[ 2014-12-10 ]

CIA lied to White House and Britain to justify torture
As the US Senate terror report is finally
published, follow the latest analysis of CIA
interrogation details, and world reaction

Latest
00.15 Mr Obama has commented on the report, after
the White House remained silent for much of the
day.

He said some of the tactics described in a Senate
report on harsh CIA interrogations were "brutal,"
"counterproductive," and amounted to torture, but
that releasing the information was an important
step in the process of making sure that such a
scenario is not ever repeated.

“Some of these techniques that were described
were not only wrong, but also counterproductive
because we know that oftentimes when somebody is
being subjected to these kinds of techniques, that
they're willing to say anything in order to
alleviate the pain and the stress that they're
feeling.

"One of the things that sets us apart from other
countries is that when we make mistakes, we admit
them," he said.

23.45 Let us remember that former CIA officer John
Kiriakou is the only CIA employee connected to its
interrogation program to go to prison. He was
prosecuted for providing information to reporters,
not for anything connected to waterboarding or
other actions that today’s Senate Intelligence
Committee report calls “torture.”

23.05 Queue the Fox News frothing. Co-host Andrea
Tantaros loses it slightly, accusing Democrats of
bringing the report to light for political
reasons: "The United States of America is awesome,
we are awesome," she said. "We’ve closed the
book on it, and we’ve stopped doing it. And the
reason they want to have this discussion is not to
show how awesome we are. This administration wants
to have this discussion to show us how we’re not
awesome."

22.40 Well everyone and his uncle seems to have
passed comment on the report now, with the most
noteable exception being the White House, which is
yet to make any statement, leaving them stranded
between increasingly polarised political
reaction.

22.30 By sheer coincidence, a Guantanamo Bay
prisoner who was accused of being a bodyguard for
Osama bin Laden has just been cleared for release
from the US base in Cuba.

Yemeni prisoner Abdalmalik Wahab was among the
first men detained at Guantanamo Bay in January
2002 but was never charged. Now the government's
Periodic Review Board has determined he can be
released.

22.23 Mooazzam Begg, a British former Guantanamo
Bay detainee, has spoken, saying: "I welcome the
report, but they need to address what's in it.
Senior US legal advisers Alberto Gonzales and Jay
Bybee told Bush that if it didn't include "organ
failure or death" it wasn't torture. This idea
trickles down the command chain and it can easily
be seen as a an open-door policy on torture.

"It wasn't just the CIA doing it, they had to have
accomplices."

22.00 A rare joint terror warning has been issued
by the FBI and the Department for Homeland
Security over fears of a backlash around the world
after the US Senate released its report on
torture.
21.16 The Senate torture report implicates the UK
and there is an urgent need “to get to the
bottom of our own involvement”, said Andrew
Tyrie, the Conservative chairman of Commons
Treasury select committee, who led an
investigation into so-called rendition flights,
said the report.
Quote It’s impossible to tell how much the
report has been redacted or reduced, cut, to take
out the extent of the involvement of other
countries, in particular America’s closest ally
the United Kingdom.
I think it is quite likely that we will find that
those redactions are very heavy. There is a
non-aggression pact on this, where the UK on the
basis of something called the control principle
does not release information that they have been
given by the United States security forces, and
likewise the Americans don’t do so in
reverse.”
For that reason we may find that key chunks that
we would have liked to see in this report have
been omitted. But that is no substitute and the
publication of report should be no substitute for
us in the UK getting to the bottom of this.’
20.46 The UN has called for the individuals
responsible for the torture programme described in
today's report to face criminal penalties.
Ben Emmerson, UN special rapporteur on
counter-terrorism and human rights, said:
Quote [The report] confirms what the international
community has long believed - that there was a
clear policy orchestrated at a high level within
the Bush administration, which allowed to commit
systematic crimes and gross violations of
international human rights law.
It is now time to take action. The individuals
responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed
in today's report must be brought to justice, and
must face criminal penalties commensurate with the
gravity of their crimes.

20.32 A business set up by two psychologists who
developed "enhanced interrogation techniques"
despite lacking relevant expertise was paid more
than $80 million by the CIA, according to the
Senate Intelligence Committee's report.
The revelations cast fresh light on the role of
private contractors in drawing up and deploying a
menu of coercive measures, including
waterboarding, sleep deprivation and close
confinement, writes Rob Crilly:
Although they are not named in the report, Bruce
Jessen and James Mitchell have both previously
been accused in official reports of
misrepresenting their expertise as experienced
interrogators.
The Senate inquiry describes how they set up a
company in 2005 specifically to conduct work with
the CIA. Soon after, the CIA had outsourced what
the report described as "virtually all aspects" of
the programme.
A year later the contract was worth $180 million,
although the contractors had been paid only $81
million by the time it was terminated in 2009.
However, although both had worked for the US Air
Force, the report questions their suitability for
the role.
"Neither psychologist had any experience as an
interrogator, nor did either have specialised
knowledge of al-Qaeda, a background in
counter-terrorism, or any relevant cultural or
linguistic expertise," it stated.
Despite that, the CIA approached them in 2002 for
help after capturing Abu Zubaydah, a senior
al-Qaeda figure.
20.15 The CIA lied about having successfully
foiled a series of UK terror plots and terrorists
through its “enhanced interrogation
techniques”, the damning torture report
reveals.
Tom Whitehead, our security editor, reports:
Four of the eight cases most cited by the
intelligence agency for the justification of its
“brutal” torture programme had links to the
UK.
The agency claimed its techniques had led to the
plots being foiled or suspected terrorists being
caught and it included some of the examples in
presidential briefings.
It claimed that otherwise unobtainable crucial
information came from the interrogation of Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed and another detainee, Abu
Zubaydah.
But the report systematically dismissed each claim
and revealed that the technique had no role and at
least two plots were foiled by the efforts of the
UK authorities.
The cases included a foiled plot to crash hijacked
planes into Heathrow Airport in 2003 – which led
to then Prime Minister Tony Blair ordering tanks
to guard the airport – and a linked plot to fly
planes into Canary Wharf.
The CIA also claimed responsibility for capture of
al-Qaeda UK operative Dhiren Barot and the foiling
of his plot to pack limousines with explosives, as
well as the capture of shoe bomber Saajid Badat.
20.00 The CIA's treatment of Abu Zubaydah, a
senior al-Qaeda fighter from Saudi Arabia among
the first top-tier terrorists to be caught by the
CIA after 9-11, reduced even interrogators to
tears.
Colin Freeman reports:
In total, he was waterboarded some 83 times, and
at one point was left “completely unresponsive
with bubbles rising through through his open, full
mouth,” according to the report.
CIA officers also beat him regularly and put him
in a coffin-like box that they said would be the
only way he would ever leave their custody.
At times, it appears that even his interrogators
were horrified by what they were doing. One CIA
note from the jail quoted by the Senate report
says: “Several on the team profoundly affected,
some to the point of tears and choking up.”
Abu Zubaydah, who is now 43, remains in Guantanamo
Bay to this day. It is claimed that the CIA
significantly overestimated his seniority within
al-Qaeda.
While some CIA officers have claimed that the
“enhanced interrogation” techniques used on
him produced useful intelligence, others say that
the most valuable information he gave was gained
through skilful questioning rather than torture.
19.32 Not only were the interrogation tactics used
by the CIA more brutal and less effective than
previously admitted, but they had been proven to
be counterproductive in the 1980s - by the CIA
itself.
Peter Foster reports
The brutal techniques deployed by the CIA’s
interrogation teams including waterboarding, sleep
and food deprivation and mock executions were
derived from Cold War manuals that had long been
discredited, the report says.
In 1989 the CIA’s own reviews of the
“inhumane” techniques concluded that those
kinds of interrogations were “counterproductive
because they do not produce intelligence and will
probably result in false answers.”
However despite this finding the report says the
CIA deployed the so-called “enhanced
interrogation techniques” in a “near non-stop
fashion for days or weeks at a time”.
19.17 America risked losing its “moral
authority” by using torture techniques, David
Cameron has suggested.
Christopher Hope reports from Ankara, where the
Prime Minister is currently for talks with Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president:
Mr Cameron was asked if he was confident that UK
intelligence had not acted on informaton obtained
by torture.
He said: “Let us be clear – torture is wrong,
torture is always wrong.
"For those of us who want to see a safer more
secure world who want to see this extremism
defeated, we won’t succeed if we lose our moral
authority.
“If we lose the things that make our systems
work and our countries successful. So we should we
be very clear about that."
Mr Cameron continued: “Now obviously after 9/11
there were things that happened that were wrong
and we should be clear about the fact that they
were wrong.
“In Britain we have had the Gibson inquiry and
that inquiry has now produced a series of
questions that the Intelligence and Security
Committee will look at but I am satisfied that our
system is dealing with all of these issues."

Source - The Telegraph

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