Many had known this but almost all governments turned a blind eye simply because members of respective governments would simply nod and point their personal threats, out of the way and into CIA hands. As a direct result, for example defenders of Pakistan would be a little shy in defending it when the need arose. Drawing distinction between politicians and Pakistan. . . . The Telegraph CIA lied to Congress, White House and Britain over brutal global torture programme, says US Senate report Report into techniques authorised by Bush administration after September 11 attacks charges CIA with exaggerating importance of information obtained under torture to justify its actions. By Peter Foster, and Raf Sanchez in Washington Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the acknowledged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, who was waterboarded 183 times, “provided information on the Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf plotting” according to the CIA, and claimed to have shown another al-Qaeda operative a “sketch in his notebook of a building in Canary Wharf”. However, the information was false, apparently given in the hope of stopping the waterboarding. Mohammed later “retracted all of this information” – and the Senate investigation found nothing to suggest the CIA ever doubted the truth of this retraction. Nonetheless, the CIA still cited the plan to attack Heathrow as one of the “plots discovered as a result” of waterboarding in a briefing note for President George W Bush in 2007. Similarly, the Senate said that Saajid Badat, the shoe bomber’s accomplice, was captured after investigations by the British security services and other agencies, not because of intelligence obtained from torture.The report is stripped of details of foreign governments’ involvement in the torture programme. It does not say whether Diego Garcia, the British territory in the Indian Ocean, was used to transport prisoners to torture sites, nor how much Tony Blair or Jack Straw knew about the CIA’s activities. Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative chairman of Commons Treasury select committee, who led an investigation into so-called rendition flights, said the report implicated the UK and there was a need “to get to the bottom of our own involvement”. “It’s impossible to tell how much the report has been redacted or reduced, cut, to take out the extent of the involvement of other countries, in particular America’s closest ally the United Kingdom. “I think it is quite likely that we will find that those redactions are very heavy. There is a non-aggression pact on this, where the UK on the basis of something called the control principle does not release information that they have been given by the United States security forces, and likewise the Americans don’t do so in reverse.” Mr Tyrie added: “For that reason we may find that key chunks that we would have liked to see in this report have been omitted. But that is no substitute and the publication of report should be no substitute for us in the UK getting to the bottom of this.’ The 480-page report, which has been bitterly contested by both the CIA and former Bush administration officials, was released despite fears that graphic new details of interrogations could provoke a backlash against US embassies and personnel around the world. In clinical and unsparing language, it describes how detainees were kept awake for more than a week at a time, put through mock drowning until they vomited and lost consciousness, and subjected to games of “Russian Roulette”, in which agents pointed their guns and pulled the trigger. President Barack Obama, who ended the torture programme when he was elected in 2008, said the CIA programme was “not only inconsistent with our values as nation” but failed to serve America’s national security interests and the so-called “War on Terror”. “No nation is perfect,” he added. “But one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past.” The declassified report was based on a three-year review of more than six million still-classified documents by the US Senate’s intelligence committee. It revealed: • graphic details of the CIA’s torture techniques, including how prisoners were waterboarded until they passed out • how at least one detainee died of suspected hypothermia in Afghanistan after being made to sleep half-naked on a concrete floor in the winter • how the CIA falsely claimed torture helped find Osama bin Laden • how the agency’s leaders lied to the US Congress and foreign ambassadors over the scale and brutality of its secret programme. However, the report says that the CIA “provided millions of dollars in cash payments” to foreign governments who would host secret prison sites. CIA agents were encouraged to “think big” in order to convince foreign countries to participate. Ultimately, 119 people were held as part of the programme, including 26 who were “wrongfully held” and later judged to have nothing to do with terrorism. The decision to publish the report was attacked as “politically motivated” and “reckless” by many Republicans who accused the committee of needlessly handing a propaganda victory to America’s enemies abroad. Even before the report was published the Chinese state news agency Xinhua accused America of having a “disregard” for human rights, adding that the US was no longer “a qualified judge on human rights issues in other countries”. Senior CIA officers from the period and former members of the Bush administration, including Mr Bush himself, contested both the report’s contents and conclusions. Mr Bush said the CIA officers involved were “patriots” while his vice-president, Dick Cheney, said the suggestion that the CIA had “gone rogue” and over-stepped its legal authorisation was “all a bunch of hooey”. Writing in The Telegraph, Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009, accuses the report’s authors of “cherry picking” their way through the documents to make their case, while failing to interview any witnesses from the period. The interrogations “added enormously to what we knew about al-Qaeda as an organisation,” he maintained, “and led to the disruption of terrorist plots, saving American and Allied lives.” But John McCain, the Republican senator who was tortured himself during the Vietnam war, said that publication was an essential part of confronting one of the most controversial episodes in post-war US history.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 22:23:58 +0000
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