"We Tortured Some Folks": CIA Lied To Congress, Senate Torture Report Reveals

[Suzanimal]

This man...SMDH.

Cheney defends CIA interrogation techniques, calls Senate report 'deeply flawed'

WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed the recently released Senate report on CIA interrogation techniques Wednesday, calling it “full of crap,” and a “terrible piece of work” that was “deeply flawed.”

Cheney, speaking on Fox News' “Special Report with Bret Baier,” said some of the controversial techniques used on militants had been previously tested and the interrogations produced results.

Cheney acknowledged he had not read the entire 500-page report summary. He strongly defended the tactics, including waterboarding and rectal hydration.

“What are you prepared to do to get the truth against future attacks against the United States?” Cheney asked.

Cheney also refuted claims that President George W. Bush was kept in the dark about the interrogations.

“I think he knew everything he wanted to know and needed to know,” Cheney told Baier.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...gation-techniques-calls-senate-report-flawed/

 

[green73]

Thank God...

REPORT: CIA Adhered to OHSA Standards When Interrogating Terror Suspects

http://dailysignal.com/2014/12/17/d...ns-interview-man-waterboarded-911-mastermind/

 

[Occam's Banana]

This man...SMDH.

Pure evil ...

h/t Bob Murphy: http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/12/potpourri-250.html

Speaking of the torture report, apparently Americans aren’t too worried about it. And Dick Cheney explicitly says that he would rather torture 25% innocent people rather than allow 30% guilty people return to the battlefield. Blackstone, he’s not.

Cheney Seems Unfazed By Question About Innocent Detainee Who Died (VIDEO)
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cheney-torture-report-innocent-detainee
Caitlin MacNeal (14 December 2014)

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday continued to fiercely defend the harsh interrogation techniques employed by the CIA under the Bush administration after 9/11.

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney said he would use the questionable interrogation methods "again in a minute."

Host Chuck Todd asked Cheney to respond to the Senate Intelligence Committee report's account that one detainee was "chained to the wall of a cell, doused with water, froze to death in CIA custody."

"And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity," Todd said.

"Right," Cheney responded. "But the problem I have was with all of the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield."

"I’m more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that in fact were innocent," he continued.

Todd pressed Cheney, asking if he was okay with the fact that about 25 percent of the detainees interrogated were actually innocent.

"I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States," Cheney responded.

Watch the clip via NBC: [video at link - http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cheney-torture-report-innocent-detainee]

 

[charrob]

Occam's Banana: just listened to the Scott Horton tape that you sited from your thread on torture. What a wealth of knowledge Scott Horton is; thanks for sharing that.

What shocks me the most is the beginning of that video where he says these CIA Torture revelations are just a tiny part of what really happened. I typed out the beginning of that video because it's just shocking:

Scott Horton on the Tom Woods Show:


The torture report:
• A product of Senate Intelligence Committee staff.
• A product of their work going through the CIA papers.
• All entirely based on CIA documents given to them.

The investigation happened because when the Senate Intelligence Committee found out about the video tapes of all the torture sessions, Hose Rodriguez who had been the head of the torture program, destroyed the video tapes – which is just clear blatant obstruction of justice.

A lawyer by the name of Durham went and started a preliminary investigation to see whether to have an investigation into this obstruction of justice.

And so then they left him (Hose Rodriguez) off the hook and they ended up doing nothing with that at all.

And so the Senate Intelligence Committee decided that they were going to go through and they were going to come up with their report themselves.

-----------------------------------------------------------

What’s important to note about this is that it does NOT include the CIA’s rendition program – where the CIA would kidnap people and send them to Mubarak in Egypt, Assad in Syria, Gaddafi in Libya and have them torture / outsource torture. That’s some other report for a different day I guess. I don’t think that one has ever been done.

This report also does not include the military’s role in the torture whatsoever. So usually when somebody says “torture / Bush Administration”, you think of Abu Ghraib. Well all of that was under Donald Rumsfeld and the Special Forces. I guess CIA was running around there some, but that wasn’t one of their black sites. That was under the military.

Stanley McChrystal, the guy who lost the Afghan War, he also ran a torture prison at a place called ‘Camp Nama’ in Iraq. And there’s all kinds of – there’s a ‘Ta Guba’ report, and Inspector General reports, and books and books – and all this other work on the military’s role and really the bulk – really thousands and thousands of people were tortured by the military in these prisons during the occupations and really all over the place – in their own homes, on the side of the road, etc., during those occupations. And including more than 100 died in custody – many of those were literally tortured to death. Outright homicides during torture – all under the military.

So this report is a much narrower focus. It’s about the people who were abducted by the CIA and taken to various black sites under CIA control and tortured by CIA officers and their contractor agents working for them. So , it’s important I think to note, just how narrow a focus this is for as much horror that is in there. It’s far from any kind of whole story.

How can these people live with themselves?

 

[milgram]

It's worth listening to Scott's other recent interviews on this subject too.

I'm up to Marcy Wheeler, who really has a strong grasp of the pertinent details on these issues. She makes interesting points about the murky details surrounding Cheney, and about how the goal of torture was often stated as "exploitation." Exploitation can mean gathering info, but it also could be for propaganda (presumably to sell the Iraq War) or turning captives into compliant spies. So "torture worked" to achieve the last two goals, even though no one is questioned about that point on TV.

http://scotthorton.org/interviews/2014/12/10/121014-marcy-wheeler/

 

[enhanced_deficit]

Obama's Cowardly Response to Torture Revelations

Posted: 12/12/2014 4:23 pm EST

The United States tortures.That much became undeniably clear this week when the Senate Intelligence Committee released the executive summary of it's report on the CIA's interrogation and detention program under the Bush administration.
The secret's been out, but the five-year investigation exposed in gruesome detail the horrific and inhumane methods employed by the CIA, as well as the repeated lies the agency told the White House, Congress, and the press.
After taking office in 2009 President Obama did ban the use of torture through an executive order, and to this day says that the practice was inconsistent with our values as a nation. But that one stroke of the pen doesn't match up with the rest of his actions.
The ethos of this administration has been to look forward and not backwards. This has meant letting the architects of the Bush torture regime escape prosecution and any semblance of accountability despite clear violations of international law.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alyona-minkovski/post_8757_b_6317214.html

 

[HOLLYWOOD]

First Look Media / The Intercept has excellent details and coverage... links below

Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, the Senior Officer at the Center of the CIA’s Torture Scandals "The Unidentified Queen of Torture"



U.S. TV Provides Ample Platform for American Torturers, But None to Their Victims

Torture, 'Meet the Press' and Cheney's Quest for Revenge - The Intercept

All you need to know about this monster:

But Cheney’s response was: “I’m more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.”

 

[enhanced_deficit]

..tortured some folks and killed many children.

 

[enhanced_deficit]

At least dDG's pup masters are willing to prosecute Idaho soldier who was in Taliban captivity for "desertion".


US soldiers raped Iraqi boys in front of their mothers
Giving a speech at the ACLU last week after the senate torture report was initially released, Hersh gave some insight into what was on the Pentagon’s secret tape.
In the most revealing portion of his speech he said that:
“Debating about it, ummm … Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

 

[Lucille]

First Look Media / The Intercept has excellent details and coverage... links below

Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, the Senior Officer at the Center of the CIA’s Torture Scandals "The Unidentified Queen of Torture"

The Queen of Torture and Michael Scheuer got married.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...supervisor-openly-calls-war-Sunnis-Shias.html

• Alfreda has married Michael Scheuer, who was her boss in the 1990s
• Mr Scheuer confirmed news but the couple is steeped in controversy
• Alfreda allegedly failed to pass on intelligence about 9/11 hijackers

Mr Scheuer confirmed the wedlock to BuzzFeed but the website said he would not comment on whether they were romantically involved when they worked together.

The couple is steeped in controversy with Alfreda allegedly watching torture sessions.

It has also previously been reported that she may have failed to give information to the FBI that could have led to the capture of the group planning the 9/11 attack.

 

[Lucille]

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/02/05/aclu-pries-torture-photos-out-of-washington/

As of time of writing, websites, and certainly not presstitute media sites, have not posted the photos of strictly illegal torture, both under US law and International law, carried out by the criminal George W. Bush regime, most likely under the orders of the criminal VP Dick Cheney, spokesman for the crazed neoconservatives whose insanity threatens the world with nuclear Armageddon.

I doubt that most Americans will ever see the photos or be aware of the shame that “their” “freedom and democracy” government, answerable only to the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, and Wall Street, has loaded on the backs of the American people and America’s image in the world.

http://sputniknews.com/us/20160206/1034316281/pentagon-released-torture-photos-aclu.html

The majority of the 1,800 or so photos will remain unreleased after US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in November invoked his authority under the 2009 exemption provision. The ACLU said it would continue to seek the release of the remaining photos.

The US government opposes publicly releasing the photos, saying the images could provoke a violent backlash and place US forces and personnel abroad at heightened risk of attack.

So the release of the images are the problem here, not the torture itself. Got it.

 

[Lucille]

I care. It sickens me.

Experts Quietly Admit to Senate Torture Report's Accuracy, But Does Anybody Care Anymore?
https://reason.com/blog/2016/02/11/experts-quietly-admit-to-senate-torture

At the time the report was released, after years of fighting between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA and President Barack Obama's administration, the official pushback from the CIA was an admission that torture ("enhanced interrogation") did happen inappropriately and the oversight wasn't always the best, and they detained people that shouldn't have been detained at all, but they did get "actionable intelligence" from the process and prevented terrorist attacks. That was the story, and they were sticking with it—yes, it was terrible, but it worked.

But then, it turns out, the CIA has quietly updated its official response in such a way that validates some of the Senate torture report's claims. Much like a newspaper hiding a correction at the bottom of an inside page among the advertisements, the CIA posted a "note to readers" without telling anybody. According to Ali Watkins at BuzzFeed, it sat online for a year before outsiders noticed its existence.
[...]
When I wrote about the Senate report back when it was released, the big takeaway was not the horrible descriptions of what the CIA did to people, though that certainly got the most press. Rather, it was the depressing, bureaucracy-driven nature of the conflict trying to establish timelines of who authorized what, who knew what, where information actually came from, and trying to penetrate layer upon layer of ass-covering concealing what actually happened.

And does it even matter anymore? In the wake of new terrorist attacks on American soil we have Trump promising to do whatever the hell gets cheers from the crowd. His unpredictability, deliberate vagueness, and willingness to outsource the actual solutions to "experts," combined with the secrecy of the CIA, should be of great concern. Getting kicked out of America under President Trump might be the least of a Muslim citizen's worries.