Senate Report Says CIA Repeatedly Lied About The Fact That Its Torture Efforts Were Useless In Finding Bin Laden

from the not-so-shocking dept

For months now, we've been writing about how the Senate Intelligence Committee is sitting on an apparently devastating 6,300 page report, which cost taxpayers $40 million, looking into the CIA's torture program. As has recently been in the news, this still-classified report has created quite the controversy, as the CIA has been doing everything it can to block its release, including spying on Senate staffers and sending what appear to be trumped up charges against the staffers to the DOJ for investigation.

Every week there are rumors that Senator Dianne Feinstein is on the verge of really pushing to declassify the report, but it never seems to happen. Still, details from the report keep slipping out, including the latest from CBS which shows how all the claims of how the CIA's torture program was instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden are simply untrue and the torture program had little to do with it. On top of that, the Washington Post has more on how the CIA blatantly and explicitly misled Congress and the public about the torture program. Did you see that movie Zero Dark Thirty, which purported to show how torture helped find bin Laden? That was nothing more than CIA propaganda via Hollywood to try to press that story forward. The reality is something different. And something that is quite ugly for Americans: we used torture programs, which almost certainly violated the Geneva Conventions, for basically no benefit at all.

Every "example" used by defenders of the CIA to defend the torture program is apparently debunked in the report. Khalid-Sheik Mohammed -- the 9/11 mastermind who was tortured 183 times and eventually "gave up" the name of the courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who eventually led to bin Laden? Turns out that he only named him well after all those waterboardings, and never revealed al-Kuwaiti's significance in any meaningful way. Other examples show that the torture program just lead various Al Qaeda officials to repeat what the CIA already knew.

Essentially, they argued, Mohammed, al-Libi and others subjected to harsh treatment confirmed only what investigators already knew about the courier. And when they denied the courier's significance or provided misleading information, investigators would only have considered that significant if they already presumed the courier's importance.

As for the guy who actually revealed the importance of al-Kuwaiti? Yes, he was tortured too, because, man, the CIA really appears to have a taste for torturing people. But he revealed the important information the day before he was tortured.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post details how the report shows that the CIA flat out lied about all of this to pretty much everyone:

“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”

One of the key findings was that most of the useful intelligence came via FBI questioning (without torture) prior to the CIA getting their hands on various prisoners who they then tortured. But, in order to continue the torture program, CIA officials took the information that the FBI got via standard questioning and claimed they got it via the torture efforts:

One official said that almost all of the critical threat-related information from Zubaida was obtained during the period when he was questioned by [FBI agent Ali] Soufan at a hospital in Pakistan, well before he was interrogated by the CIA and waterboarded 83 times.

Information obtained by Soufan, however, was passed up through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community, the Justice Department and Congress as though it were part of what CIA interrogators had obtained, according to the committee report.

“The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.

Once again, it appears that the CIA's stonewalling against the release of this report is almost certainly linked to the fact that it's effectively going to portray the CIA as a bunch of torture-hungry war criminals, who still refuse to admit that this morally repugnant program was useless -- and who lied about it to Congress, the DOJ and the American public in order to keep on torturing people. Of course, some of us are old enough that we still remember when the US used to be against torture, in part because of all the years of evidence proving that it was useless in actually getting information out of people. One would have hoped that the US government, and the CIA in particular, didn't need to recreate "experiments" by committing war crimes to reprove what was already known about the effectiveness of torture.

Filed Under: cia, congress, enhanced interrogation, lying, osama bin laden, senate, torture, waterboarding

The Senate Is Sitting On A Devastating Report About How The CIA Avoided Oversight Of Unnecessary Torture Program

from the congressional-oversight! dept

So much attention concerning the intelligence community lately has been focused on the NSA. There has been a bit of looking at the FBI as well, but for the most part the CIA has been left untouched -- even though when the Washington Post released details of the US's black budget (thanks to Ed Snowden), it surprised many people to discover that the CIA still has a significantly larger budget than the NSA.

Late last week, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer had a fantastic article revealing some details of a still-classified report put together by the Senate Intelligence Committee which apparently rips the CIA to shreds over its torture program, both in how ineffective the program was, but also in how the CIA tried to avoid any real oversight from Congress.

At its core is a bitter disagreement over an apparently devastating, and still secret, report by the Senate Intelligence Committee documenting in detail how the C.I.A.’s brutalization of terror suspects during the Bush years was unnecessary, ineffective, and deceptively sold to Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, and the public. The report threatens to definitively refute former C.I.A. personnel who have defended the program’s integrity. But so far, to the consternation of several members of the Intelligence Committee, the Obama Administration, like Bush’s before it, is keeping the damning details from public view.

The CIA, apparently, has been "defiant and defensive" in response to the massive report (over 6,000 pages, and which apparently cost $40 million to produce). CIA boss John Brennan has apparently been especially aggressive in trying to challenge the report and in blocking it from being declassified.

As Mayer notes, many of the new details came out due to Senator Mark Udall (who, for years, has been a leader in trying to stop the NSA's bad behavior) first blocking the confirmation of Stephen Preston to become General Counsel of the Defense Department (a position formerly held by Jeh Johnson, who was just nominated to run Homeland Security). Preston, prior to this, had been General Counsel for the CIA. Udall used the opportunity to quiz Preston about both the Intelligence Committee's report and the CIA's angry rebuttal, noting that if Preston stood by the rebuttal, he would be very uncomfortable about confirming him for the Pentagon job.

Preston, in his response, appears to distance himself from the CIA's position, agreeing with some of the findings in the Senate report. In particular, he admits that the CIA "fell well short" of keeping Congress informed and allowing Congress to have oversight over the CIA's torture program.

In fact, Preston admits outright that, contrary to the C.I.A.’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the Committees included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”

The contention that the C.I.A. provided inaccurate information to the congressional oversight committees is apparently extensively documented by the report. Udall notes that the report contains a two-hundred-ninety-eight-page section on “C.I.A. Representations on the C.I.A. Interrogation Program and the Effectiveness of the C.I.A.’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to Congress.”

Furthermore, the report apparently notes that rather than actually briefing the entire Intelligence Committee on what it was doing, the CIA only briefed the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In other words, beyond providing enough misleading information to fill a large book, the CIA also made sure that the Senate Intelligence Committee members (outside of the two top members) weren't even informed of the details of what they did.

There's a lot more in the Mayer piece, going through many of the key revelations that can be parsed out from both Udall's questions and Preston's answers, but it's apparent that (1) the CIA had very little real oversight from Congress concerning its torture program, (2) the Senate Intelligence Committee is pissed off about this, and (3) there's a massive report detailing all of this that will eventually see the light of day. It does sound like many on the Senate Intelligence Committee -- including (much to my surprise) Dianne Feinstein -- are fighting to have the report released (I'm sure with many redactions). Udall is pushing strongly for such a declassification:

“My views of the C.I.A.’s response remain unchanged,” Udall wrote. “As I told John Brennan during his confirmation hearing, acknowledging the flaws of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program is essential for the C.I.A.’s long-term institutional integrity—as well as for the legitimacy of ongoing sensitive programs. At this point, I do not believe the C.I.A. has sufficiently acknowledged the flaws that the committee has meticulously detailed with thirty-five-thousand footnotes in six-thousand-three-hundred pages.”

Udall also reiterated his demand to “declassify as much of the committee’s report as possible.” He added, “Without the right amount of sunshine, some of the problems documented in the study—to include problems that I believe still exist today—will remain uncorrected. The American people have the right to know what the government has done on their behalf.”

Between the lack of any real oversight of the NSA and now, it appears, the CIA as well, once again we're left wondering how the administration can pretend that these agencies are actually under control and not prone to abuse.

Filed Under: cia, enhanced interrogation, jane mayer, john brennan, mark udall, senate intelligence committee, stephen preston, torture