Senate probe catalogs brutal techniques

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The United States brutalized scores of terror suspects with interrogation tactics that turned secret CIA prisons into chambers of suffering and did nothing to make America safer after the 9/11 attacks, Senate investigators concluded Tuesday.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, years in the making, accused the CIA of misleading its political masters about what it was doing with its “black site” captives and deceiving the nation about the effectiveness of its techniques.

The report was the first public accounting of tactics employed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and it described far harsher actions than had been widely known.

Tactics included confinement to small boxes, weeks of sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, slapping and slamming, and threats to kill, harm or sexually abuse families of the captives.

The report produced revulsion among many, challenges to its veracity among some lawmakers and a sharp debate about whether it should have been released at all.

GOP Sen. John McCain, tortured in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, was out of step with some fellow Republicans in welcoming the report and endorsing its findings.

“We gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer,” he said in a Senate speech. “Too much.”

Five hundred pages were released, representing the executive summary and conclusions of a still-classified 6,700-page full investigation.

President Barack Obama declared some of the past practices to be “brutal, and as I’ve said before, constituted torture in my mind. And that’s not who we are,” he told the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo in an interview.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the Democratic committee chairwoman whose staff prepared the summary, branded the findings a stain on the nation’s history.

“Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” she declared, commanding the Senate floor for an extended accounting of the techniques identified in the investigation.

The report catalogued the use of ice baths, death threats, shackling in the cold and much more. Three detainees faced the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Many developed psychological problems.

But the “enhanced interrogation techniques” didn’t produce the results that really mattered, the report asserts in its most controversial conclusion. It cites CIA cables, emails and interview transcripts to rebut the central justification for torture — that it thwarted terror plots and saved American lives.

In a statement, CIA Director John Brennan said the agency made mistakes and has learned from them.

But he also asserted the coercive techniques “did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.”