vetoed by President Bush). This report will help to further clamp down on brutal interrogation techniques. It will push Congress and President Obama to resolve the issue. The CIA, in fact mislead any type of oversight over the torture programs. So instead of jumping to "we're all blame" conclusions, why don't you blame the people in charge that secured the funding for these officers to do it?

The root of the problem is that the state is a monopoly on violence. What is a "citizen" supposed to do? Vote for the red master or the blue master next time? It makes no difference.

The best thing a "citizen" can do is recognize the state is foundationally unethical and has no legitimate political authority and never did. [1] Once we leave behind the mysticism of state authority, perhaps we can find better ways to organize society in ways that are ethically sound.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Auth...

How is that going to help you? Going rogue on your own is not going to get these people in prison, or prevent that it will happen again.

You need people on your side. You need a majority of Americans on your side. And once you've got that, you can vote the politicians out of office, elect some better ones, and finally see justice done. And maybe before that, you can use the threat of this happening to get the current crop of politicians to finally care about justice.

You keep playing their games. I'm going to get busy looking for solutions with an actual possibility of success.

You say that, but your dismissive attitude to the solution sounds like you're doing the exact opposite. Do you really honestly think you can solve the problem on your own?

I would venture we all need to be held accountable. "This happened on our watch" and the like.

This is our government, and these acts are done in the name of our safety.

If you are not interested in someone torturing on your behalf, you need to speak out, and loudly.

It's not only your government, it's also the staff working at the military/industrial complex. It's also other governments and their staff who have been pribed/coerced to help them with their plan.

It's people. It's people among us.

It's sickening.

your elected officials are only now learning about what happened. nothing there was authorized by who you allowed into power.

The common man is even more detached from the powers that be than previously assumed (which was already low).

"The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing"

We knew - we knew - that detainees were being tortured. We didn't know how many; nor for how long; nor the exact methods; but we did know that it was happening.

true. i stand corrected.

We (congress) knew more than vague generalities. According to Jose Rodriguez[1], administration and congressional leaders knew, approved, and were kept briefed throughout.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-on...

In one case, CIA abducted a mentally handicapped man who they knew to be innocent[0], for the sole purpose of recording and sending video tapes of him crying and in distress to his family members to use "as leverage"[1][2].

[0]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/542386688329125888/...

[1]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/542385586313502720/...

[2]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1376...

* I would never support the use of these techniques against soldiers of a legitimate state or other criminal actors.

* The perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks to me represent a completely different sort of threat than has ever been encountered - which legitimized the use of torture (though to be honest, the sorts of techniques outlined in the report don't really sound like what I would classify as "torture"; i.e., the infliction of unbearable pain with no expectation of actionable information being extracted.)

* If the techniques were in fact of no value (which the CIA disputes) then I would of course not support their continued use. I don't support the infliction of 'needless' pain or suffering. If they were providing useful information then I have no ethical or moral problem with them.

What is different about the 9/11 attacks that legitimizes the use of torture, when you would not support it against soldiers or other criminals?

Do keep in mind that 9/11 doesn't even register on the atrocity scale when compared to what's been done by "soldiers of a legitimate state." If you would endorse torture to prevent another 9/11, why wouldn't you also endorse torture to prevent, say, another Hiroshima?

> What is different about the 9/11 attacks that legitimizes the use of torture, when you would not support it against soldiers or other criminals?

They had demonstrated the practice of mass killings of innocent civilians and expressed the desire to continue to do so.

> If you would endorse torture to prevent another 9/11, why wouldn't you also endorse torture to prevent, say, another Hiroshima?

Well, setting aside the moral equivalency of 9/11 to Hiroshima, I suppose if there was reason to believe there was a nuclear threat and there was access to someone for whom it was legitimately believed could provide details which would prevent it, employing torture would be morally and ethically justified.

Let me refresh one of the key point of the report (sorry about the caps)

TORTURE IS NOT EFFECTIVE

This is hardly news, it has been known for a long time. CIA knew it before 9/11

Again, that to me is the crux also. If it is not effective than there is no justification. If it is, which the CIA claims it was, then I have no ethical problem with it in this limited situation

The CIA is completely biased here. They have every reason to claim that torture is effective purely to defend their past actions. Their stated opinion on it means absolutely nothing, in that you'd expect them to say exactly that either way.

Mass killings of innocent civilians are commonly carried out by "soldiers of a legitimate state."

OK, so nuclear attacks by soldiers justify it. How about conventional strategic bombing? Invasions? Exactly where and why do you draw the line, if you're not drawing it where you previously said?

I'll admit, you've got me.

I don't know where I would draw the line, but in the case of Qeada/ISIS, they are well across my personal fuzzy gray line.

I think you'd better sit down and think about it a bit more before publicly advocating for torturing prisoners, then.

> They had demonstrated the practice of mass killings of innocent civilians and expressed the desire to continue to do so.

That hardly makes them unique, or even different than previous enemies the US has faced, and dealt with detainees from, and studied the effects of interrogation, and concluded that torture is ineffective.

And, as the Senate report notes, every single one of the CIA claims that this torture was effective misrepresented the facts, either of whether information gained through torture had not independently been gained through other means, or whether the information gained was gained through the torture at all (often claiming information gained from a detainee before "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used was gained through those techniques, which is only plausible if the techniques are so effective that they send shockwaves back in time), or by simply misrepresenting the existence of threats that were supposedly disrupted when no real threat existed.

I would also like to turn the question around though:

If torture could prevent the mass killing of innocent civilians, do you see any justification in it?

No. I don't think torture is ever justified, under any circumstances. No exceptions.

If you start bending on this, you become the thing you hate. Take the moral high-ground or slide down the mountain. Good luck finding a comfortable place somewhere before you are below the person you hate.

Even if I thought it prevented mass killing in the short term, it is certainly likely to lead to more mass killing in the long term.

You bring up Hiroshima as an example.

I think that in many ways this becomes the old Moral Absolutism versus Moral Relativism problem.

You can have a moral absolutist who says, "Harming another human is wrong, therefore we will not torture under any case." (A different absolutist might be more utilitarian in arguing for torture of one to save many, but you get the point- an absolutist has a position and a rigid interpretation of that position, and sticks with it)

You can have a moral relativist who says, "Harming another human is wrong. We cannot torture someone to collect information, but we cannot avoid collecting that information because if we avoid collecting that information it will lead to someone else harming more humans."

Two sides to the same moral problem. I tend to agree with the relativist view of the problem rather than the absolutist view; the relativist in this case is informed by the consequences of both action and inaction whereas the absolutist in this case only cares about the consequences of action. The solution? Absolutism will provide a solution because something is either right or wrong. So absolutism is easy, attractive. Relativism provides no clear solution, which is why many people prefer to reason in moral absolutist terms.

You (like so many others, sadly) assume torture is actually effective, and that objections to its use rest solely on immorality.

I object to torture on moral grounds. I also object to it on practical grounds. It doesn't work.

Since both of those objections point in the same direction, the solution is completely clear.

This has also been stated by many interrogation professionals, so it's not like it's just uninformed civilians running around saying "torture doesn't work, so don't use it"

I hate torture. One of the problems is that many interrogation professionals also say it works.

To be fair, it's a lot easier to just rationalize what you're doing than to admit you've been doing unspeakable things to humans for no real benefit.

Certainly, I accept your objection on practical grounds, but cannot quite accept the objection on moral grounds.

If something doesn't work, then don't do it. Hiroshima was an extreme example of that. By August the political establishment in Japan was split, with consensus moving rapidly to peace out of the war because by mid 1945 the industrial centers of Osaka and Tokyo were ruined by fire bombings. It just so happens that at the same time the government is moving to surrender, we use two bombs to vaporize more people.

"We need to use these bombs to end the war sooner." A fine argument to the intentionalist, regardless of outcome, but the consequentialist will have a problem with it because the atomic bombings did not lead to an early conclusion of the war, the fire bombings did.

It just so happens that at the same time the government is moving to surrender, we use two bombs to vaporize more people.

They were so close to surrendering that the US had to drop two atomic bombs on Japan?

The problem with that kind of reasoning is that it assigns a quantitative value to life. I don't think you can subject human life to this kind of mathematical reasoning: we'll sacrifice two lives to save three, or twenty to save five hundred. This kind of calculation is utilitarian economics, not ethics. Ethical reasoning tells us that certain categories of action are intrinsically wrong, regardless of context, and that whatever immediate benefit accrues from them, they will taint and corrupt the individual and the society that perpetrates them. Torture indisputably falls within this category.

We went on to foreign soil, and abducted the prisoners in question. It's not like we found them sneaking across our borders with bombs... We have a legal declaration of war on "terror" ... all enemy combatants in such a declaration are POW, regardless of their status in a standing army.

I have a fairly flexible moral code as far as even torture is concerned... this goes beyond what I would consider appropriate in any sense of the word.

Someone should make a demonstration video out of this, showing the various techniques used. I think that would illustrate just how insane it is.

Zero Dark Thirty already has.

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

>This video is not available in your country.

Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost.

It was, and I think his point is borne out in the fact that numerous films and TV shows have depicted torture that would formerly have been the preserve of pure villains to tools available to heroic protagonists in sufficiently urgent circumstances. Never do you see the efficacy of it questioned, or the deleterious effects on the administrator explored, or the scenario where it is erroneously applied to an innocent or where an intelligence asset is lost as a result. Deliberately or not, the fictional depiction of torture over the last decade or so has been almust uniformly ideological.

Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives"

the top headline on Fox news this morning was quoting some blowhard politician calling the release of the report 'unconscionable.' strange moral calculus in which the publication of a document is considered a more egregious offense than torturing people.

I have a family member who was hooked on the TV show "24" which featured torture.

I think that it is quite possible that there is some purposeful desensitization going on.

I've heard this theory. It's not really consistent with the fact that "24" was a torture-fest from the first season, aired before the enhanced interrogation stuff really got going. I was in college at the time, and we loved the show. You don't need much "purposeful desensitizing" to convince a bunch of 20-something guys it's okay to torture terrorists.

You're not the target audience. The point was to make sure that a 48-year old pasty accountant and his kids are de-sensitized.

Q: do you still love the show? After all this, I mean.

As far as 24 goes, it didn't air until after the Sept 11 attacks, but it went into production 6 months before, and was first conceived of sometime in 2000. While a few 9-11 truther types would have it that this was part of a long-planned propaganda campaign, I don't believe that - 'two-fisted cop who doesn't go by the book' is a decades-old trope. I do think that the experience of terrorism helped to build the audience for the show and make it a huge hit, though, when it might have seemed absurdly overblown if it had screened a year earlier.

I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.

I've assumed this theory prima facie for a while. Further examples are movies glorifying war (Homefront, Lone Survivor). As coldtea mentions, it could be considered a form of moving the Overton window.

As 'angibrowl points out, the movie trope of the good guy that isn't constrained by procedural rules is very old.[1] The 1980's action movie catalogue is full of it. Moving the Overton window doesn't even make sense in this context. Moving it from where? We're talking about a country full of people that vociferously supported bombing harmless Vietnamese villages off the map. Aside from maybe the folks who grew up in the 1990's, who weren't exposed to any real global conflict, I'd be surprised if the current generation wasn't the least receptive in American history to questionable methods of warfare.

[1] You see it a lot in crime dramas from the 1980's, where things like the 4th amendment are portrayed as just letting criminals off on "technicalities."

The current trend traces at least as far back as DIRTY HARRY (1971). "Dirty Harry" was a common reference to extra-procedural cops for a couple decades.

Perhaps it's 'keeping the window propped up' (over to where it was moved long ago). The long history isn't exclusive to the idea that these shows and movies are a form of propaganda, or desensitization.

Moved when? Name one generation that you think was less accepting of questionable conduct in warfare.

The long history suggests that the shows and movies are a symptom of cultural attitudes, rather than a cause. For example, consider all the media in the 1980's portraying criminal procedural protections as "technicalities." I think it was in response to the fact that, after 1960, crime per capita tripled before incarceration per capita started going up. As I said about 24--in the aftermath of 9/11, the torture-fest was just capitalizing on the anger people felt. On my college campus in 2002 there was a lot of talk about nuking the middle east and things like that, which is quite contrary to what the government was saying.

We went to very different colleges, I guess.

And, toward the idea of film as propaganda of what are actually terrible behaviors: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/11306...

You've got the tail wagging the dog here. Art is often a reflection of the times.

Do you remember post 9-11 America? People were angry and afraid.

Jack Bauer tortured because America wanted him too.

My little sister just got into with me on facebook about how it is perfectly ok to torture our enemies.

That's just the last straw for me. I would never have someone in my life, family or not, who would think raping people is acceptable. This is even worse. Even our enemies shouldn't be raped/tortured.

But killing them is ok?

I'm gonna say yes - not killing them in cold blood execution style but in the sense of them being a valid target. If you're in a position to torture/rape someone, you've already neutralized them as a threat by capturing them. Shooting or bombing someone is not necessarily OK, but while the person is at liberty they could in theory be about to shoot your or engineer some other sort of attack - the operation to assassinate Admiral Yamamoto in WW2 being a good example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vengeance

On the other hand, torture isn't something that people do because they feel they have to, but rather because they can. Since all the accumulated evidence to points to it being a poor way to to gather intelligence information, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it's just way of being vindictive or sadistic instead, something that we find deplorable in other contexts. I think it's considered deplorable because such feelings are quite common but the majority of us make the effort not to act upon them.

>But killing them is ok?

the human race so far narrowed it down to 2 possibilities - judicial proceedings or war following the rules of Geneva Conventions. Every other form of violence is a crime, with torture and killings being the crimes against humanity, prosecutable by any government and without statute of limitations.

These torture victims weren't even allowed to kill themselves. At least one tried to gnaw through his own veins just to end it all. Yes, this kind of torture is worse than murder. To the victim, but also for the perpetrator, because it's done in cold blood for a prolonged time. You have to have a truly sick mind to be able to do this and continue doing this. The people doing this do not belong out on the street, and they certainly should not be holding any kind of authority.

It's a lot like what's called an Overton Window:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Huge 24 fan here (watched all seasons), I loved the show but that doesn't mean I support torture. I always found the following things ridiculous (and pretty unrealistic):

1) The ridiculous urgency of it, where they're running against the clock to "stop the bomb" or something like that. These kinds of scenarios are highly unlikely in real life, IMHO.

2) That Jack Bauer always got away with all the things he did. AFAIK, he did not spend even a single second inside a US prison (although he did come pretty close a few times).

I always looked at the show as fiction (like a superhero show), not something to be emulated in real life. I really hope most of its viewers looked at it the same way.

I always watched 24 with the understanding that Jack Bauer is just another villain.

I know lots of people who love Game of Thrones but it's a bit silly to think that there's a deliberate attempt to normalize incest or feudalism. It's just a TV show people happen to live.

Game of Thrones also has dragons and ice-zombies. 24 purports to be something that - while far-fetched - "could happen". I don't think you can say that about Game of Thrones. Also, in GoT you get a pretty good idea of the downsides of incest and feudalism, on the off chance the viewer wasn't already aware - whereas in 24 torture is presented as a wonderful thing in certain (or all) circumstances.

I do not believe that it was done on purpose, I think it's in some way a reflection of general morals and ideas of dealing with terrorism floating around in the US society at that time, shortly after 9/11.

Imagine you are the director of such a show that is about some hero that prevents terrorism. What would you make that hero do to prevent a second 9/11 to capture the audience.

Edit: What I can imagine is that 24 inspired some US officials.

Maybe, but I don't think it was done actively. I remember when I was still at a certain military institution and the Dean was periodically pulling in all of the cadets in small groups during "Dean's hour", a period immediately following lunch, to remind us that torture is something that flies in the face of everything we were about to stand for, especially as we were about to graduate and head off to Iraq/Afghanistan. He even tried to get the folks running 24 to quit showing it so prominently [1]. I think it was really just about making money - torture has shock value just like anything else that pushes the established boundaries of violence for television. So I don't think there's some broader conspiracy, I think the people running Fox are really just assholes and capitalized on people's fears.

There's something to be said for the post-9/11 zeitgeist that it gonna take us a really, really long time to get over. We see it in super hero movies (if I have to watch Manhattan get pulverized one more time...) and in a more evolved and complex form with Homeland. I think it'll be years before we come to terms with how we've responded as a society and with what we've done.

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9876686

A relevant recent article, arguing basically that, from 3AM magazine: Saying no to Jack Bauer mainstreaming torture [1].

Google cache as 3AM magazine seems to have some troubles at the moment[2]

[1] http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/saying-no-to-jack-bauer-mains...

[2] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.3a...

> Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot

Meanwhile, jokes about prison rape are socially acceptable & the US government refuses to do much of anything to stop it.

Criminals are apparently considered unworthy of civil rights. Just witness how many people justify the recent high-profile police killings by pointing out that one victim had previously robbed a convenience store and another one was selling cigarettes on the black market. In many people's minds, "selling illegal cigarettes" equates to "OK to kill in the street." Given that, it's no wonder that prison conditions aren't scrutinized.

> Just witness how many people justify the recent high-profile police killings by pointing out that one victim had previously robbed a convenience store and another one was selling cigarettes on the black market

I haven't seen many people use Brown's robbing the convenience store (and assaulting the shopkeeper) to justify his shooting. It's his attacking the officer and trying to take the officer's gun that is typically used as justification.

The convenience store was relevant before the forensic evidence was available, because at the time we had to choose between two stories, neither of which made much sense:

1. Cop with no prior evidence of problems flips out for no apparent reason and blows away a young man who he had stopped for jaywalking, or

2. Young man who was kind, gentle, non-violent and never harmed anyone flips out for no apparent reason and attacks a cop who is just trying to tell him to walk on the sidewalk.

Both of these require someone to be acting way out of known character. Add in the convenience store, and we know that Brown was already acting way out of character that day, just moments before the shooting, which tips the probabilities way in favor of #2.

Now that the forensic evidence is available and backs #2, there are two questions that we should be asking.

1. Why was Brown acting so out of character that day?

Or were we seeing the "real" Brown that day, and the character he presented to family, teachers, clergy, etc., was a front? If so, then we should be finding out how he fooled them, so that in the future teachers and clergy can do a better job of recognizing such people and intervening.

2. Why did Officer Wilson allow himself to get into a position where Brown could attack him and go for his gun?

Character doesn't really interest me. People can be extremely inconsistent. It's to the point where it's a standard joke that the neighbors of serial killers describe them as being nice people. So I personally see no inconsistency with either the supposed nice kid going bonkers or the supposed good cop turning murderous.

To me, the interesting questions are your second one plus the question of why the officer started shooting instead of leaving the scene, potentially returning with backup, since he was still in his car.

Off-topic, but I have a hunch that the answer could be toxoplasmosis.

The second half of your statement is untrue. Google "prison rape reduction act" - this has resulted in a significant improvement as reported both through scientific surveys and anecdotal accounts.

> I have no words. This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud.

Godwin's Law? As far as I know there were no mass machine-gunnings, people hanged with piano wire or actually any people tortured to death. A lot of the techniques listed are pretty much what the US (and UK) army use on their own troops as part of escape and evasion training.

You are mistaken. From the report:

On November --, 2002, adetainee who had been held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died from suspected hypothermia at the facility. [camp COBALT]

And Obama has the nerve to call beheadings "barbaric"?

http://rectalrehydration.com/

Let's not forget, not all the detainees were terrorists.

US promoted a reward program in middle east asking locals to turn in anyone with ties to terrorists. All they had to do was tell a name to US military, and collect reward for every name.

Many locals turned in thousands of innocent people just to collect a reward. These people were immediately arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay without any investigation. US did not even require any probably cause, evidence or investigation to detain and torture these people.

If CIA tortured George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in this way, I am sure they would confess to being an accomplice along with Osama Bin Laden in 9/11 attack.

Unfortunately, this US "war on terror" has created tens of thousands of more terrorists all over the world. It haven't made the US or World any safer, it has created a even bigger monster.

As any war on anything is bound to do. You can't push against something and get less of it - you get more pushing right back at ya.

In this sense, US Gov is the primary cause of and is directly responsible for nearly ALL terrorist acts in the past decades, globally.

The actual thread of terrorism is so minute, that it's not worth worrying about. However, the fact that a 'war on terror' exists is what is desired (by the various parties that stand to gain with such a war). ANd it's not even just one group or org - it's a whole bunch of them, each individually acting in a self-interested way. The end result is the military industrial complex, all the federal money and various other parties, all pushing in the same direction because it benefits them.

The only real way to get around this problem is balance of power - more people need to be richer, so that on average, nobody can push their agenda better than anyone else.

What is your source? Both because I have always heard about the "rewards program" and am interested in reading more, and because wherever you got the information that thousands of people were ever sent to Guantanamo Bay is simply wrong [1]. I see a trend of people rehashing things about Guantanamo Bay that they've heard somewhere else and just putting it out there. It doesn't help the progressive agenda of understanding GTMO and closing it, because the information is just plain wrong.

[1] http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/gtmo-by-...

I saw this in a documentary (I guess it was PBS or BBC). It also had testimonies of innocent people who were detained & tortured for 5+ years, then released by US.

Here are few links about it:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8472804/...

http://www.reprieve.org.uk/publiceducation/2012_08_30_Public...

Gitmo was not the only detention centre. Abu Ghraib is the most notorious of the other centres.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner...

The most famous innocent victim of paid-information is the taxi driver Dilawar, beaten to death in the Parwan Detention Facility.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side

your link says this: "Bounties paid by Bush Administration to anyone who would hand over a possible terror suspect: $3,000 to $25,000" and references http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8049868/ns/world_news

No.

But A LOT of them were.

s/A LOT/some

A program similar to this was employed in Vietnam war , however after thousands were assassinated and killed by said,South Vietnam and the program having had diminishing returns the program was halted, they believe many innocents were turned in due to localized revenge minded regional authorities.

You got that right. :|

    at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard
    ...
    included an "intellectually challenged" man whose CIA detention was 
    used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information

> Torture should be like rape. Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot.

How do you know we haven't used rape as torture? We've already walked up to that line, with medically unnecssary anal rehydration acknowledged as a form of control.

So, we are debating the appropriateness of rape. And yes, that sickens me.

BTW the two guys who researched and advised most of these techniques walked away with $80 MILLION

https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+$80+million

We didn't do this to high-value Nazi POWs.

>Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost.<

Like most of what Zizek says, this doesn't survive even the slightest scrutiny. Not that I want to be seen as "pro-torture", but to dismiss it categorically, as Zizek does, is to fail to grapple with the more general ethical conundrum of collateral damage.

Harris discusses this quite effectively[0]. Basically boiling it down to (paraphrasing) "If you're against torture then you should be against any action that results in collateral damage."

[0]http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/why-id-rather-not-speak-a...

As much as I loathe the immorality and idiocy of these programs, there is no reason to lose all historical perspective.

> This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud.

A big difference is that those groups tortured and killed many of their own subjects for their political dissidence. In this case, the CIA tortured (albeit counterproductively) to protect its citizens, and there was a free press to uncover and help stop these programs for the most part.

It seems to me like there are four key findings here:

(1) the CIA did some truly horrific stuff to detainees -- wallings, waterboardings, sleep deprivation, threatening their families, etc. (Specific quotes are in rdtsc's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8723834 ).

(2) the CIA systematically lied about and hid information about what they were doing from other parts of the government -- from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, US ambassadors in countries that housed detention facilities, etc.

(3) the CIA didn't provide its operatives with training in interrogation until months after the program started, didn't have facilities in place until just shortly before they took custody of their first prisoner, had very little oversight even within the CIA itself (see finding #12, page 17 of the pdf), and otherwise seemed to be flying by the seat of their pants. So they weren't even making decisions in a coherent, systematic fashion.

(4) all of this horrific, lied-about stuff... didn't even work. They weren't saving lives, and they had plenty of reason to know (before, during, and after) that the techniques wouldn't/weren't/didn't accomplish anything of value. So even firm believers in "the ends justify the means" don't have a leg to stand on here.

and even when it is public, there is still not repercussion to the people that made the bad decision.

A few things:

The Republicans have issued a rebuttal. I assume this means they support torture. I hope this dissuades some of their remaining voter base from continuing to support them.

Clapper has issued a rebuttal, claiming that the report isn't neutral. I assume he also supports torture. Not sure that he has any credibility left after being caught on the record lying to congress, but whatever.

The White House attempted to keep this report from coming out. Obama's admission that "we tortured some folks" was hollow, and his promises regarding torture transparency have been refuted as lies. I assume that the White House supports torture, via its resistance to exposing torture. I hope this dissuades some of their voter base from continuing to support them.

Feinstein, though extremely undesirable due to her support of the NSA, has showed some balls here. In the months leading up to the release of this report, she claimed that the CIA was threatening her, so we'll see what happens. I would like it if the next big stink she makes is about the CIA's surveillance of the Senate committee.

The CIA itself has just been pinned on the record as having intentionally misled Congress (its only real oversight) for a period of nearly a decade. Additionally, the CIA has been pinned on the record as having attempted to cover up evidence that it tortured people, and then also spied on the people investigating the torture within the US government. I hope that this agency is drastically reduced by some sort of chemotherapy now that some of its crimes have come to light.

Just remember that this isn't over. Keep paying attention to who defends the CIA, and which media outlets place torture as a choice on the same level as other options. Keep paying attention to the way that the government tries to deny, scapegoat, and minimize this, and make sure to point it out wherever you see it. Finally, don't let them re-focus on the inevitable violent reprisals that will soon come. Releasing the report isn't the ultimate cause of violence against the US or its proxies, torturing people is.

Edit: It appears as though in one of the footnotes of the report there is an admission that one of the people who was tortured to death was an innocent man who was wrongly abducted.

The White House attempted to keep this report from coming out.

That's inaccurate. Kerry asked for a delay in its release; as Secretary of State, responsible for US embassies around the world, it's his job to draw attention to the risk factors. All reports I've read prior to the release said that both the President and Vice President were strongly in favor of publication. Ultimately the choice to classify or declassify rests with the President.

Anybody got any sources on either side of the points about the current administration?

It's also been argued that the White House really wanted to prevent the release, and reasoned that if they could prevent it from coming out until the new (republican) senate takes office, that republican congress would likely kill it entirely and let the white house claim the high ground despite actually doing the opposite. Kerry's actions certainly support that theory.

When you say that the President and VP were in favor of publication, that is definitely not consistent with what we've seen from Obama.

Remember when Obama blocked the release of additional Gitmo evidence because he claimed it would result in Americans being hurt? I assume the exact same logic was used here to prevent this report from coming out.

I assume Kerry's plea for a delay was a result of the CIA pressuring him to protect their assets which are embedded with embassies worldwide. The collaboration between the State Department and the CIA runs deep, like a mold with many filaments.

> When you say that the President and VP were in favor of publication, that is definitely not consistent with what we've seen from Obama.

We've seen Obama declassify this exact report, without which it could not be published. I'm not sure how much more consistency there can be on this point.

> Remember when Obama blocked the release of additional Gitmo evidence because he claimed it would result in Americans being hurt? I assume the exact same logic was used here to prevent this report from coming out.

I conclude (rather than assume) that it wasn't, because if it that logic was used by Obama, then this report wouldn't have been declassified.

> I assume Kerry's plea for a delay was a result of the CIA pressuring him to protect their assets which are embedded with embassies worldwide.

I don't see any reason to assume that. Its not entirely implausible, but the way that it paints US ambassadors as dupes of the CIA and undermines US diplomatic credibility is also a plausible reason for Kerry to seek to delay it, particularly if there are ongoing negotiations to which the particular issues on which it most damages that credibility may be relevant, and there are numerous other plausible reasons why Kerry might have sought the delay.

>"The Republicans have issued a rebuttal. I assume this means they support torture."

>"Clapper has issued a rebuttal, claiming that the report isn't neutral. I assume he also supports torture."

>"The White House attempted to keep this report from coming out...I assume that the White House supports torture..."

Politics is a dirty, complex game. If you treat every news event as black and white like this, you will form many extremist positions very quickly. Obama, for example, banned torture via executive order when he took office. Did you cry that he was "against torture" when that came out?

This is black and white, unless you have no morals. We tortured people and now some people are defending those actions.

Let me ask you this: What if this report came out and said the exact opposite? What would your reaction be if the interrogation techniques were in no way overly brutal, if everything was done to the books, and the information collected saved millions of lives.

I'm going to take a guess and say you'd be very skeptical of the contents. Maybe you'd go so far as to say everything about the document was a lie perpetrated by the Republican party and other supporters of "advanced interrogation techniques".

This is just a prime example of confirmation bias [0]. If a report comes out saying torture has worked, you dismiss it. If a report comes out saying the opposite, you hail it as the only evidence that even matters (obviously I'm exaggerating a bit to make my point, but I'm sure you get the idea).

A very strongly-sided report just became declassified with little insight into any biases that its writers may have. I highly doubt anyone in the government lacks the integrity to put out a completely fake report of this caliber, but everyone should be looking at this with at least a little cynicism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Torture is a cut and dry moral issue; inflicting pain on a person willfully for an extended period of time is not acceptable behavior, nor is this fact a matter of politics. The people/groups I listed in my original comment have placed themselves on the wrong side of this moral issue, and history will judge them harshly as such.

Obama may have issued an executive order when he entered office, but attempting to block/redact/delay this report betrays his true loyalties.

It isn't an extremist position that torture is wrong, or that the people who support/cover up torture are in the wrong. If anything, it is an extremist position that torture is a valid tactic.

Yes, torture is a pretty cut and dry moral issue. That does not mean the people/groups you listed are "for torture" based on the small sample of reactions you listed. I would not describe the Obama administration as being "for torture" just for going against the report (can you source that by the way? I can't find it). Maybe they genuinely thought unrest in its aftermath would pose a security risk? I don't think this is really what they thought, hence, the report was released. Likewise, perhaps the Republican party views the report as inaccurate, but not that torture is justified in general (given past members' support for the programs, I doubt this too, but still).

Apparently 2/3 of Americans are on the wrong side of this "cut and dry moral issue." http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/09/poll-68-of-americans-s...

That’s quite irrelevant.

It wouldn't be the first time that 2/3 of Americans support something atrocious. Slavery, voting rights, segregation, senseless wars, drug laws, gay rights, etc.

> The Republicans have issued a rebuttal. I assume this means they support torture.

Stop assuming Republicans support torture.

McCain comments on the report: http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/12/09/lv-mcc...

Not trying to make this a party issue but that is 1 GOP rep who has been subjected to torture. Considering the GOP released a rebuttal to the report, I think it is a fair statement to say in turn that they are effectively supporting the use of torture by the US [1].

Edit: 1. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/republicans-dismiss-senate-tortur...

Marco Rubio has come out in support of the actions of the CIA; who is to say he doesn't represent the party line on this issue more than McCain?

(and really, McCain is one of few Republicans who doesn't support torture because of his own background as a POW)

Is McCain's opinion shared by the rest of the Republicans? If so, then getting justice done should not be a problem. My impression is that McCain is pretty alone, though.

> The Republicans have issued a rebuttal. I assume this means they support torture.

> Clapper has issued a rebuttal, claiming that the report isn't neutral. I assume he also supports torture.

If I write, 'cryoshon eats babies,' and Jimbo replies, 'no he doesn't; he eats eggs, and besides he was starving,' then that doesn't mean that Jimbo supports baby-eating: it means that he doesn't believe that eating eggs is eating babies.

There is a minority report which rebuts this one, and the CIA itself have issued their own rebuttal. Now, those could be non-rebuttals entirely of the form, 'doesn't matter, it worked' or they could be rebuttals of the form, 'the worst stuff you mention never happened; the rest of it is unpleasant but legal, and effective.'

They could also be true, or false—as could this report.

Strong persecution and us-versus-them phrasing going on here. This is our government, our representatives, the people we elected and allow to perform these actions. We as a whole may not be as directly culpable, but we certainly are not clean of conscience. It evokes thoughts of "this happened on our watch". Even for those not residing in the USA, there is responsibility.

I think we should be a little more amazed that this report is available at all---an through internal channels at that. While we're all bashing the CIA for what they've done (and are right to do so), we should also appreciate that this is also at some level an instance of government working "properly": one branch of government audited another branch, found that there had been misconduct, and was able to publish a report showing what had been done wrong. This is not the end of the road---we still need to fix the problems and prevent them from happening again---but publicly acknowledging the problems is a massive first step.

Before we all jump on the bandwagon to paint the USA as the next major authoritarian regime, ask yourselves the question: would this report ever get published in North Korea, China, or the former USSR? Frankly, I can't imagine it. This report proves that the USA might not be better than any of those countries with regard to these events... but at least it appears that the USA has the guts to acknowledge publicly its mistakes.

Well, that's assuming that the people who did this actually consider these mistakes (they don't) and that they will be held even a little bit accountable (which looks unlikely). As it is, it's as much bragging as it is auditing: nothing bad will come to those who committed these heinous acts, and it will provide no discouragement for those who come after and have to make the decision about whether or not to torture.

a steam valve to relieve pressure keeps the great death machine running smoothly.

This is a really good point, and shouldn't be lost in the outrage. Of course, the outrage shouldn't be lost either, but you're right: some of our morality is salvaged by the publication of this report.

Its something yes, but considering no one will be charged at all for well documented and extremely grave crimes well... Its hard to take solace in being a little better than a full on totalitarian regime.

It is called hypocrisy. These debates are not real, they are planned and can be shut off like a spigot.

In 2004 a whole layer of top CIA officials were forced out. Defense Secretary Colin Powell resigned. Dick Cheney purged the CIA of personnel who might have served as some counterbalancing force. Once the good and reasonable people were gone (fired, forced to resign etc.), the CIA ran amok. If we look honestly at what went wrong, it's pretty clear how to fix it. Fire all the people that lied to Congress and broke the law by employing prohibited techniques. Prosecute them to the fullest extent possible. Simultaneously, conduct an internal review of all the former CIA fired for political reasons and hire them back. These are the people America desperately needs to repair our broken system. The CIA is desperately in need of reform. The world is too dangerous and complicated a place to have the wrong people running our foreign policy. If they lied about torture, what else are they lying to Congress about? Clearly it isn't the solution to every problem but it would be the best possible, immediately actionable step. Bring back the good patriot Americans who were fired from their job with the intelligence agencies for political reasons. Get rid of and prosecute the bad apples.

Colin Powell was never Defense Secretary, he was Secretary of State. In any case, as the report notes, the CIA was already running amok before 2004, so any purge then was not a necessary prerequisite for the CIA to run amok, though it might have removed a constraint that would have reigned things in sooner.

Local and national news TV programs have been going on for days about how all of our embassies are on "High Alert" in anticipation of violence directed at them/us on the basis of what's in the report. I take that by itself as an admission that the government's conduct has been what should be considered unacceptable, and is probably only "lawful" in the most meaningless sense of the word (if at all).

Rightfully so. People should be upset. We let a sense of urgency take over our moral compass. Which was the completely wrong way to look at this conflict anyway: we had no need to be that urgent given that our resources were (and still are) effectively inexhaustible. We got bad intelligence, we made a lot of enemies, and we lost the moral high ground that the US had worked hard to rebuild after Vietnam. The failure happened at the top: Bush (presumably guided by Cheney and the neo-con "long war" doctrine) chose to ignore decades of intelligence research showing that torture leads to bad intel. Because the failure happened at the top, nobody will pay for it.

Had we done things the right (slow) way, we would have a lot more friends in the region. Because the long, slow way of intelligence gathering involves building trust and developing friendship with people. But the American public doesn't have the patience for long peacekeeping missions like that, and the international community doesn't either.

There are so many layers of secret courts and classified legal opinions that it's hard to say the US has much rule of law anymore. People have lost faith in the legal system much the same as they have lost faith in our legislative system. All that's left is the executive branch, which leaves us dangerously at risk of a dictator taking over if we elect the wrong person, because the other two branches of government are too weak to stop him. I hate to get all tinfoil-hat, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched anymore.

"we would have more friends in the region"

This seems to be thrown around a lot. You hear things like, "if we didn't go into Iraq/Afghanistan, we would have more friends in the region," "if we didn't prop up Mubarak or the Saudis or someone else, we would have more friends in the region," "if we gave more support to the Palestinians, we would have more friends in the region."

I think this is the wrong way to think about our policy. We currently have a set of "friends" in the region; Israel, Saudi, etc. The things we do will always upset a portion of the population, but you will also have some who support those actions (foreign policy has not all been a shambles, which is why we retain regional allies in spite of the things that have happened over the past two decades).

Changing your actions will never guarantee that you will make more friends, because in making some friends we would lose others. By catering to the progressive populations in the Middle East, you isolate the conservative populations, and vice versa. Rapprochement with Iran, as an example, may seem like a fine idea, but the mere prospect has Israel and the Saudis concerned. So changing policy cannot achieve "more friends." What we can do is choose who we want to be friends with carefully, and let that guide our policy.

The friends we've chosen in the region also don't help us. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel are particularly well-liked in the region (and that's putting it lightly), but both are seen as US puppets.

Honestly I don't think we really care much anymore what the Saudis think; the regime has fantastic wealth but very little real power beyond holding the purse strings for hyper conservative terror groups. I think eventually the hypocrisy and opulence of the regime will cause the terror groups to throw off their former masters and come after them -- and all credible reports say the Saudi army isn't much more than a facade propped up by a handful of US contractors. We probably wouldn't let them fall to terror groups, but we also aren't really comfortable propping up a regime that is actively funding a proxy war against us.

"The friends we've chosen in the region also don't help us"

The recent OPEC decision declining to reduce production in the face of falling oil prices, thus screwing over Russia hard, means that Saudi Arabia is most certainly a useful US ally.

All allies are useful, even backstabbing frenemies like Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia (or more specifically, the ruling regime in Saudi Arabia) needs us more than we need them these days.

I mean, I realize the prime reason they fund Islamist terror groups is to cause regional instability that drives up the price of Saudi oil...

That's actually a terrible reason to fund armed groups. Al Qaeda's original mission was to replace the Saudi monarchy; there were many attacks in Saudi Arabia after 9/11, they weren't talked about much. So the Saudi monarchy is not interested in helping those kinds of groups.

Armed groups are often funded by wealthy individuals for a variety of reasons (Osama bin Laden being a famous example). Armed groups funded by the Saudi monarchy are in other countries, fighting the regime's enemies by proxy (eg. the Syrian and Iranian governments).

Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture? Even when it obviously means torture: "Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique."

When talking about a physical place. That is so blatant word replacement that I find it hard to take it seriously.

I think one of the conditions for the release of this report was to erase any mention of the word "torture".

The word "torture" is in the document. I happened to just read it in the middle of page 12 (conclusion #5).

>Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture?

Because there is an 'unenhanced interrogation technique' that is almost but not quite torture.

Never forget that beneath the violation of human rights is a desire to destroy. Calling something 'enhanced' is just another way of saying 'we forked you'.

I think you already know the answer to this.

They do this for the same reason that when cops shoot civilians they don't say "Then Officer Smith shot the assailant". They say "Then there was an officer-involved shooting.": To use language as a tool to manipulate the viewpoint of the public.

except, "Officer Smith shot the assailant" is more manipulative of the listener's viewpoint than the actor-neutral phrasing "there was a shooting and Officer Smith was involved"

"...Language can be used politically to deceive and manipulate people, leading to a society in which the people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality. Language becomes a mind-control tool, with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination." - On George Orwell's 1984.

[1] - http://www.berkes.ca/archive/berkes_1984_language.html

This is probably why:

"While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured."

In her introductory letter, Feinstein said it: "...it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured." (page 4)

"You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American english is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse." - George Carlin

Here's an amusing and insightful video of Carlin dissecting the language behind Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

The U.S. military seems particularly prone to this habit of using euphemisms to mask reality.

George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" covers this subject well.

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

Full Essay: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

As a European I think this has deepcultural roots, probably in religion. I'm struck by the way many elecators don't go to the 13th floor, or the 13th in a series of numbered streets is often called something else (eg in SF you have 12th Avenue, Funston Avenue, 14th Avenue...). People prefer to say someone 'passed' (presumably to the afterlife) rather than that they 'died'. And of course there's no swearing on TV - although this only applies to American swear words, it's OK to use words that are considered quite rude in English or Australia.

I have a theory that this is part of the American fondness for TV shows featuring English detectives (Elementary, Forever, Constantine and just about every mystery show on PBS): by speaking the same language but coming from a quite different cultural context, they're able to engage in narrative truth-seeking because of their obliviousness to or disregard for implicit American cultural mores.

One reason to do it is to just set aside the language debate and get on with talking about the actions taken.

So "These things you did are wrong, I don't care what you want to call them or who said they were legal." The legal debate has important implications for lots of people, but the fine details of it aren't very interesting to the moral debate.

The trouble is that legality is all about language and definitions.

It's because they stick to their narrative. PR speak.

Torture is a loaded word that directly implies guilt, where as "enhanced interrogation" is a fairly neutral term. Despite the reports narrative of pointing out all the failures of the CIA in allowing these techniques to be performed, it can't just say "The CIA is a bunch of jackasses who tortured some folks". It needs to be objective to be taken seriously.

> Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture?

"Enhanced interrogation technique" is an uncontroversial, accurate factual description. "Torture" is a conclusion of law applied to the facts that, while there is overwhelming reason to accept that the conclusion is valid for the program as a whole, and many of the specific instances in particular, does not necessarily apply to all of everything that is under the label "enhanced interrogation techniques", and is, in any case, not a legal conclusion that the Committee reached (though the Chair of the Committee, Senator Feinstein, in her introduction to the release, emphatically and directly states as her personal conclusion both that the program involved "torture", and that it involved "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment (both terms being significant in regard to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (including Common Article 3 of the Conventions, which applies to conflict that is not between states-parties to the convention) [0] and the manner in which grave breaches of the Conventions are incorporation into US criminal law as war crimes under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2441 [1].)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Grave_breach...

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2441

> "Enhanced interrogation technique" is an uncontroversial, accurate factual description.

Such language exists only to obscure the meaning. How exactly do you distinguish an "enhanced" interrogation technique from merely an interrogation technique? Is there any better criterion than saying that an interrogation technique is "enchanced" if it involves torture?

Orwell has a nice essay about this: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

UPDATED: I can't reference Orwell and start sentences with "In my opinion..." :)

"Torture" isn't just a crime it's also a word that's been around for centuries that is used to describe the kind of things described in the report. People who want to avoid it do so because its a powerful and emotive word. Describing it as "enhanced interrogation techniques" is just a euphemism to make it seem more palatable because everyone agrees "torture" is wrong but who even knows what an "enhanced interrogation technique" is?

‘Enhanced’ is factual here? How about ‘Damaging interrogation technique’? That’s certainly more factual than ‘enhanced’.

> ‘Enhanced’ is factual here?

Yes, in terms of intensity.

> How about ‘Damaging interrogation technique’?

That's more conclusory than descriptive of the technique, though certainly the whole report (well, the whole several-hundred-page "executive summary") makes that point.

I don't think there is any advantage to adding the emotional weighting associated with the conclusion that the report leads to into the language describing the individual facts. Its more comfortable, perhaps, to people who didn't need the facts to come to the conclusion that the report demands, but I don't see that as an important feature.

Are we noticing the irony of using the term "uncontroversial" to answer controversy?

Sure, "comparatively less emotionally loaded way of distinguishing from other interrogation techniques that also does not carry the weight of appearing to be conclusory on a matter of law on which the Committee was very clearly not intending to state a conclusion" would probably be better than "uncontroversial".

But the point is that people disagree that the emotionally-loaded word should not be used. That's the whole controversy.

"Enhanced interrogation technique" is an uncontroversial, accurate factual description.

I disagree. 'Enhanced' certainly refers to intensification or increase, but also has strongly positive associations. If you experienced two injuries in a row you wouldn't normally say that the second one had 'enhanced your pain experience' - if you did people would assume you were a masochist of some sort. The measure of interrogation is surely in the quality of results it yields; if some technique actually results in a decrease in the quality of intelligence then I'd say it's a degraded interrogation technique.

To the extent that you want a neutral description of an action whose efficacy is unknown, you could say 'aggressive interrogation technique' or 'intensified interrogation technique' or any number of other words. Just because 'enhanced' can be read to mean intensified or increased without necessarily being better does mean it is commonly understood to mean that; when you're choosing terms to describe something to the public - and especially when you're choosing words for their referential rather than explanatory power - that lowest common denominator of meaning is the one that matters.

I appreciate the fine legal distinction that you're drawing here in the context of war crimes and so forth, but I suggest to you that phrases like 'enhanced interrogation technique' are actually part of the problem - deliberate euphemisms chosen primarily for their anodyne qualities.

> uncontroversial, accurate factual description.

Are you so obsessed with minutiae of definitions that you are unable to see that both terms describe reprehensible acts performed by people against other people?

The parent is right to be skeptical considering the number of lawyers involved in this mess. Torture is obviously illegal so it has more implications than just "enhanced interrogation".

Right to be skeptical of what, precisely?

The media is saying the methods were "far more brutal" than previously thought, which is a gross understatement.

Because torture dungeon doesn't exactly sound nice

Just like murdering jews was called a "resettlement operation." To sanitize the language.

Dianne Feinstein deserves enormous credit. Fox News and Republicans are bashing her and by extension her party as traitorous as we speak. The argument that this report should be kept in secret because it endangers Americans' lives is abominable. As an American living abroad, I'm happy to see this released.

Still, I wonder about some of the side-effects of this. Instead of arresting and interrogating terrorists we kill them with drones as its less messy.

I would rather be killed than tortured, obviously depending on the type of torture.

It's really disappointing that she does support the NSA's extrajudicial activities, though, to the point of calling Snowden a traitor.

C'est la vie :P

This does nothing to help my view of her.

The report didn't endanger American lives; their actions did.

> Still, I wonder about some of the side-effects of this. Instead of arresting and interrogating terrorists we kill them with drones as its less messy.

We were killing plenty of people in the War on Terror while the detentions and torture were going on (heck, the torture was sold in part on the basis that it was helping us find and kill people that needed killing in that war.) And some of those tortured also died as a result.

Torture and killing aren't mutually exclusive alternatives.

>> Instead of arresting and interrogating terrorists we kill them with drones as its less messy.

Less messy, less dirty, less dirty hands etc etc. Yeah right. I wonder how the drone operators sleep at night after a "successful" hit at e.g. a wedding ceromony etc.

Drone kills are still plain evil. And illegal.

Look into her history. Before she was against it, she was for it.

She was in favor of what, exactly?

I think a drone strike is pretty fucking messy. What a drone strike does is move the mess to a place that's easy to conceal from American citizens.

It was her job in the first place to keep this from happening. The fact that this report even needed to happen is a result of her committee's inability to provide the oversight that they are tasked with.

Fellow parents, how do you teach or plan to teach your kids about this? I was discussing this with my son last night, but I really couldn't explain to him the prejudice and fear that people use to justify these types of acts, or the "otherness" that the perpetrators try to construct around the victims in the media. It's just not something he's experienced yet. There's no way to put it into context.

That's because there wasn't any prejudice or fear that warranted this, ever. IIRC, in Dick Cheney's autobiography, he states that he was a driving force behind pushing the intelligence community to torture their detainees. And he states that he did so "because if we started torturing people, no one would call the republican party weak on terrorism." He didn't have to go that extra mile.

That was it, that was the justification. Once reports and pictures started coming out, the Murdoch press ran stories that "enhanced investigation techniques" were responsible for foiling various terror threats, despite official proclamations and studies at the time saying otherwise. And then the press claimed it was a partisan issue, because that's what they always do, without any regard to what the issue actually was.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that in my personal opinion, the only story to be heard here is that in the real world, evil is defined as actions actions taken in self-interest that harm others (Dick Cheney's actions in this story, as well as the people who obeyed those directives). That while the press made it seem like 50% of people were pro-torture, the press never, never, accurately shows the actual viewpoints of the people, not to mention how morally bankrupt and unreliable this shows the national press to be. And one last point about how many people were convinced by news reports that since these things were only being used against bad people, it was okay, and how that should be a lesson to others and the future... and how many times this has happened this exact same way in the past.

I can't think of any good person that have ever argued that they are "tough on [x]".

And he states that he did so "because if we started torturing people, no one would call the republican party weak on terrorism." He didn't have to go that extra mile.

Those quotation marks really demand a citation.

I'm only joking, but wouldn't seeing a SAW movie with them and explaining that this kind of violence is perceived as justified against certain groups suffice?

That's not really a terribly awful idea. Would probably be incredibly useful for unknowing adults, as well.

Are you familiar with Jane Elliott's "Blue eyes/brown eyes" experiment? It's a good kind of ultra-lite introduction to racism/discrimination if you've literally never come across the concept before. (Comes up a lot in Holocaust curriculum.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQAmdZvKf6M

Though I wonder if small children aren't closer to understanding this than most of us. They're such a jumble of implicit biases at the best of times... You know that thing you're so scared of, that only comes out when you turn off the lights? Some adults grow up and stop being scared, and some adults don't.

Elliott's experiment is one of the most impressive teaching methods I've ever seen. This is such a good way of introducing kids to discrimination and hatred, how easily it spreads, and how it affects people.

The interviews with the people that had Elliott's lesson much later when they were adults is notable - the lesson stuck with people, in life-affecting ways.

It's been a long time, but could Seuss' The Sneeches (those with stars and those without thars) serve the purpose?

For a wonderful fictional piece on the same theme, try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(novel)

I was just wondering about this in relation to those who were advocating for not releasing the report at all. I fail to see any difference between this stance and telling a child to not admit their guilt of wrong doing because they will have to actually suffer the consequences of their actions.

Depends how old the kid is. If he's four then all you can say is that some grown-ups were really mean to each other when they shouldn't have been. If he's a bit older, maybe you can relate it to some other questionable behavior, like why do criminals commit crimes instead of being good, or conversely why do we bother going through a trial before throwing bad people in prison or shooting them. There's a psychological theory that violence often results from the psychological distress encountered when the real does not confirm with the imaginary, but the very length of this thread shows that these things are difficult to process for adults, never mind children.

In the foreword:

> Reading them, it is easy to forget the context in which the program began - not that the context should serve as an excuse, but rather as a warning for the future.

Well said.

Ooh, that's good. Here, have a comment so your citation stands out more.

From the section "The Committee makes the following findings and conclusions:" on page 9 number 10 is interesting "#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques." I have assumed that's the case with many of their operations, are there more public accounts of them doing this?

Classification has become a tool to protect careers, not the nation. These people all acted individually towards whatever incentives they saw desirable. Money, power over helpless detainees, I don't know. Specific people did exactly what they wanted to do. And it's not like the whole CIA was on board, but the people who disagreed can get the fuck out of the room and let the adults play torture games.

    CIA attorneys, discussing aspects of the campaign involving off-the-record 
    disclosures, cautioned against attributing the information to the CIA itself.
    One senior attorney stated that the proposed press briefing was "minimally 
    acceptable, but only if not attributed to a CIA official." The CIA attorney 
    continued: "This should be attributed to an 'official knowledgeable' about 
    the program (or some similar obfuscation), but should not be attributed to a 
    CIA or intelligence official.

    Another CIA attorney noted that the draft "makes the [legal] declaration I
    just wrote about the secrecy of the interrogation program a work of fiction.."
    CTC Legal urged that CIA leadership needed to "confront the inconsistency" 
    between CIA court declarations "about how critical it is to keep this 
    information secret" and the CIA "planning to reveal darn near the entire 
    program.

This is horrific. Just reading the findings and conclusions section is astounding. Embarrassing and shameful day for the USA.

I am pretty sure today isn't the shameful day.

I'm pretty ashamed today as a US citizen, but I get what you are saying. Sad thing is I bet we are still doing this.

Today we should be embarrassed. Next week when the news moves on to the next celebrity breakup, and nearly everyone forgets about this, that is the real shame.

(Page 56) Specifically, the interrogation techniques that went unreported in CIA cables included standing sleep deprivation in which a detainee's arms were shackled above his head, nudity, dietary manipulation, exposure to cold temperatures, cold showers, "rough takedowns," and, in at least two instances, the use of mock executions

Mock executions...

I don't see any section called findings and conclusions

page 9 of the pdf.

I am not an American, but I have one specific positive point to say about that: generally the only way to get a country to acknowledge the horror it did is to invade it and trial the leaders (Germany WWII: trial, Iraq against kurds: trial, France Vichy: nothing substantial, France colonial wars: amnesty, USSR: nothing, Yugoslavia: trial, without real invasion). In this instance, nobody is in court (if we ignore Poland), but at least there is some admission.

It is easy to forget that this is just a report and up to this point it hasn't had any real consequences yet. If this will ever lead to anything (be it criminal charges, convictions or change in policy) is still open.

I don't think it will lead to anything, not more than the 11th september 1973, or the whole Operation Condor. There is no balance of powers around the CIA.

Reading the report leaves me slack-jawed considering my own history. My great uncle was an officer of the Geheime Feldpolizei, a secret state security organization developed to combat native resistance against Nazi occupation during WWII. His job was to infiltrate and destroy Maquis French and their supporters (the resistance). The means they used were mass betrayal, example executions, torture, even the wholesale destruction of entire villages.

In 1946 he was charged with Crimes Against Humanity and sentenced as a war criminal by an allied tribunal consisting mostly of official American personnel. He deserved exactly what he got. What he did was utterly unconscionable even in a time of war.

I cannot, however, imagine representatives of today's America having the same kind of tribunal against war criminals with the same kind of standing. It is now simply unimaginable in anything but lurid, obscene terms. Dark days indeed.

America did a hell of a lot worse than this stuff during WWII. In fact, this stuff is child's play.

We loaded up air planes with incendiary bombs and flew over Toyko purposely igniting their wooden homes to purposely cause a firestorm that killed .1 million people in a single night. Pretty fucking brutal.

Pooring ensure up a guys ass is pretty bad, but we instead of letting our B-52's bomb Taliban villages into nothing, we use drones.

Progress is slow, but it's happening.

I won't argue with you on this. I think if we're at the point of comparing effects against intent in the discussion, nobody proves anything much anymore. Shades of darkness are less important now than working together to change the direction towards light, peace.

Best part is page 403:

"most of them [CIA personnel] do not know that when the wpost/ny times quotes 'senior intel official,' it's us... authorized and directed by opa [Office of Public Affairs]."

Of course everyone with half a brain knows this, it's funny 1) CIA personnel don't and 2) the WPost and NYT continue this practice of citing anonymous sources that are in reality public speakers, giving a carefully designed statement.

It's a shame the report is so partisan. The democrat and republican sides disagree on basic facts, such as whether torture worked in extracting information, and whether that information helped to save lives. Both sides accuse the other of cherry-picking to bolster their cause. Since the primary records are unavailable to us, there's no way to get a more trustworthy opinion on the program. The CIA's behavior is probably pretty horrible, but it's unwise to be very confident in that assessment.

Another interesting fact is that torture may work, or it may not, yet many people don't want torture to work. But think about it for a second: If torture worked, it would be an opportunity to save lives. Torturing one known criminal to extract information that could save dozens (or hundreds) of innocents is unsavory to say the least, but it's better than the alternative. (To reverse the situation, one wouldn't kill dozens of innocents to prevent the torture of a known criminal.) Simply ignoring the issue and saying, "Torture is always wrong," can lead to more death and suffering than thoughtfully considering the issue.

I'm not talking about some hypothetical ticking time bomb scenario. This can actually apply to real life. Consider collateral damage. In war, it is acceptable to accidentally kill innocent people. It is also acceptable to intentionally kill combatants. But torturing combatants to extract information that would reduce collateral damage is unacceptable. It's such a strange instance of moral blindness.

Note that this doesn't mean I would want torture to be legal even if it worked. It seems like there's a good case to be made for keeping torture illegal, since doing so would force a would-be torturer to be sure about the circumstances; so sure that they'd willingly to go to prison to save innocent people.

Edit: So far, both replies are attacking positions I do not endorse. I'm saying make torture illegal even if it works. I'm saying ticking time bomb scenarios are poor justifications for torture. But I'm also saying that torture may save lives in some circumstances. If we're willing to accept the horror of collateral damage, we should also be willing to reduce it using methods as horrific as torture.

Firstly, torture doesn't work, but it's not about that.

Violence simply isn't morally legitimate ever, whether it's aggression or as a response to violence (possibly even greater violence).

Whether it's torture, murder, whatever, it doesn't matter. Doing it in the name of war or national security doesn't make a moral difference.

The ticking time bomb thing is just an excuse for this behaviour.

I disagree about violence. The animal kingdom is inherently violent. Is it socially inappropriate to use violence in most parts of Western civilization? Yes. But in other places around the world (and in some cultures and groups in the West), violent behavior is the norm. It's brutal, it has lasting effects, it's demoralizing to the victim, however it is what we are all born with.

Does that mean violence is 100% unacceptable? If it wasn't, then we would not eat meat, many sports would not be popular, they wouldn't display fights in movies, etc. As an element of evolution, violence in some form will persist and thrive in our society.

So you want to skew the conversation from a discussion the legitimacy of torture, to "is violence bad in it's biological essence".

The reason people come to stark conclusions like "all violence is bad" is because they experienced real war, or real violence.

Read post war literature.

I would rather dismiss violence completely, even though it would be slightly intellectually dishonest, rather than indulge in quasi philosophical conversations on violence in it's biological essence (when the context is war or torture).

To me, it's obscene, a mockery of the millions that has lost their lives to war, and a self masturbatory intellectual privilege of the few wealthy enough to live far from the unimaginable horrors of real war.

> torture, murder, whatever, it doesn't matter. Doing it in the name of war or national security doesn't make a moral difference.

Well it seems that the narrative of your post veered toward violence. I don't agree with sadistic methods for extracting information. Violence would be the absolute last tool in my belt to resolve a conflict. War is brutal and unseemingly unnecessary these days. I do agree that not only the elite, but our society treats war as a game. Most of our society is (successfully) far removed from conflict, many of us don't know what it is like to lose our home, security, a loved one, a limb, etc. all to war.

I am fully aware of what our "enemy" is capable of, of what they have done to us, what they do to their own people. I can't say that I get a knee-jerk reaction to the thought that certain parts of our government employs methods of torture when in the back of my mind lies countless stories of reportedly worse violent methods by others. I can't condemn the methods used in the report until I fully read it. I do condemn the overreach of power, misleading our elected officials, and other politically subversive actions.

"Violence simply isn't morally legitimate ever, whether it's aggression or as a response to violence (possibly even greater violence)."

That requires some justification

  The democrat and republican sides disagree on basic facts, 
  such as whether torture worked in extracting information,

That is not a 'basic fact' that any of the people involved in the report is qualified to determine from the records.

Whether torture 'works' is highly subjective. Why was certain information given? How correct was the information? How relevant was the information to preventing (further) criminal activity? And even if you could assess the upside, there is still the downside to compare to it.

Do you want to live in a country where hundreds of people may be detained for years without trial, without recourse, while being tortured, because one of them may at some point give up some information that may prevent some future criminal activity?

You say

  Torturing one known criminal to extract information that could save dozens 
  (or hundreds) of innocents is unsavory to say the least, but it's better 
  than the alternative.

but that's a false dichotomy. In actual fact you would have to torture many criminals to extract information that saves lives. And the torturing, and having the ability to torture, has a cost. How do you quantify that cost and judge it less than the lives saved? Because if you allow torture, police will use it on every criminal. If you ever get arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, you will get tortured, because you may know something about other people that were there. And they won't believe you if you say you don't know them. And it could take a while to sort that out.

>It's a shame the report is so partisan

Is it partisan? There's not much mention of Republicans and Democrats in the report. OK it happened under the Bush presidency but could potentially have happened otherwise.

let's assume a group like Occupy started to gain enough traction that they became a serious threat to the status quo. that is to say, that the current power base started to shift to a form of politics outside the current two party flip flop system the USA has today.

How long do you think it would be before those 'subversive' groups, even as non-violent, would start to receive the same treatment?

There are few of us prepared to stick our heads above the parapet. Those that do, end up fucked. I.e. Snowden, Assange and Manning.

Sometimes I dream about a people's takeover, Fight Club style, where each man on the street reminds those in power who cooks their food, who washes their clothes, who takes care of their children. A subtle collective threat en-mass to fight the power.

Then I drift back off to sleep.

   I am the People, the Mob
   Carl Sandburg, 1878 - 1967

   I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
   Do you know that all the great work of the world is 
   done through me?

   I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the 
   world’s food and clothes.

   I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons 
   come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send 
   forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.

   I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for 
   much plowing.

   Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is 
   sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death 
   comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. 

   And I forget.

   Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red 
   drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.

   When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the 
   People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget 
   who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then 
   there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: 
   “The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or 
   any far-off smile of derision.

   The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

Actually, there were already leaked plans from the FBI to assassinate Occupy members if the movement became too influential.

http://whowhatwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/FloridaFBIS...

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/25/why_did_fbi_monitor_oc...

I guess we can't let those plebeians have their way, now, can we?

Well, when do the trials begin? Remember, 'Just following orders' is not a defense.

"enhanced interrogation techniques"

I hate this bullshit language. Just use the real word: Torture.

I didn't know this was actually going to get declassified! Apparently it's a legit release, not a leak: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/12/08/...

the first paragraph makes it clear:

"On April 3, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to send the Findings and Conclusions and the Executive Summary of its final Study on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to the President for declassification and subsequent public release"...

EDIT: also the fact that it's stamped "Unclassified" everywhere. If it was stamped as still classified and had been leaked, anyone with a clearance would risk losing it by reading the file.

Wait what? >>EDIT: also the fact that it's stamped "Unclassified" everywhere. If it was stamped as still classified and had been leaked, anyone with a clearance would risk losing it by reading the file.

So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document? I'm confused, more explanation please ;-) This IS sounding vaguely familiar in some way, but I don't get it.

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. Also, I find it interesting how many people here on HN are up to snuff on security clearance issues and ready to answer this question. 5 informative answers in 30 minutes!

Yeah, a security clearance prohibits viewing anything like this. Even if you have Top Secret you can't look at things that weren't meant for you to read.

> So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/01/us-military-blo...

> “Additionally, classified information is not automatically declassified simply because of unauthorized disclosure,” Wollman continued.

> “Classified information is prohibited from specific unclassified networks, even if the information has already been published in unclassified media that are available to the general public, such as online news organizations.”

In order to legally view a classified document you must possess two things: 1) the appropriate classification level (or above) and 2) a need to know

The only people who are restricted from reading classified documents are those who hold government security clearances. Folks who haven't bound themselves to that particular machine cannot be told what they can and cannot read.

If you have a clearance you're expected to follow proper protocols in accessing classified information. Reading something via a leak is not the proper protocol.

Think of it as analogous to being given a "gift" that you know is stolen. Even though you didn't steal it, you know it actually belongs to someone else, so you shouldn't accept it.

If it's leaked, you're not allowed to read it.

If it's re-classified as Unclassified, you're allowed to read it, as it's no longer classified material.

thanks, that's an important distinction.

To better state my initial point: if you have a clearance, you can only read classified material you're supposed to have access to for your job. If it's leaked but still classified, you can't read it.

If it's declassified, then you can read it.

Just because you have been cleared to "potentially know" some details, it doesn't mean that you have carte blanche with all classified data.

> So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document? I'm confused, more explanation please ;-) This IS sounding vaguely familiar in some way, but I don't get it.

So just to go into a little more detail...

When a person with a clearance comes across classified information they must possess the proper clearance level along with being read-on to specific caveats (some of which actually cannot be discussed here but let's just say they're part of the markings that specify the classification level of a document).

While some classified folks may or may not be at a level of clearance and read-on to the correct caveats they still cannot mishandle classified information which would include reading or handling classified material in any way outside of a secure office. So even if you're cleared enough to read it you would be mishandling it on the public internet and thus could get your clearance taken. You also MUST report that this occurred as finding out after the fact also puts your clearance at risk.

> So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document?

Yup. It's still classified. Otherwise anyone who was caught reading a document they weren't supposed to could just say "my friend gave it to me" or "it was leaked on the internet somewhere".

I'm pleasantly surprised too. Next on my wish list is for the Nobel Committee to rescind their Obama peace prize. Fingers crossed...

he stopped it.

And protected every single criminal who was part of it.

Yeah, it's much easier just to assassinate anyone you want from the other side of the planet with a remote bomb.

Or send in a team of assassins when you want to be extra sure that nobody can survive to a right to trial.

I completely agree.

Keep in mind this is just an executive summary, not the full report, and the CIA and White House were able to heavily redact it: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/02/x-things-keep-...

Too bad this only covers the CIA and not the military. I was a 97E (interrogator) in the Army during both Bush administrations, who was lucky to never be deployed. I bet the military also has lots and lots of sins that need to be uncovered.

If I may ask, were you trained in the stuff discussed in this report?

Nope. But then again, what goes on downrange can be very different than what goes on in the schoolhouse.

There's a table at the end with Hayden's testimony adjacent its factual refutation.

This guy will never face charges for lying to Congress.

If anyone has senators on the Intelligence Committee (like Feinstein D-CA), write or call your senator and tell them that they made the right choice.

Members: http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/memberscurrent.html

Not all members of the committee deserve your appreciation..

> The 6,000-page report was researched and written by Democratic staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee between 2009 and 2013 after committee Republicans chose not to participate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/us/politics/q-and-a-about-...

Feinstein has chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009. Her job over the past 5 years in this role was supposed to be oversight of these intelligence agencies.

Fact is until this release she has been a staunch defender of the existing intelligence programs and the status quo among NSA, White House, and CIA. She's exactly the type of person you do not want chairing this committee. Unfortunately when Edward Snowden stepped up and did her job for her (without the privilege of legislative immunity), she called it "an act of treason."[1]

In my opinion if the CIA hadn't been caught spying on her committee's computers she wouldn't have released this report at all. It's an act of retribution in my cynical opinion.

That said, props to her for releasing the executive summary[2] of the report.

[1]: http://thehill.com/policy/defense/304573-sen-feinstein-snowd... [2]: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/02/x-things-keep-...

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

AFAIK Susan Collins did participate. See here:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/09/live-coverage-...

"Given the authors – Committee Democrats along with (...) Susan Collins (R)"

How can the average person combat this? Does anyone have recommendations for organizations to support? I'm honestly at a complete loss for where to start.

edit: removed a comment on this article getting flagged.

Wonder who we have to thank for that.

As we're not supposed to comment as to why we flagged a particular article, it's probably not productive to complain about flagging in the comments.

You're right. I've edited the comment to reflect that.

There are probably two factors at play here:

(1) somewhat counterintuitively, HN penalizes stories that have a large number of comments compared to votes. It's typical for a post with ~300 upvotes to have under 100 comments; you can see several examples on the front page right now. This thread has nearly 200 comments. Having significantly more than the expected number of comments, and especially deep comment threads, is often an indicator of a flamewar, so the algorithm penalizes stories that meet that pattern.

(2) flags. Not "omg I support torture" flags, but "this isn't hacker news, it's mainstream media" flags. This story is very much on the bubble for me -- it's obviously something being covered in mainstream news, but this is a link to the actual report and people are discussing the findings in detail. (I have not flagged it, but I understand why others would.)

[EDIT: this comment was posted in response to a since-removed question about this story's position on the front page. I have left it because I believe the information is helpful.]

Glad that it's released but years too late.

The idea that policy-makers did not know what was going on is ridiculous. The reality is many did not want to know and where more concerned about the post 9/11 political environment instead of standing up for what was right.

Meanwhile, legendary Silicon Valley angel Ron Conway appears to support the CIA and its torture program.

http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2014/12/09/ron-conway-twee...

https://twitter.com/RonConway/status/542404171865927681

This release is a great development, and despite the overwhelming angst and disgust that many here are (rightly) feeling about these actions, it affirms that we aren't a totalitarian state. That our system of checks and balances does work, imperfectly for sure, but what system is perfect? If you aim for perfection, you will always fall short, but surely this means you should correct your aim and do better, not give up. And better we will do.

Those comparing these actions to the KGB, or Gestapo, are wrong on two counts: scale and intention. There is a difference between the mistreatment of few hundred and that of a few million. There's a difference between the goal of fighting nihilistic terrorists and the goal of exterminating undesirable ethnicities and dissidents.

That we are better than the worst may seem small consolation, but it is something that needs pointing out, if only to protect against moral relativism. To be able to reach towards righteousness, we must be able to distinguish not only right from wrong, but more right from right and more wrong from wrong. Moral relativism is seductive, but it's a crutch that prevents us from building a better society.

The United States of America has unique responsibilities in the world, perhaps in world history, we are the stewards of liberal civilization. As such, we should certainly aim for the highest standards and chastise and correct ourselves when we fail. But only fools could think that if we go away, or withdraw unto ourselves, the world will suddenly be a better place (as many is this thread seem to suggest). Those who deny the reality of power can never fight it's ill-effects.

> Moreover, CIA officers told U.S. ambassadors not to discuss the CIA program with State Department officials, preventing the ambassadors from seeking guidance on the policy implications of establishing CIA detention facilities in the countries in which they served. (#8)

I was not aware the CIA could order an ambassador from seeking the guidance of its superiors...

The documents were likely classified in such a manner that the ambassador would have need-to-know clearance to read it but not the folks they wished to consult with.

When the torturers give you an order, you're probably inclined to follow it.

The document has

> TOP SECRET [blackbox] NOFORN

on it. That's crossed out and UNCLASSIFIED is inserted, but what's that black box covering up? Is it another level of secret access so secret we can't know the name?

On the basis of googling "top secret noforn filetype:pdf", it seems that the convention is for the redacted text to be some kind of source classification (eg. "SI" for Signals Intelligence or "COMINT" for Communication Interception.

I have no idea what it would be in the case of this report, but my guess would be that it was redacted to avoid ambiguity given that "Unclassified" is stamped next to it, rather than because the classification is itself secret.

The classification is not secret, but the intelligence sources themselves likely remain classified, including the identification of the kind of sources supporting the information in the now-declassified executive summary.

Even vague descriptions of intelligence sources are often treated as more sensitive than the information derived from those sources.

It's likely this was classified top secret and SCI (sensitive compartmentalized information). SCI compartments are classified, which is probably what was blacked out. Otherwise, it may indicate a classified partner knowledge sharing program that is classified.

Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greystone_%28CIA_operation%29

Sort of. Conventionally, it's the cover name of the information compartment. If we knew what that was, since we now know what it refers to because that's unclassified, it wouldn't provide an effective cover anymore.

Of course, that's still a bit silly. The CIA insisted they redact even the initials of the countries involved. Ridiculous. Well, country R is Romania, country P is Poland. There are two others, I think Country J may well be Jordan.

I think I would probably be completely OK with this report being leaked in its unredacted form, including names: I sadly doubt there's any other way justice will ever be done and these people will answer for their crimes against humanity.

As an exercise visit as many news outlets as you can and count how many times they use the word torture in their articles.

I just quickly went to a few and the results are below with the sources below that

CNN 3

BBC 2

Al Jazeera 5

FoxNews 2

NBC News 3

ABC News 1

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/09/politics/cia-torture-report/in... http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30401100 http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/9/senate-tortu... http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/12/09/senate-panel-rele... http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cia-torture-report/doj-stan... http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/torture-report-reveals-cias-b...

bonus points for headlines :)

Is there a difference in these documents?

http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf

http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy2.pdf

http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy3.pdf

The first is the executive summary of the official study. The second appears to be additional views added by individual senators on the committee. The third is a rebuttal from the Republicans on the committee.

An incredibly thoughtful and non provoking introduction to the document from Dianne Feinstein. This is a good thing and anything that can help America step back from her actions in future and take pause rather than extreme and counter productive measures is a good thing.

I hope some day that just like the well tested evidence that torture doesn't work it'll be shown that mass surveillance also gives next to nothing that targeted data gathering wouldn't.

Just to clarify are you using the word "her" in this section:

"America step back from her actions in future"

To mean:

"America step back from the actions of the US government in future"

Just to play devils advocate, so please don't take this personally...

There are varying levels of culpability that we all share right. It's difficult to see that we are all part of the problem if we aren't engaged in trying to change it. Your statement suggests that the American government operate in a vacuum and certainly every day people aren't engaged it does seem more and more that they can do as they wish.

I'm going to go donate something to http://www.rootstrikers.org/ now.

You've mistaken my question as holding some kind of opinion.

Reading your reply I can see why. I'm sorry I didn't word it better.

ps: I'm not American.

pps: I believe that American's, like anyone living in a democracy, are ultimately responsible for the actions of their Government.

Yes, sometimes people use "her" to talk about a country. It is an unusual use though.

Some other coverage of the same report:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/press-releases/release-of-tor...

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/09/live-coverage-...

First, I would like to comment on the fact that given the current state of surveillance, I think a re-evaluation of oversight processes needs to be done. If the CIA isn't properly reporting to the White House, the NSC, and is avoiding oversight by congress, then who the fuck is managing these things? On that same note, what kind of NSC would allow that kind of movement? One that really knows whats going on and approves but doesn't want to be seen as complicit is my guess. Otherwise, the director, or more precisely, the AD, would be the main guy "in the know", but what kind of skeletons does he have and who knows them? What is the real power structure here beyond the official chain of command?

How rogue does the Company have to get before someone reigns it in? And with the current state of surveillance, how could any congressmember practically seek to do it? Between the Agency and the Company, they have dirt on them all.

My second comment is on torture itself. I'm guessing the main scapegoat is going to be the contractors pulled in post 9/11. Class 11: My Story Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class, is a must read for anyone interested in this factor. That being said though, as I have posited about the GOT in more general terms, I have doubts about the actual intentions of these kinds of programs in the first place.

I'll forget the pragmatic and philosophical discussion about torture effectiveness for information extraction for a moment, and just come out and say it.

This is how you create terrorists... on purpose.

Need a war? You need someone to fight. Don't have someone? Create them.

There's also the side ancillary benefit of the possibility of turning some of the radicals into doubles, who then can be used for all kinds of fun stuff. The leader of ISIS spent much time in camp Bucca. The guy responsible for the Benghazi attack also spent time in one of these kinds of facilities. Is this really the goal? Looking for good people to turn so they can be manipulated from afar (and then probably killed so they don't talk).

Really and truly, I don't think we can have this discussion properly without bringing JFK into this picture. I've spent a long time trying to understand these big picture things, and my conclusion is not one that you want to hear. Namely, that there was a slow, silent coup against the American government that was fully completed at JFKs assassination. Also, please don't forget that it was the JFK incident that led the Agency to develop the anti conspiracy plan to make the phrase "conspiracy theory" anathema to public debate and discourse.

Even if you ignore JFK, a good case can be made that the security agencies (probably FVEY?) currently seem to have at least de facto control basically anywhere they want. Exercising that control got a lot easier - and less obvious - as technology became available. Traditional informants and enforcers sometimes get noticed, but JOIN...WHERE user.id=foo across phone location data is very hard to discover.

The key part, I think, is that COINTELPRO ended in name only. Worse, as the use of the internet increased, the number of times I've had to consider "JTRIG-style disruption, paid corporate shill, or useful idiot" has increased dramatically.

While a "silent coup" is one possibility, I have been liking how Dan Geer's described[1] the high-level picture of our situation as a Cold Civil War. Cold wars are fought by proxy, and there has been a lot of pointer-chasing to trace in the modern political situation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI ( http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt )

Hope the report will help Americans to find the answer of Why they hate us?

This response is asinine.

What do you say to the organizations that massacre entire villages and towns in their own county, make regular suicide and car bombs to blow up crowded and high traffic places (in M.E., Russia, China), dismember their young for stealing bread or disobeying, killing colleagues for not being Muslim enough?

They have plenty of reasons to hate us, we are not like them, but it looks like they do fine in spreading destruction and agony in their home as well.

Check out the comparison between the Hayden testimony and what this report found -- from pg. 462 onward (~37 pages total) it's a point-by-point refutation. Language in almost all of the examples includes "This testimony is incongruent with CIA records" and even "This testimony is inaccurate".

Are Jim Mitchell & Bruce Jessen and their company "Mitchell Jessen & Associates" those redacted but mentioned in the Torture Report?

http://ow.ly/FClBo

You'll get more accurate information through tricks and false friendships than torture. There is no justification for torture. None. It's not even a good tool regardless of the morality.

>There is no justification for torture. None.

- revenge

- increasing the torturer's loyalty for the organization (how many torturers are whistleblowers?)

- showing your superiors how far you are willing to go in pursuit of information

- terrorizing the enemies you haven't captured yet

- strengthening the connections with subordinate countries (Romania hosted secret torture prisons and bribes where given to officials. Who there dares to challenge the imposed economical partners or foreign policies? Or the visa requirements still in place in a country that hosts US military bases on its territory for that matter.)

None of those are justifications.

I don't think torture has to be justified to those looking to employ it. It is the most brutal method to rock someone's core, to break them as a person.

Because of the current technological progress, we cannot just hack into someone's brain. The availability of methods for information extraction today are slim, you have a lot of officers who lost people, had their own tortured, and are looking demonstrate tenacious resolve in the face of an enemy.

I disagree with the use torture, it is sadistic. However in some context it is not inconceivable to why some would use it.

I do not understand how torture can be an effective tool for extracting accurate information.

If I am being tortured, I would likely be so quick to tell my captors whatever they wanted to hear to make the pain stop.

The French 10e division parachutiste arrested and interrogated around 24,000 suspects during the battle of Algiers, often using electrical torture, rape, etc., of which an estimated 3,000 were summarily executed.

This effectively put an end to the FLN presence in Algiers. Which, I suppose, gets to show that it can be effective in some circumstances, if you are willing to show the appropriate degree of ruthlessness.

French are all around great guys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

As the sinking of a boat and the accidental death of a crew member have little to do with the effectiveness of torture, I can only conclude that you wish to partake in a bout of gratuitous French bashing.

In this case, I suggest that you start by getting some better material. The Rainbow Warrior is just a blip on the radar. You will find better attack angles in our post-WWII colonial behaviour (for instance, the repression in Algeria and Madagascar), our colonial wars or our African policy. Godspeed.

The Republican rebuttal: http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy3.pdf

and some commentary about it: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/republicans-dismiss-senate-tortur...

I hear some modest outrage in people's comments, but I sincerely doubt most of you want to actually confront the leadership simply because they're aligned with you politically on most other things.

Other than tossing out some words, I fear most of you are going to do nothing and continue voting for the same ol' status quo crooks and cronies.

"Of the 119 individuals found to have been detained by the CIA during the life of the program, the committee found that at least 26 were wrongfully held."[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm3Cr1dAnco

This is shameful... I found this website trawling around http://rectalrehydration.com/

Reposted foreword: http://pastebin.com/ZJSBptaj

Because gross pdf.

Hmm, page 291 of pdf "Collected Communications". I bet that's something to do with prism.

I am sure CIA torture report has definitely shaken average Americans.

The average American reads "torture" and moves on. America is no longer a society whose government is afraid of it, instead we prefer to be 'managed' for the sake of convenience.

ITT: Shock, awe, denial, scapegoating, buck-passing, et al.

I hope we can all agree now that a country' ideology doesn't matter, what matters is how the power is structured. And that's not pretty.

Just remember folks - this is the agency Amazon chooses to provide its services to. Vote with your wallet.

Leszek Miller, prime minister of Poland at the time of US concentration camps and architect of CIA-PL deal, was interviewed couple of times since 2005 on TV. Every time he urged to "shut the fuck up about it already", to not upset "our allies", and to stop directing "terrorist" attention at our country. Thats pretty much current state of TV coverage in Poland.

"Funny coincidence": We had Andrzej Lepper, opposition leader in government of Leszek Miller, commit "suicide" in 2011. Whats so weird about that? Lepper was famous for announcing TALIBAN presence in village Klewki at the end of 2001. Klewki is 50km from Stare Kiejkuty and Szymany - locations of US concentration camp.

It is incredibly depressing how many war criminals in/formerly in the US government will get away with what they've done.

What is scarier: that US gov has been lying about this or that US gov genuinely doesn't know what's going on within its agencies?

In all likelihood there's plenty of both going on.

Of related interest is the Op-Ed in the NY Times by ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/opinion/pardon-bush-and-th...

It's saddening to read such a two-faced argument by the head of an organization I supported with both time and money. When even the ACLU would rather call for pardons instead of prosecution because they no longer believe it politically viable I feel there is little left to say on the matters of justice and law in my country.

I can only hope Romero is soon fired so the ACLU can return to it's core mandate as written by them:

The ACLU is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country. ~

Once a country abandons it's laws it is soon then abandoned by it's people.

Two thoughts:

1. The CIA hacked the Senate's computers and performed other surveillance on them. Since they were caught, it is likely that this did not shall we say, endear the CIA to the Senate.

2. Unless and until the people in the CIA that did these things, and the bosses who approved these things, face jail time, loss of government pensions, etc. I predict that nothing will change.

This is long overdue, and pardon my jade, but there is nothing in here that is at all a surprise. The only news in this release is that the government itself is finally recognizing what civil society has known for years: as soon as you put government and psychologists together, you have trouble.

Well, medical personnel in general-when you add them to the apparatus of interrogation, bad things happen.

Falsehood right in the forward: "the largest attack against the American homeland in our history". War of 1812?

According to Wikipedia, the entire War of 1812 caused 2,200 American deaths total, let alone in a single attack.

Per capita relative to population size it was much larger.

I was under the impression that in the War of 1812, USA was the agressor. Wikipedia seems to also support this view. Is that not correct, or do americans just have their own differing viewpoint?

It's rarely that simple, and I'm not sure what Wikipedia article you're reading. Impressment - kidnapping of American sailors into British naval service - was a pretty big issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_War_of_1812

I didn't mean to comment on whether the war was justified or not, but simply that it was USA that attacked (and so the war doesn't quite qualify as an attack against America).

Read almost half of it today and nothing really surprising. Still waiting for the Taliban, Al Qaida, and IS interrogation program reports though.

If we can't hold ourselves to a higher standard than religious terrorist groups then something is very wrong with this country.

Can you really not make a distinction between cold shower and televised beheading/castration. I agree there is something very wrong with this country if that is the case. I've spent enough Karma today.

"Cold shower" is a joke of an understatement. These men were kept awake for over 7 days at a time, subjected to sustained waterboarding, slapped and thrown around, left to suffer with festering bullet wounds, etc etc. All that while being told that their families were going to be raped, tortured, and killed.

I know if I was personally subjected to those things I might not be so averse to having my head cut off.

I ask you the same thing I asked Rayiner above: try it for yourself.

Take a letter size piece of paper and put it on the floor. Strip naked. Have a "cold shower", then stand on that piece of paper for just two hours.

Bonus points if you manage to stay standing with a wet cloth bag on your head. Extra points if you manage this after having been on reduced calories and no sleep for 48 hours.

In your case nothing happens if you step off the paper.

I don't know that you should really suggest this. I've had hypothermia, it is quite unpleasant. And you don't know the state of his health, a myriad of bad things could happen.

I'm surprised no one has brought up Homeland's past two episodes. It's fiction to be sure, but I think the raw emotions can be seen in the episodes. I have issues with people here being armchair ethics police.

Also, I have just skimmed the report, so may be in error, but is there any context to those tortured? If they did not share with the CIA when they asked nicely, why? Did the tortured gun down innocent civilians? Are they known to have plans for a large attack? What would you do in that situation?

I refuse to make the jump to "America the Gestapo" I refuse to make black and white "torture is wrong, always" OR "they got what's coming to them".

There is evil. There is good. We get into theological and moral implications if I go any further so I'll stop there lest I get downvoted because I believe in some old white guy with a beard.

> If they did not share with the CIA when they asked nicely, why?

Maybe because they were innocent? Maybe because they just didn't know the answers? But let's brutally torture them for years anyway... just in case?

> Did the tortured gun down innocent civilians?

According to the report, some of the detainees, including a mentally disabled man, were known to be innocent themselves.

Presumably there isn't any real evidence that any of them have actually done anything. Otherwise they would surely be tried in a court, rather than being brutally tortured in secret camps for years on end, with no legal counsel or so much as a shred of humanity?

If I was tortured using the utterly disgusting methods in this report, I would quickly claim to have gunned down civilians, eaten babies, or indeed whatever else I though they wanted me to say...

Honestly, reading parts of this report left me feeling nauseated. I don't understand how anyone can even consider agreeing with what these sub-human monsters have done, regardless of context. That they will get away with this, and some even profit greatly from it, further sickens me.

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