CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says

Washington Post

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.

The article is a pretty interesting read.

Several officials who have read the document said some of its most troubling sections deal not with detainee abuse but with discrepancies between the statements of senior CIA officials in Washington and the details revealed in the written communications of lower-level employees directly involved.

Officials said millions of records make clear that the CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda — including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

So once again a 3-letter agency lies to the government about its operations. And go figure, torture is not as effective for getting reliable intelligence as they wanted us to believe.

One official said that almost all of the critical threat-related information from Abu Zubaida was obtained during the period when he was questioned by Soufan at a hospital in Pakistan, well before he was interrogated by the CIA and waterboarded 83 times.

Information obtained by Soufan, however, was passed up through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community, the Justice Department and Congress as though it were part of what CIA interrogators had obtained, according to the committee report.

“The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.

With all the information available, I have a hard time believing Congress can claim they were mislead. Talk about temerity? What's worse is press will run with this as fact and there are people who will eat it up with a spoon.

Thanks for post BTW. Good stuff

Torture can get you any confession you want and has been used for this purpose all through history.

Getting reliable intel via torture is another matter entirely. It rarely works. When it does, the intel is way too old to use. Perhaps the CIA would have been better off taking the time to study history before embarking on human rights abuses.

This is just so wrong, and brought to you by the Government of the land of freedom, milk, honey and apple pie.

Just so wrong.

Change labels from enemy soldier to terrorist and you can conveniently throw the Geneva Convention right out the window . How the mighty have fallen to the depths of depravity.

P