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CIA torture called ‘a stain on the nation’s history’
10/12/2014
WASHINGTON — The United States tortured scores of terror suspects with interrogation tactics that turned secret CIA prisons into chambers of suffering while doing next to nothing to make America safer, Senate investigators concluded Tuesday, reported the Associated Press.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report 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 chairman whose staff prepared the summary, branded the findings a stain on the nation’s history.
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