They have done so many nasty and rotten things since being created, and it didn't stop in the 1970s because of the Church Committee.
"CIA used brutal methods, misled leaders, report finds; Senate committee details Bush-era torture, says extreme acts did not disrupt terrorism" by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times December 10, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a sweeping indictment Tuesday of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, drawing on millions of internal CIA documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.
The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that CIA officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.
And yet we are expected to believe what they say now?
In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the CIA used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in US custody. With the approval of the CIA’s medical staff, some CIA prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the CIA’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.”
Will shoving something up your ass make you confess?
CIA medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”
Did he admit to being the chief planner before or after the torture?
The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the CIA has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit, a facility where the CIA had claimed that waterboarding was never used.
Oh, the CIA lied?
One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”
AmeriKa can never again lecture anyone over human rights.
The release of the report was severely criticized by current and former CIA officials, leaving the White House trying to chart a middle course between denouncing a program that President Obama ended during his first week in office, and defending a spy agency he has championed.
Agency was split over interrogations
We are told they ended torture. I don't believe it.
The CIA’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that the brutal treatment of prisoners was a train wreck “waiting to happen.”
Obama welcomed the release of the report, but in a written statement made sure to praise the CIA employees as “patriots” to whom “we owe a profound debt of gratitude” for trying to protect the country.
OMG!
But in a later television interview, he reiterated that the techniques “constituted torture in my mind” and were a betrayal of American values.
The interview was with Telemundo, and I'm starting to wonder what values he is talking about? Wars of mass-murder built on lies?
************
Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, said repeatedly that the detention and interrogation program was humane and legal.
The war criminal who authorized it all with his signature.
The intelligence gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda. Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, and a number of former CIA officials have said more recently that the program was essential for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
That narrative has been proven to be a lie, and the suppression of badly photo-shopped evidence and the dumping of the body into the sea simply confirm the cover-up. In fact, this whole narrative regarding Al-CIA-Duh upon which the foundation for torture rests is a giant ruse.
The intelligence committee’s report tries to refute each of these claims, using the CIA’s internal records to present 20 case studies that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders, or even finding bin Laden.
How could they have when it is government intelligence agencies that create, fund, and direct "terror" groups?
The report said that senior officials — including former CIA directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss, and Michael V. Hayden — repeatedly inflated the value of the program in secret briefings both at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and in public speeches.
All a bunch of f***ing liars who have now sacrificed any $elf-$erving credibility they may have had -- and add them to the list of war criminals, too.
Months before the operation that killed bin Laden in 2011, the CIA secretly prepared a public relations plan that would stress that information gathered from its disputed interrogation program had played a critical role in the hunt. Starting the day after the raid, agency officials in classified briefings made the same point to Congress.
In other words, the whole event was pure propaganda (one which they even made into a movie).
But in page after page of previously classified evidence, the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, released Tuesday, rejects the notion that torturing detainees contributed to finding bin Laden — a conclusion that was also strongly implied in “Zero Dark Thirty,” the 2012 movie about the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader.
Our whole society is based on myths. That's why it is in so much trouble.
“The vast majority of the intelligence” about the Al Qaeda courier who led the agency to bin Laden “was originally acquired from sources unrelated to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, and the most accurate information acquired from a CIA detainee was provided prior to the CIA subjecting the detainee to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” according to the Senate report.
Blah, blah.
It added that most of “the documents, statements and testimony” from the CIA regarding a connection between the torture of detainees and the bin Laden hunt were “inaccurate and incongruent with CIA records.”
What, more lies from the CIA?
On Tuesday, the CIA disputed the committee’s portrayal that it had been misleading and disingenuous about the role of that program in the hunt for bin Laden.
In a speech in the Senate, moments after the report was released Tuesday morning, Feinstein described the tumultuous history of her investigation and called the CIA interrogation program “a stain on our values and our history.”
She said, “History will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.’ ”
That is a sad statement, and it still hasn't happened. This report vanished down the memory hole as quick as it came up.
As she was preparing to speak, John O. Brennan, the CIA director, issued a response that both acknowledged mistakes and angrily challenged some of the findings of the Senate report as an “incomplete and selective picture of what occurred.”
I call it a newspaper, and what of it?
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
Oh, no wonder it is such nonsense.
“As an agency, we have learned from these mistakes, which is why my predecessors and I have implemented various remedial measures over the years to address institutional deficiencies,” Brennan said.
But the report is more than 6,000 pages long, but the committee voted in April to declassify only its 524-page executive summary and a rebuttal by Republican members of the committee. The investigation was conducted by the committee’s Democratic majority and their staffs.
Related: CIA Spied on Senate
That is only because they were tortured first!
Many of the CIA’s most extreme interrogation methods, including waterboarding, were authorized by Justice Department lawyers during the Bush administration.
But they weren't told it was being done, so.... ????
But the report also found evidence that a number of detainees had been subjected to other, unapproved methods while in CIA custody.
Like what?
The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some CIA personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.
The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a CIA facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some CIA officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.
During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some CIA officers began sending messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected.
“Strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic (e-mail or cable traffic),” wrote Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.
He's the guy who helped destroy the video tapes, and as you can see they wanted no record of their war crimes.
“Such language is not helpful.”
Many Republicans have said that the report is an attempt to smear both the CIA and the Bush White House, and that the report cherry-picked information to support a stance that the CIA’s detention program yielded no valuable information. Former CIA officials have already begun a vigorous public campaign to dispute the report’s findings.
Oh, like the Iraq nuclear and WMD "intelligence" was cherry-picked?
What kind of political scum defends torture, anyway?
In its response to the Senate report, the CIA said that to accept the committee’s conclusions, “there would have had to have been a yearslong conspiracy among CIA leaders at all levels, supported by a large number of analysts and other line officers.”
Yeah?
Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators, but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the CIA to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.
And all those governments are also complicit in war crimes.
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Too bad Democrats are no longer in charge of the Senate:
"Democrats blast Obama’s moderate tone on CIA report" by Peter Baker, New York Times December 11, 2014
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday found himself caught in the middle of a collision between the Central Intelligence Agency and his Democratic allies, who accused the White House of helping to cover up a legacy of torture and put the president on the defensive over an interrogation program he never supported.
A day after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a blistering report on the CIA’s interrogations of terrorism suspects a decade ago, Obama — who banned such methods when he took office — came under fire from committee Democrats for declining to endorse the report’s conclusion that the methods were ineffective and standing by the CIA director, John O. Brennan.
The president’s attempt to find a balance on a polarizing issue inherited from his predecessor was seen by those critics as a failure to hold the agency accountable.
Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, a Democrat on the committee and a longtime critic of the CIA interrogations, took to the Senate floor to excoriate the agency for failing to come to terms with its mistakes and the White House for enabling its deceptions. Udall repeated his call for Brennan to resign.
“Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information to misrepresent the efficacy of torture,” Udall said. “In other words, the CIA is lying.”
Those are really strong words, and they already murdered his brother (died in a hiking accident, we were told, when Udall was questioning the spying and data collection).
He added that the president had failed to exercise his responsibility.
Even as he shoots out executive orders.
“There can be no cover-up,” Udall said. “There can be no excuses. If there is no moral leadership from the White House helping the public understand that the CIA’s torture program wasn’t necessary and didn’t save lives or disrupt terrorist plots, then what’s to stop the next White House and CIA director from supporting torture?”
I assumed they would -- as they always have.
Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, another Democrat on the committee, said in an interview, “I would hope there would be a bit of a housecleaning from the White House given the results of this report. The fundamental problem here is not just what happened but the continued resistance of the leadership of this agency to the basics of oversight.”
Nope.
The White House defended Brennan, a career CIA officer who served as Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser in the White House before the president sent him back to the agency last year as director.
“John Brennan is a decorated professional and a patriot,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “And he is somebody that the president relies on on a daily basis to keep this country safe.”
He's hopeless.
After Tuesday’s release of the executive summary of the report, Obama repeated his belief that the techniques used after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, constituted torture and betrayed American values. But he did not address the fundamental question raised by the report: Did they produce meaningful intelligence to stop terrorist attacks, or did the CIA mislead the White House and the public about their effectiveness, as the committee asserted?
The president is hoping to convince the public that the issue has been confronted and resolved since he signed an order barring the controversial interrogation techniques shortly after taking office in 2009.
Then the torture magically disappeared, right?
In a written statement and television interviews after the report was released Tuesday, Obama stressed his respect for the “patriots” of the CIA who worked to guard the nation in an uncertain and dangerous period, even as he concluded that the methods they used “did significant damage to America’s standing in the world.”
While that frustrated critics of the CIA who wanted a more unambiguous condemnation of torture and its architects, others said his comments struck a reasonable middle ground.
“They seemed measured and responsible,” said Cesar Conda, an adviser to Republicans like former vice president Dick Cheney and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. “He’s walking a fine line between his base and his duties as commander in chief.”
Republicans and supporters of the CIA saved their fire for the Senate Democrats who issued the report. Cheney, in his first public comments since its release, said he had read only summaries of it but denounced the report as “full of crap” and said it was a “flat-out lie” to suggest that President George W. Bush was kept in the dark about details of the program.
The delicious irony of that piece of excrement hollering liar. I mean, c'mon.
“He knew certainly the techniques,” Cheney said on Fox News. “We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that.”
Then you, Bush, Ashcroft, Rice, Powell, et al, are all guilty of war crimes.
Cheney scoffed at the suggestion that methods like waterboarding, nudity, slapping, and sleep deprivation violated human rights. “How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 Americans?” he asked.
What was with the war games stand down, Dick?
For Obama, the report reopened a fight he had tried to avoid for nearly six years. Although he denounced torture during his 2008 campaign, he has resisted pressure from activists to hold anyone accountable.
What's one more broken campaign promise?
Now back in the hole.
--more--"
Also see:
Secret Torture Sites
Not Seeing the CIA Torture
Begging For Mercy
And at bottom?
Torture report highlights consequences of permanent war
War is the health of the state. Headline-grabbing scandals involving the national security apparatus come and go. Today’s is just one more in a long series extending back decades. As long as the individuals and entities comprising that apparatus persist in their commitment to permanent war, little of substance will change.
That's where we are today.
