Senate Report Finds CIA Torture Produced Fabricated Intel and Thwarted No Plots

http://news.yahoo.com/senate-report-finds-cia-torture-produced--fabricated--intel-and-thwarted-no-plots---232012393.html
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After days of brutal interrogations, in which he was slammed against walls, slapped in the gut, and repeatedly waterboarded — “near drownings” that caused him to vomit — 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his CIA interrogators he was “ready to talk.”

The story he told in March 2003: He had sent an al-Qaida operative to Montana to recruit African-Americans for terrorist attacks inside the U.S. The alarming new claim sent FBI agents scrambling to find evidence of the plot, but they came up with nothing.

And for good reason: KSM later admitted he had fabricated the story — that because he was being subjected to such rough measures, he “simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear,” according to an internal agency cable quoted in the mammoth Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Tuesday by the panel’s chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The invented Montana plot is only one example of multiple wild-goose chases and other false leads that were produced by the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” — what President Barack Obama himself has labeled “torture” — in the years after 9/11, according to the 489-page Senate report.

“The methods in question ... regularly resulted in fabricated information,” the report states in its key findings. And the CIA itself at times was hoodwinked: “During the brutal interrogations, the CIA was often unaware the information was fabricated, leading CIA officers or contractors to falsely conclude that they were acquiring unique or actionable intelligence when they were not.”
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This is a copy of the cover of the CIA torture report released by Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein D-Calif., Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014. U.S. Senate investigators delivered a damning indictment of CIA interrogations Tuesday, accusing the spy agency of inflicting suffering on prisoners beyond its legal limits and peddling unsubstantiated stories that the harsh questioning saved American lives.

This is a copy of the cover of the CIA torture report released by Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne … For years, the CIA has said its resort to aggressive interrogations had “saved lives” — an assertion that was repeated today by six former top CIA officials in a joint op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

Noting the panicked atmosphere in the country after 9/11, with intelligence reports pouring in about a “second wave” of attacks and nuclear weapons supposedly being smuggled into the streets of New York City (“It felt like the classic ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario — every single day”), the former officials — including ex-directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden — wrote that their approval of “enhanced interrogation techniques” had “led to the disruptions of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.”

But the Senate report paints a very different picture: of a chaotic, poorly run program that was far more brutal than was previously known and whose details were concealed from some of the most senior members of the U.S. government.

U.S. ambassadors in some of the countries where CIA black sites were built were never told about what was taking place on their own turf. Then FBI Director Robert Mueller was denied access when he tried to get his own agents to question KSM.

Among those also initially kept out of the loop: Secretary of State Colin Powell. “The WH (White House) is extremely concerned that (Secretary) Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what's been going on,” a CIA lawyer wrote in July 2003.

Many of the techniques laid out in the report have been publicly known for years — forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary and temperature manipulation, wall slamming and, of course, waterboarding, a practice dating back to the Spanish Inquisition in which subjects are strapped down and doused with water to simulate the experience of drowning.

But the committee uncovered new details about how these techniques were actually applied in practice.
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This undated file photo provided by U.S. Central Command, shows Abu Zubaydah, date and location unknown. Zubaydah was the CIA’s guinea pig. He was the first high-profile al Qaida terror suspect captured after the Sept. 11 attacks and the first to vanish into the spy agency’s secret prisons, the first subjected to grinding white noise and sleep deprivation tactics and the first to gasp under the simulated drowning of waterboarding. Zubaydah’s stark ordeal became the CIA’s blueprint for the brutal treatment of terror suspects, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report released Tuesday.

This undated file photo provided by U.S. Central Command, shows Abu Zubaydah, date and location unknown. Zubaydah …
The first “high-value detainee” taken to a black-site prison was waterboarded so many times that he lost consciousness at one point and “became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”

At least five detainees in CIA custody experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation — which in some cases went on for up to 180 hours. A CIA prison in Afghanistan (known as the Salt Pit but referred to as COBALT in the report) was described in CIA cables as a “dungeon” where hooded prisoners were kept in complete darkness and shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music — and only a bucket to use for human waste. One of the detainees died from hypothermia after being left naked from the waist down.

But the report’s most controversial — and intensely disputed — finding is that the CIA program produced often unreliable intelligence and that agency officials repeatedly misrepresented its value to top policymakers inside the Bush White House, Congress and the American public. One of the high-value detainees who were supposedly providing vital intelligence, an Indonesian terrorist known as Hambali, later recanted most of what he had told his interrogators. Hambali “said he merely gave answers that were similar to what was being asked and inferred the interrogator or de-briefer wanted,” according to a CIA cable cited in the report.

Another supposed CIA success was the interrogation of Abd al-Rahim Nashiri, the suspected bomber of the USS Cole, who was waterboarded and had an electric drill threateningly waved by his skull by a guard. He was credited by the agency with coughing up intelligence about plots against foreign ships in the Persian Gulf. In fact, the committee found from internal cables that Nashiri had already provided that information to another country’s interrogators while he was in foreign custody.

The committee report examined 20 “case studies” in which agency officials had claimed they had thwarted plots or rounded up suspects based on aggressive interrogations. These assertions, the panel found, were “inaccurate and contradicted by the CIA’s own records.” For instance, the trail that led to the capture of KSM in Pakistan began not with the harsh tactics of the CIA but rather with FBI agents who used traditional “rapport building” techniques to get information from Abu Zubaydah before the rough stuff began. So too did the information that led to the arrest of Jose Padilla on charges that he had been dispatched to set off a nuclear “dirty bomb” inside the U.S. — another frightening claim the CIA made to justify its program and which some of the agency’s own officials soon concluded were wildly inflated, if not false.

In this Jan. 5, 2006 file photo, Jose Padilla, center, is escorted to a waiting police vehicle by federal marshals near downtown Miami.

“We’ll never be able to successfully expunge Padilla and the ‘dirty bomb’ plot from the lore of disruption,” one senior CIA official wrote in an October 2005 cable. “Even KSM says Padilla had a screw loose.”

Still, the CIA is standing its ground on one of the most contentious issues of the post-9/11 era. “It remains CIA’s position that detainees in the detention and interrogation program, including those subjected to EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques) did provide valuable and unique intelligence,” a CIA spokesman said on Tuesday.

Why then did the committee find differently? According to the agency, the Senate probe reached its conclusion “by working backwards from the known outcome in each example to show how it might have been achieved without the intelligence derived from interrogations involving EITs.” Added the spokesman: “That’s like doing a crossword puzzle on Tuesday with Wednesday’s answers key.”

Why Torture?

The sorry fact is that according to the Senate report, it did not thwart any plots. All it did was produce false intel and confessions. We haven't convicted KSM for being involved in 9/11. Where is the evidence connecting him to Bin Laden or to any alleged hijackers? Civilian trial nor military tribunal has produced any hard evidence of his guilt. All we have is a "torture confession."

Why torture when it is widely known to be ineffective? 1) To get false confessions to back up a false flag. 2) To fabricate intel to seemingly justify the program and keep people believing a myth. 3) To feed bogus info to the 9/11 Commission, whose report was based largely on CIA torture tapes (plus perjury by NORAD). 4) To set a precedent for defying the Geneva convention. These are war crimes and must be prosecuted.

This could be a springboard to truth.

The Role of 9/11 in Justifying Torture and War-Chossudovsky

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-role-of-911-in-justifying-torture-and-war-the-criminalization-of-the-us-state-apparatus-s...

The Role of 9/11 in Justifying Torture and War: The Criminalization of the US State Apparatus. Senate Report on CIA Torture is a Whitewash
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, December 11, 2014

The words “possible criminal actions” by CIA employees is used in the report.

The terms unethical and immoral are mentioned. The criminality of those who ordered these actions at the highest levels of government, however, is not acknowledged.

The actions directed against alleged jihadists are categorized as ineffective in the process of revealing intelligence. This in itself is a red herring. The objective of torture was not to reveal intelligence.

What of course is not acknowledged is that the alleged terrorists who were tortured were framed by the CIA.

Known and documented the Al Qaeda network is a creation of US intelligence.

The jihadists are “intelligence assets”.

Torture serves to perpetuate the legend that the evil terrorists are real and that the lives of Americans are threatened.

Torture is presented as “collateral damage.” Torture is an integral part of war propaganda which consists in demonizing the alleged terrorists.

- See more at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-role-of-911-in-justifying-torture-and-war-the-criminalization-of-the-us-state-apparatus-s...

Great Article!

While the Senate Report admits that torture wasn't effective, it doesn't seek to punish the guilty. The Senate Report is a failure. Torture is a WAR CRIME. It must be prosecuted.

We tortured the innocent and protected the guilty. No excuse for not releasing the 28 redacted pages of the Congressional 9/11 report now. We abducted and warehoused people without charges in most cases, with no trials, and tortured them.... while protecting the identities of those connected to the 9/11 massacre -- at least with regard to the patsies. Tides are turning in public opinion. This is what a facebook friend posted today:

"Cheney directed 9/11 with co-conspirator The Mossad, then tortured Muslims for false confessions."

How 9/11 Truth Looms in the Background of the CIA Torture Stor

http://www.activistpost.com/2014/12/how-911-truth-looms-in-background-of.html

How 9/11 Truth Looms in the Background of the CIA Torture Stories
Bernie Suarez
Activist Post

With CIA torture programs now fully exposed to the world, a common background theme has emerged. The CIA torture report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is a summary of the original report which you can read for yourself. In the first few pages of the Senate report we are quietly reminded that the backdrop which set the stage for the justification of torture is 9/11. More specifically, the 9/11 "official story" narrative. The much questioned, challenged, and refuted official story narrative that is. The report quietly pulls the reader in with a passionate recollection of 9/11:

I recall vividly watching the horror of that day, to include the television footage of innocent men and women jumping out of the World Trade Center towers to escape the fire. The images, and the sounds as their bodies hit the pavement far below, will remain with me for the rest of my life.

Reading down further in the report, the 9/11 official story meme continues fully settling on the clear determined narrative that would be used in the CIA's attempt to justify torture by reminding the audience of the "terrorist plots"

It is worth remembering the pervasive fear in late 2001 and how immediate the threat felt. Just a week after the September 11 attacks, powdered anthrax was sent to various news organizations and to two U.S. Senators. The American public was shocked by news of new terrorist plots and elevations of the color-coded threat level of the Homeland Security Advisory System. We expected further attacks against the nation.

Do you remember now? The day when (CIA asset) Bin Laden and his (CIA) Al Qaeda terrorist (supposedly) took over four commercial planes and strategically overpowered the world's greatest military, all from a cave in Afghanistan?

more: http://www.activistpost.com/2014/12/how-911-truth-looms-in-background-of.html

How 9/11 Looms with Obama Nominee

So Ashton Carter is up for SecDef? Hows about that. That good old Aspen Strategy, they are tenacious.

"I expect he will face tough questions at his confirmation hearing about President Obama's failing national security policy, but I expect he will be confirmed," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

Maybe someone will ask Carter about his co-authoring "Catastrophic Terrorism : Tackling the New Danger". Maybe Frank Sinatra will tour this spring.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-secdef-profile-20141206-story.html#page=1

Cheney : "I think what needed to be done was done,"

By Eric Bradner, CNN

Bush's Republican vice president insisted that the Central Intelligence Agency's rough tactics -- which the report said included mock executions, beatings, "rectal rehydration" and feeding, sleep deprivation and more -- helped the United States "catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11."

"It did in fact produce actionable intelligence that was vital in the success of keeping the country safe from further attacks," he said.

Asked specifically about the rectal rehydration instance detailed in the report, Cheney said: "I don't know anything about that specific instance -- I can't speak to that."

He also said he hadn't actually read the report. Its full 6,000 pages haven't been released, but a lengthy summary was issued Tuesday. Cheney said he'd "seen parts of it. I read summaries of it."

Contrary to the report's conclusion that Bush didn't know the extent of the CIA's efforts, Cheney said the President was involved in discussions about the interrogation techniques, and that Bush even pointed out some of those conversations in a book he wrote after leaving office.

He said he has no regrets about the tactics used after the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks.

"I think what needed to be done was done," Cheney said. "I think we were perfectly justified in doing it. And I'd do it again in a minute."

Cheney

It should come as no surprise that Cheney supports the Bush Administration's torture policy as Cheney - among Another Nineteen and others - has the biggest investment in the cover up. Without extorting confessions the official narrative has very little to support it. They need torture. That's also why they lie, conceal documents, hide videos, destroy evidence, obfuscate reports and promote unscientific theories.

Karl Rove Says Bush Knew About CIA Interrogation Program

On Sunday, Karl Rove said Bush was fully briefed on all of the CIA's tactics early on in the program in 2002, citing the former president's recent book.

"He was briefed and intimately involved in the decision," said Rove

more
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/14/karl-rove-torture_n_6322774.html

Anti-Terror

We should portray ourselves as anti-terror in a more clear-cut and upfront way. There's a need to go beyond academic arguments when doing outreach to the Other Half who are brainwashed and propagandized. "We must get the terrorists who blew up the towers and helped 9/11 happen," depicting our opposition as "soft on terror." "No one should be let off the hook.." We need to claim the anti-terror banner and present the truth message via anti-torture and anti-terror frameworks.

Comments

The comments to your concise letter are a hoot.

"Twoofer Alert" -- hawkeye

Oh, hawkeye, now you're gonna make me cry. Stop it.

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"Torture the innocent to protect the guilty? If you believe this crap you are literally too stupid to comprehend reality." -- Frank Underwood

If Frank actually believes this then he has an extremely deficient understanding of human nature.

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The hollow comments to your fine letter are a good sign... of desperation. At his recent appearance on 9/11 Free Fall, I was pleased to hear NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller note how while the "truther" criticisms are rational, the denier responses are embarrassingly childish. Well done, McGee.

Yes great article

defenders are desperate, great replies as usual.

Twoofer......

This "Twoofer" crap really irks me and not in the nanny nanny boo boo sense that the progenitors of such tripe think it evokes but in the total lack of any kind of genuine dialog that such a poster is offering. I am currently watching a biopic about Torgny Segerstedt, an erstwhile Swedish theologian who,while editor in chief a a major Swedish newspaper, comes to loggerheads with his publisher who wants to censor him. Segerstedt argues for freedom of speech while the publisher, an anti-nazi as well, just doesn't want this fire-brand to get the country invaded like all the other Scandinavian countries. The arguments are elegant and I wanted to take both sides and no one, as you might expect, called anyone cwazy.

Like it or not, if you are on this board you are part of the intelligentsia and copy-pasta "glad hand" terms like "twoofer" have no part in any kind of intellectual debate. Though not religious I must admit that theologians make great rhetoricians like David Ray Griffin, Graeme MacQueen, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Thanks to, among others, the giants listed above, we have all succeeded, or at list aspired, to function on a higher intellectual plane. Calling someone a twoofer is like Hitler calling Bonhoeffer a "Cwistian."

What is most insidious is the poster's admonition, to the person he is responding to, to seek mental help; he is simply not even qualified to make this assessment and not only that, to even consider it. The vapid comment is reproduced below.

TWOOFER ALERT
Submitted by hawkeye on December 22, 2014 - 4:00pm.

Hey Twitch, make that phone call: http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-helpline

Twoofer

A term as annoying as it is illuminating. First, it denigrates the pursuit of truth, and the human desire to separate that which is truth from that which are lies. One has to wonder if this term is yet another thought-stopping creation of the CIA or just the 'clever' creation of some now anonymous blogger. Second, the term "twoofer" as pejorative seems to play into the Neocon philosophy, which is itself based on "the big lie" of the ominous, eternal enemy. That is, that social cohesion in Neocon theory is achieved through this universal acceptance of the lie - or myth, or "public presumption", as Zelikow prefers - and that it is this tenuous unity which protects us from the terrible Other. What this implies is that one really can't even have a debate with a Neocon, as commonly understood, as he will lie as as a matter of course - it's in his etiological DNA. May I repeat myself?

What this implies is that one really can't even have a debate with a Neocon, as commonly understood, as he will lie as as a matter of course - it's in his etiological DNA.

Which brings us to the crux of the problem. We tend to think of wars as discrete events - it begins, is fought, and it ends. Dr. Peter Phillips in a talk was sharing an interaction which took place with proto-Neocon Richard Pearle. Pearle was making his point that we (America) should wage "total war", and he meant it. By that I get to mean that we are at war with the world and will be for as long as it takes for 'our' Myth and 'our' dominance to be universally accepted as fact - or, I guess, perish in trying. Total war. Constant war. Not some discrete event we describe as war, but an ongoing frame of mind. In a hot battle for our lives I would fight, lie and deceive in a heart beat to save ourselves from perishing, but I would not confuse that instant with my worldview. IMHO the Neocons conflate the two. I reject this on the simple grounds that the devil is a liar. And I don't mean this religiously, as one can be a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or nothing in particular and knows that however elusive the truth may be, whatever it is, it is not a lie. To say otherwise would be to say that the light is the darkness - senseless (who enters a room, turns off the light, to search for his keys? There is a difference).

I see I've rambled some. Merry Christmas to all.

Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses-THE EDITORIAL BOARD NYTime

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/prosecute-torturers-and-their-bosses.html?smid=re-share&_r=2

Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses

By THE EDITORIAL BOARDDEC. 21, 2014

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/prosecute-torturers-and-their-bosses.html?smid=re-share&_r=2

Hmmm

While I embrace with others here this Editorial pronouncement by the NYTs, I find it ironic that had they properly reported on WTC 7 and the illuminating work of the independent investigators, then the very foundation of the administration's and CIA's torture program would be thoroughly undermined. The NYTs have thus far succeeded in 'missing' the story even though our brothers and sisters in this movement dropped a hint in the form of a 50' billboard across the street from their offices.