Reed Brody talking:
the first thing that really jumps out is just the sheer pervasiveness of the brutality. I mean, even those of us who have been looking at this for the last 10 years, as one of my colleagues said, may be not surprised, but shocked.
You know, you described the rectal feeding, the rectal hydration. You know, this was not just one prisoner, this was a number of prisoners. And they were used, according to the CIA documents, as a means of behavior control. I mean, this is, you know, an IV infusion placed up somebody’s rectum, and the person is in a forward-facing position, their head lower than their torso, at which point you put in a rectal tube with an IV. The flow will regulate, sloshing up the large intestines. You put up the tube as large as you can, then you open the IV wide. No need to squeeze the bag, let gravity do the work. And this was not—you know, this is rape. This is the CIA discussing in emails and documents the methods they are using to rape detainees.
A detainee who died in the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, who was partially nude and chained to a concrete floor, who died from suspected hypothermia; at least three detainees were threatened with harm to their families, threats to the children of detainees, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee; a detainee told that he would never be allowed to leave alive; detainees placed in ice water baths; people shackled in dark cells, called by—the CIA’s own people referred to it as a “dungeon”—I mean, this is medieval stuff. And, you know, it really—it really—I have say, it’s really shocking, even for me.
As you mentioned, this was a dysfunctional program. The interrogation program was essentially outsourced to these two psychologists, who you mentioned. And neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator. They had no specialized knowledge of al-Qaeda, no background in counterterrorism or any relevant linguistic or cultural information. And as you pointed out, they received $81 million. And these contractors made up 85 percent—or their company that they created and other contractors made up 85 percent of the workforce for these detainee operations.
Now, at the same time that it was run amok, there was a culture—and this is important to understand—of just, you know, let them loose. On a number of occasions, there were complaints. There were—things went up to headquarters. And the word that came back was: “Look, we’d rather be safe than sorry.” And in one case, no action was taken against a CIA officer for wrongful detention because, quote, “[t]he Director strongly believes that mistakes should be expected in a business filled with uncertainty. … [T]he director believes the [scale tips] decisively in favor of accepting mistakes that over connect the dots [against those that] under connect them.” Even in the case of the death from suspected hypothermia that we talked about, headquarters decided not to take action because they were “motivated to extract any and all operational information.”
You pointed out, I think, probably the key thing being discussed in Washington today is the conclusion that no actionable intelligence that could not have been garnered by other means were extracted through this program. And the committee went through 20 incidents in which the CIA claimed to have garnered actionable intelligence that was used to capture people or to foil plots. And in each of those 20 incidents, the committee found either that the intelligence already existed, that it wasn’t used, or that the plot in fact didn’t exist. And people particularly focus on the capture of Osama bin Laden and the identification of the courier who led the U.S. to Osama bin Laden. And the committee found that the vast majority of the intelligence about the Qaeda courier, quote, “was originally acquired from sources unrelated to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, and the most accurate information acquired from a CIA detainee was provided prior to the CIA subjecting the detainee to … enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Another thing we see here constantly is the desire to evade the law. You referred to, and Dianne Feinstein, in what I found to be a remarkable speech on the Senate floor, referred to the lies. But there are a lot of little tidbits that we find in this report. For instance, you mentioned there was, in addition to the black sites in foreign countries, there was a black site at Guantánamo. But in 2004, the Supreme Court in the Hamdan ruling basically said the Constitution applies in Guantánamo. And at that point, the detainees who were in Guantánamo were shipped out of Guantánamo—and this is the CIA detainees, of course—and they were sent to Morocco. And actually, what’s interesting tidbit in the report is that they were actually placed in a Moroccan jail, as opposed to the other countries where they were placed in CIA facilities. And the problem was that they heard—they were so close to the Moroccan prisoners that they could hear the Moroccan prisoners screaming.
In the other cases, in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, the CIA detention centers were far away from—they were CIA detention centers. What is interesting in this report, too, about those centers is the kind of the diplomatic cost of having CIA detention centers in another country. Often, the ambassadors to those countries were not informed or were only informed after the deal was done. In order to basically buy the cooperation of these countries, the U.S. had to offer them wish lists of what they wanted. In one very interesting note in the report—and it shows the kind of the perverse effect of having a CIA detention center—the secretary of state in 2004 ordered a U.S. ambassador in an unnamed country to démarche the country to ask that that country provide for its prisons full access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. But, of course, the problem was, at the same time, the U.S. had prisoners in that country who it was keeping secret and, obviously, not available to the Red Cross.
Final and probably most important point is, I guess, what is not in this report. This report, you know, deals with one aspect of one part of the detainee mistreatment in the war on terror. It deals with the CIA prisoners held in black sites. It does not, for instance, deal with renditions by the CIA. So there’s no mention in here of the CIA sending prisoners to places like Syria, under Bashar al-Assad, where people like Maher Arar, who has been on your show several times, was tortured. It does not talk about people being sent to Libya, under Muammar Gaddafi’s intelligence agencies, where they were tortured. It does not talk about people being sent to Egypt. And it doesn’t talk about what the Pentagon was doing. It doesn’t talk about the programs approved by Donald Rumsfeld.
And probably more importantly, by focusing everything on the CIA, it tends to kind of let off the hook all those people above who authorized these programs. So, we know, and from President Bush’s own memoirs, that he authorized waterboarding. Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, these are all people who signed off on the authorization on these techniques, not to mention the lawyers, people like John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who gave the legal authorization for this.
Earlier, you had President Obama’s remarks, in which he said that it was important that this report be made public so that, hopefully, we won’t make these mistakes again. These aren’t mistakes. These are crimes. And, you know, Dianne Feinstein, in her Senate remarks, referred to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which says that torture can never be justified under any circumstances. Well, that convention says something else. It says that torture must be prosecuted, that when someone is alleged to have committed torture, the state concerned must refer that case to their competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
What assurance do we have that this is not going to happen again? You know, it’s not enough, again, to say, “Well, we tortured some folks, this was a bad policy choice, I’m going to put a stop to the torture.” You know, it is not a policy choice, again. It is a crime. And there needs to be—if this is really going to be—if there are really going to be any deterrence for this not happening again, there needs to be prosecutions. And it’s wonderful—you know, you’ve talked about Human Rights Watch’s work around the world. Human rights organizations regularly, when countries commit torture, when individuals commit torture, we call on those countries to hold the abusers to account. And that has to be the same thing for the United States. We believe, as you mentioned—and we’re not the only ones, the United Nations has said the same, Amnesty International has said the same—that there is a case to answer for senior U.S. leaders on charges of torture, for the things in this report and for the wider authorizations that they gave for torture and war crimes to be committed.
— source democracynow.org
Reed Brody, counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch. He has written several reports for Human Rights Watch on prisoner mistreatment in the war on terror, including a 2011 report which called for a criminal investigation of senior George W. Bush administration officials.