WASHINGTON - The CIA’s interrogation of Al-Qaeda suspects was far more brutal than acknowledged and did not produce useful intelligence, a damning and long-delayed US Senate report said Tuesday.
The Central Intelligence Agency also misled the White House and Congress with inaccurate claims about the programme’s usefulness in thwarting attacks, the Senate Intelligence Committee said.
The US Senate released the scathing report asserting that the CIA misled the public while carrying out ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques that in some cases amounted to torture.
The report, which took seven years to complete, is the most detailed analysis yet of the CIA’s activities, containing information about the secret detention of at least 119 people and practices that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, said amounted to torture.
“While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” she said in the forward to the report.
The CIA’s arguments in support of the techniques were based on “inaccurate claims,” the report concluded. Agency officials presented misleading evidence to the White House, Justice Department, Congress and the public that in some cases had “no relationship” to the actual information gained from detainees.
“The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis,” it claimed.
The report contains details about water-boarding, sexual threats and other controversial methods to obtain information in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The report concludes those techniques were largely ineffective and poorly managed.
Ahead of the damning report’s release, thousands of Marines — part of contingency response forces — were put on heightened alert, as U.S. intelligence agencies and foreign governments feared it will cause “violence and death” abroad, according to Congressman Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. U.S. embassies have also been put on alert.
The Department of Defence sent a message to military commanders worldwide to review their security procedures because of the likelihood of violence. CNN reported the Marines on alert include 2,000 in Africa, 2,000 in the Middle East and 2,200 on ships in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden. There are also three teams of about 50 Marines each that are trained to respond to embassy threats in Spain, Bahrain and Japan.
Additionally, Tuesday’s report concludes that the CIA misled its overseers in Washington when carrying the practices out.
President Barack Obama cancelled many of the techniques via executive order when he entered the White House in 2009.
The version of the report being released to the public is just an executive summary of a full 6,300-page document that will remain classified and is likely to never see the light of day.
The release comes despite opposition from many Republicans, who feared it would reopen old wounds, undermine the nation’s intelligence officials and lead to new violence against the US.
“The hallmark of a free society is open and transparent government, but certain disclosures must be carefully weighed against the potential damage to the national security interests of the United States and the security of the men and women who serve our country overseas,” Senator Dan Coats, a Republican who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Media reports citing sources familiar with the document said it includes graphic details about techniques the Central Intelligence Agency used in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The sources said tactics meant to force detainees to divulge information on terrorist plots and cells went beyond the techniques authorized by White House, CIA and lawyers working for President George W. Bush’s Justice Department.
Cases in which CIA interrogators threatened one or more detainees with mock executions, a practice never authorised by Bush administration lawyers, are documented in the report, the sources said.
It concludes that harsh interrogations did not produce a single critical intelligence nugget that could not have been obtained by non-coercive means. Former CIA and government leaders, including former US vice president Dick Cheney, dispute that conclusion.
The report describes how al Qaeda operative Abdel Rahman al Nashiri, suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was threatened with a buzzing power drill, the sources said. The drill was never actually used on him. It documents how at least one detainee was sexually threatened with a broomstick, the sources said.
It was unclear whether the report would lead to further attempts to hold those involved accountable. The legal statute of limitations has passed for many of the actions.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that President Obama supported making the document public “so that people around the world and people here at home understand exactly what transpired.”
American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony Romero said in an opinion piece in The New York Times that Obama should issue formal pardons to senior officials and others to make clear that these actions were crimes and help ensure that “the American government never tortures again.”
Two Republican lawmakers issued a statement calling the release of the report “reckless and irresponsible.” Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, is due to make the report public in a Senate floor speech.
“We are concerned that this release could endanger the lives of Americans overseas, jeopardise US relations with foreign partners, potentially incite violence, create political problems for our allies, and be used as a recruitment tool for our enemies,” senators Marco Rubio and Jim Risch said.
Senator Angus King, an independent, told CNN releasing the report was important because it could persuade a future president not to use these techniques.
“We did things that we tried Japanese soldiers for war crimes for after World War Two. This is not America. This is not who we are. What was done has diminished our stature and inflamed terrorists around the world.”
“Did we torture people? Yes. Did it work? No,” King said.
The 500-plus page report that the Intelligence Committee has prepared for release, a summary of a much more detailed, 6,000-page narrative which will remain secret, includes a 200-page narrative of the interrogation programme’s history and 20 case studies of the interrogations of specific detainees.
Intelligence Committee Democrats were expected to post the report on the panel’s website on Tuesday, along with lengthy critiques of it by committee Republicans and the CIA.