Showing posts with label torture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label torture. Show all posts

Thursday, 3 April 2014

Senate panel votes to release CIA torture report



 of the Bush administration's record when it comes to waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques." The panel voted 11-3 to order the declassification of almost 500 pages of the 6,300-page review, which concludes the harsh methods employed at CIA-run prisons overseas were excessively cruel and ineffective in producing valuable intelligence.
Even some Republicans who agree with the spy agency that the findings are inaccurate voted in favor of declassification, saying it was important for the country to move on.

"The purpose of this review was to uncover the facts behind the secret program and the results, I think, were shocking," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the committee chairwoman, said. "The report exposes brutality that stands in sharp contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never be allowed to happen again. This is not what Americans do."

The intelligence committee and the CIA are embroiled in a bitter dispute related to the three-year study. Senators accuse the agency of spying on their investigation and deleting files. The CIA says Senate staffers illegally accessed information. The Justice Department is reviewing competing criminal referrals.

As a result of Thursday's vote, the CIA will start scanning the report's contents for any passages that could compromise national security. That has led to fears in the committee that a recalcitrant CIA might sanitize key elements of their investigation, and demands for President Barack Obama to ensure large parts of the report aren't blacked out.

Obama, said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., should "hold onto the redaction pen himself."

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Thursday restated Obama's support for declassifying the document and said intelligence officials would be instructed to conduct the work quickly. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said his agency would "carry out the review expeditiously," but suggested the process may be difficult.

"We owe it to the men and women directed to carry out this program to try and ensure that any historical account of it is accurate," Boyd said.

The report was produced exclusively by Democratic staffers. It concludes among other things that waterboarding and other harsh techniques provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to congressional aides and outside experts familiar with the document.

Feinstein and other senators also have cited a series of misleading claims by the CIA over the years about the effectiveness of the program, including in statements the agency made to President George W. Bush and Congress.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the intelligence committee's top Republican, joined the vote in favor of declassification despite criticizing the report as a "waste of time." He said the U.S. public should be able to see the report alongside reservations among the GOP members of the committee.

"This is a chapter in our past that should have already been closed," Chambliss told reporters. He said Republicans would dispute some of the conclusions in their own report and insisted the CIA interrogations "led not only to the takedown of bin Laden, but to the interruption and disruption of other terrorist plots over a period of years."

Members of the intelligence community have criticized the investigation for failing to include interviews from top spy agency officials who authorized or supervised the brutal interrogations. They questioned how the review could be fair or complete.

"Neither I or anyone else at the agency who had knowledge was interviewed," said Jose Rodriguez, the CIA's chief clandestine officer in the mid-2000s, who had operational oversight over the detention and interrogation program. "They don't want to hear anyone else's narrative," he said of the Senate investigation. "It's an attempt to rewrite history."

Rodriguez himself is a key figure in the Senate report, not least for his order in 2005 to destroy 92 videotapes showing waterboarding of terror suspects and other harsh techniques.

Senate investigators were unable to talk to relevant CIA officials because of legal constraints posed by a separate investigation ordered by Attorney General Eric Holder. At Holder's direction, John Durham, an independent prosecutor, conducted several criminal probes related to interrogation methods and evidence destruction before dropping them altogether in 2012 - shortly before the Senate panel wrapped up its work.

Congressional aides said the CIA's own field reports, internal correspondence, cables and other documents described day-to-day handling of interrogations and the decision-making and actions of Rodriguez and others.

Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Dan Coats of Indiana and Jim Risch of Idaho voted against releasing the report.

"Too much time, energy and too many resources have been spent investigating a CIA program that ended more than six years ago," Coats said.

Bad blood between Senate aides and the CIA ruptured into the open last month when Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the agency of improperly monitoring the computer use of Senate staffers and deleting files, undermining the Constitution's separation of powers.

Thus far, both senators and the agency have tried to keep the declassification issue separate from their ongoing dispute.

Feinstein expressed hope that most of the summary and findings would escape CIA censors and reach the public within 30 days.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the report's public release is "the only way we can get this relationship with our intelligence agencies right again."

Monday, 31 March 2014

Torture provided no key evidence in hunt for OBL: US senate report





WASHINGTON: Water-boarding and other harsh interrogation techniques provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a new senate report into the use of torture by the CIA in the years after the September 11 attacks is expected to claim.

If confirmed, the finding in the 6,200-page senate report will directly challenge assertion by former members of the George W. Bush administration that the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques were an essential tool in prosecuting the war on terror.

Congressional aides familiar with the still-secret report told the Associated Press that a review of some 6 million classified documents had led them to conclude there was no benefit derived from treatment that the United Nations and rights groups say amounted to torture.

The US senate’s powerful intelligence committee is due to hold a vote on Thursday on whether to release a 400-page summary of the report, setting in motion a declassification process that could take several months before documents are made public.

The findings of the report have already caused a bitter and public rift between Dianne Feinstein, the Committee’s democrat chair, and the CIA whom she has openly accused of trying to frustrate the publication of the report since its findings were approved in December 2012.

Most fundamental among its findings is expected to be that the treatment meted out to Al Qa’eda suspects in sites such as Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, the Guantánamo Bay detention centre and “black jails” around the world did not ultimately yield critical intelligence.

The successful assassination of bin Laden was seized on by former Bush administration figures and top CIA officials as vindication of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” they authorised after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

That narrative was strengthened in the popular imagination by Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial film Zero Dark Thirty, a dramatic reconstruction of how bin Laden’s whereabouts were pieced together that was accused by civil rights groups of wrongly depicting torture as effective.

Among the key points of contention in the report was the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks who was waterboarded 183 times.

Intelligence officials have cited that Mohammed had confirmed that he knew an important al-Qaida courier with the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti who helped lead CIA investigators to the compound in Abbottabad where bin Laden was killed.

However the Senate report concludes such information wasn’t critical and was obtained not when Mohammed was being water-boarded, but under standard interrogation months later, the unnamed aides told the Associated Press.

The CIA also has pointed to the value of information provided by senior al-Qaida operative Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was captured in 2005 and held at a secret prison run by the agency.

In previous accounts, U.S. officials have described how al-Libi made up a name for a trusted courier and denied knowing al-Kuwaiti. Al-Libi was so adamant and unbelievable in his denial that the CIA took it as confirmation he and Mohammed were protecting the courier.

The Senate report concludes evidence gathered from al-Libi wasn't significant either, aides said.

Essentially, they argue, Mohammed, al-Libi and others subjected to harsh treatment confirmed only what investigators already knew about the courier. And when they denied the courier's significance or provided misleading information, investigators would only have considered that significant if they already presumed the courier's importance.

The aides did not address information provided by yet another al-Qaida operative: Hassan Ghul, captured in Iraq in 2004. Intelligence officials have described Ghul as the true linchpin of the bin Laden investigation after he identified al-Kuwaiti as a critical courier.

In a 2012 news release, Ms Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin, both Democrats, acknowledged an unidentified “third detainee” had provided relevant information on the courier.

But they said he did so the day before he was subjected to harsh CIA interrogation. “This information will be detailed in the Intelligence committee's report,” the senators said at the time.

In any case, it still took the CIA years to learn al-Kuwaiti's real identity: Sheikh Abu Ahmed, a Pakistani man born in Kuwait. How the U.S. learned of Ahmed's name is still unclear.

Without providing full details, aides said the Senate report illustrates the importance of the National Security Agency's efforts overseas.
Intelligence officials have previously described how in the years when the CIA couldn't find where bin Laden's courier was, NSA eavesdroppers came up with nothing until 2010 - when Ahmed had a telephone conversation with someone monitored by U.S. intelligence.

At that point, U.S. intelligence was able to follow Ahmed to bin Laden's hideout.
 

Monday, 24 March 2014

Armed forces personnel may be booked for torture: Pervaiz

LAHORE: Information and Broadcasting Minister Pervaiz Rashid has said that according to the amended law, a First Information Report (FIR) can also be registered against the armed forces personnel under the torture allegations.

Addressing a regional conference, organised here under the auspices of the Democratic Commission for Human Development (DCHD), the minister said the democratic government of Pakistan Muslim League-N was opposed to any type of torture.

The Constitution of Pakistan barred from all types of human rights violations. He admitted that police torture was a reality but the Fair Trial Article of the 18th Amendment provides protection from torture, the minister said.He said that the conference recommendations would provide a guideline to the government to do legislation to end all types of torture in the country.