12 Things to Keep in Mind When You Read the Torture Report

by Dan Froomkin

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report will be released “in a matter of days,” a committee staffer tells The Intercept. The report, a review of brutal CIA interrogation methods during the presidency of George W. Bush, has been the subject of a contentious back-and-forth, with U.S. intelligence agencies and the White House on one side pushing for mass redactions in the name of national security and committee staffers on the other arguing that the proposed redactions render the report unintelligible.

Should something emerge, here are some important caveats to keep in mind:

1) You’re not actually reading the torture report. You’re just reading an executive summary. The full Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program runs upward of 6,000 pages. The executive summary is 480 pages. So you’re missing more than 80 percent of it.

2) The CIA got to cut out parts. The summary has been redacted – ostensibly by the White House, but in practice by officials of the CIA, which, lest we forget, is the agency that is being investigated, that spied on and tried to intimidate the people conducting the investigation, and whose director has engaged in serial deception about the investigation. The original redactions proposed by the White House included eliminating even the use of pseudonyms to let readers keep track of major recurring characters, and appeared intended to make the summary unintelligible.

3) Senate Democrats had their backs to the wall. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein faced enormous pressure to get the summary out in some form, before the incoming Republican Senate majority could do the White House a solid and squelch it completely.

4) The investigation was extremely narrow in its focus. Committee staffers only looked at what the CIA did in its black sites; whether it misled other officials; and whether it complied with orders. That is somewhat like investigating whether a hit man did the job efficiently and cleaned up nicely.

5) The investigation didn’t examine who gave the CIA its orders, or why. The summary doesn’t assess who told the CIA to torture – despite the abundant evidence that former vice president Dick Cheney and his cabal architected, choreographed and defended its use, with former president George W. Bush’s knowing or unknowing support.

 

More

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/02/x-things-keep-mind-ever-get-read-torture-report/

Note how Froomkim's analysis leaves out 9/11

For years mainstream media journalists have failed to properly investigate and report about 9/11. They simply pretend that all the unanswered questions have no bearing on policies like torture. If they are ever called on their pathetic coverage they typically resort to bashing conspiracy theorists.

Here are two issues that have been well documented. Yet the media has never gotten answers:

1) Are the redacted 28 pages in the Joint Inquiry report not relevant? How on earth can one reconcile the notion of a panicked White House implementing a desperate, ad-hoc torture program with a deliberate White House effort to cover up direct links to the hijackers?

2) Why has the mainstream media failed to investigate CIA's deliberate obstruction of al Qaeda investigations before 9/11? Not one single mainstream journalist has ever gotten a credible explanation for the CIA's conduct. There has never been a single interview with Alec Station chief Rich Blee or deputy chief Tom Wilshire. How are we supposed to reconcile panicked CIA officials giving NSA Rice an urgent briefing on 7/10/01 with a deliberate CIA effort to impede al Qaeda related investigations during the same time frame?

The Bush White House and the CIA were both highly involved in the torture program. So their 9/11 related conduct has everything to do with the torture report. How can the public take journalists seriously when they decry government efforts to clamp down on press freedom? When you read all the analysis of the torture report next week note how many articles use stupid phrases like "a good faith torture program implemented by panicked officials desperate to protect the Homeland."

Was the torture program actually a "tough on terror" PR campaign intended to mask high level corruption? A PR campaign sold to the public by so called investigative journalists?

good questions

Noise asks excellent questions...

It seems the CIA torture program is working. It's main purpose is to destroy the captives mentally, the 9/11 cover up if exposed would have prevented a war that killed hundreds of thousands if not millions (How would America be sold an Iraq war when Saudi Arabia Intelligence is exposed as conspirators?) Trillions of dollars could have been saved, real answers could have produced real solutions to terrorism and the rampant corruption that is taking away liberties, and now we have torture done in our name because these captives pose a problem. Several being tortured have direct links to protected Saudi Intelligence assets, which is why they are kept in secret military tribunals, why they are tortured and why the 28 pages are kept locked away.

Just one example.....Binalshibh tortured while Basnan gets protected.........see....

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=254040.msg1494766;topicseen#msg1494766

This is outrageous. Getting these prisoners in a REAL OPEN Public court and releasing the 28 pages are BOTH required and should be demanded.

I'm disgusted.

The Intercept

This is an example of how Pierre Omidyar's new news outlet has folded in nicely with all the other MSM outlets. Excellent observations noise.

US Torture Report Summary Released

US Torture Report Summary Released

Full Report
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40421.htm

Senate Torture Report Finds the CIA Was More Brutal Than Anyone Knew
By Jason Leopold
"under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured." - Dianne Feinstein
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40422.htm

Details from the CIA Torture Report Summary
Hypothermia, Broken Limbs, and Rectal Feeding
By CJ Ciaramella
One prisoner at a CIA black site froze to death. Others were forced to stand on broken feet, threatened sexually with broomsticks, or subjected to "rectal feeding"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40423.htm

"We tortured some folks....." Barack Hussein Obama

Jus cogens
"Jus cogens (from Latin: compelling law; English: peremptory norm) refers to certain fundamental, overriding principles of international law, from which no derogation is ever permitted. See Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law (5th ed., Oxford, 1998). In practice, jurists' attempt to classify certain rules, rights and duties as jus cogens or peremptory norms have not met with success: while there is near-universal agreement for the existence of the category of jus cogens norms, there is far less agreement regarding the actual content of this category.

Examples of jus cogens norms include: prohibition on the use of force; the law of genocide; principle of racial non-discrimination; crimes against humanity; and the rules prohibiting trade in slaves or human trafficking." Cornell University Law School: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/jus_cogens

The Legal Prohibition Against Torture "Torture is universally condemned, and whatever its actual practice, no country publicly supports torture or opposes its eradication. The prohibition against torture is well established under customary international law as jus cogens; that is, it has the highest standing in customary law and is so fundamental as to supercede all other treaties and customary laws (except laws that are also jus cogens). Criminal acts that are jus cogens are subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that any state can exercise its jurisdiction, regardless of where the crime took place, the nationality of the perpetrator or the nationality of the victim." Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org/news/2003/03/11/legal-prohibition-against-torture

Taxi To The Dark Side (2007)

From the producer of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Who Killed the Electric Car? comes a documentary that takes a critical look at the Bush administration's policy on torture

Taxi To The Dark Side (2007) This film won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 80th Annual Academy Awards.


http://youtu.be/IqpBfUC2cYE

US law: Waterboarding is a capital crime.

Regarding torture: many senior members of the Bush Administration refused to acknowledge that torture was part of the "enhanced interrogation" program practiced by CIA operatives in secret rendition centers in a number of nations, as well as the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. President Bush even went as far as to famously intone: "America does not torture".

However a very strong legal precedent was established several decades ago, in the Tokyo Trials following WWII, conducted under the auspices of US law. In those trials, a number of Japanese military officers were charged and found guilty of torturing captured US servicemen. The method of torture employed by the Japanese was *water boarding*, and the court decided that water boarding was indeed a form of torture. The punishment meted out was severe: for water boarding (torturing) US captive military personnel, a number of the accused were sentenced to death by hanging.

If the system is to retain any consistency and credibility, *ANYBODY* who authorizes or takes part in the waterboarding (or other forms of torture) of a prisoner should be tried as such, whether it be some low level CIA thug following (clearly illegal orders), right up to the top people in the administration who authorized it, should be tried and punished accordingly, if found guilty. Regardless of whether one is for or against the death penalty, if the law still calls for the death penalty for such war crimes, and that is what the court decides, then so be it.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

Ex-Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent: Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld knew the "vast majority" of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent

http://www.truth-out.org/article/item/713:exbush-official-willing-to-testify-bush-cheney-knew-gitmo-prisoners-innocent

Torture seems to have been used to protect the guilty

Under torture people will say anything to get it to stop and this is why it is not considered an effective interrogation method if real intelligence is desired. However, if all that is desired are patsies, it would work well.

To get patsies the real perpetrators of 911 seem to have opted to torture people to get them to say they did things they actually did not do. Of course, what is said under torture is generally not admissible in court if it can't be verified by other means. This is why the trials of KSM and others need to be secret tribunals and even then it seems there are problems, as the trials are not moving forward. It is another reason the Guantanamo Bay prison cannot be closed. It is also why the video of the torture was destroyed. The patsies just sit there with the pretense that they are guilty being offered to the American public as part of the protection scheme for the actual perpetrators.

We live in a sick world that needs to be exposed...

If you think the torture report is bad, in 2004 Seymour Hersh alleged the Pentagon possessed videotape of children being raped in front of their mothers by Army Interrogators. It was later confirmed.
http://www.salon.com/2004/07/15/hersh_7/

“Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay?” said Hersh. “Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.” -Seymour Hersh

On December 1, 2005, Yoo appeared in a debate in Chicago with Doug Cassel, a law professor from the University of Notre Dame. During the debate, Cassel asked Yoo,

"If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?", to which Yoo replied "No treaty." Cassel followed up with "Also no law by Congress—that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo", to which Yoo replied "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo#Legal_opinions

Media ‘gagged over bid to report MP child sex cases’: Security services accused of aiding Westminster paedophilia cover-up
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/22/media-gagged-westminster-child-abuse-ring

Claims that boys were murdered by VIP sex ring are credible and true - British Police
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/18/police-claims-vip-sex-ring-murder-three-boys

[ORIGINAL RESEARCH] The Mountain of Evidence for a Massive International Pedophile Ring Protected by Police and Intelligence Agencies
http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1cm0t3/original_research_the_mountain_of_evidence_for_a/

[Army Report] Abu Ghraib: Male Rape Witness Statement from Taguba Report:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6527.htm

Abu Ghraib abuse photos 'show rape': Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5395830/Abu-Ghraib-abuse-photos-show-rape.html

Sick M.F.s

Good work, O. This needs to be exposed. These are the evil-doers.