The Senate report summary should forever put to rest CIA denials that it engaged in torture, which is criminal and can never be justified,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The report shows the repeated claims that harsh measures were needed to protect Americans are utter fiction.” Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of officials, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.

President Barack Obama halted the CIA interrogation programme when he took office in 2009, and has acknowledged that the methods used to question Al-Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.

The 6,300-page Senate report includes what officials described as damning new disclosures about a sprawling network of secret detention facilities, or ‘black sites’. Leaks about the Senate report first emerged in August this year, prompting Obama to declare: “We tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.” However the President said that he favours making the report public so that the American people could judge for themselves the CIA’s conduct.

Key findings
1. None of 20 cases of counterterrorism “successes” attributed to the techniques led to unique or otherwise unavailable intelligence
2. The CIA misled politicians and public
At least 26 of 119 known detainees in custody during the life of the programme were wrongfully held, and many held for months longer than they should have been
3. Methods included sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, often standing or in painful positions
4. Saudi al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah was kept confined in a coffin-sized box for hours on end
5. Water boarding and “rectal hydration” were physically harmful to prisoners, causing convulsions and vomiting

Black Sites
The report will show that a more widespread network existed of so-called black sites — secret prisons where interrogation took place — than previously acknowledged, according to the Washington Post

While techniques including sleep deprivation and water boarding to simulate drowning were on a Department of Justice approved list, the report describes other methods. These included prisoners at a secret site in Afghanistan repeatedly having their heads dunked in tanks of ice-cold water.

The report is also said to make it clear that important intelligence against al-Qa’ida, including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, had little to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

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 water-boarded 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 also oversold the role of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. CIA officials claimed he was the “mastermind”

Two other terrorism suspects, from Libya — Mohammed al-Shoroeiya and Khalid al-Sharif — endured similar treatment at Salt Pit, according to Human Rights Watch. One of the men said CIA interrogators “would pour buckets of very cold water over his nose and mouth to the point that he felt he would suffocate. Icy cold water was also poured over his body. He said it happened over and over again,” the report says. CIA doctors monitored the prisoners’ body temperatures so they wouldn’t suffer hypothermia.

Global Criticism
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has said the CIA’s brutal interrogation programme “violated all accepted norms of human rights in the world”. He is among many world leaders condemning how the agency imprisoned and questioned al-Qaeda suspects.

Meanwhile, Poland’s former president has publicly acknowledged for the first time his country hosted a secret CIA prison. Aleksander Kwasniewski said that he put pressure on the US to end brutal interrogations at the prison in 2003. “I told Bush that this co-operation must end and it did end,” Kwasniewski told local media.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius called on the US to say whether CIA used his country to interrogate prisoners. A previous Lithuanian investigation found the CIA set up and ran a facility near the country’s capital but could not determine if prisoners were held there.

Germany’s foreign minister also criticised US actions on 10th December in the Bild newspaper, saying “what was then considered right and done in the fight against Islamist terrorism was unacceptable and a serious mistake”.

UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism Ben Emmerson said that senior officials from the administration of George W Bush who planned and sanctioned crimes must be prosecuted, as well as CIA and US government officials responsible for torture such as water boarding. “As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice,” Emmerson said in a statement made from Geneva.

And Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said that the CIA’s actions were criminal” and can never be justified”.

The European Court of Human Rights heard cases of involving European complicity in CIA torture. In doing so, it had a chance to deliver justice in relation to the CIA’s torture programme and highlight the failure of institutions in the United States to do the same.

The United Nations said the program violated international law and basic human rights. And British-based advocacy group CAGE demanded criminal proceedings following the release of the report.

Former US Vice President & Defence Secretary defend torture
Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president, mounted a strident defence of the torture of terrorist suspects by American interrogators. He reportedly said to the media “Given a choice between doing what we did or backing off and saying ‘we know you know the next attack against the United States, but we’re not going to force you to tell us what it is, because it might create a bad image for us,’ that’s not a close call for me”. Cheney said it produced “phenomenal” results and dismissed the Obama administration’s investigations of its legality as “objectionable” and a “terrible precedent”.

Former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a hardliner who was one of the key persons of the Bush administration, reportedly said about CIA interrogation with the terrorists “What we know about who the CIA tortured, how, and what good it did.”

In his book titled Known and Unknown (2011) he did not regret the mass killings in Iraq and tortures perpetrated on many suspected terrorists. He also did not regret the US invasion in 2003 which was found to be by the UN as “illegal”. Rumsfeld when interviewed by Errol Morris, a journalist, writes in his book “In my confirmation hearing…the best question I was asked was: What do you worry about when you go to bed at night? And my answer was, in effect, intelligence. The danger that we can be surprised because of a failure of imagining what might happen in the world.”

Conclusion
The United Nations Committee against Torture and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture clearly stated that these techniques are torture, While the Bush administration was deeply engaged in brutal torture of Al-Qaeda suspects, the administration had criticised other countries for using those same techniques as torture. Many Human Rights Organizations across the world have considered this conduct of the administration as hypocrisy.

However one fact comes out that the disclosure of the report also shows that whatever activities the US administration does cannot be kept secret for long and come out finally for public knowledge and that is one of the strengths of American democracy.

Barrister Harun ur Rashid Former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva

(Dhaka Courier)