More Sunlight for the Deep State: Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA "Rectal Feeding" Torture Program

I go to work. On the way to and from work I read the paper, the Gray Lady, the New York Times. Before work, I wake up early and read what she has to say online.

This is basically my life. I run on the weekends and watch the NFL on Sundays. Mostly though I go to work and read the newspaper.

And I must say that this morning's edition is unusual. It is not often that one story so dominates the front section. For instance, the recent reaction to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury decisions did not consume as much space as the release yesterday of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's torture program carried out at black-site prisons around the globe during George W. Bush administration.

Probably the main reason for such depth of coverage is that the report's release has been anticipated for years; it has also been the source of a separation of powers conflict when researchers for the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the CIA of illegally monitoring their investigation by accessing their computers.

Mark Mazzetti, whose story, "Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations," anchors the Gray Lady's coverage, summarizes:

The battle over the report has been waged behind closed doors for years, and provided the backdrop to the more recent fight over the C.I.A.'s penetration of a computer network used by committee staff members working on the investigation. C.I.A. officers came to suspect that the staff members had improperly obtained an internal agency review of the detention program over the course of their investigation, and the officers broke into the network that had been designated for the committee’s use.

Mazzetti's lengthy article is topnotch, as are many of the other stories in today's paper. But if you wanted a helpful synopsis, the Gray Lady's unsigned editorial, "The Senate Report on the C.I.A.’s Torture and Lies," is a good place to start:

The report raises again, with renewed power, the question of why no one has ever been held accountable for these seeming crimes — not the top officials who set them in motion, the lower-level officials who committed the torture, or those who covered it up, including by destroying videotapes of the abuse and by trying to block the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of their acts.

At one point, the report says, the C.I.A. assured Congress that the behavior of the secret jailers and interrogators was nothing like the horrors the world saw at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That was the closest the agency seems to have come to the truth — what happened appears to have been worse than what took place at Abu Ghraib.

The CIA-peddled lie that the Senate report seeks to debunk is that torture was an effective technique that revealed actionable intelligence:

The C.I.A. and some members of the President George W. Bush’s administration claimed these brutal acts were necessary to deal with “ticking time bomb” threats and that they were effective. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, an avid promoter of “enhanced interrogation,” still makes that claim. 

But “at no time” did the C.I.A.’s torture program produce intelligence that averted a terrorism threat, the report said. All of the information that the C.I.A. attributed to its “enhanced interrogation techniques” was obtained before the brutal interrogations took place, actually came from another source, or was a lie invented by the torture victims — a prospect that the C.I.A. had determined long ago was the likely result of torture.

Scott Shane makes this same point in "Report Portrays a Broken C.I.A. Devoted to a Failed Approach":

The report spends little time condemning torture on moral or legal grounds. Instead, it addresses mainly a practical question: Did torture accomplish anything of value? Looking at case after case, the report answers with an unqualified no.

In fact, it says, “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.” Still, higher-ups ordered that the methods be continued and told Congress, the White House and journalists that they were having great success. 

Just as striking as that central finding is the detailed account of C.I.A. mismanagement. Both factions in the fight over interrogations were led by people with histories that might have been expected to disqualify them. 

The chief of interrogations, who is not named in the report, was given the job in fall 2002 even though the agency’s inspector general had urged that he be “orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques” in a training program in Latin America in the 1980s.

And Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, identified by the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar in the report, had not conducted a single real interrogation. They had helped run a Cold War-era training program for the Air Force in which personnel were given a taste of the harsh treatment they might face if captured by Communist enemies. The program — called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — had never been intended for use in American interrogations, and involved methods that had produced false confessions when used on American airmen held by the Chinese in the Korean War. 

The program allowed the psychologists to assess their own work — they gave it excellent grades — and to charge a daily rate of $1,800 each, four times the pay of other interrogators, to waterboard detainees. Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen later started a company that took over the C.I.A. program from 2005 until it was closed in 2009. The C.I.A. paid it $81 million, plus $1 million to protect the company from legal liability.

The two former Air Force psychologists, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who crafted the CIA torture program are mentioned repeatedly in today's coverage. They, along with former CIA chief Michael Hayden, who is quoted more than once lying about the effectiveness of torture, seem to be likely targets for any future prosecutions.

Calls will continue to mount in Geneva for some type of reckoning for the architects of the Bush-Cheney torture protocols (see "Overseas, Torture Report Prompts Calls for Prosecution" by Rick Gladstone and Robert Mackey) as the content of the Senate report sinks in. For instance, the following passage from Mazzetti's article:

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 C.I.A. 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.

In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. 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 American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The CIA and the GOP and the Wall Street Journal have already started to counterattack (see Scott Shane, "Political Divide About C.I.A. Torture Remains After Senate Report’s Release") by dismissing the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report as a partisan Democrat document that is inaccurate chiefly because it included no interviews with the principals of the CIA program. This is obfuscation. The report's findings are based on comments made by CIA officials in classified cables. As Mazzetti notes,

The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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, Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some C.I.A. 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 (email or cable traffic),” wrote Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.

The Senate report describes the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as a "series of near drownings." 

“Such language is not helpful.”

The Republican Party and the CIA can try to sweep this under the rug, but I believe such an effort will only diminish their already diminished public standing. We are at a moment when people are in the streets protesting homicidal institutional racism. Who is going to rally under the banner of forced "rectal feeding" other than polluted oligarchs like Sheldon Adelson and cancerous pols like Dick Cheney?