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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.
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.
Shh.
Well I think someone should "mistakenly" go to jail then.
If the CIA were a person (or smaller less corrupt organization) they'd be held liable (and possibly in contempt) with massive punishments.
I guess it's not just the banks that can be TBTF.
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The CIA is a rogue fully-unaccountable shadow organization that thumbs its nose at ALL regulators including Congress. The longer this is allowed to go on the closer to a totalitarian state we are allowing ourselves to veer toward. Checks and balances mean JACK SHIT when they just go right around all of them.
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.
Well, if you believe that the new report the CIA will provide is the same as the old report, then I have a bridge I would like to sell you.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
in the basement, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
-I'm just sayin'
Ask the NSA I'm sure they've got a copy.
"CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document. Then, while carrying the computer from which the file was deleted, officials tripped and dropped it into an MRI scanner's powerful magnet. In an effort to free the computer it was struck repeatedly with a rubber mallet. Once freed, being alarmingly warm, the computer was submerged in water to cool. Later, the computer fell from the horse that was transporting it and it was trampled to pieces. The pieces were cast into the volcano."
Torture is used because the people who use it believe, perhaps entirely sincerely, that the person they are torturing knows something that the people who are performing the torture either want to or need to know, and the importance of them knowing this is of more importance to them than the personhood of the person they are torturing. Of course. it has precisely zero effectiveness if this belief is mistaken.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
So again, stop believing hollywood, they make shit up for a living.
When you have to compare yourself to ISIL to look good, I guess you've reached the top of the bottom.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Waterboarding (pouring water over the enemy combatant's face) and hooding (putting a bag over their head so they can't see) are bad.
Are you serious? Waterboarding someone is a drowning technique. Waterboarding is 'pouring water over their face' the way tearing someone's finger nails out is a 'rough manicure'. They were drowning people several times a day for days or weeks on end. You need to get your head straight on this.
"In other words, raping these civilians hundreds of times each."
Wait that sounds pretty unpleasant. Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to write it as "In other words, they potentially got some unwanted sexual attention"? /sarcasm
Systematically raping thousands of girls, many of them hundreds of times each, is a completely different level of horrible.
Yes, absolutely, but really its only different because of the scale. We only waterboarded (hopefully) a small number of people (possibly dozens) of times. Not hundreds or thousands. But seriously you can't claim the moral high ground over a criminal who raped his victims repeatedly when you drowned and resuscitated your own victims over and over again. The ONLY thing that made us better was the scale was pretty small by comparison.
I'm not even sure which torture I'd call more inhuman -- held down and raped by soldiers repeatedly vs held down and drowned repeatedly... to hear the waterboarding victims talk; about the panic attacks, nightmares they live with now, the terror and the pain they felt... they might well have opted for the rape instead. Maybe it doesn't even make sense to try to hold one or the other as worse.
Israel which is a friendly country to the USA let it be known to the Bush administration that they had given up using torture against terrorism as it was so ineffective.
The Bush administration, just like you, was impervious to facts, always preferring their own ideological preconceived notions to reality. Lately, this seems increasingly have become a signature of the whole GOP. If facts are not to your liking just pretend they aren't true.
Oh I totally believe that they only had one copy of this critically important report. It's too bad that the dog ate it or whatever.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Waterboarding is drowning under controlled conditions. It's supposed to simulated but many times the victims did drown and had to be resuscitated.
I think the main point is that if the US is going around trying to convince the world that it's the shining example of goodness that has been wronged then it shouldn't be going around doing evil acts like this. After the 9/11 attacks there was a tremendous amount of sympathy and goodwill towards the US in which it could have used for much good. Even after the invasion of Afghanistan it kept much of that goodwill because it got the approval from the UN. Then it didn't get the approval for the invasion of Iraq due to the lack of evidence but still went ahead, proof of how prisoners were treated came out, Guantanamo, the death toll from the second Iraq war (and not just the US casualties), the torture scandal, drone strikes, and a long list of other things has eroded that goodwill and even turned it into hostility from certain areas. The world was ready to help the US but it's leaders chose a path of vengeance instead of tackling the problem.
Torture is used because the people who use it believe, perhaps entirely sincerely, that the person they are torturing knows something that the people who are performing the torture either want to or need to know, and the importance of them knowing this is of more importance to them than the personhood of the person they are torturing.
Torturers always have ways of explaining away their actions. It is for their country, their faith, the truth or liberty - for the greater good. The goal justifies the means. You should read up om Himmler's speeches to the SS top; all torturers think like that, whether it is the Spanish Inquisition and their "We cause you suffering in this life, so your time in Purgatory will be shorter", Daesh's burning and stoning of innocent people - or the waterboarding og suspected terrorists by the Americans. Good people don't do this, not just out of regard for the victim, but because they have chosen not to lower themselves to the same level as the terrorists and their sadistic torturers.
Of course. it has precisely zero effectiveness if this belief is mistaken.
It has no value whether their belief is true or false, we already know that. A person who undergoes torture is focused entirely on escaping the mistreatment, not on giving accurate information. When you are tortured, your trust in the torturer and in people in general is fundamentally destroyed, and you don't believe that you are not going to be tortured again, soon, whether you tell the truth or not, so you only want the hell you are in right now, to stop; so you say anything they want to hear. At least it may buy you a few hours or even days before it starts again.
In order to gather reliable evidence, you absolutely must establish some sort of trust - you make promises, then keep them, you respect the individual, and gradually they may change their minds and cooperate. You reward cooperation, but not in a way that makes them feel they are being paid off for being traitors. And so on. It isn't really difficult.