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New Leaks Show CIA’s Contempt for Congress

An interrogator isn’t just focused on extracting information, but on controlling it. When a closer sits down with a prisoner, she wants her prey to be entirely dependent on her for information about possible sentences, news of the outside world, or even the time of day, so she can manipulate or bargain with the truth […]
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An interrogator isn’t just focused on extracting information, but on controlling it. When a closer sits down with a prisoner, she wants her prey to be entirely dependent on her for information about possible sentences, news of the outside world, or even the time of day, so she can manipulate or bargain with the truth as serves her needs.

As revelations from the Washington Post show, this is precisely the relationship that the CIA has been cultivating with Congress throughout the War on Terror. The recent allegations that the CIA hacked into the computers of Congressional staff and tried to erase damaging documents is only the latest salvo in the agency’s war of obfuscation. The CIA has overstepped its authority and then lied to Congress, to prevent the people’s representatives from reining the operatives in.

Current and former U.S. officials spoke anonymously to the Washington Post about the content of the classified report that the CIA has tried to sideline. Although the report on CIA detention and interrogation was completed in 2012, it has been tied up in bureaucratic red tape, and not one page of the 6,300 has been declassified. The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to vote this Thursday to recommend that Obama declassify the executive summary of the report.

Until then, judging by the leaks, it looks more and more like the CIA was engaged in unlawful practices. Not just the morally unlawful practice of waterboarding, which was nevertheless approved from on high, but other forms of torture that had no official sanction. The Washington Post describes the CIA’s treatment of the nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed:

At the secret prison, [Ammar al-]Baluchi endured a regime that included being dunked in a tub filled with ice water. CIA interrogators forcibly kept his head under the water while he struggled to breathe and beat him repeatedly, hitting him with a truncheon-like object and smashing his head against a wall, officials said.

This practice of near drowning and beating has never been authorized as an interrogation procedure. But, according to the Human Rights Watch, other prisoners at the same secret prison received the same treatment. CIA doctors stood by during these abuses, carefully checking the health of the prisoner, but serving the interests of the agency, helping the torturers push the bodies of their prisoners as far as they could go without killing anyone, presumably to avoid paperwork and oversight.

These acts of abuse did not result in useful intelligence. The Congressional report makes it clear that some prisoners were waterboarded after giving up useful data, and, although the brutal treatment produced no new information, the original revelations were used as evidence for the necessity of the technique. According to one of the Washington Post‘s anonymous sources:

“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”

The CIA might be able to claim it concealed the full scope of its activities from the American people due to national security reasons, but it’s very hard to believe that briefing Congress honestly would give terrorists an edge.

The evidence suggest that the CIA has gone rogue—imprisoning and torturing suspects, misleading their superiors, and trying to hide the evidence. The declassification of Congress’s report can’t come soon enough, so we can assess the damage the agency has done, and decide how to keep it under proper supervision and surveillance.


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