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CIA Watchdog 'Mistakenly' Destroyed Its Only Copy Of A Senate Torture Report (yahoo.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the Keystone-Cops dept.

An anonymous reader writes: According to Yahoo News, the CIA inspector general's office "mistakenly" destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved. Agency officials described the deletion of the document to Senate investigators as an "inadvertent" foul-up by the inspector general. "CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of 'enhanced' interrogation methods," reports Yahoo News. The Senate Intelligence Committee and Justice Department knew about the incident last summer, sources said. However, the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report was never made public, nor was it reported to the federal judge at the time who was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act. Despite this incident, a CIA spokesperson has said another unopened computer disk with the full report is still locked in a vault at agency headquarters. "I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy," wrote Dean Boyd, the agency's chief of public affairs, in an email. Feinstein is calling for the CIA inspector general to obtain a new copy of the report to replace the one that disappeared. A 500-page summary was released in 2014, and concluded that the CIA misled Americans on the effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation." Specifically, the interrogations were poorly managed and unreliable.

6 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. "Enhanced Interrogation" is Torture. by headkase · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a fact no matter how you try to weasel out of it: "enhanced interrogation" is actually torture. Which doing so in a time of war is a war crime. The stuff Japanese people were sentenced to death for shortly after their trials at the end of World War II.

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    Shh.
    1. Re: "Enhanced Interrogation" is Torture. by Plus1Entropy · · Score: 4, Informative

      The US hasn't declared war since WWII.

      This is one of those nonsense things people say that simply isn't true.

      A declaration of war is an act of Congress. People like to throw around the word "formal" as if that means something, i.e. that it doesn't count somehow if the act doesn't say "declaration of war" or a variation thereof. The Constitution mentions no specific form that the legislation must take, it simply says "Congress shall have the power to [...] declare war".

      Since WWII, there have been Congressional acts passed for the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War, to name a few.

      --
      Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
  2. Copies still exist; CIA IG deleted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Senate Intelligence Committee, which produced the report, has copies of its own report. The CIA has copies. The CIA IG destroyed its copy, provided to it by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and told the committee. Stupid, yes...but given that it was the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, it's not like the CIA IG destroying its only copy of the Senate's report amounts to, well, anything.

  3. Re:hooding, waterboarding are bad. Raping 13yo gir by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Get your history right. We executed Japanese Soldiers for waterboarding ours during WWII. You listen to Faux News too much.

    http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2015/jan/12/bobby-scott/bobby-scott-after-wwii-us-executed-japanese-war-cr/
    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/18/john-mccain/history-supports-mccains-stance-on-waterboarding/
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/12/16/cheneys-claim-that-the-u-s-did-not-prosecute-japanese-soldiers-for-waterboarding/

  4. Re:Sadism. by mvdwege · · Score: 3, Informative

    has been known to be completely ineffective as a means of getting information at the very least since the French tortured vigorously in Algeria about 50 years ago.

    It has been known far longer than that

    --
    "I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
  5. Re:Sadism. by T.E.D. · · Score: 3, Informative

    Talk to professional interrogators, or the people that have actually studied the subject. According to them, torture is worse than worthless because the 'intelligence' you gather is far more likely to be false than anything else.

    Not quite. If you want to get to the truth of what happened, then torture is worthless. However, if you want someone to say a specific thing regardless of what the truth is (eg: admit to a crime), torture can be very effective.

    For example, the CIA was feeling pressure to prove their methods were effective. So their main goal whenever they tortured someone at their black sites was to get them to give up names of others who they could kidnap and torture. They became sort of the Amway of torture. The victim would eventually start giving names of anyone plausibly Muslim they may have rattling around in their head, and then the next round of renditions would begin. The CIA could then throw up all the numbers of names and leads they were getting as proof that their methods were working.

    You will to this day hear Bush Admin. officials cite these numbers to defend their torture program.