This Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a redacted version of its colossal investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-9/11 interrogation practices on suspected terrorists, the findings of which simply shock the conscience. As a nation, we are coming clean, but our hands are still bloody.
After five years and $40 million dollars, this investigation has shed light on the dark perversion of our nation’s values by some of the country’s highest officials.
“The CIA’s actions a decade ago are a stain on our values and our history,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.) the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “There may never be the right time to release this report. But this report is too important to shelve indefinitely.”
President George W. Bush authorized the so-called “enhanced interrogations” to extract information from suspected terrorists quickly for reasons of national security. Yet this report casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of the program; moreover, the report is filled with countless examples of unconscionable abuses against detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and in CIA “black sites,” which are secret prisons located outside the U.S. meant to evade the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Good thing, because the abuses sustained by the inmates were certainly both cruel and unusual; despite Bush’s euphemism of “enhanced interrogations,” only one name properly suits the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation techniques: torture.
On one particular inmate named Majid Khan, prison guards conducted “rectal feeding,” in which they pureed hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins and forced Khan to endure this egregious form of torture.
According to the report, “Of the 119 known detainees, at least 26 were wrongfully held,” including an “intellectually challenged man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information.” These wrongly held individuals suffered tremendously at the hands of the CIA; for example, one individual named Abu Hudhaifa “was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation” before the CIA released him after they realized they had the wrong man.
Even the CIA officers charged with the task of torturing the detainees could barely stomach the CIA’s operations; during the waterboarding of Saudi Arabian Abu Zubaydah, CIA personnel noted that “everyone seems strong for now, but if the group has to continue… we cannot guarantee how much longer.” The report continues: “Several on the team profoundly affected… some to the point of tears.”
The report describes the infamous use of waterboarding as a “series of near drownings,” and that the interrogation techniques used resulted in “psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm.”
It also cast doubt on the effectiveness of the program, stating that, “C.I.A. officers regularly called into question whether the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, assessing that the use of the techniques failed to elicit detainee cooperation or produce accurate intelligence.”
Members of the intelligence community and the CIA have already fired back, creating their own website called CIASavedLives.com to tout the program’s successes. “[The report] is a one-stop shopping place for the other side,” said Bill Harlow, who was a top CIA spokesperson during the Bush administration, to Foreign Policy on Dec. 8. Former Vice President Dick Cheney echoed this statement, calling the report’s findings “a bunch of hooey” in the New York Times on Dec. 8.
Simply put, the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program, more accurately characterized as its “torture” program, was an utter horror show. The report demonstrated the extent to which the CIA’s use of torture tore into the gentle fabric from which our democracy is woven, causing many of us to question who we are as a nation.
The most passionate and forceful comments against the CIA’s use of torture came from someone who personally experienced the same levels of barbarity as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War: Sen. John McCain (R-Az.). “I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us,” McCain said on Tuesday on the Senate floor. “It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.”
“Our enemies act without conscience. We must not,” he added.