Search
Close this search box.

CIA Lied About Torture, Senate Report Suggests


ciaWhen CIA interrogators were torturing accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at a secret prison in Poland in March 2003, a top CIA analyst asked them to show him a photograph of an alleged terrorist named Majid Khan.

The interrogators slapped Mohammed, denied him sleep, rehydrated him through his rectum, threatened to kill his children and waterboarded him 183 times. And he offered up details on Khan.

The analyst later told the CIA’s inspector general that Mohammed’s information helped lead to Khan’s arrest, CIA records show. The watchdog included that as a success story in a 2004 report that became public and for many years stood as the most detailed accounting of the program.

But the analyst, then deputy chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, knew Khan already had been captured in Pakistan at the time Mohammed was asked about him, according to the 520-page Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogations that was released this past week.

In other words, what she told the inspector general wasn’t true.

The Senate report has exposed years of such CIA misrepresentations that seem designed to boost the case for the effectiveness of brutal interrogations. The CIA acknowledges the misrepresentation about Khan’s arrest, while disputing most and playing down others.

But the Senate investigation relied on the CIA’s own records to document a pattern of an agency consistently understating the brutality of the techniques used on detainees and overstating the value of the information they produced.

“You’ve decided to do something and now you’ve got to justify it, and you may even believe your justifications,” said Cynthia Storer, a former CIA analyst whose work has been credited with helping locate bin Laden, and who opposed the torture.

“The CIA lied,” Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, one of the agency’s toughest critics, said in the Senate a few days ago.

In its written response to the report, the CIA said it was “dismayed” that it had “failed to meet its own standards for precision of language, and we acknowledge that this was unacceptable.” But, the agency said, “Even in those cases, we found that the actual impact of the information acquired from interrogations was significant and still supported.”

CIA officials insist that the treatment of Mohammed and other detainees yielded valuable intelligence, something the Senate report disputes. The CIA stands by 18 of the 20 cases in which the Senate says the agency failed to obtain uniquely valuable intelligence from detainees through harsh interrogation.

The Senate report has exposed lies well beyond its pages.

Former top CIA manager Jose Rodriguez wrote in his 2011 memoir, “Hard Measures,” that during waterboarding, “our officers used far less water for far shorter periods of time than they were allowed.”

He suggested that the public’s view had been swayed by “a cartoon version” in which detainees are “practically being doused by a fire hose.”

CIA records cited in the report show that Rodriguez, who destroyed videotapes of some of the sessions, was not telling the truth.

The waterboarding was far more intense and gruesome than the Justice Department had authorized, according to the records, which the CIA has not disputed.

Waterboarding caused al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah to become “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth,” while the procedure used on Mohammad evolved into a “series of near drownings,” with interrogators cupping a pool of water over his nose and mouth. The first waterboarding session of Mohamed lasted 10 minutes longer than the Justice Department allowed, the Senate report says.

Rodriguez, who ran the CIA interrogation program, did not respond to requests for comment.

CIA officials said they could not speak for Rodriguez, but they say the analyst’s assertion about Khan’s arrest was a one-time mistake.

Senate investigators say the error was repeated many times to the inspector general and was used to bolster the case for Justice Department approval of brutal techniques. The misinformation was also sent to a CIA panel reviewing the interrogation program.

The same analyst, who now holds a senior job in the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center, exaggerated other aspects of intelligence gained under torture to the inspector general, the report says. She played a pivotal role in the wrongful CIA kidnapping of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who says he was tortured at the CIA’s Salt Pit in Afghanistan.

Another CIA misrepresentation, the Senate report says, was the assertion to the White House, the Justice Department, Congress, and later the public that Zubaydah, the first detainee to be waterboarded, told the CIA he believed the U.S. was weak and lacked resilience, and that he stopped cooperating under traditional interrogation techniques.

In August 2006, a CIA al-Qaida expert wrote: “We have no records that ‘he declared that America was weak, and lacking in resilience’ …” Another al-Qaida expert wrote, “I can find no reference to AZ being deifant (sic) and declaring America weak… in fact everything I have read indicated he used a non deifiant (sic) resistance strategy.”

Two others speculated how the exaggeration took hold. They refer to the senior analyst who gave the misinformation to the inspector general.

“Yes, believe so,” an officer wrote. “And agree, we shall pass over in silence.”

Years of such misinformation bubbled to the surface during the first briefing about interrogations to the full Senate Intelligence Committee, in 2007, by then-CIA Director Michael Hayden. He made so many factual misstatements about the program, the techniques, the number of detainees and the intelligence, that the Senate study devotes a 37-page appendix to fact-checking his testimony.

“I was describing the mature program that I was suggesting should go forward,” Hayden said in an email this past week. “I think a lot of the incidents they pointed out came from really early in the interrogation process.”

(AP)



9 Responses

  1. The CIA has lied repeatedly about Jonathon Pollard and continues to do so despite having been shown to be lying time and again.

  2. They should torture these terrorists & do it some more. After all they’ve done and continue to promote nothing you can do to them is too much. I’m glad the CIA tortured them & it’s not the publics business what they do to terrorists. So good for them for lying about it too. Maybe These liberal democrats should be tortured too.

  3. The CIA is supposed to lie. They are are SPIES! Lives depend on their not tipping their hand! Congress is not known for tight lips, and neither is the media.
    The secular, leftist media has also been caught in blatant lies over the past few weeks. They also tend to leave critical information out of the stories. Look at what they say about Eretz Yisrael!

  4. People of the United States,
    Have you all forgotten what calamity befell the people of NY and the security of the US? Over 3000 people died in the twin towers. Some 600 plus died in the two planes that crashed into the towers. How about the plane that crashed into the Pentagon – 300 people? How about the other plane that crash in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Pennsylvana – 300 people? You’re worried about what torture techniques were used to extract information from these subhuman primates? If a human has no regard for life, such as these subhuman primates that use woman and children as human shields, do you really want to provide them with a napkin while you try to extract vital information about future attacks on the US by their cohorts? The IDIOTS that had this information released should be sent to Guantanamo themselves as they need some rehabilitation. What is the job of the ISA / CIA other than for the security of their individual nations?

    Politics will be politics. One has to be very careful when getting involved in any form of politics from simple shul politics to Mayor of one’s city.

    Johnathan Pollard is not a lost cause except that you can’t completely blame it on Israel or the US. Yes, the US is using Pollard as a playing card but Pollard as brilliant as he was, waited till the security people were waiting for him at the gates of the Israeli Embassy. Should the ambassador have opened the gates and let him in only to have taken into charge as there is reciprocity between Israel and the US so he was jus taken into custody. Throughout time we have been the scapegoat for all calamities.

    I say kol hakavod to the CIA for doing whatever they did in order to withdraw information from the savages.

Leave a Reply


Popular Posts