The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued on Dec. 9 a long report describing the CIA’s Bush-era torture program as not “effective” and damaging to U.S. interests.

The inquiry begun in 2009 made 20 key findings about the program launched during the Bush-Cheney administration, according to an analysis by the Washington Post.

The program, the senate oversight panel said, was:

1 “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence”
2 “rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness”
3 “brutal and far worse than the CIA represented”
4 “conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher”
5 “repeatedly provided inaccurate information”
6 “actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight”
7 “impeded effective White House oversight”
8 “complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions”
9 “impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General”

10 “coordinated the release of classified information to the media”
11 “unprepared as it began operating”
12 “deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration”
13 “overwhelmingly outsourced operations”
14 “coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved”
15 “did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained”
16 “failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness”
17 “rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable”
18 “ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections”
19 “inherently unsustainable”
20 “damaged the United States’ standing in the world”

Related News Coverage

Huffington Post, Senate Report Says Torture Program Was More Gruesome, Widespread Than CIA Claimed, Ali Watkins and Ryan Grim, Dec. 9, 2014. The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released the highly anticipated 500-page summary of its report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, providing a sobering glimpse into one of the darkest chapters in the U.S. government’s history. In the report, a product of a 5-year investigation, Senate investigators reveal sordid details of the systemic and individual failures by the agency personnel who ran the “enhanced interrogation program” — the government’s euphemism for systematic torture — during the George W. Bush administration. The program involved capturing terrorism suspects and shipping them to secret overseas prisons, where they were subjected to techniques such as waterboarding. The CIA’s program has long been criticized as un-American and a chilling departure from the nation’s values. Opponents allege that it resulted in gross abuses and inhumane treatment of detainees, some of whom were eventually revealed not to have been involved in terror organizations. The 6,300-page report may be the most unsanitized official account to date of the agency’s program, which the Senate investigators say was mismanaged, poorly conducted and characterized by abuses far more widespread than the CIA previously conveyed to lawmakers.

Huffington Post Separate Stories: Forced Rectal Feeding…Detainee Waterboarded 83 Times…Kept In Cramped Box For 300 Hours…CIA Accidentally Tortured Own Informants…Led To Fabricated Info…Some Officers Had History Of Sexual Assault…Interrogator Threatened To Rape Detainee’s Mother…CIA Paid Torture Experts $81 Million…Innocent People Brutalized…Quarter Of The World Helped Run Program…CIA Misled Media To Shape Coverage… Didn’t Help Find Bin Laden…How U.S. Actually Captured 9/11 Mastermind…GOP: Torture Helped America!…Reminder: This Is Waterboarding

Washington Post, A grim portrait of CIA tactics, Report details brutality, pattern of deception, Greg Miller, Adam Goldman and Julie Tate, Dec. 9, 2014. A Senate probe of the agency’s secret interrogations after 9/11 alleges the use of unapproved practices and dishonesty with the White House and Congress. Read the report. The 20 key findings. The 10 most harrowing excerpts.
Another hit for U.S. global standing.

Washington Post, Searing report unlikely to put a dent in CIA’s power, Greg Miller and Dana Priest, Dec. 9, 2014. Decades of scandals haven’t reined in the agency, which U.S. leaders rely on to do what no other agency can. The release of a searing report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA’s interrogation program Tuesday was the latest morale-sinking moment for an agency that has been buffeted repeatedly throughout its history, from the Bay of Pigs fiasco to the Nixon-era domestic abuses to the 1980s scandals tied to Iran and Latin America. If anything, the cycle has only been compressed in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with at least four major investigations, not to mention criminal probes, during a frenetic 13-year span. That collection now includes a 528-page account of alleged CIA abuses and dishonesty in its brutal treatment of terrorism suspects.

Lawfare, Released: SSCI Detention and Interrogation Study, Along With Minority Views and the CIA’s Response, Wells Bennett, Dec. 9, 2014. Here is the long-awaited Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. The latter includes in a single file a foreword authored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, as well as the Study’s findings and conclusions. Additionally, the Committee also has published these materials: Senator Feinstein’s statement; a history of key dates in in the Committee’s study; and a timeline of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. Among other materials are: The Minority Views of Vice Chairman Chambliss, joined by Senators Burr, Risch, Coats, Rubio, and Coburn; Senator Jay Rockefeller’s additional views; Additional view members of Committee members (Senators Rockefeller, Wyden, Udall, Heinrich, King, Collins); The CIA’s June 2013 response; The statement from Director Brennan and the CIA’s fact sheet.

New York Times, Bush and C.I.A. Ex-Officials Rebut Torture Report, Peter Baker, Dec. 7, 2014. A long-awaited Senate report condemning torture by the Central Intelligence Agency has not even been made public yet, but former President George W. Bush’s team has decided to link arms with former intelligence officials and challenge its conclusions. The report is said to assert that the C.I.A. misled Mr. Bush and his White House about the nature, extent and results of brutal techniques like waterboarding, and some of his former administration officials privately suggested seizing on that to distance themselves from the controversial program. But Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that “we’re going to want to stand behind these guys,” as one former official put it. Mr. Bush made that clear in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “We’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the C.I.A. serving on our behalf,” he told CNN’s Candy Crowley. Vice President Dick Cheney, a strong defender of the program, is shown in an official photo.

Justice Integrity Project, Our CIA, Empowered by JFK Murder Cover-up, Blocks Senate Torture Report, Andrew Kreig, Dec. 1, 2014. The CIA’s obstruction of probes of President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination helps explain the agency’s success thus far in blocking Senate oversight of CIA-run torture. The agency this fall is fighting publication of a Senate report on torture while it also avoids for the most part adverse news coverage and government inquiry regarding Kennedy’s death. The CIA has sought on national security grounds major edits in the Senate probe begun in 2009 of agency torture of terror suspects.

Esquire, Mark Udall Promises America Will “Be Disgusted” at CIA Torture Report; And that he’ll use every power he still has to declassify it, Scott Raab, Dec. 5, 2014. The Senate Intelligence Committee is soon expected to release its summary of the so-called CIA Torture Report, the committee’s four-year-long investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era torture practices. Release of the summary is the result of months of wrangling and negotiating with the White House on what would be released to the public and when—and it will likely be heavily redacted. During an interview conducted on Friday, November 21, by Esquire writer at large Scott Raab, outgoing senator Mark Udall of Colorado, who lost his reelection race on November 4, once again said that if the report is not released in a way he deems transparent, he would consider all options to make it public. In this excerpt from the interview, Raab asks Udall if he will read the document into the record on the floor of the Senate before he leaves in January, an act for which he cannot be prosecuted.

Background

Justice Integrity Project Coverage

Justice Integrity Project, Questions raised of prosecutor who cleared Bush officials in purge probe, July 25, 2010.

• Connecticut Watchdog, Case Closed on the U.S. Attorney Firings? Really? DOJ’s Political ‘Purge’ and Torture Probers Suppressed Evidence In Connecticut Crime Case, Andrew Kreig, July 26, 2010.
• Huffington Post, New Facts Call Into Question DOJ Facts Past and Present, Andrew Kreig, July 26, 2010. Case Closed on the U.S. Attorney Firings? DOJ’s Political ‘Purge’ and Torture Probers Suppressed Evidence In Crime Case, July 26, 2010, with same column also in OpEd News.

Other Coverage

Salon / Unclaimed Territory, Torture crimes officially, permanently shielded, Glenn Greenwald, July 1, 2011. In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House — announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution: (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., “good-faith” torturers). The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and service members who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a “preliminary review” to determine if a full investigation was warranted — in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected. Yesterday, it was announced that this “preliminary review” by the prosecutor assigned to conduct it, U.S. Attorney John Durham, is now complete, and — exactly as one would expect — even this category of criminals has been almost entirely protected, meaning a total legal whitewash for the Bush torture regime.

Washington Post, Justice Department to investigate deaths of two detainees in CIA custody, Peter Finn and Julie Tate, June 30, 2011. The Justice Department has opened full criminal investigations of the deaths in CIA custody of two detainees, including one who perished at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. officials said Thursday. The decision, announced by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., means continued legal jeopardy for several CIA operatives but at the same time closes the book on inquiries that potentially threatened many others. A federal prosecutor reviewed 101 cases in which agency officers and contractors interrogated suspected terrorists during years of military action after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but found cause to pursue criminal cases in only two.

Catching Our Attention on other Justice, Media & Integrity Issues

PaulCraigRoberts.org, The Most Essential Lesson of History That No One Wants To Admit, Paul Craig Roberts, Dec. 8, 2014. This is a very important article by Thad Beversdorf. It documents that US military invasions of Iraq and Syria were planned long in advance of 9/11 and that the conflict that Washington is engineering with Russia long predates the conflict that Washington has orchestrated in Ukraine. Beversdorf demonstrates that the same handful of neoconservatives have been involved in writing policy papers that define Iraq, Syria, and Russia as threats. With the threat defined, the same people write letters to the US president describing an urgent need to act. Then the same people appointed to office and in power implement the military actions against the threat. Beversdorf establishes that it is all based on lies and deception of the Western peoples. Now the same handful of neoconservative ideologues are focused on “destroying Russia economically to disable them militarily in an effort to prevent a Sino-Soviet alliance.” This attempt to fortify Washington’s power over the world has the earmarks of World War III.

First Rebuttal, The Most Essential Lesson of History That No One Wants To Admit, Thad Beversdorf, Dec. 7, 2014. Ron Paul wrote an eye opening article recently about some legislation that was just signed in Congress, namely H. Res. 758. In the article Dr. Paul explains the purpose of the resolution. It’s not a new law but provides a basis of facts that will be relied on for future action. So essentially the resolution purports that Russia behaved badly in various ways and by way of signing H. Res. 758 each congressman was indicating their agreement that the propositions contained therein are factual. Iraq was not a consequence of poor intelligence or bad decisions in the wake of post 9/11 emotions. The invasions of both Iraq and Syria were being planned and discussed for many years before 9/11. It is imperative to understand such things. Because while we cannot change history, we must use history to change the future.

Naked Capitalism, NYTimes Dealbook’s Dishonest Salvo at Elizabeth Warren Over Calling Out an Unqualified Nominee for Treasury Post, Yves Smith, Dec. 8, 2014. Even though Andrew Ross Sorkin and his mini-empire, the New York Times Dealbook, are reliable defenders of their Big Finance meal tickets, they’ve managed to skim above, if sometimes just barely above, abject intellectual dishonesty. But Dealbook has published not one but three pieces in as many weeks in defense of an unacceptably weak Obama Administration nominee for an important Treasury post, the Under Secretary of Domestic Finance. The candidate is Antonio Weiss, a Lazard mergers and acquisitions professional who was elevated to head of investment banking in 2009. There’s no doubt that Weiss is accomplished. The non-trivial problem, as Elizabeth Warren and others have pointed out, is that Weiss’ experience and skills have absolutely nothing to do with the Treasury role.