Torture documents and news roundup

Posted By Annie Lowrey Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - 4:50 PM Share

There's been a wealth of information released on the treatment and torture of detainees in U.S. custody in the past days. Here's a capsule of the new news:

  • The Senate Armed Services Committee released a declassified report, written in November, 2008.  The report describes how the Pentagon used SERE techniques, meant to help captured soldiers resist foreign interrogators, to break down U.S. detainees.
  • A New York Times story pointed out that the CIA did no due diligence on the history of SERE techniques before using them on detainees.
  • The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a narrative history of the harsh treatment of detainees like Abu Zubayda. It works through the myriad overlapping Office of Legal Counsel opinions pertaining to detainee treatment.  
  • Last week, the Obama administration released four memos, requested by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act, detailing the Bush administration's legal case for torture. The memos, which had few redactions, described in intricate detail what happened to detainees during interrogations -- including forced nudity, forced wakefulness, beatings and slappings.  
  • A blogger parsing released memos found that Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, two of the three people waterboarded at the hands of CIA interrogators, were waterboarded 266 times. 
  • Questions arose about whether the brutal treatment of detainees ever led to actionable intelligence. To this end, in a Fox News interview, former Vice President Dick Cheney asked for the release of memos showing that waterboarding worked. Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, took to the pages of the Washington Post's editorial section to argue that enhanced interrogation prevented terrorist attacks.
  • President Obama went forward and back about the prosecution for the CIA agents who tortured detainees; ultimately the decision belongs to Attorney General Eric Holder. Top torture reporter Jane Mayer at The New Yorker started to deconstruct the "invisibility cloak" President Obama cast last week. 
EXPLORE:AL QAEDA, BUSH ADMINISTRATION, BUSH'S LEGACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, INTELLIGENCE, LAW, MILITARY, SECURITY
 

LALEH

5:48 PM ET

April 22, 2009

NYT story on CIA not knowing the provenance of SERE

The story that somehow no one, neither CIA, nor elected officials, nor anyone else, knew anything about the origins of SERE as communist torture is simply not plausible. How on earth could the NYT reporters actually buy that?

Anyone who knows SERE knows where it came from. How could they not have known? Is "ignorance" now their defence?

 

EFERRARI

11:34 PM ET

April 23, 2009

Your Torture timeline.

Hi Annie. CIA started using torture in April 2002 on Abu Zubaydah shortly after his capture. I got it via Scott Horton and also Katherine Eban. You might want to update to make clear that torture preceded memos. Thanks.

 

EMIL300

5:09 PM ET

April 24, 2009

his captors discovered,

his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality." frasi tristi

 

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