Summary
We’re going to wrap up our live blog coverage for the day. Here’s a summary of where things stand:
- Calls strengthened for the architects of the CIA torture program to be brought to justice. The ACLU called on the justice department to appoint a special prosecutor and Human Rights Watch called for a criminal investigation. UN officials issued a similar call.
- Outgoing senator Mark Udall said people responsible for illegal torture still work at high levels of the CIA and Obama administration and that the president must “purge” them.
- In an extraordinary speech on the Senate floor, Udall, an intelligence committee member, said “the CIA is lying” about key details of its torture program.
- Udall said he had read an internal CIA review of the torture program, called the Panetta report, and he said it is a “smoking gun” that directly contradicts public statements by CIA officials about the efficacy of torture, disclosures to Congress and more.
- Udall called for the resignation of CIA director John Brennan, who he said had obstructed the Senate and made a mockery of congressional oversight.
- Former CIA director Michael Hayden scrambled to defend the agency and himself. The last 30 pages of the Senate report are devoted to misleading statements made by Hayden. He said the report was misleading.
- Governments around the world decried the torture program, even governments that participated. Isis members and other militant Islamic groups seized on the torture revelations as more proof of “Crusader” cruelty.
Updated
Video: Former Guantánamo captive David Hicks heckles Australian prosecutor at awards ceremony
Ex-Senate staffer to ex-CIA director: 'Go the fuck ahead'
The Huffington Post contributes zesty added detail to the developing Michael Hayden story, in which the former CIA director is talking as fast as he can to make the Senate look bad and make the agency look better.
“As Hayden sees it, he’s being held to a much higher standard than his peers,” writes Sam Stein:
“I mean what are they doing—trying to score my public speeches? What’s that about?”he said in an interview with Politico magazine. “You want me to go out and score Ron Wyden’s speeches?
Naturally, Wyden’s close associates weren’t pleased to see Hayden try and drag him down as he grappled for a lifeline in the aftermath of the torture report’s release. Wyden’s former top spokeswoman, Jennifer Hoelzer, emailed over the following:
1. That’s really fucking offensive given that all of Ron’s statements are directed towards informing the American people and exposing the [intelligence community’s] attempts to mislead, while Hayden’s all about the lying/misleading.
2 - While I’m no longer Ron’s official spokesperson, I think I speak for everyone on team Wyden, when I say “Go the fuck ahead.”
So revealing that Hayden thinks it's untoward for people to scrutinize the statements of the NSA & CIA director. http://t.co/kvmka3TiHA
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) December 10, 2014
Updated
The landmark Senate report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program will soon be available in paperback, reports the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino (@lgamgam):
The 500-page chronicle of abuses carried out against detainees at CIA-operated prisons around the world will be published by Melville House in paperback and as an e-book, the independent publisher announced on Wednesday. The Senate intelligence committee released the heavily redacted report on Tuesday.
Titled The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, the book is due to hit shelves on 8 January 2015.
“Our fear was that, with all the distractions of the holiday season, the report would fade quickly from the news cycle,” Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson said in a statement.
“That may, in fact, have even been part of the point of releasing it now, and what seems to have discouraged other publishers from publishing it. But it’s probably the most important government document of our generation, even one of the most significant in the history of our democracy.”
Read the full piece here.
For more on the things Michael Hayden says, see here and here.
Just curious: After being proven a serial liar, has Michael Hayden faced a tough interview yet? So far, looks like they same old reverence.
— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) December 10, 2014
The Guardian view on the CIA torture report: there is a second scandal here.
“If it is a scandal that the CIA tortured, it is another scandal that it hired a private business to do that work on its behalf,” the editors write in a new leader:
Buried deep in the US Senate’s report on CIA torture is an account of how often brutal interrogation was outsourced to a private company in receipt of huge sums of US taxpayers’ money. The CIA transferred a total of $81m to a firm set up by two psychologists involved in the interrogation programme. The value of the CIA’s contract with this firm reached $180m in 2006, though in fact only $81m was paid out before the contract expired in 2009. In 2007 the CIAprovided that same company with a multiyear indemnity arrangement to protect it and its employees from legal liability. The agency later paid out a further $1m in connection with this agreement.
All this gives a fascinating glimpse into how private business interests became enmeshed in activity – the interrogation of suspected terrorists – that we would normally regard as the exclusive preserve of the state, namely the safeguarding of national security. If it is a scandal that the CIA tortured, it is another scandal that it hired a private business to do that work on its behalf.
Read the full piece here.
Senator Feinstein’s office has released a statement rebutting criticism that the Senate report was flawed because Senate staffers did not draw on interviews with people involved with the torture program – neither interrogators nor victims – to draw its picture of what happened.
Dianne Feinstein, mid-2000s era blogger. pic.twitter.com/65ZseZqvJZ
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) December 10, 2014
Here’s the key bit from Feinstein’s latest statement:
In January 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey opened a formal criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA videotapes and appointed DOJ Special Prosecutor John Durham to conduct that investigation.
Senator Feinstein said the following during her remarks on the Senate floor on December 9, 2014:
“On August 24, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder expanded that review. This occurred six months after our study had begun.
Durham’s original investigation of the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes was broadened to include possible criminal actions of CIA employees in the course of CIA detention and interrogation activities.
At the time, the committee’s Vice Chairman Kit Bond withdrew the minority’s participation in the study, citing the attorney general’s expanded investigation as the reason.
The Department of Justice refused to coordinate its investigation with the Intelligence Committee’s review. As a result, possible interviewees could be subject to additional liability if they were interviewed.
The CIA, citing the attorney general’s investigation, would not instruct its employees to participate in our interviews. (Source: classified CIA internal memo, February 26, 2010).
Burr: Udall 'has to live with consequences'
The incoming chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina, has warned that Senator Mark Udall will have to “live with consequences” of what he said on the Senate floor today. Politico reports:
[Burr] said that findings disclosed by Udall are actually “very classified.”
“Listen, he’s protected under the free speech,” Burr said, apparently referring to the speech and debate clause of the Constitution. “So Mark Udall’s the one that has to live with consequences of it.”
One of Udall’s key points was that an internal CIA review of the torture program, the Panetta Review, contradicted public statements by CIA officials about the value of intelligence gleaned through torture and other points. Udall said the Panetta review was a “smoking gun” of CIA deception and “the CIA is lying.”
One way of reading Burr: “it’s very classified that the CIA is lying.”
Udall said the CIA paid contractors to read every one of the 6m-plus documents multiple times before Senate staff could look. That and site requirements ran up expenses into the tens of millions:
Feinstein: CIA's demands that contractors review all docs and Senate staff work at offsite are why torture report cost $40M.
— Shane Harris (@shaneharris) December 10, 2014
UPDATE: Senator Dianne Feinstein would like to point out that the lion’s share of those expenses stemmed from CIA demands and conditions – not from Senate intelligence committee spending.
FACT CHECK: Intelligence Committee did not spend $40 million on CIA detention and interrogation study. http://t.co/3AkPHQj1N4
— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) December 10, 2014
The tweet links to a statement:
The Senate Intelligence Committee study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program was completed entirely with existing committee resources; only minor staff additions were needed at some early stages of the study.
The overwhelming majority of the $40 million cost was incurred by the CIA and was caused by the CIA’s own unprecedented demands to keep documents away from the committee. Rather than provide documents for the committee to review in its own secure Senate office—as is standard practice—the CIA insisted on establishing a separate leased facility and a “stand-alone” computer network for committee use.
The CIA hired teams of contractors to review every document, multiple times, to ensure they were relevant and not potentially subject to a claim of executive privilege. Only after those costly reviews were the documents then provided to committee staff.
Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein wrote several letters objecting to this unprecedented action, pointing out the wasted expense and unnecessary delays. Later, this arrangement at the off-site CIA facility allowed CIA personnel to remove documents it had provided for the committee’s use and to inappropriately gain access to the committee staff’s computer network and email.
Updated
Guardian national security editor Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) has filed a news story describing the bombshells in Senator Mark Udall’s speech accusing the CIA of lying and calling for the resignation of director John Brennan today:
“A recently defeated senator described portions of a still-classified CIA overview of torture on the Senate floor as a “smoking gun,” accusing the CIA and the White House of lying about brutal CIA interrogations and continuing to cover them up. [...]
Senator Mark Udall called upon Barack Obama “to purge his administration of high-level officials” complicit in the Bush-era torture program.
That purge, he said, should include CIA director John Brennan, a confidant of Obama whom Udall said the president had declined to rein in during a long clash with the Senate intelligence committee. Udall first called on Brennan to resign in August, after Brennan conceded that agency officials had inappropriately accessed emails and work product of Senate torture investigators on a shared network.
With a tone at points mournful and angry, Udall, who lost his re-election last month, said “the CIA has lied to its overseers and the public,” and blasted the White House for not holding anyone “to account”.
“Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture. In other words, the CIA is lying,” Udall said in what may be his final major Washington address.
Read the full report here.
“Now, the question for everyone who read this essential textbook of CIA wrongdoing, even for those who never will, is: Where do we go from here?” writes Trevor Timm in Comment Is Free:
Transparency can’t possibly be the only punishment for an agency which has broken the law so systematically. ...
Joining other groups in looking ahead, the ACLU laid out a comprehensive accountability plan on Tuesday that calls on attorney general Eric Holder to immediately appoint another special prosecutor – like, today – to investigate the architects of the torture regime, like the Dick Cheneys and John Yoos who were barely mentioned in the Senate’s report. The White House can also compensate victims, mandate more transparency and propose comprehensive CIA reform in Congress so this colossal failure of oversight and rampant criminality never happens again.
Read the full piece here.
“The latest revelations of torture and abuse by the CIA in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks are not news to Isis, al-Qaida or other extremist Islamist groups,” writes Guardian Middle East editor Ian Black (@ian_black). “But they have been instantly incorporated into the narrative of ‘Crusader’ cruelty – and may be used to justify similar methods as well as to promote recruitment”:
“Read [the Senate report] my brother and stick your shoe in the mouth of those who say that the Islamic State distorts Islam,” one Isis supporter tweeted. Another, a Syrian, wrote: “Getting beheaded is 100 times more humane, more dignified than what these filthy scumbags do to Muslims.”
Hani al-Sibaei, a prominent radical Islamist scholar, commented: “American politicians consider CIA report on torture of Muslim detainees a disgrace to America! Damn you! Your entire history is a stain on the face of humanity.”
Nabil Naim a former Egyptian jihadi leader, announced that he was ready to raise a 10,000 strong force of suicide bombers to attack America. Isis itself issued no official response.
Read the full piece here.
Here’s that Udall speech, uploaded now to YouTube:
Here's @MarkUdall's speech on the Panetta Report and what a nice Jesuit monk John Brennan is. https://t.co/fsHfBALAhO
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) December 10, 2014
Video: CIA ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques undermine US moral authority, says White House
Afghanistan’s new President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday condemned the CIA torture program Wednesday, saying the United States’ actions violated “all accepted principles of human rights”. AFP reports:
“The Afghan government condemns these inhumane actions in the strongest terms,” he said at a specially convened press conference at the presidential palace in Kabul.
“There can be no justification for these kinds of actions and inhumane torture in today’s world.”
Afghanistan was home to the notorious Salt Pit torture site north of Kabul, where detainee Gul Ruhman was chained to the floor and froze to death and others including alleged 9/11 organizer Ammar al-Baluchi were tortured.
Updated
US officials and other American citizens implicated by the Senate report on torture could face arrest in other countries as a result of investigations by foreign courts, human rights lawyers said on Wednesday, Guardian diplomatic editor Julian Borger (@julianborger) reports:
“If I was one of those people, I would hesitate before making any travel arrangements,” said Michael Bochenek, director of law and policy at Amnesty International.
The Obama administration wound up an inquiry into criminal responsibility for the use of torture in 2012, without launching any prosecutions and it is unclear whether the Senate report will lead to that decision being reviewed. But because torture is considered a grave crime under international law, other governments could arrest and prosecute anyone implicated in the report who was on their territory under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
“Some of these people will never leave US borders again,” Bochenek said. “If say, one of them goes on holiday in Paris, then France would have the legal obligation to arrest and prosecute that individual. States have clear obligation in cases of torture.”
Read the full report here.
A British man who was allegedly tortured after being detained in Pakistan at the request of the CIA and MI5 has embarked upon the latest round of his damages claim against the UK government, the Guardian’s Ian Cobain (@iancobain) reports:
In a legal case that is rooted in the close relationship that British intelligence maintained with the CIA at a time when the agency was involved in the abuse of suspects, Salahuddin Amin says that the UK should be held to have been complicit in his mistreatment.
Amin, 39, a taxi driver from Luton, north of London, was held prisoner in Pakistan for 10 months after being detained in 2004. He was then deported to Britain, and in 2007 he and four other men were convicted for their roles in an al-Qaida plot to detonate a bomb or series of bombs at targets in the south-east of England. One proposed target was the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London, while a second was the giant Bluewater shopping centre east of the capital. Amin was jailed for life and lost his appeal against conviction.
He does not allege that he was tortured by British or American intelligence officers, but says he was beaten, whipped and deprived of sleep by officers of Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and on one occasion threatened with an electric drill. In between these torture sessions, he says, he was questioned on around 12 occasions by two MI5 officers who called themselves “Matt” and “Richard”, as well as by CIA officers.
Read the full report here. And here’s a list of countries that cooperated with the CIA torture program:
At least 54 countries supported CIA rendition and torture. http://t.co/0N6YM1l3ai #TortureReport pic.twitter.com/vsdhzImQ54
— Open Society (@OpenSociety) December 10, 2014
MPs and human rights groups have demanded a judge-led inquiry into Britain’s involvement in CIA abductions of terror suspects, Richard Norton-Taylor (@nortontaylor) and Ian Cobain (@iancobain) report:
Under pressure from Britain and other allies, their role in the CIA renditions were redacted from the report.
The two main cases involving MI5 and MI6 in CIA operations involve Binyam Mohamed, a UK citizen, tortured and secretly flown to Guántanamo Bay, and the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami-al-Saadi, two prominent Libyan dissidents, and their families who were flown to Tripoli in 2004 when they were tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police. [...]
David Davis, the Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary, said on Wednesday that investigations into the cases should be reinstated under a judge and with explicit terms of reference, adding: “It is very hard to see argue that this shouldn’t happen.”
“The intelligence and security committee isn’t capable of doing this. The ISC can’t subpoena, it can’t demand. The ISC sees what the ISC is shown. And the ISC’s reports are subject to No 10 redactions. The government shouldn’t have the power to decide what is put into the public domain about this matter.”
Read the full piece here.
Updated
Video of Senator Mark Udall’s speech this morning is here. Update: we’ve now embedded video of the speech in the blog here.
Updated
The former leadership of the CIA is mounting a robust fightback against the Senate report, with previous agency chief Michael Hayden leading the way, the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill (@ewenmacaskill) reports.
The report includes quotes from a Hayden interview with Politico:
[Hayden] said he was feeling emotional about being criticised in the report, and denied that the CIA had been more brutal than had been reported to Congress.
Hayden insisted that valuable information had been obtained:
“My very best argument is that I went to [then-deputy CIA director] Mike Morell and I said, ‘Don’t fuck with me. If this story [about the usefulness of intelligence gained from enhanced techniques] isn’t airtight then I’m not saying it to Congress.’ They came back and said our version of the story is correct,” Hayden said.
He added that the interrogation of one detainee led to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who in turn led to others. “We learned a great deal from the detainees,” he said.
Read the full piece here.
PSA:
Does torture report have you thinking, Damn, I didn't know the half of it? Well, you still don't. This is just a censored executive summary.
— Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) December 10, 2014
The Guardian’s Carmen Fishwick and James Walsh have rounded up of how newspapers worldwide covered the release of the Senate report on CIA torture.
Read the full report here. Here’s the bit
In the UK:
The Times emphasied the impact of the report on the CIA despite the fact that many of its conclusions “had been trailed long in advance”.
The CIA depicted here is the rogue agency of Hollywood fiction, writing its own rules, hoodwinking its paymasters and betraying the values for which America purports to stand. The agency has prepared a furious point-by-point rebuttal, but it would do well to take the bulk of this broadside on the chin.
The Independent followed the Times in its accusation that America chose to “forfeit the moral high ground” after 9/11.
We have known the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ such as waterboarding constituted torture. Now the committee has confirmed it. This is not just a breach of the solemn and absolute prohibition of torture to which the US has committed itself in international treaties: it is a terrible political and moral mistake.
The Telegraph said that what was more alarming is that those responsible “sought to conceal the truth about their activities from American policymakers and the public. Even the White House ... was kept in the dark as to the extent of the programme.”
Human Rights Watch calls for criminal investigation
“The Senate report should not be relegated to a shelf or hard drive but be the basis for criminal investigations on the use of torture by US officials,” Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Wednesday.
“The failure of the Obama administration to hold those responsible for torture to account risks leaving torture as a policy option when the next inevitable security threat strikes.”
The statement includes a section titled “the need for accountability”:
“It’s unconscionable that President Obama refuses to allow prosecution of a single person who authorized, implemented, or covered up the torture,” Roth said.
“The Senate report summary should be the beginning, not the end, of the process to bring to justice those who committed torture in the name of the American people,” Roth said. “Real presidential leadership will be needed to ensure the next steps are taken.”
(h/t @oliverlaughland)
Udall’s intelligence committee partner in promoting government transparency, Ron Wyden of Oregon, says a pattern of prevarication on the part of former CIA (and NSA) director Michael Hayden is “unacceptable in America”.
What #CIA Dir Hayden told overseers vs what actually happened. Unacceptable in America http://t.co/IKQIJu5a2W pic.twitter.com/RHdQAKhwQC
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) December 10, 2014
The torture report ends with ~30 pages of testimony from Michael Hayden side-by-side with proof that what he said was false or misleading.
— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) December 9, 2014
Summary
Here’s a snap summary of what Senator Mark Udall just said on the Senate floor. Udall is a member of the intelligence committee and the outgoing Democratic senator from Colorado, having lost a reelection bid last month.
- Udall delivered a blistering criticism of the president of the United States, CIA director John Brennan and others who he said have hidden the story of torture carried out by the United States from all parties, including the Senate intelligence committee.
- Udall said Obama “needs to purge his administration of high-level officials” complicit in torture. People who violated anti-torture laws sit in high-level positions in the US government right now, Udall said, and they need to be purged.
- Udall made a passing description of the internal CIA review of its torture practicies known as the Panetta Review (conducted by former CIA director Leon Panetta). The review is “refreshingly free of excuses, qualifications and caveats,” Udall said – in stark contrast with the CIA’s external posture.
- Udall referred to the “CIA, assisted by a White House that continues to try to cover up the truth.”
- Udall called on Brennan to resign, as he has before.
Udall: CIA "flippant & dismissive" to oversight, WH "willingness to let the CIA do whatever it likes, even if it means undermining" Obama
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) December 10, 2014
- President Barack Obama has not helped the Congress or the public learn the truth of US torture programs, Udall said. “Actions speak louder than words” on transparency, he said.
- “CIA tortured detainees to confirm they didn’t have intelligence, not because they thought they did,” Udall said. He called Brennan “willfully inaccurate” in his portrayal of the program to Congress.
Updated
“I have no doubt that we will emerge from this dark episode with our democracy strengthened and our future brightened,” Udall says.
He concludes his speech. He says he will miss doing the “important work” of the intelligence agency “more than I can say.”
Tremendous loss to SSCI, Senate and American people that Senator @MarkUdall is leaving Senate.
— Andrea Prasow (@andreaprasow) December 10, 2014
Updated
Udall calls for 'purge' of officials who sanctioned torture
Udall, a member of the intelligence committee and outspoken critic of unwarranted government surveillance, calls for the resignation of CIA director John Brennan, as he has before.
Udall: People who violated anti-torture laws sit in high-level positions in the US government right now. They need to be purged.
— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) December 10, 2014
Updated
Senator Mark Udall, the Democrat of Colorado who just lost his reelection campaign, is speaking on CSPAN 2 and is going to explain the findings of a secret internal CIA review of its own torture practices known as the Panetta Review, he says:
Wow. @MarkUdall says he's about to explain the findings of the secret 'Panetta Review' of CIA torture right now: http://t.co/hGKf4vFKb4
— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) December 10, 2014
Udall now gonna reveal "Panetta Review" re torture. "Refreshingly free of excuses, qualifications & caveats." Says CIA prov inaccurate info.
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) December 10, 2014
Obama's "actions speak louder than words" on transparency, Udall still blasting
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) December 10, 2014
Updated
Obama avoids laying blame in new remarks on torture report
In his first televised remarks on the torture report, President Barack Obama stuck to his line of condemning past actions without taking sides in the debate over whether there was a cover-up or people should be held accountable, Guardian Washington bureau chief Dan Roberts (@robertsdan) reports:
“In the aftermath of 9/11, in the midst of a national trauma, and uncertainty about whether these attacks were going to repeat themselves... what’s clear is that the CIA set up something very fast without a lot of forethought,” Obama told Telemundo.
“The lines of accountability that needed to be set up weren’t always in place and some of these techniques that were described were not only wrong but were counterproductive.”
The president claimed the methods used were flawed, but he stopped short of agreeing with the Senate report that no useful intelligence was gathered that could not have been obtained elsewhere.
“We know that oftentimes when someone is being subjected to these kinds of techniques they are willing to say anything to alleviate the pain and distress they are feeling. We have got better ways of doing things,” Obama said.
He also said it was impossible to imagine the pressures after 9/11, but that “does not excuse all of us from looking squarely at what happened and make sure that it doesn’t happen again”.
“It’s important for us not to paint any broad brush [picture] about all the incredible dedicated professionals in out intelligence community based on some actions that were contrary to who we are but it’s also important for us to face up to the fact that when countries are threatened often they act rashly in ways that in retrospect were wrong.”
“We need to acknowledge that in part in order build in place systems, so that if – heaven forbid – we find out ourselves under the kind of direct threats that have occurred in the past that we recognise the dangers ahead of time and do better,” said Obama.
Asked if was concerned the CIA could still be hiding things from him, Obama said no: “I have been very explicit... in prohibiting these techniques. Anybody who was doing the kind of things described in the report would not simply be keeping something from me, they would be directly violating the orders I have issued as commander in chief.”
Updated
There’s not a great deal of chagrin on display on the part of former George W Bush administration officials in the face of calls for their prosecution on war crimes charges. Former vice president Dick Cheney spoke with the New York Times on Monday.
“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Cheney said:
“I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.” [...]
“When we had that program in place, we kept the country safe from any more mass casualty attacks, which was our objective,” he said.
The program, he added, was “the right thing to do, and if I had to do it over again, I would do it.”
The Guardian’s Sarah Galo (@sarahevonne) rounded up negative reaction in Congress to the release of the report, including from Florida Senator and potential 2016 presidential candidate Marco Rubio:
Those who served us in aftermath of 9/11 deserve our thanks not one sided partisan Senate report that now places American lives in danger.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) December 9, 2014
Updated
This is sure to be worth watching: analysts Trevor Timm, Ali Watkins, Marcy Wheeler and Jason Leopold are talking about the torture report on HuffPost Live:
UPDATE: The conversation has ended, so we have taken the video player down.
Updated
ACLU calls for special prosecutor on torture
How would prosecution of officials responsible for torture work? The ACLU is arguing that the justice department should appoint a special prosecutor:
To ensure that the investigation of the torture program is comprehensive and insulated from political interference, Attorney General Eric Holder should appoint a special prosecutor from within the Justice Department and transfer to that special prosecutor all of his authority to investigate and prosecute crimes relating to the program. A special prosecutor would be able to make prosecutorial decisions without having to seek the attorney general’s permission.
Why the Justice Department should appoint a special prosecutor, and what that special prosecutor should do. https://t.co/JbqwU3iQJM @ACLU
— Jameel Jaffer (@JameelJaffer) December 9, 2014
Read further reasoning by the ACLU here. Points include:
- The Justice Department Has The Tools To Hold Those Who Authorized Torture Accountable
- Neither the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 nor the discredited memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel provide a “golden shield”
- A Comprehensive Criminal Investigation is Long Overdue
Lawyers for 9/11 suspects demand access to documents
“Cheryl Bormann can finally say the CIA hung her one-legged client from his wrists.”
That’s how Guardian national security editor Spencer Ackerman begins our report on “How the torture report could unravel prosecution of alleged 9/11 masterminds”:
By torturing the five men now being tried in the 9/11 military commission, the CIA may have jeopardized the US government’s ability to seek the death penalty, and perhaps jeopardized the case entirely. [...]
Bormann and two of her colleagues, lawyers for alleged 9/11 co-conspiratorsKhalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ammar al-Baluchi, said the release of the report strengthened their hand for even greater disclosure about CIA torture of their clients before the military commission. While the Senate investigators sorted through six million pages of torture-related documentation, lawyers for the 9/11 defendants have received not a single page.
Now that much of the report is public, “the time is now past to knock off this nonsense about keeping this under wraps”, said David Nevin, accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s attorney. “Give us all the details. Give us all the access.”
Read the full piece here.
One reason for the strong reaction to the Senate report – which has been preceded by other documentation of torture by the United States including reports by HRW (pdf) and the ICRC (pdf) – is that the Senate report reveals the use by CIA agents and proxies of brutal and previously undisclosed torture techniques.
“The CIA program was far more brutal than the CIA represented to policymakers and the American public,” the Senate report found.
The Guardian has catalogued the report’s horrors here. Recall that out of 119 people detained between 2002-2008, 26 were found to be wrongfully detained. The atrocities included:
Detainees were forced to stand on broken limbs for hours, kept in complete darkness, deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, sometimes standing, sometimes with their arms shackled above their heads.
Prisoners were subjected to “rectal feeding” without medical necessity. Rectal exams were conducted with “excessive force”. The report highlights one prisoner later diagnosed with anal fissures, chronic hemorrhoids and “symptomatic rectal prolapse”.
The report mentions mock executions, Russian roulette. US agents threatened to slit the throat of a detainee’s mother, sexually abuse another and threatened prisoners’ children. One prisoner died of hypothermia brought on in part by being forced to sit on a bare concrete floor without pants.
Here’s the full piece, Rectal rehydration and standing on broken limbs: the CIA torture report’s grisliest findings.
Updated
CIA torture report: the world reacts
The world reacted Wednesday morning to the startlingly detailed picture of CIA torture delivered by the Senate on Tuesday. Allies expressed support mixed with regret, while regimes that the United States has sought to isolate by detailing their human rights abuses took the opportunity to turn the criticism back on the US. We have gathered the reactions here.
The list includes United Nations, Britain, Iran, China, North Korea, Poland, Guantánamo, Yemen, Egypt, Malaysia, Russia, France and more. A Twitter account associated with Iran’s supreme leader called out the United States for hypocrisy on human rights and got in a lump about Ferguson, Missouri, for good measure:
They claim #humanrights &trample its basics in their prisons,in interactions w nations &even w their own ppl.#TortureReport #Ferguson 2/8/10
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) December 10, 2014
Read the full roundup here. Separately, China and North Korea, two of the nations most often criticised by the US over human rights, lined up to return fire, Tania Branigan reports from Beijing:
Even before the report had been released, China’s state news agency Xinhua carried an editorial saying the US “should clean up its own backyard first and respect the rights of other countries to resolve their issues by themselves”.
Citing the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the torture report, it added: “America is neither a suitable role model nor a qualified judge on human rights issues in other countries, as it pertains to be.
“Yet, despite this, people rarely hear the US talking about its own problems, preferring to be vocal on the issues it sees in other countries, including China.”
A Chinese court on Tuesday jailed six students of Ilham Tohti, a Uighur scholar from the Xinjiang region where there has been deadly violence that Beijing blames on Muslim separatists. The US issued a call for the students’ release.
Read the full piece here.
Here’s a video primer on what’s in the Senate report on CIA torture:
Hello and welcome to our live blog coverage as the world reacts to the release on Tuesday of a historic Senate report on the CIA’s torture program.
Human rights groups and the United Nations are calling for the criminal prosecution of the architects of the program following revelations that the torture was even more brutal than previously known and its use more routine.
“[The report’s] release once again makes crystal clear that the US government used torture,” Amnesty International USA’s executive director, Steven W Hawkins, said in a statement. “Torture is a crime and those responsible for crimes must be brought to justice.”
Our report on the torture techniques revealed in the Senate report is here. Our roundup of reaction from around the world – from the UN to Iran to Yemen to Russia to France and more – is here. Join us as we continue to unpack the report and measure its implications.
