US torture laid bare – but the CIA remains defiant
Dungeons, sexual threats, days and days of sleep deprivation, rectal feeding, Russian roulette: water-boarding is no longer the darkest place the CIA imagined for suspects of terror in the years that followed 9/11.
The Senate intelligence committee report, based on five years’ work and six million documents, lists a stunning set of brutal practices deployed by agents, and contractors, at secret prisons around the world.
Moreover, it argues the practices didn’t gain useful intelligence, nor were they properly disclosed to the congress, the public or the White House.
Kylie Morris speaks to John Rizzo, CIA acting general counsel 2001-2009
No surprise then at the push-back from the intelligence community today, which denies any intention to mislead, and rejects the narrative that it gave the green light to field agents to peddle in torture.
The community must have hoped that warnings of potential security fallout for American interests abroad would have deterred the determined Dianne Feinstein from revealing the summary of the report she sweated over.
The CIA has set up its own website to take down the arguments. In brief, it describes the select committee’s work as “the single worst example of congressional oversight in the CIA’s many years of government service”.
It argues staff cherry-picked information to provide answers they knew the democratic majority on the committee wanted. They label it “politicization”.
No-one will contend this report is free of politics. Even the timing of its release – or the fact of its release – in the dying days of the Democratic majority in the Senate, before the Republicans assume their more dominant role in the new year, is a trick of politics.
But that seems the lightest possible critique of a report which tables such grievous claims.
Its revelations will be considered one by one by anyone hungry to understand the dark conscience of post 9/11 America.
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