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CIA Watchdog 'Mistakenly' Destroyed Its Only Copy Of A Senate Torture Report (yahoo.com)
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.
Waterboarding (pouring water over the enemy combatant's face) and hooding (putting a bag over their head so they can't see) are bad. The US shouldn't do those things, as policy. No country should, and especially the US (more on that later*).
On the other hand consider if we captured Osama bin Laden , who knew about plans for future terror attacks. If our interrogation experts thought that putting a bag over his head to annoy him might increase the information he revealed (potentially saving innocent lives), I'd happily fetch a bag for that use. I digress. Generally, those techniques are bad policy.
> The stuff Japanese people were sentenced to death for shortly after their trials at the end of World War II.
The japanese war criminals were convicted of kidnapping all the girls and women in villages they attacked and making them "sexual slaves". In other words, raping these civilians hundreds of times each. They were also convicted of mass murder - men from the villages, once they were too emaciated to work in the forced labor camp, would be lined up and shot.
Again, pouring water on a terrorist's face isn't a very nice thing to do to that terrorist. Systematically raping thousands of girls, many of them hundreds of times each, is a completely different level of horrible.
To say to the survivors of this rape program that their story is no worse than someone who chose to be a terrorist having water poured on them is deeply offensive and shows an incredible lack of perspective or understanding of the world.
I promised more about why the US especially shouldn't be mean to enemy combatants. The US is not historically a people, not an ethnic group or ancient tribe who established borders of the area they control like most nations. Japan is the area that (ethnic) Japanese people control, the area of Japanwse culture. The responsibility of the Japanese government is to the Japanese people, and it should protect Japanese culture and tradition.
The US isn't descended from an ancient tribe or ethnic group. The US wasn't created to define the area of US culture and traditions. Rather, was explicitly founded to protect freedom , justice, and liberty. That's the entire PURPOSE of founding the country, expressed in the founding documents. The US claims to be, aspires to be, "the brightest beacon of freedom to the world". Japan makes no such claim. Therefore, in order to accomplish our explicit purpose, the reason the country exists in the first place, we must treat justice and freedom as our top priorities. When we don't do so, we've failed in a way that other countries don't, because they make no claim of being "the land of liberty". This concept is called "American Exceptionalism". Some disagree, of course. President Obama rejects the concept American Exceptionalism, the idea that the US has a special responsibility to respect people's rights.