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New Torture Report Blames Obama and the Media for Not Confronting the Truth
Posted: 04/17/2013 9:18 am

By this point, there really should be no doubt in anyone's mind that torture was widely used during the last administration -- and that nothing like that should ever happen again.

The new, comprehensive report out today from an august, bipartisan commission goes a long way toward making that abundantly, authoritatively clear, laying the blame fully at the feet of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other top officials.

But the reality is: That's old news. What's new and disturbing and important about the report from the Constitution Project's Task Force on Detainee Treatment is how it calls attention to the absurd reality that we, as a country, are actually still arguing about any of this.

And for that, the report lays the blame fully at the feet of the current administration, for covering up what happened and stifling any sort of national conversation on the topic -- and the media, for splitting the difference between the facts and the plainly specious argument made by torture regime's architects that what occurred should be defined as something other than what it so obviously was.

The report points out, as I have in the past, that neither Obama nor Congress have done a thing to make sure that, the next time a perceived emergency comes up, some other president or vice president won't decide to torture again.

Obama's policy of "looking forward instead of looking backward," in this light, is exposed as a cover-up that is actually holding the country back from a crucial period of self-understanding, and growth.

There's also a matter of law. That U.S. officials involved with detention in the CIA's black sites committed war crimes and violated interntional law, which the report concludes to be self-evident, isn't something Obama is allowed to ignore.

It actually violates the U.S.' legal obligations under the international Convention Against Torture, which requires each country to "[c]riminalize all acts of torture, attempts to commit torture, or complicity or participation in torture," and "proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction."

"The United States cannot be said to have complied," the report concludes, noting:

No CIA personnel have been convicted or even charged for numerous instances of torture in CIA custody -- including cases where interrogators exceeded what was authorized by the Office of Legal Counsel, and cases where detainees were tortured to death. Many acts of unauthorized torture by military forces have also been inadequately investigated or prosecuted.
So it's not just Bush and Cheney who violated international law; now it's Obama, too.

The report is blistering about the cover-up. "The high level of secrecy surrounding the rendition and torture of detainees since September 11 cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security," it states. "Ongoing classification of these practices serves only to conceal evidence of wrongdoing and make its repetition more likely."

The end result is a society in moral disarray: "Democracy and torture cannot peacefully coexist in the same body politic," the report states. "The Task Force... believes and hopes that publicly acknowledging this grave error, however belatedly, may mitigate some of those consequences and help undo some of the damage to our reputation at home and abroad."

And what an indictment of false equivalency by the media. Shame on us. The report notes:

The question as to whether U.S. forces and agents engaged in torture has been complicated by the existence of two vocal camps in the public debate. This has been particularly vexing for traditional journalists who are trained and accustomed to recording the arguments of both sides in a dispute without declaring one right and the other wrong. The public may simply perceive that there is no right side, as there are two equally fervent views held views on a subject, with substantially credentialed people on both sides. In this case, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that among those who insist that the United States did not engage in torture are figures who served at the highest levels of government, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

But this Task Force is not bound by this convention.

The members, coming from a wide political spectrum, believe that arguments that the nation did not engage in torture and that much of what occurred should be defined as something less than torture are not credible.

So the so-called objective reporters who couldn't speak the truth were basically accessories after the fact.

There's so much more in the report worth reading, and discussing.

Perhaps its most urgent conclusion is that forced feeding of detainees -- going on right now -- "is a form of abuse and must end."

The report notes the "crucial support" to the torture regime provided by people in the medical and legal fields, which it says raises "profound ethical questions for both professions."

And weighing into territory recently plowed during the debate over the movie Zero Dark Thirty and its depiction of torture as providing useful information, the report notes that there is no evidence to support that view, and points out that the people saying torture worked have "inherent credibility issues," one of which is that they are the ones "who actually who authorized and implemented the very practices that they now assert to have been valuable tools in fighting terrorism."

The U.S. has lost its moral compass before, the Task Force notes. It does so in every war, to some degree or another. And yet, the report concludes, there is "no evidence there had ever before been the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after September 11, directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody."

That's not something we can just pretend never happened. We need accountability.

Victims of U.S. Torture Respond to the New Terror Detainee Report
Omar Deghayes was blinded in one eye by a guard at Guantanamo. What does he think of the Constitution Project's conclusions about detainee treatment?
ANDREW COHENAPR 17 2013, 1:06 PM ET

By releasing Tuesday a detailed new report on the mistreatment of terror-law detainees, the experts at the Constitution Project aren't really telling us anything we didn't already know about America's descent into the madness of torture. The truth is, we've known for a decade or so that, in our name, terror suspects were tortured for information. And we've known for nearly that long that senior officials within the Bush Administration both authorized such conduct and then sought to protect themselves, and the actual torturers, from liability for their conduct.

But that doesn't mean the report isn't important. It is. First, our attention spans being what they are, the "findings and recommendations" made in its 577 pages are vital reminders of what happened, and how, and why; and of how little accountability has ever sprung from one of the darkest episodes in American legal history. If it were up to me, there would be a comprehensive report like this issued every five years or so, just around the time the nation is apt to forget again how fragile the rule of law can be in times of crisis. From the introduction:

Task Force members generally understand that those officials whose decisions and actions may have contributed to charges of abuse, with harmful consequences for the United States' standing in the world, undertook those measures as their best efforts to protect their fellow citizens.

Task Force members also believe, however, that those good intentions did not relieve them of their obligations to comply with existing treaties and laws. The need to respect legal and moral codes designed to maintain minimum standards of human rights is especially great in times of crisis.

It is encouraging to note that when misguided policies were implemented in an excess of zeal or emotion, there was sometimes a cadre of officials who raised their voices in dissent, however unavailing those efforts.

Second, the report is important as a bipartisan expression of disdain for the poor judgments made by executive branch officials, as well as those made by members of Congress, in the formation, implementation, and justification of these torture policies. Nor was blame restricted to the realm of government. "The architects of the detention and interrogation regimes sought and were given crucial support from people in the medical and legal fields," the report concludes. "This implicated profound ethical questions for both professions ..." Republicans signed onto these conclusions. So did Democrats.

Third, the report is important as a tool to shame federal lawmakers, and Justice Department officials, to do more to develop the historical record of this story. "The members of the Task Force believe there may be more to be learned," the report concludes, through the use of "subpoena power to compel testimony and the capability to review classified materials." There is no reason to think that the Obama Administration or Congress would now undertake such a review. But will the White House or Congressional leaders even be questioned about the report and its conclusions?

Fourth, there are the recommendations made by panel members. One is that the government should "strengthen the criminal prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." Another is that the President should "direct the CIA to declassify the evidence necessary for the American public to better evaluate" the torture claims. Only on the topic of whether to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, did Task Force members disagree. Two conservative panelists argued in favor of keeping the facility open for now. Will these recommendations even be seriously debated in Washington?

Since I have little standing to speak about the substance of the report -- since so few of us can truly understand what American policy really meant for those who found themselves in those interrogation rooms-- I thought it would make sense to ask someone who does to share with us his perceptions of the work done by the Task Force. So I asked Maher Arar for his views. Arar is the Syrian-born Canadian resident who was apprehended by American forces in 2002, tortured in Syria, and then released without charges or a trial (or an apology from U.S. officials).

After reading the report, I asked, what would you want to say to John Yoo or any of the other architects of the American torture policy? Arar told me: "If anything your torture program not only was harmful to the people you torture but it was equally harmful to your nation's ideals and values. Your forefathers and Founders would be ashamed of your actions. ... Today," he continued, "the main target are Muslims. Tomorrow it could be you. Never take what your officials say for granted."

I also posed these questions, and more, to Omar Deghayes, a Libyan man who was tortured at Guantanamo Bay, to read the report and to offer his perspective. What happened to Deghayes is appalling. In 2010 he shared his story with the Guardian's Patrick Barkham:

It is not hot stabbing pain that Omar Deghayes remembers from the day a Guantánamo guard blinded him, but the cool sen­sation of fingers being stabbed deep into his eyeballs. He had joined other prisoners in protesting against a new humiliation -- inmates ­being forced to take off their trousers and walk round in their pants -- and a group of guards had entered his cell to punish him. He was held down and bound with chains.

"I didn't realise what was going on until the guy had pushed his fingers ­inside my eyes and I could feel the coldness of his fingers. Then I realised he was trying to gouge out my eyes," Deghayes says. He wanted to scream in agony, but was determined not to give his torturers the satisfaction. Then the officer standing over him instructed the eye-stabber to push harder. "When he pulled his hands out, I remember I couldn't see anything -- I'd lost sight completely in both eyes." Deghayes was dumped in a cell, fluid streaming from his eyes.

The sight in his left eye returned over the following days, but he is still blind in his right eye. He also has a crooked nose (from being punched by the guards, he says) and a scar across his forefinger (slammed in a prison door), but otherwise this resident of Saltdean, near Brighton, appears ­relatively ­unscarred from the more than five years he spent locked in Guantánamo Bay.

Deghayes is one of the lucky ones. He was thereafter released from Gitmo, without ever having to stand trial, and now lives as a free man. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

COHEN: There were portions of the report, detailing detainee abuse, which surely were difficult for you to read given your history. What was your initial gut reaction to the contents of the Report? Did it make you angry? Did it make you sad?

DEGHAYES: It is quite painful reading through the report and having to relieve and remember the unwelcome thoughts of the Guantanamo days, not that it is ever forgettable ... But I was shaken the most by the case of Dilawar, the innocent Afghan taxi driver who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. He was tortured to a degree that caused him to lose his sanity and daydream to death.

Another case is Yasser Talaal Az-Zahrani, this young man who was shown hell alive. After his death, the story of mental and psychological torture was extended to his family, as -- after long years of wrongful detention -- they received the dead body of their son, but incomplete, without the throat. Yasser was buried, and along with him the truth of his case also was buried.

COHEN: The panel that investigated the treatment of detainees concluded that it is "indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture." What was your reaction when you read those findings and conclusions? Does this belated acknowledgement by some of America's political and social leaders change the way you perceive your own experiences at the hands of your captors?

DEGHAYES: I felt as if I was reading that it is indisputable that the light of the sun can be seen! It took 11 years to establish this fact that is known to every human being! To be honest, I think of those still in Guantanamo and other torture facilities more than thinking of my own experience and of those who have been freed ... I have no doubt that more acknowledgements will follow. It is a matter of measuring political gains, and simply a matter of time -- the truth eventually comes out.

COHEN: The Task Force also concluded that "the nation's highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture." What do you think that responsibility is? And what would you like to see done about it?

DEGHAYES: As the report unveiled, Carolyn Wood said that the seniors had set no guidelines on how to treat the detainees, so the guidelines were simply none. That was a green light for sadistic movie lovers to bring their evil imaginations into practice... [S]adly, we were stripped of all our dignity and rights at the hands of those claiming to be human rights' gatekeepers! Every victim loves to see justice taking place, so those who engaged in these practices, be it giving orders, or committing the actual dirty act of torture -- both seniors and juniors on all levels -- should be brought to justice, publicly.

COHEN: Have you ever thought about what you would say to John Yoo, or Jay Bybee, or Alberto Gonzales, or David Addington, or Dick Cheney, or any of the other architects of the American policies which resulted in the treatment you received? Do you believe that they will ever have to answer for those policies more than they already have?

DEGHAYES: They will surely have to answer, if not in this life then in another life where the ultimate justice cannot be interrupted. This is my personal belief. I'd rather direct my word to every politician, journalist, and lawyer, and to every person who happens to have an influential word, a word that could bring shame to an entire nation, to take lessons from the past, and learn from the mistakes of others rather than repeating them!

COHEN: What lesson should the American people take from the treatment you received, and from the conclusions contained in the report?

DEGHAYES: The report exposes a lot of facts that were kept hidden from the public. I hope that every person could read it. I believe the vast majority of the American people are peaceful and they oppose all forms of injustice. The dirty policies of torture bring out enemies instead of getting rid of them.

U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: April 16, 2013

WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.
DOCUMENT: Constitution Project’s Report on Detainee Treatment

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning.

Debate over the coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of President George W. Bush has often broken down on largely partisan lines. The Constitution Project’s task force on detainee treatment, led by two former members of Congress with experience in the executive branch — a Republican, Asa Hutchinson, and a Democrat, James R. Jones — seeks to produce a stronger national consensus on the torture question.

While the task force did not have access to classified records, it is the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs. A separate 6,000-page report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s record by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based exclusively on agency records, rather than interviews, remains classified.

“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” the report says.

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

Interrogation and abuse at the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites, the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba and war-zone detention centers, have been described in considerable detail by the news media and in declassified documents, though the Constitution Project report adds many new details.

It confirms a report by Human Rights Watch that one or more Libyan militants were waterboarded by the C.I.A., challenging the agency’s longtime assertion that only three Al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the near-drowning technique. It includes a detailed account by Albert J. Shimkus Jr., then a Navy captain who ran a hospital for detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison, of his own disillusionment when he discovered what he considered to be the unethical mistreatment of prisoners.

But the report’s main significance may be its attempt to assess what the United States government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.

The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials’ claims that they were not.

In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of torture and the compensation of its victims.

Like the still-secret Senate interrogation report, the Constitution Project study was initiated after President Obama decided in 2009 not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 counterterrorism programs, as proposed by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and others. Mr. Obama said then that he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” Aides have said he feared that his own policy agenda might get sidetracked in a battle over his predecessor’s programs.

The panel studied the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A’s secret prisons. Staff members, including the executive director, Neil A. Lewis, a former reporter for The New York Times, traveled to multiple detention sites and interviewed dozens of former American and foreign officials, as well as former detainees.

Mr. Hutchinson, who served in the Bush administration as chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration and under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he “took convincing” on the torture issue. But after the panel’s nearly two years of research, he said he had no doubts about what the United States did.

“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.

“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how decisions were made.”

He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.”

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews.

It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses; advocates of going public lost the fight, delaying public exposure for months, the report finds.

Mr. Jones, a former ambassador to Mexico, noted that his panel called for the release of a declassified version of the Senate report and said he believed that the two reports, one based on documents and the other largely on interviews, would complement each other in documenting what he called a grave series of policy errors.

“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases,” Mr. Jones said. “We lost our compass.”

While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.

The report calls for the revision of the Army Field Manual on interrogation to eliminate Appendix M, which it says would permit an interrogation for 40 consecutive hours, and to restore an explicit ban on stress positions and sleep manipulation.

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

The report compares the torture of detainees to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “What was once generally taken to be understandable and justifiable behavior,” the report says, “can later become a case of historical regret.”

New Torture Report Blames Obama and the Media for Not Confronting the Truth

ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.
I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.

When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.

I was wrong to trust him. There was no work. I wanted to leave, but had no money to fly home. After the American invasion in 2001, I fled to Pakistan like everyone else. The Pakistanis arrested me when I asked to see someone from the Yemeni Embassy. I was then sent to Kandahar, and put on the first plane to Gitmo.

Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray.

I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.

I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping.
There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren’t enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings; nothing is happening at regular intervals. They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up.

During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily. I called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was being done correctly or not.
It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity.

When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding.
The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.
Where is my government? I will submit to any “security measures” they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.
I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.

The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.
And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.
I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, told this story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call.

German human rights group files complaint against CIA ‘Queen of Torture’
The move puts Alfreda Frances Bikowsky in the center of efforts to hold CIA officials accountable for alleged abuse
October 19, 2015 5:00AM ET
by Elisabeth Braw @elisabethbraw
Khaled El Masri
Khaled El Masri, a German citizen, was kidnapped by the CIA in 2003.Nihad Nino Pusija / Ullstein Bild / Getty Images
BERLIN — A German human rights group has filed a criminal complaint against Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, a CIA official who allegedly authorized torture of suspected al Qaeda militants. The complaint, submitted in federal court on Monday, presents proof of Bikowsky’s involvement in the torture of German citizen Khaled El Masri and asks that she be prosecuted in Germany. It also puts Bikowsky, nicknamed the “Queen of Torture,” in the spotlight of European efforts to hold CIA officials accountable for allegations of abuse.

In 2003, Macedonian agents, mistaking El Masri for a suspected member of the 9/11 plot, seized the Kuwaiti-born car salesman as he was on his way to Skopje, the capital, for vacation, holding him for 23 days. Even after a CIA official warned her that El Masri was a victim of mistaken identity, Bikowsky, then deputy head of the CIA’s Alec Station — the unit in charge of tracking Osama bin Laden — insisted on having El Masri flown to Afghanistan for further questioning. After four months in Afghanistan, where he was violently interrogated, El Masri was put on a CIA flight to Albania and returned to Germany. “There are already arrest warrants in Germany for the air crew who flew El Masri to Afghanistan so we’re simply following the chain of command,” said Andreas Schüller, head of the International Crimes and Accountability Program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), the Berlin-based human rights legal organization that submitted the complaint against Bikowsky.

In the complaint, which was filed in July and has been seen by Al Jazeera America, the ECCHR asks the prosecutor to launch a criminal investigation into Bikowsky. The complaint notes that the U.S. Senate’s torture report, released in December last year, contains evidence linking Bikowsky to El Masri’s rendition and torture. “The CIA director … decided that no further action was warranted against XXX, then the deputy chief of ALEC Station, who advocated for al-Masri’s [sic] rendition,” the Senate report stated in a passage included in the ECCHR’s complaint. The allegations are consistent with findings by investigative reporters. In December last year, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that Bikowsky “gleefully participated in torture sessions,” and “falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.”

Should the German federal prosecutor decide not to launch a criminal investigation, ECCHR will file a criminal complaint with the state prosecutor in Munich, whose office eight years ago issued arrest warrants against 13 CIA officials involved in El Masri’s disappearance and detention.

“If the prosecutors are inclined to take up a case of human rights abuse by foreign officials, there’s scope in Germany for broad investigations into human rights abuses under universal jurisdiction,” explained Benjamin Ward, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia. “That could have a very important effect and make officials implicated in abuse reluctant to travel to other countries.” Though ordinary citizens can file criminal complaints, nonprofits staffed by legal experts have better chances at success.

Mihail Kogalniceanu airbase, CIA black site
Romanian military at the end of a corridor in the Mihail Kogalniceanu Airbase, a Soviet-era facility that became the focus of a European investigation into alleged CIA-operated secret prisons.Vadim Ghirda / AP
Germany’s Code of Crimes against International Law, which came into effect in 2002, makes Germany one of few countries that allow prosecutors to investigate human rights crimes committed abroad; the accused is not required to be present in Germany. German prosecutors could, in other words, pursue cases of human rights abuse linked to CIA officials in Afghanistan and Guantánamo even if the crimes have minimal connection to Germany. “The critical question is the political will,” said Ward. “Are the prosecutors willing to go where the evidence takes them? Private investigations by groups like the ECCHR are unlikely to directly lead to prosecutions, because state interests are involved. But NGOs’ efforts to bring these abuses to light have encouraged prosecutors to open investigations.” Frauke Köhler, the spokeswoman for the German federal prosecutor’s office, said that officials began reviewing potential cases as soon as the Senate torture report was released. “The ECCHR’s criminal complaint is part of this investigation,” Köhler explained.

The ECCHR is, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in the United States, the Swiss group TRIAL, and Redress in the UK, one of several organizations most active in pursuing legal investigations into human rights violations. A decade ago, the group filed largely symbolic criminal complaints against George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director George Tenet. But it is now going after mid-level officials, who are easier to link to the abuse. “Our goal is that by operating on different levels we’ll be able to pull the net tighter around perpetrators of human rights abuse,” explained Schüller. (The CIA declined to comment for this story.) The ECCHR and the CCR have filed an expert opinion in support of France’s decision to open an investigation into former Guantánamo commander Geoffrey Miller. Earlier this year, the National Court in Paris summoned Miller to respond to allegations of torture.

Schüller said the ECCHR plans to file several additional complaints by the beginning of next year. A criminal complaint alone does not result in an arrest warrant, but if the ECCHR learns that Bikowsky is planning to travel internationally it will contact foreign border agencies to ask for her detention. “The complaint makes it impossible for Bikowsky to serve overseas,” said Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer and lecturer at Columbia University. Though no Western official has been arrested on the basis of a criminal complaint alone, earlier this month former CIA official Sabrina De Sousa, who had been convicted in absentia by an Italian court, was detained trying to enter Portugal. The court found De Sousa guilty of involvement in the detention of radical preacher Abu Omar in Milan in 2003. A total of 26 U.S. officials have been convicted in absentia by Italian courts for human rights abuse connected to renditions. According to Horton, the CIA has already banned 22 officials involved in torture from traveling abroad.

While the Senate torture report has provided human rights organizations with new evidence, the European Court of Human Rights has established a legal precedent that works in favor of victims of human rights abuses. In a 2012 ruling, the ECHR sided with El Masri, who filed a complaint against Macedonia’s interior ministry. “Historically a cloak of legal immunity has been cast around intelligence operatives due to the risk of actions being revealed in court that could harm intelligence operations,” noted Horton. “What’s happening now is that human rights groups are saying that while the courts can’t dig into everything there’s an exception for crimes against humanity.”

The Daily 202: Walter Mondale frustrated with Obama’s handling of CIA torture report
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By James Hohmann, Tom Hamburger and Elise Viebeck October 19 at 7:25 AM
Former Vice President Walter Mondale arrives for a state dinner for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Tuesday, April 28, 2015, at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Walter Mondale arrives at the White House for a state dinner for the Japanese prime minister this April. He gave an exclusive interview to The Daily 202 on Sunday night. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
THE BIG IDEA:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale wants the full Senate torture report released to the public and faults President Obama for not doing more to hold the Central Intelligence Agency accountable for interfering with congressional oversight.

In an interview last night with me and my colleague Tom Hamburger, the Democratic elder statesman also said that CIA employees involved in penetrating computers used by Senate staffers should be punished.

The 87-year-old will be celebrated during a full day of events in Washington on Tuesday, all sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Joe Biden will speak at GWU about his legacy as vice president, and former President Jimmy Carter—being treated for cancer that has spread to his brain—plans to fly up from Georgia for a dinner gala at the Four Seasons.

While President Obama called the CIA’s interrogation methods “torture” and ordered the program dismantled soon after his inauguration, he has defended the agency since taking office and White House staff pushed to limit how much of the report, which detailed abuses, could be declassified.

“I’m surprised by the president, who was a distinguished scholar, a constitutional lawyer, president of the Harvard Law Review,” Mondale told The Post. “He knows what these issues are, but he’s not been a strong advocate, to put it mildly, toward requiring accountability. I agree with most of the things the president does; I do not agree with this.”

In one of five panels on Tuesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence committee, and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, will talk about “reconciling national security and the U.S. Constitution.” Mondale praised the 528-page executive summary released by the Intelligence Committee last December after intense negotiations between the Senate and the White House. But most of the 6,900-page report remains classified. What was released got redacted heavily.


CIA headquarters in Langley (Larry Downing/Reuters)
Reminiscing about his own service in the mid-’70s on the Church Committee, which explored abuses of power at the CIA and FBI post-Watergate, Mondale mused that the more recent investigation had a much harder time trying to extract answers from the intelligence community. Gerald Ford’s Republican White House was committed to helping Sen. Frank Church’s effort, Mondale noted, but he said the Obama administration often supported CIA efforts to not fully comply with requests from the oversight committee.

“What Dianne Feinstein confronted here was a very active agency that was in control of itself and did not want to comply with their legitimate requests, and I believe with the support of the president, they did so. That’s pretty formidable,” he told Tom Hamburger. “When we did the Church Committee report, we were lucky because J. Edgar Hoover was no longer around (as FBI director). The newspapers had already reported a lot of these abuses. And there were many people in the CIA, including its director, who felt the agency was out of control and needed the oversight the Congress was providing. And Edward Levi, (Gerald) Ford’s attorney general, wanted to help. His leadership over there was indispensable to our success.”


Frank Church (D-Idaho) displays a poison dart gun in Sept. 1975 as Co-Chairman John Tower (R-Texas) looks on. CIA Director William E. Colby told the panel, on which Mondale sat, that 37 lethal poisons were discovered in an agency lab. The oversight effort led to lasting reforms. (AP Photo)
During the Intelligence committee’s investigation, CIA staffers went into a computer network being used by congressional staffers to figure out how the Senate obtained a certain document. Initially, CIA director John Brennan denied wrongdoing and an agency lawyer asked the Justice Department to criminally investigate congressional investigators. Later, Brennan apologized for the search. A CIA “Accountability Board” led by ex-Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) concluded earlier this year that “no discipline was warranted for the five CIA personnel under review because they acted reasonably…”

Mondale is not satisfied with that conclusion. “There should be discipline,” he said Sunday night by phone. “This was pretty abusive. They hacked into the files of an independent committee of the U.S. Congress. There should be some punishment and some kind of discipline imposed on those responsible.”

Besides remarks from Biden, there will also be discussions Tuesday aimed at highlighting the Carter-Mondale administration’s support for human rights abroad and civil rights at home. Mondale is excited to talk about their enduring achievements, such as the creation of the Department of Education, the Camp David Accords and the Panama Canal treaty. Carter and Mondale also plan to offer support for the Iranian nuclear agreement. See the full agenda here.

| Tue Dec 1, 2015 9:39am EST Related: U.S.
Human Rights Watch demands U.S. criminal probe of CIA torture
BY DAVID ROHDE

Human Rights Watch called on the Obama administration on Tuesday to investigate 21 former U.S. officials, including former President George W. Bush, for potential criminal misconduct for their roles in the CIA's torture of terrorism suspects in detention.

The other officials include former Vice President Dick Cheney, former CIA Director George Tenet, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Human Rights Watch argued that details of the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation program that were made public by a U.S. Senate committee in December 2014 provided enough evidence for the Obama administration to open an inquiry.

"It’s been a year since the Senate torture report, and still the Obama administration has not opened new criminal investigations into CIA torture," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "Without criminal investigations, which would remove torture as a policy option, Obama’s legacy will forever be poisoned."

Representatives for Bush and Tenet declined comment. Representatives for Cheney, Ashcroft and Rice could not immediately be reached for comment.

Former Bush administration officials and Republicans have argued that the CIA used "enhanced interrogation techniques" that did not constitute torture. They argue that the Senate report was biased.

"It's a bunch of hooey," James Mitchell, one of the architects of the interrogation program told Reuters nearly a year ago after the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings. "Some of the things are just plain not true."

In a video released in conjunction with the report, "No More Excuses" "A Roadmap to Justice for CIA Torture," the president of the American Bar Association calls for a renewed investigation as well. In June, the ABA sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch also saying that the details disclosed in the Senate report merited an investigation.

"What we’ve asked the Justice Department to do is take a fresh look, a comprehensive look, into what has occurred to basically leave no stone unturned into investigating possible violations," said American Bar Association President Paulette Brown. "And if any are found to take the appropriate action as they would in any other matter."

CIA interrogators carried out the program on detainees who were captured around the world after the Sept. 11, 2001 hijacked plane attacks on the United States.

In 2008, the Bush administration opened a criminal inquiry into whether the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations. After taking office in 2009, the Obama administration expanded the inquiry to include whether the interrogation program’s activity involved criminal conduct.

In 2012, the Obama administration closed the criminal inquiry. Then Attorney General Eric Holder said that not enough evidence existed for criminal prosecution, including the death of two detainees.

Human Rights Watch argued that the Senate report contained new information that showed detainees were tortured in violation of U.S. and international law, including rectal feedings and unauthorized forms of "waterboarding," which makes the person feel as though they are drowning.

Laura Pitter, Human Rights Watch’s senior national security counsel and the lead author of the report, said that calls from some Republican Presidential candidates for the revival of the CIA interrogation techniques made the need for a renewed inquiry that much more important.

"Until the inherent criminality of these acts is made clear," she said, "there is a danger that future administrations will use the same tactics again."

Published on
Friday, February 19, 2016
byCommon Dreams
Former Guantánamo Chief Summoned by French Court Over Torture Allegations
General Geoffrey Miller presided over the U.S. military prison in Cuba from 2002 to 2004, after then-President George Bush approved of 'enhanced interrogation' techniques including waterboarding
byNadia Prupis, staff writer


A French judge has summoned the former chief of Guantánamo Bay, retired U.S. General Geoffrey Miller, to appear in court on March 1 to face allegations of torture against detainees.

Miller presided over the U.S. military prison in Cuba from 2002 to 2004, shortly after then-President George W. Bush approved the use of so-called "enhanced interrogation" tactics, including waterboarding, hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, removal of clothing, and exposure to extreme heat or cold.

Former prisoners of the camp for years have urged international courts to subpoena Miller over his role in the torture and mistreatment of detainees during his time as Guantánamo commander.

The investigation against Miller began after two French citizens, Nizar Sassi and Mourad Benchellali, who were detained at Guantánamo from 2001 to 2004 and 2005 respectively, lodged a criminal complaint against Miller in a French court. The Paris Court of Appeals approved their request last April.

William Bourdon, an attorney who represents some of the detainees in the case, told France 24 on Thursday that it was unlikely Miller would show up because "top U.S. civilian and military officials refuse to be held to account by [foreign] judges."

There's something in the air...

Still, U.S. and international legal advocacy groups praised the judge's decision. The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which have submitted expert reports (pdf) in the proceedings, said Friday that "Miller played a key role in the implementation of the U.S. torture program at Guantánamo prison. It is time he answers for it."

"We commend the French justice system for pursuing its investigation into torture at Guantánamo despite the unwillingness of both Bush and Obama administrations' to cooperate with the investigation," the groups said. "We urge the U.S. to make Miller available for questioning and let this judicial process run its course."

"The French nationals who endured torture at Guantánamo under Miller’s command, and have persisted with this case, deserve their day in court," the groups continued. "As long as the U.S. remains unwilling to fully investigate its torture program and prosecute its architects and senior implementers, justice will be pursued in courts and countries, like France, where it can be found."

Sassi and Benchellali said they were arbitrarily arrested in Pakistan in alleged connection with the September 11 attacks and sent to Guantánamo, where they say they were tortured.

In an interview with France 24 in April, Benchellali said he wanted "redress" for what he endured, stating, "I've been mistreated. I want those responsible to be called to account."

Miller has also been accused of encouraging abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where the general presided for several months between 2003 and 2004. In September 2003, he submitted a report to the U.S. Department of Defense suggesting that prison guards use abusive tactics to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.

Judge criticizes Pentagon suppression of thousands of Bush-era torture photos
Alvin Hellerstein, who presided over 12-year lawsuit to disclose military images of detainee abuse, may force further release of photographs in ‘near future’
us military torture
A composite showing some of the torture images from US military, among 198 photographs released in February. Photograph: Department of Defense
Spencer Ackerman in New York
@attackerman
Wednesday 11 May 2016 16.12 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 11 May 2016 16.19 EDT

A federal judge has sharply rebuked the Pentagon for the process by which it concealed hundreds of Bush-era photos showing US military personnel torturing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggesting Barack Obama may have to release even more graphic imagery of abuse.

Alvin Hellerstein, the senior judge who has presided over a transparency lawsuit for the photos that has lasted more than 12 years, expressed dissatisfaction over the Pentagon’s compliance with an order he issued last year requiring a case-by-case ruling that release of an estimated 1,800 photographs would endanger US troops.

“We don’t know the methodology, we don’t know what was reviewed, we don’t know the criteria, we don’t know the numbers,” Hellerstein said during an hour-long hearing on Wednesday.

Hellerstein said he would formally rule on the matter in the “near future”, a process that may compel the Pentagon to disclose additional photographs.

Tara LaMort, a justice department attorney, argued to Hellerstein that a multi-layered review of the photographs, conducted by the military officers on the Pentagon’s joint staff, had determined that disclosing the vast majority of the photographic treasure trove would provide terrorist groups with propaganda useful for recruitment.

Yet Hellerstein, a Bill Clinton appointee who said he has tried to give Obama and George W Bush deference on keeping potentially inflammatory photos secret, told LaMort that determination was “not enough” for judicial review because it omitted the reasoning behind withholding specific photographs.

“My complaint is there are no articulations,” Hellerstein said. The government “has not said why ‘this particular’ photo is dangerous”.

LaMort acknowledged she was facing an “uphill battle” before the judge, who replied: “I should say: you’re good at that.”

In February, the Pentagon released 198 torture photographs from the hoard, following a certification from defense secretary, Ashton Carter, that they posed a negligible threat to US service members. That certification resulted from Hellerstein’s order in 2015, following an October 2014 ruling, rejecting the position of two US presidents that none of the photographs ought to be made public.

The 198 photos released in February display bruises, bandaged body parts and reddened marks on unidentified detained people. Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sought release of the photographs since 2004, immediately suspected that Carter had only marked the most innocuous of the photographs for release as a means of ending the disclosure lawsuit.

The ACLU has pursued the case for over a decade, through setbacks in both Hellerstein’s courtroom and in higher appellate courts, because it argues that the photographs represent evidence of crimes. Their suppression, the ACLU contends, distorts the historical record about the extent the US engaged in torture.

Published on
Friday, May 13, 2016
byCommon Dreams
Federal Court Blocks 'Truth About Torture' in Ruling on Senate Report
ACLU considering appeal to force release of final 6,000-page report on CIA's torture program
byNadia Prupis, staff writer


"This decision has the disappointing result of keeping the full truth about the CIA torture program from the American public, and we're considering our options for appeal." (Photo: Justin Norman/flickr/cc)
A federal appeals court on Friday rejected a lawsuit that called for the full release of the U.S. Senate's report on the CIA's post-September 11 abuse and torture of detainees.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said the report isn't subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests—ruling against the ACLU, which filed the lawsuit seeking publication of the 6,000-page document.

"This decision has the disappointing result of keeping the full truth about the CIA torture program from the American public, and we're considering our options for appeal," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security project.

Congressional documents are exempt from FOIA rules, but the ACLU argued that the Senate Intelligence Committee gave up control over the report when it handed it over to the White House and other agencies.

The court disagreed. Judge Harry Edwards wrote for the unanimous three-member panel that there was "clear intent by the Senate committee to maintain continuous control over its work product."

Shamsi added that the judges should have "credited the committee's clear intent to disseminate the torture report widely to the executive branch. Instead, the opinion wrongly relies on a years-old agreement between the committee and the CIA that didn't apply to the final version of the report. The committee later sent the report to agencies, with express instructions that it be read and used."

An executive summary of the document, often referred to as the "torture report," was released in 2014. Among its key findings, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the CIA misled policymakers and the public about the nature of the program. The report detailed the agency's brutal treatment of detainees, including through beatings, shackling, death threats, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and sexual assault.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Published on
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
byCommon Dreams
New CIA Documents Reveal More Horrors of President Bush's Torture Program
Heavily redacted trove details death of detainees and draft letter requesting interrogators be protected from prosecution
byNadia Prupis, staff writer

"These records document grave crimes for which no senior official has been held accountable." (Photo: Justin Norman/flickr/cc)
The CIA on Tuesday released dozens of documents detailing its torture and rendition program under the Bush administration, from the horrific treatment of detainees to the agency's 2002 plan to ask the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) not to prosecute interrogators.

The heavily redacted trove of more than 50 documents was published in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year, which sought records referenced in the U.S. Senate's damning report on the CIA's program—commonly referred to as the torture report—released in December 2014.

"These newly declassified records add new detail to the public record of the CIA's torture program and underscore the cruelty of the methods the agency used in its secret, overseas black sites," Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said Tuesday. "It bears emphasis that these records document grave crimes for which no senior official has been held accountable."

Among the cases outlined in the documents is that of 34-year-old Gul Rahman, who was detained by the CIA in 2002 on suspicion of being an al Qaeda operative and who froze to death in one of the agency's secret prisons in Afghanistan. During his captivity in November 2002, Rahman was beaten, doused with cold water, and left shackled in a cold cell, naked from the waist down.

The documents detail Rahman's apparent resistance to the torture, including "[remaining] steadfast in outright denials" and "[complaining] about the violation of his human rights."

Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said the details show that "Rahman was brutalized in part because his torturers decided that complaining about his torture was a form of resistance and he needed to be 'broken.'"

The torture program's architects, CIA-contracted psychologists James Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, are currently facing a lawsuit from Rahman's family.

The documents detail Rahman's apparent resistance to the torture, including "[remaining] steadfast in outright denials" and "[complaining] about the violation of his human rights."
Elsewhere in the files is a draft letter (pdf) prepared by a CIA official for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft that requested the DOJ agree in advance to shield officials involved in the torture program from legal action by federal prosecutors. The request concerned interrogators involved in the torture of "ghost prisoner" Abu Zubaydah, who was abducted in Pakistan and transferred to U.S. authorities in 2002 and has remained at the Guantánamo Bay military prison since 2006 without trial.

The letter reads:

Nonetheless, the interrogation team has now concluded...that the use of more aggressive methods is required to persuade Abu Zubaydah to provide critical information we need to safeguard the lives of innumerable innocent men, women, and children in the United States and abroad. These methods include certain activities that normally would appear to be prohibited [....] I respectfully request that you grant a formal declination of prosecution, in advance, for any employees of the United States, as well as any personnel acting on behalf of the United States, who may employ methods in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that otherwise might subject those individuals to prosecution.

Rights groups condemned the details found in the documents, which also included the CIA's concerns that tortured detainees should be prevented from seeing representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for the rest of their lives.

"We’re seeing just how much Mitchell, Jessen, and their CIA co-conspirators knew that what they were doing was wrong and illegal. They talked about seeking a get-out-of-jail-free card for torturing people, and then discussed how to make sure their victims were silenced forever, even if they survived their torture," Ladin said.

The documents also redacted nearly all mention of the CIA's Office of Medical Services, which was ostensibly in charge of detainees' care.

Physicians for Human Rights medical director Dr. Vincent Iacopino added, "We continue to be stunned by the CIA's audacity in suppressing all details related to the role medical officials played in the agency's brutal torture program....This wholesale redaction is part of the CIA's pattern of concealing evidence of its crimes, and it suggests U.S. government officials are still trying to avoid any and all liability for torturing detainees."

Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets
The first part of the inside story of the Senate investigation into torture, the crisis with the CIA it spurred and the man whose life would never be the same
Support the Guardian’s fearless journalism by making a contribution
by Spencer Ackerman in Washington
Friday 9 September 2016 07.10 EDT 303 Shares


When he needed to take something out of the secure room where he read mountains of their classified material, they typically obliged. An informal understanding had taken hold after years of working together, usually during off-peak hours, so closely that Jones had parking privileges at an agency satellite office not far from its McLean, Virginia, headquarters. They would ask Jones if anything he wanted to remove contained real names or cover names of any agency officials, assets or partners, or anything that could compromise an operation. He would say no. They would nod, he would wish them a good night, and they would go their separate ways.


After midnight in the summer of 2013, Jones deliberately violated that accord.

Jones, a counter-terrorism staffer, had become the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee, the CIA’s congressional overseer, on its biggest inquiry. For five years, he had been methodically sifting through internal CIA accounts of its infamous torture program, a process that had begun after the committee learned – thanks to a New York Times article, not the agency – that a senior official had destroyed videotapes that recorded infamously brutal interrogations. The subsequent committee inquiry had deeply strained a relationship with Langley that both sides badly wanted to maintain. The source of that strain was simple: having read millions of internal emails, cables and accounts of agency torture, Jones had come to believe everything the CIA had told Congress, the Bush and Obama White Houses and the public was a lie.


Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA's 'failed coverup' of torture report
Read more
There was one document in particular that proved it. Jones and his team had found it years before, placed mysteriously onto a shared computer network drive the Senate intelligence committee investigators were using in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. But they hadn’t appreciated its full significance until the agency, in an attempt at refuting a report that was still far from publication, told Barack Obama’s staff that the committee was pushing a hysterical interpretation of the agency’s fateful post-9/11 embrace of torture. The document, prepared for Leon Panetta when he was CIA director, had reached the same conclusions about the torture program that Jones had. As long as Jones had it, he would be able to show that the agency knew full well how brutal the torture was; how ineffective its torturers considered it to be; and how thoroughly the CIA had covered all of that up.

As long as Jones had the document, that is. Lurking in the back of his mind was the event that had led him to devote five years of ceaseless work, through nights and weekends: the CIA had already destroyed evidence of torture. It did that before the Senate had launched an investigation, and long before that investigation had turned acrimonious.

Inside the small room in Virginia the CIA had set up for the Senate investigators, Jones reached for his canvas messenger bag. He slipped crucial printed-out passages of what he called the Panetta Review into the bag and secured its lock. Sometime after 1am, Jones walked out, carrying his bag as he always did, and neglecting to tell the agency security personnel what it contained. After years of working together, no one asked him to open the bag.

Outside the CIA satellite office in Virginia
McClean, Virginia
Jones walked to the parking lot until he found his black Porsche Boxster. He tossed the bag onto the passenger seat and drove across the Potomac river, not stopping until he reached the Hart Senate office building on Capitol Hill. It was hours before dawn, but Jones walked into the building, sped to the second floor where the committee did its work, and placed the locked bag into a committee safe.

We had crossed a bridge. For the first time we had knowingly violated a CIA agreement
Daniel Jones
Jones, by accord, had significant access to classified agency material. He would not be leaking the Panetta Review to the public. He was ensuring its preservation so Congress could exercise its constitutionally mandated oversight on an agency with a vivid recent history of document destruction on precisely this issue. But Jones, in his first-ever interview, acknowledged to the Guardian: “We had crossed a bridge. For the first time we had knowingly violated a CIA agreement.”

It was an unfathomable turn of events, and it would have severe repercussions. Jones had years of training and experience handling classified material: before joining the Senate committee staff, he was an FBI counter-terrorism analyst. The Senate committee was not favorably inclined toward absconding with intelligence documents: its leadership was spending summer 2013 excoriating NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a traitor. But, Jones said: “I was afraid [the document] would be destroyed … I was the one saying, ‘We have to do this.’”

Jones takes “full responsibility” for taking the document, but will not clarify who actually made the decision. Senators on the committee say they learned about it after the fact rather than directing him to take the document, and support the decision to this day.

“I don’t disagree with it. I mean, look, Director [John] Brennan tried very hard to cover up the Panetta Review,” said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and longtime intelligence committee member.


The Panetta Review saga would spur a furious CIA to take an extraordinary step: it would spy on its own legislative overseers – especially Jones. The episode would spill out publicly the following March, when top committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who had already taken a huge political risk in pushing the torture inquiry, accused the CIA on the Senate floor of triggering what she called a constitutional crisis. Both sides requested the justice department pursue a criminal investigation on the other. The bitterness would nearly overshadow a landmark report, a fraction of which was released to the public in December 2014, that documented in chilling detail the depravations CIA inflicted on terrorism suspects after 9/11.

The CIA has stopped defending its torture program but not its personnel. While it has reknit its relationship to the committee, thanks to a GOP leadership that has all but disavowed the torture investigation, it continues to maintain that the torture report is inaccurate. Obama, whose trusted aide John Brennan runs the CIA, kept the report at arm’s length, with his administration declining even to read it.

But the CIA has gone beyond successfully suppressing the report. In a grim echo of Jones’s fears, the agency’s inspector general, Langley recently revealed, destroyed its copy – allegedly an accident. Accountability for torture has been the exclusive province of a committee investigation greeted with antipathy by Obama. While Obama prides himself on ending CIA torture, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has vowed if elected to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. Key CIA leaders defending the agency against the committee, including Brennan and former director Michael Morrell, are reportedly seeking to run Langley under Hillary Clinton.

This is the inside story of the Senate investigation into torture and the crisis with the CIA it spurred. It is formed from interviews with critical players in the drama, supported by voluminous internal reports and publicly available documents. Jones agreed to provide new details but would not discuss classified information with the Guardian.

When it came time for Brennan to talk publicly about the Senate inquiry, long after Jones’s predawn drive, he spent five minutes fitting the CIA’s torturers into the context of 9/11. But 9/11 changed Jones’s life as well.

A native of central Pennsylvania, Jones, now 41 years old, taught in Baltimore in his early 20s as part of the Teach for America program encouraging service in inner-city schools. After 9/11, he recalled, he wanted to influence public policy over the emerging war on terrorism, and sought work on Capitol Hill. An aide to Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic leader, advised Jones to instead spend several years at a counter-terrorism agency, like the CIA or FBI. The aide would eventually cross paths with Jones in a different capacity – he was Denis McDonough, the Obama confidant who would become White House chief of staff.


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Daniel Jones: the Senate staffer spied on by the CIA
Jones arrived at the FBI in 2003 and spent the next four years there. The bureau was in the midst of a transformation: a generation after Congress had drastically reduced its domestic intelligence-gathering functions, following Nixon-era scandals, 9/11 had compelled its re-entry into the business of pre-empting homegrown terrorists. Jones set up shop in the counter-terrorism division as an analyst, primarily focused on al-Qaida and Sunni extremist groups and occasionally traveling overseas for his work. At one point, he was even detailed to the CIA.

But his future in the bureau was always limited, as he wasn’t a special agent, the field operatives who form the heart of the FBI. Sticking to his plan, Jones arrived on the Hill in January 2007, where his intelligence credentials helped find him a place working for Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat and the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.

Rockefeller told the Guardian that while Jones’s FBI experience qualified him to work on counter-terrorism issues on the committee, Jones’s time as a Baltimore teacher attracted Rockefeller’s interest.

“His decision to make this contribution before he began his career in national security told me something about his character and it was something to which I could relate. He impressed me then and I have only come to admire him more in the years since,” Rockefeller, who retired from the Senate in 2015, said.

The intelligence committee is a culture all to itself. Unlike most congressional panels, the vast majority of its work occurs in secret. It is term-limited, so members’ expertise levels vary. The byzantine rules of classification restrict staffers who might bolster legislators’ knowledge from accessing significant relevant information. Membership, particularly on committee leadership, instantly boosts the profile of ambitious legislators, who become de facto surrogates for intelligence officials on cable news. All of this means that a committee tasked as the primary avenue for imposing accountability on secret agencies faces the ever-present risk of becoming captive to the agencies they oversee.

Daniel Jones
Daniel Jones
Photograph: Laurence Mathieu-Léger for the Guardian
Each element of the 16-agency intelligence community responds to the committee differently. As every intelligence service carries an inherent risk of scandal, they all have an abiding interest in keeping the panel on its side. The National Security Agency, the most powerful and technically sophisticated aspect of US intelligence, tends to send briefers to the Hill who wax loquaciously about the complicated details of its digital surveillance – which lends them an advantage over legislators afraid to admit what they don’t understand. The CIA, however, tends to duck uncomfortable questions by telling senators they’ll send responses later, the better to ensure accurate answers, and secure in the knowledge that busy legislators won’t often follow up. Yet its high-handed style tends not to provoke legislators who would prefer a close relationship with an agency many are inclined to see as performing unsavory tasks for the greater national good.

The committee’s internal politics also operate outside the partisan straightjackets that the broader Congress eagerly wears. Aside from the vanishingly few public hearings it holds – an annual threat briefing, a budget briefing, nominations for senior intelligence appointees – its work occurs in secret. That secrecy prevents the public from knowing the overwhelming amount of activity about its intelligence services. It also affords committee members the leeway to take positions in tensions with party leadership or to ask questions of intelligence briefers that don’t track conveniently with what their more ideological constituents would prefer. While there is a limit to how bipartisan or cross-ideological the committee will behave – former staffers are quick to point out that their work still occurs on the hyper-partisan Hill – both senators and staff describe the closed-door committee work as a venue where unity concerning national security can occur.

“It’s absolutely what people hope Congress is,” Jones recalled.

The torture report began in such a manner.

In November 2005, a senior CIA official named Jose Rodriguez destroyed 92 videotapes depicting the brutal 2002 interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abdel Rahim Nashiri. Rodriguez’s tapes destruction remained a secret to his congressional overseers for two years, until a 6 December 2007 New York Times article revealed it; they barely even knew the CIA taped interrogations at all. Outrage was swift and, while tilted toward the Democrats, bipartisan, to include the éminences grises of the 9/11 commission. Even the US justice department began an ultimately fruitless inquiry. The Senate committee, then controlled by the Democrat Rockefeller, demanded an explanation.

Abu Zubaydah.
Abu Zubaydah. Photograph: AP
Michael Hayden, the CIA director, provided an assurance. The CIA did not destroy evidence, Hayden told them, because the agency had extensive records of the interrogations, from field cables, memoranda and internal emails. It was the first time the committee had learned about the documentation of one of the agency’s major operations. Jones, a committee lawyer named Alissa Starkzak and two Republican staffers were tasked with combing through Langley archives and documenting what would have been on the destroyed tapes.

Both Jones and Starkzak – who declined comment to the Guardian – knew they would be looking through a soda straw. (The GOP staffers stopped coming to Langley after two or three visits, Jones recalls.) The material they reviewed covered only April to December of 2002. It occurred around only one black site, in Thailand, and concerned just two detainees. The heavily redacted material went only one way: cables back to headquarters, containing nothing about what agency leaders instructed their field operatives to do. Yet the material was extensive: the paper documents the agency permitted the staffers to see looked to Jones like an Encyclopedia Britannica.

What they found, over a half a year’s work examining just two detainees’ interrogations from the first year of the torture program, shocked them. It was widely known by 2008 that Abu Zubaydah was tortured. But Jones and Starkzak did not expect to see internal accounts detailing, by the minute, what the CIA did to him. They didn’t know, for instance, that interrogators had tortured him to the point that he would obey, like a dog, when they would snap their fingers, nor that they left a man suspected of knowing al-Qaida’s secrets alone for 47 days. The cables describe Abu Zubaydah as kept naked, filthy, stinking, shaking with fear, shoved inside a filth-riddled wooden box, defecating on himself. Agency personnel, in the official communications, get emotional and request transfers rather than continue torturing men they come to believe lack relevant information on terrorism. It immediately raised the question of what the CIA was really doing to dozens of other detainees at its black sites.

“I don’t think the CIA even knew what they were giving us, to be honest,” Jones said.

“These cables were the most graphic of all the cables to exist. Later on, as you go through the program, the cables get less and less detailed. To the credit of the agency personnel who were working on it, they were very detailed. … Everything that we were told was basically the opposite of what happened.”

That detail gave Jones his first recognition of the gulf between what the CIA actually did and what it told everyone outside of Langley that it did. Jones ended up creating a 29-page Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of the early days of CIA torture.

Behind closed doors in the Hart building, Jones presented his findings to the committee on 11 February 2009. Both Republicans and Democrats were shocked by “the incredible brutality of the program at a level beyond which anybody imagined,” Jones said.

The Hart Senate office building
11 February 2009
senate-building
“At the back of the report, for what we called the ‘tapes investigation’, the staff created a chart that depicted the most torturous 17 days of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation. It was almost a minute-by-minute chronology of what the CIA was doing to Abu Zubaydah, and how Abu Zubaydah reacted,” recalled Rockefeller.

“I think everyone on the committee – Democrat and Republican alike – was quite taken by this section of the report. It was hard to deny the ineffectiveness of the CIA interrogations, the brutality, or the fact that the committee had been deeply misled by the CIA.”

Some senators, particularly Republicans, were taken aback at the idea that the CIA would perform such acts. But Jones’s presentations that CIA interrogators knew the torture was useless – contradicting years of agency spin – did not attract significant interest from the senators.

“To me, I thought that’s what people would be taken with – holy shit, we’ve been sold a bill of goods,” he said. “But what they were really taken with was the brutality. … There was a bipartisan consensus that this can’t be the end, there’s got to be a final product, there’s got to be more here.”

I don’t think the CIA even knew what they were giving us
Daniel Jones
Less than a month later, on 5 March 2009, the committee voted 14-1 to expand the investigation, the dissenting vote being Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss. Instead of examining Rodriguez’s destruction of the videotapes, now the Senate committee would investigate the entire torture program. Part of Jones’s new mandate was to assess whether the CIA “accurately described” its torture program within the Bush administration and to Congress. Still, some of the Republican members imposed limits on the investigation’s scope: Jones couldn’t look at the Bush White House, just the CIA.

The announced inquiry came at an uncomfortable time for the CIA and the White House. Since Obama won the presidency in November, human rights groups had spent four months pressing for a reckoning with torture.

While Obama shut down the torture program on his second day in office, he also said that his focus as president would be to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards”. A senior campaign aide and former senior CIA official, John Brennan, became his chief White House adviser for counter-terrorism, a signal that Obama did not wish to have antagonistic relations with Langley. His choice for CIA director, after Brennan’s equivocations on torture raised red flags for liberals, was Leon Panetta, a longtime Democratic congressman and consummate insider.


President-elect Barack Obama in January 2009.
Obama’s eagerness to turn the page on torture alarmed some of his allies. The Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Patrick Leahy and John Conyers, were pushing for broad investigations into both torture and mass surveillance.

In February 2009, Antonio Taguba, the army major general who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib, joined a coalition of 18 human rights groups pressing Obama and the Democratic Congress for an independent truth commission on torture. They had support from very senior Democratic legislators, including House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy and House judiciary chairman John Conyers. Activists petitioned attorney general Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor for the agency.

If the White House and the CIA didn’t like the intelligence committee looking into the CIA’s recent past, they would like an unpredictable 9/11 Commission-style panel and an independent prosecutor far less. The secretive panel, with its longstanding ties to Langley and its Democratic leadership, seemed like a safer option. An added political benefit was the committee’s new chair: Dianne Feinstein of California, who had a long history of disappointing liberals over national security.

Still, the CIA had some caveats.

Usually, when the Senate committee investigates the intelligence agencies, it does so on its home territory. The business of the committee, to include investigations, occurs in secure, locked rooms at the Hart building. Members and staff leave their phones outside; staff who lack the appropriate security clearances do not enter. The entire premise of the intelligence committees, established in the 1970s, was their unique fitness within Congress to handle classified material in order to provide accountability on secret agencies.

Panetta wanted a different arrangement. The CIA was forecasting the provision of between three and six million pages of relevant documents. Panetta’s aides voiced concern that they could not abide names of operatives, locations of black sites and countries cooperating in the torture program transiting to Capitol Hill. Either the committee would have to wait on the delivery of the documents until after the agency painstakingly redacted its material – a process with no defined endpoint and likely to last months, if not years – or it could set up shop in a satellite CIA facility in northern Virginia.

Leon Panetta
Leon Panetta
At CIA headquarters in Langley in February 2009. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
“Every other investigation the committee conducted when I was chairman was done from the intelligence committee’s offices – offices that are fully secured and certified to hold the most sensitive and classified information that exists,” said Rockefeller.

“The CIA’s detention and interrogation program was the exception.”

The proposed arrangement discomfited the committee. Both Jones and Louis Tucker, the GOP staff director, agreed that the investigation should unfold in the Hart building, the same as any the panel would conduct.

Feinstein was giving their concerns teeth. Her meetings with Panetta, whose “intelligence and integrity” she praised in his confirmation hearing that February, showed a hard edge. Behind closed doors, in early June, Feinstein pressed Panetta for access to documents. Panetta, a salty politician, raised his voice, referenced their long history together, and said she was asking for unprecedented access. Feinstein raised hers back, and threatened to send subpoenas to the CIA. Here were two fixtures of decades of California Democratic politics, sizing each other up to determine who would dominate whom.

But the committee had to consider the reality of the task it was confronting. It had taken over a year to investigate just two interrogations related to the tapes, and in truth, primarily one, as Nashiri did not come into CIA custody at the Thai black site until December 2002, the tail end of the period Jones and Stanzak investigated. The CIA did not produce any documents until the middle of 2008. How much time would they lose if they waited for the agency to redact at least 3m documents concerning more than 100 detainees?

Everything that we were told was basically the opposite of what happened
Dan Jones
The CIA offer came to look acceptable. Jones and his team would drive out to the satellite location. They would have an office, lit bright white and windowless, in its basement. While there, Jones believed, they would receive access to a computer network, known as RDINet – for “Rendition, Detention and Interrogation” – hived off from the internet, accessible to them alone, onto which the CIA would place the documents. It was unusual, but they found, compared to the alternatives, they could live with it. Jones’s team set to work at the site on 18 May.

Days later, Panetta and Feinstein came to a final agreement on access. Several letters document their accord, with a final one from Panetta on 12 June saying “an agreement was reached between CIA and SSCI staff personnel regarding operating procedures for the SSCI review of material related to the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs.” The letter said the CIA would establish “a walled-off network share-drive” that only the Senate staff would access for work, and that “CIA access to the walled off network shared drive will be limited to CIA information technology staff, except as authorized by the committee or its staff.”

CIA
Letter dated 12 June 2009 from CIA director Panetta to Dianne Feinstein. Photograph: CIA
An earlier accord, dated 28 May, also referred to establishing a “share-drive [that] can be segregated with only SSCI access and walled-off CIA IT administrators, except as otherwise authorized by SSCI.” That document was titled Memorandum of Understanding Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Review of CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program – something agency reviews would later claim, as controversy over the inquiry reached a crisis point, did not exist.

Ironically for an agency whose concerns were premised on security breaches, now it had to hire IT contractors to set up the network for the committee staff. Documents did not actually arrive until 22 June, and then, they were maddeningly difficult to search through, as the agency insisted on using an obscure and not terribly functional search tool. The staff the CIA posted to liaise with the investigators were “openly hostile”, Jones said, and dragged their feet on responding to Jones’s concerns.

Then the CIA was hit by what seemed like a bombshell. In August 2009, US attorney general Eric Holder expanded the remit of the prosecutor looking at the tapes destruction, John Durham, to include the torture program, much as the Senate committee had. The justice department’s new mandate was not as broad as the Senate’s. It would only concern itself with torture that exceeded the boundaries set for the CIA by the Bush-era justice department. Still, for all of Obama’s emphasis on looking forward and not backward, now the CIA had to face its greatest fear since launching the torture program: possible prosecution.

Holder’s decision, ironically, would ultimately hinder the committee more than the CIA, and lead to a criticism that the agency would later use as a cudgel against the Senate.

Typically, when the justice department and congressional inquiries coincide, the two will communicate in order to deconflict their tasks and their access. In the case of the dual torture investigations, it should have been easy: Durham’s team accessed CIA documents in the exact same building that Jones’s team did.

But every effort Jones made to talk with Durham failed. “Even later, he refused to meet with us,” Jones said.

Through a spokesman, Durham, an assistant US attorney in Connecticut, declined to be interviewed for this story.

The lack of communication had serious consequences. Without Durham specifying who at CIA he did and did not need to interview, Jones could interview no one, as the CIA would not make available for congressional interview people potentially subject to criminal penalty. Jones could not even get Durham to confirm which agency officials prosecutors had no interest in interviewing. “Regrettably, that made it difficult for our committee to do interviews. So the judgment was, use the record,” said Wyden, the Oregon Democrat on the panel.

But when the Senate investigators discovered discrepancies between what the cables they read indicated and what CIA leaders represented internally or publicly, they would be unable to solicit answers from the people in question.

Durham’s investigation led to the first partisan break on the committee. The committee’s vice-chairman and top Republican, Kit Bond of Missouri, informed Feinstein that GOP members and staff were withdrawing. The special prosecutor had put the committee – and CIA officials – in an untenable position, Bond said publicly on 25 September: “What current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the committee’s questions?”

By then, the Republican staff had largely withdrawn from the investigation already, with many not bothering to show up to the Virginia facility. Feinstein had already complained about that to Bond in early April. And other strains were evident in the committee’s bipartisanship: a top Republican aide, Kathleen Rice, maintained it would be too onerous to require the CIA to list for the investigators all its black-site detainees.

Bond did not stop at withholding Republican support for the investigation.

In early April 2010, Feinstein, frustrated with the lack of access to agency personnel, wrote to Panetta requesting interviews. It was a preliminary step: at that point, she sought little more than Panetta’s assurance to begin processing interviews on the committee’s behalf.

Dianne Feinstein
Dianne Feinstein
Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
Bond rejected Feinstein’s request – not only in a letter to her two weeks later, but in a letter to Panetta a few days after that, urging him not to make CIA officials available to the committee. His stated rationale was the same: steering agency employees out of criminal danger. But as Bond also objected to document requests of the sort Panetta had already agreed to provide, Jones suspected other motives.

Jones had lost the support of the committee Republicans. “At this point, they’re working on behalf of CIA,” he said. Bond did not reply to a request for an interview.

Panetta, and his successors, never approved any interviews the committee sought with agency personnel. It wasn’t only officials involved in the program who were constrained in speaking with Jones. In October 2009, during a visit to Langley, Jones sought to interview staff from the inspector general’s office, which had investigated interrogations in 2004. Stephen Preston, the CIA’s lead attorney, stood in the hallway outside his office and insisted he be able to attend the meeting, explicitly to monitor what they discussed on behalf of Panetta. Voices were raised, and Jones’s team marched out of Langley rather than hold the meeting on those terms. Preston – who declined comment to the Guardian – finally relented, and an unmonitored meeting occurred the following month.

“When Director Panetta agreed to provide [the committee] with unprecedented access to CIA documents to pursue its review, the Office of General Counsel was established as the sole conduit for requests and responses to the committee,” said CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani.

“There was a meeting with [committee] staff and OIG where the General Counsel participated in that role. It is our understanding that when topics moved to issues unrelated to the review, the General Counsel left and the meeting between [committee] staff and the OIG proceeded.”

Jones’s fight with the CIA was just beginning.

It turned out that those contractors the committee thought the CIA hired to aid in collecting responsive documents were also acting as gatekeepers. They would review torture documents three times before disseminating them to the investigators to determine not only relevance, but whether higher-ups ought to make the call to turn them over. In some cases, the chain went up to the White House, to review for executive privilege – advisory conversations with White House staff, a broad category that typically keeps a record within the hands of an administration.

White House counsel Greg Craig, his successor Bob Bauer, and Don Verilli were involved in the review, with their colleague Kate Shaw trekking to the off-site location. The attorneys would describe the documents flagged for them to Jones and Starkzak, case by case, and ask if they were interested in them. In several cases, the volume of documents meant the CIA had already unwittingly turned over copies of documents flagged for executive privilege review – and, once informed of that, the White House attorneys would roll their eyes and move on.

The White House involvement helped Feinstein navigate the first outright crisis in CIA-committee relations over the torture inquiry. In March 2010 Jones and his colleagues started noticing that they had difficulty accessing documents they knew they already had. Simple search terms weren’t retrieving certain records anymore.

“We noticed they were gone right away,” Jones said.

It would have been easy to disappear documents, even in substantial amounts. The agency had provided millions of pages. The only way it could have happened was for the agency to have removed the information from a computer network the CIA set up for the Senate that Jones did not know the agency could access.

Confronted, the CIA pointed to the tech consultants. Then they pointed the finger at the White House, suggesting that Obama’s attorneys ordered them to remove the documents – a much bigger accusation, with serious implications. Feinstein, alarmed, turned to the White House, and on 12 March, Jones met with White House lawyers, who denied ordering the removal of anything.

In a process that remains opaque to Jones, the CIA investigated internally and, months later, determined they had removed over 900 documents from the committee. It happened twice – with another, smaller wave of removals occurring in May, months after Feinstein first brought the issue to the White House. And it was a violation of the agreements the agency had reached with the committee about the conduct of the inquiry.

“This really upset us early on, because it would never have happened if we had conducted this investigation like we conducted every other CIA and intelligence community investigation, which is that it happens at our location, on our computers,” Jones said.

Ultimately, new White House counsel Bauer conveyed verbally to the chairwoman that the CIA would not remove any more documents. On 17 May, the CIA apologized to Feinstein as well. The committee never got the removed documents back, but at least had alternate copies of some .

“It wasn’t like, we thought, they would enter into our computers and search them, or go through them,” Jones said, with a wry laugh.

Around then, the CIA’s contractor staff largely turned over. The new crew were “more cordial, open, informal”, Jones remembered. (“Those working relationships were professional and I am unaware of any need for bolstering,” the CIA’s Trapani said.) They dragged their feet on document requests less. Some would even complain, in shared frustration with Jones’s team, that their superiors were taking too long to release material.

Jones attempted to accommodate his CIA counterparts. Agency officials would occasionally come to him, expressing concern that some documents they provided were marginally related to interrogations, but they contained information about ongoing and unrelated operations. Some of them contained material that was especially sensitive, particularly for contemporary agency activities, but didn’t shed significant light on torture. He let them “pull the documents … This happened throughout, even up until the very end.”

The agency made other changes that eased the committee’s task. Later in 2010, CIA got rid of the clunky old search tool, following longstanding complaints from both Jones and Durham’s investigators, and replaced the network search function with a Google interface. Easier sifting was “hugely important”, Jones said, as the agency kept piling material on.

This would never have happened if we had conducted this investigation … at our location, our computers
Daniel Jones
The year 2010 gave way to 2011 and 2012. Panetta left to run the Pentagon and David Petraeus, the retired general, took his place. Petraeus seemed “supportive” of the inquiry, recalled Jones. Yet as the committee staff worked nights and weekends at the satellite CIA office, some wondered if the deluge of documentation was a tactic to ensure the investigation collapsed under the weight of accumulated material.

Even with the glut of documentation, the Senate team did not have sufficient evidence to give an account of a major aspect of the CIA’s post-9/11 apparatus: rendition.

Renditions, used before 9/11, were extrajudicial transfers of captured people; after 9/11, a variant, called “extraordinary rendition”, sent captives to the custody of allied intelligence services, neither American nor the country of a detainee’s origin. Some of the CIA’s closest rendition partners worked for the world’s most brutal dictators: Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.

The rendition infrastructure was even bigger than that of the black sites, which the CIA itself ran. More detainees ran through it than the at least 119 held at the black sites. But once detainees moved into a different intelligence service’s custody, the records the CIA retained of them were scant, or secondhand, or both. It posed a problem for an investigation that sought rigorous internal documentation for every claim it would make. The more time the Senate spent attempting to run down rendition leads, the more it would delay its investigation of the CIA’s interrogations and detentions. And after all, the mandate for the inquiry set by the committee was to determine what the CIA did to men it detained, not what its partners did.

“It was a killer not to cover it, but you’ve got to draw a line,” Jones said. Much CIA documentation the committee had referring to rendition amounted to “hearsay”, not enough to responsibly present.

“Those rendition records don’t involve people who were technically detained by the CIA. These are transients. The records are just not there.”

But the consequence of that decision was profound. While ultimately the classified version of Jones’s report would contain information on CIA renditions, the vast majority of the CIA’s renditions operations – operations that left still-untold numbers of people disappeared, severely wounded, and likely worse – have been lost to history.

Among legislators, the inquiry became background noise. Bond had relinquished the vice-chairmanship to Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, who in 2009 had been the only dissenting vote against launching the investigation. Feinstein, on five different occasions, asked the GOP to rejoin the inquiry, to no avail.

It took until August 2012 for the CIA to cease the bulk document production. (The CIA disputes this, and Trapani said it continued to “facilitate and support” Senate document access until December 2014.) By then, the staff estimated they had the equivalent of two urban libraries. Jones had been writing the classified report incrementally. Starting in October 2011, Feinstein had him send pieces of the report to the committee, Democrats and Republicans, so no one was taken by surprise.

In December 2012, Jones finished the report. It was at that point 6,200 pages long and entirely secret. In a sign of the diminished partisan consensus around torture, the vote to adopt the report was 9-6, with Maine moderate Olympia Snowe the only Republican to assent. Now would come the next fight: to declassify the report.

But since the committee had a more immediate task, Feinstein and the Democrats decided to leverage it. On 7 February 2013, Obama confidant John Brennan had his confirmation hearing with the panel to run his beloved CIA. By now, the CIA had overcome its major fear over torture accountability: Durham’s investigation had concluded in summer 2012 and had prosecuted no one. There would be no criminal accountability for torture, and it was an open question whether the public would ever read Jones’s report. The committee sought Brennan’s attitude toward the inquiry.

John Brennan
John Brennan
Brennan is sworn in to testify at his confirmation hearing on 7 February 2013. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters
Brennan equivocated on torture throughout the hearing. Although he was the agency’s deputy executive director when the program began, he minimized his knowledge of it. (A former CIA officer who has long known Brennan and who has since criticized torture, Glenn Carle, told the Guardian: “He has never been a proponent of this stuff.”) Brennan called waterboarding “reprehensible” but would not, under repeated questioning, call it torture. He promised outright to provide the committee with his “full and honest views” after reading the torture report, but when pressed on declassifying it, said: “I would have to take that declassification request under serious consideration, obviously.”

No response was forthcoming to the declassification request. But on 27 June 2013, the CIA sent a 100-plus page response to the committee raising a host of objections to the Senate’s conclusions.

The agency dissented from the conclusion that torture “did not produce unique intelligence that led terrorist plots to be disrupted, terrorists to be captured, or lives to be saved.” That “flawed conclusion” led to another, the agency claimed: that the CIA “resisted internal and external oversight and deliberately misrepresented to Congress, the executive branch, the media, and the American people” the truth about its torture.

Rejecting an assessment that the agency “misrepresented” the program – lied about torture, less euphemistically – the agency said: “The factual record maintained by the agency does not support such conclusions.”

Jones was stunned, and for a very particular reason. For years, he had been in possession of a specific agency document that not only supported those conclusions, it reached them itself – what a senator on the committee, Mark Udall of Colorado, would later call a “smoking gun”.

The document was the Panetta Review. Much of it remains a mystery to Jones even today: whether he or another staffer found it on the network, whether the agency meant them to receive it, or if an agency whistleblower slipped it onto the Senate drive. Nor does the CIA have an answer to the puzzle: “CIA does not know how [Senate] staff acquired the unauthorized documents,” Trapani said. But Jones recalls discovering it around 2010 and “pretty immediately” understanding its significance.

“When we saw this document, we weren’t like, ‘Oh, great, we got the CIA.’ It was: ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, thank God – we’re not crazy,’” he said. “This was high stakes. A lot was riding on it. It was a relief.”

They called it the Panetta Review because the agency prepared a summary of its renditions, detentions and interrogations work for Director Panetta, who had come to Langley after Obama shut the program down. One version was a Microsoft Word document, clearly a draft, with the function allowing users to see each others’ changes enabled. Another version, apparently more final, was a PDF. Iterations by CIA were clear on view: “You could see the attorneys looking at it and saying, ‘Well, let’s make sure we can back this up, can you add more citations?’”

The final version of the Panetta Review, Jones said, was more than 1,000 pages long. The CIA has represented it as “summaries of documents being provided to the [committee] … highlighting the most noteworthy information contained in the millions of pages of documents being made available,” as agency attorney Martha Lutz would tell a court after Vice reporter Jason Leopold sought to acquire the still-classified document. Jones said that description is incorrect.

“It’s a narrative, plain and simple. ‘This is Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation.’ ‘This is KSM [Khalid Shaikh Mohammed].’ They’re topic oriented: ‘These are the inaccurate things we told the president.’ It’s a final findings document. It has 13 findings. And one is, basically, they provided inaccurate information to support the use of EITs,” or enhanced interrogation techniques, the agency’s preferred euphemism for torture.

Lutz would later tell a federal court that “even the post polished versions remained drafts and were subject to change”. The CIA stopped compiling the Panetta Review in 2010 after Durham told Preston that CIA risked complicating any prosecution if it “made different judgments than the prosecutors had reached”, Charlie Savage reported in his 2015 book Power Wars.

What’s so shocking about that is that we thought this problem … was limited to the Bush administration
Dan Jones
Useful as the document was, it took on brand new significance now that the CIA was denying the conclusions that it had endorsed in the Panetta Review.

“I did not think they were going to say: ‘None of this is right, you’re all wrong.’ I expected to receive the Panetta Review,” Jones said.

“What’s so shocking about that is that we thought this problem – the CIA providing inaccurate information to the president – was limited to the Bush administration, to [ex-directors] Tenet, Goss and Hayden. This is John Brennan’s CIA, Obama’s CIA. There’s a famous picture of Brennan briefing the president with their response in May of 2013, before we received their response. They’re providing inaccurate information to the president of the United States in the present day.”

Obama, Brennan and McDonough
Obama, Brennan and McDonough
Barack Obama talks with John Brennan, center, and chief of staff Denis McDonough in the West Wing of the White House, May 2013. Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House
And the CIA, Jones knew, had a very recent history of destroying videotapes recording torture. It was the reason he had spent five and a half years sifting through the agency’s darkest secrets. Even more recently, the CIA had removed hundreds of documents, surreptitiously and in violation of the understanding the committee thought it reached with the agency, from the Senate files.

Jones walked to his car and drove to the satellite CIA office. His life would never be the same.

Next: ‘A constitutional crisis.’ An incensed CIA spies on Jones. Accusations fly between the CIA and the Senate.

Prison officials visited CIA "dungeon," but kept no record of the trip

NEW YORK — The Bureau of Prisons has acknowledged for the first time that two of its officials traveled 14 years ago to a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan, where they provided training to staff at a facility once described by an intelligence official as “the closest thing he has seen to a dungeon.”

The admission came Thursday in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, which sued in April after the Bureau of Prisons denied having any record of involvement with the detention site.

The Bureau of Prisons’ November 2002 visit to the site — known interchangeably as “The Salt Pit” and COBALT — was documented in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture, interrogation and detention, which was released in 2014.

The report notes that prison officials determined the site was “not inhumane” despite seeing detainees who were forced to stand for days naked and shackled to walls in total darkness, “in a facility that was described to be 45 degrees Fahrenheit.” Loud music played around the clock and the detainees were given only buckets for their waste.

The CIA asked for the Bureau of Prisons inspection, because agents worried conditions were too harsh for them to elicit reliable intelligence, according to the Senate report.

Some detainees “’literally looked like (dogs) that had been kenneled,” one interrogator said, according to the Senate report. “When the doors to their cells were opened, ‘they cowered.’”

image6368643x.jpg
Gul Rahman (pictured) died in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002, after being shackled to a cold cement wall in a secret CIA prison in northern Kabul known as the Salt Pit. AP PHOTO/HABIB RAHMAN, HO
During the prison officials’ visit, one detainee, Gul Rahman, died from apparent hypothermia, “naked except for a sweatshirt,” the report said. Rahman was well-known in Afghanistan after an earlier incident in which he rescued the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, while wading through rocket and small-arms fire.

Prison officials said they were “wow’ed” and had “never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived,” according to the Senate report.

The Bureau of Prisons is a domestic law enforcement agency that does not have the authority to classify intelligence information. The agency explained in the legal filing on Thursday that the two officials who visited the detention site were told by the CIA “that they were not permitted to discuss their participation in this training, or to create or retain any records of the training or their involvement.”

NO RECORDS RETAINED. (p. 11)
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Despite the extraordinary, and rare, assignment to travel to a war zone, one of the two officials told a Bureau of Prisons lawyer this year that he “never saw a written request .... rather, his supervisor orally tasked him to participate.”

That same prisons official conducted training for the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, and was allowed to produce limited documentation of that assignment.

Carl Takei, the ACLU attorney who first asked the Bureau of Prisons for information about the COBALT visit in a Freedom of Information Act request, said Thursday’s acknowledgement raises new questions about the agency’s role at the detention site.

“These two particular individuals, according to the Senate report, saw a place that was simply horrifying and they had a chance to raise alarms about these conditions of confinement. Instead of doing that, they allowed it to proceed unopposed,” Takei said.

He added that it’s an issue that has suddenly become pressing in the days since members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have indicated an interest in reinstating approval for certain controversial interrogation techniques.

“As we transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, this entire question of official torture is being raised anew,” Takei said. “This is an illustration of how when there’s an administration that officially endorses torture, that endorsement effects every level of government.”

The ACLU said Monday it is dropping its lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons because of Thursday’s disclosure.

The Bureau of Prisons filing includes a series of emails sent in 2011 and 2015 about the Afghanistan trip.

The 2015 email includes a link to a CBS News article about the agency’s visit to the detention site, and the email’s subject line was the title of the article.

In the body of the email, the sender wrote just one sentence: “They just won’t let it go.”

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The Bureau of Prisons has not yet responded to a request for comment on this case.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bureau-of-p ... t-dungeon/

Senate Democrat Urges Obama To Ensure The CIA Torture Report Won’t Disappear
Ron Wyden is worried the report could be destroyed under the Trump administration if it’s not made a federal record.
12/02/2016 07:00 am ET | Updated 1 day ago

Laura Barron-Lopez
Congressional Reporter, The Huffington Post

KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS
The CIA torture report, an “exhaustive history with hundreds of footnotes,” should “at a minimum” be protected by becoming federal record, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). President-elect Donald Trump promised during his campaign to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
WASHINGTON ― If President Barack Obama wants to codify his legacy on banning the use of torture in U.S. intelligence gathering, he should declassify the 6,700-page CIA torture report and make it a federal record, according to a top Senate Democrat.

Ron Wyden, a vocal member of the Senate intelligence committee, has long urged the administration to declassify the report with necessary redactions. But now he’s pressuring Obama to make the report a document of federal record before he leaves office ― protecting it from possible destruction under a Donald Trump presidency.

With Trump heading to the White House in just under two months, the Oregon Democrat told The Huffington Post it’s “more important than ever” that the American public know what is in the full torture report.

Something Obama “can do today on this,” Wyden said, is “make sure the report isn’t destroyed and lost to history.”

“All that the president needs to do is direct that the report be a federal record under the Federal Records Act, and an agency record pursuant to [the Freedom of Information Act], and then it can be disseminated widely to appropriate, cleared agencies,” Wyden said in his Capitol Hill office on Wednesday.

On his second day in office Obama used his executive authority to ban “enhanced interrogation” techniques authorized by President George W. Bush, but his administration decided not to press charges against individuals involved in the torture program. Prompted by revelations that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of some of its interrogations, the Senate intelligence committee voted in 2009 to investigate the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. In December 2014, the Democrats on the committee released a 525-page executive summary of their findings. They concluded that the CIA’s interrogation program used techniques far more brutal than it had previously disclosed and misled the public about the efficacy of the program in producing intelligence.

The full report remains classified. Lawyers who represent detainees at Guantanamo who were previously held at CIA black sites say the executive summary of the torture report reveals only a small part of the abuse their clients endured.

The Obama administration has been less than eager to declassify the report, with agencies directed to keep their copies unopened. Even less transparency is expected from his successor. Trump, a real estate businessman with no prior government experience, said earlier this year that he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

Trump’s sympathetic stance toward torture is why Wyden thinks the president-elect wouldn’t think twice about the destruction of a report long mired in controversy.

“It seems to me ― and this’ll be the argument we’d be making to the administration ― that the president wants a legacy issue,” Wyden said. “This is something he can do today that will be very meaningful, and frankly we’re very concerned that it’s just going to get destroyed and that will be that.”

Making the torture report a federal record would not require its declassification, but making it an agency record would open it up to a Freedom of Information Act request. Even then, it can be redacted in part or full.

The report, an “exhaustive history with hundreds of footnotes,” should “at a minimum” be protected, Wyden said. He later clarified it has tens of thousands of footnotes.

Wyden pointed to Trump’s campaign promises, the views of those he’s surrounding himself with, and comments made by his Republican colleagues as proof there’s a real threat the report could be lost forever.

In January 2015, during his first month as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) requested that the White House return every copy of the document that had been distributed to the administration officials and federal agencies. In a letter to Obama, Burr wrote: “I consider that report to be a highly classified and committee sensitive document.”

“It should not be entered into any Executive Branch system of records,” Burr continued.

At the time, Burr also said he planned to give back a critical secret document, the Panetta Review, that underpins the entire Senate investigation into the CIA’s torture program.

Burr never got the copies of the torture report back; the White House said it would “preserve the status quo.”

But once Republicans have complete control of the federal government from the White House on down, it only follows that Burr would again request to have the last copies of the secret report returned. And what he does with them after that is pretty much up to him.

That means the fate of the infamous document would depend on individual senators like Wyden fighting to keep it in existence until it can be declassified.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who led the intel committee during the investigation and when the report was released, is also pushing for Obama to declassify the document.

She hasn’t always been supportive, however. A New Yorker report published in the summer of 2015 said Wyden, then-Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) rarely aligned with Feinstein on surveillance and tried to convince her to push for the entire declassification of the report.

“Feinstein, concerned that the information in the full report would be too inflammatory, decided that the executive summary sufficed for the time being,” according to the New Yorker.

She’s changed her mind since, and handed a letter to Vice President Joe Biden to give to Obama last week, urging him to make it public.

“The time has come to declassify the report, allow the general public to make up its own mind,” Feinstein said, according to Politico. At least, those that’ll read 7,000 pages.”

So far, the White House response has not been encouraging.

“It was not a full-throated: ‘We are gonna declassify the report,” Wyden said of recent statements coming from the administration. “So we’ve got some heavy lifting to do on that.”

In the final days of the Obama administration, Wyden says, he plans to focus on preserving the torture report so people understand what the CIA engaged in when interrogating suspected terrorists, and “that it’s contrary to our values; contrary to our laws.”

“I want to amp up the concern I have to make sure that this full report is not destroyed,” he said. “That’s all the more reason why the report ought to be put in hands of American people so that you can have a real debate about this.”

White House spokesman Ned Price didn’t comment on Obama’s plans for the report or on calls by Democratic senators for it to be declassified or made a federal record.

“The President supported the declassification of the Summary, Findings, and Conclusions of the Senate’s report on detention and interrogation, with appropriate redactions for national security, in part to ensure certain practices were never employed again,” Price said. “We also have made clear that U.S. law prohibits torture without exception, and that all U.S. personnel are prohibited from engaging in torture at all times and in all places. Similarly, we reaffirmed our commitment to the Convention Against Torture, and have strongly backed Congressional efforts to codify key interrogation reforms from the Executive Order that the President signed nearly 8 years ago.”

“To be sure, we have owned up to past mistakes and helped to right wrongs ―both at home and abroad,” Price continued. “As the President said in 2014, ‘No nation is perfect. But one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better.’ That is precisely what we have done and will continue to do.”

When Feinstein disseminated the copies nearly two years ago there were eight: one sent to the White House, two to the CIA (one for the inspector general, which was “mistakenly” deleted) and the rest to five different agencies.

The White House declined to comment Thursday on the status of the various copies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ron ... f37fe3f262

You Won’t Read a Full Accounting of America’s Use of Waterboarding and Torture Anytime Soon
Supreme Court turns away transparency lawsuit trying to force release of Senate report.
Scott Shackford|Apr. 24, 2017 2:05 pm
Waterboarding
Ingo Wagner/EPA/Newscom
A push to force the federal government to publicly release the full contents of a Senate report on the secret torture and detention of terror suspects ended quietly this morning with a simple rebuff by the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court declined to consider a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU had been suing under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to force the federal government to release the contents of a 6,000-page report from the Senate. The full report detailed not just the terrible treatment—waterboarding and other forms of torture—of people suspected (sometimes incorrectly) of terrorism overseas; it also argued that the violent interrogations failed to get useful information and that the CIA lied about the program to higher-ups in government to conceal what they were doing.

An executive summary—clocking in at more than 500 pages—was finally declassified and made public in heavily redacted form back in 2014 after a long fight over it. But the full report has been secreted away to the point that the Department of Justice has actually ordered federal agencies to not even open and read the report, and Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has attempted to get federal agencies to give their copies of the report back to the Senate.

The ACLU's lawsuit is partly why. In defending against the ACLU's lawsuit, the federal government argued that the full torture report was a congressional record and therefore not subject to FOIA. The ACLU countered that passing the report along to agencies in the executive branch meant otherwise. Unfortunately, courts have up until now found for the government. This morning the Supreme Court denied certification for the ACLU's lawsuit, so their push ends here with a loss for transparency.

It is the end of this particular legal fight, Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, tells Reason. "It is a very disappointing end because we think that the lessons of the full report are really necessary to learn."

Nevertheless, Shamsi felt as though the fight itself hasn't been a total loss. The outrage that followed the disclosure of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques led military and executive branch leaders to acknowledge the legal limitations to what they were permitted to do to prisoners of the war on terror, and the military has promised to use only interrogation techniques listed in the Army Field Manuals, meaning no waterboarding.

"Opposition [to torture] at the highest levels is going to be critically important," Shamsi said. That's particularly true because President Donald Trump campaigned fully in support of waterboarding and even harsher forms of torture as tools to fight the Islamic State.

The Supreme Court declining to hear the case means the legal fight is over, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the chance Americans will ever get to see the full report is completely gone. The president has the authority to declassify the full report's contents, but that seems extremely unlikely given Trump's positions. Before leaving office, President Barack Obama managed to save a copy in his presidential archive. So even if the Trump administration has all the copies of the full report destroyed, there's still one out there they can't touch.

When the executive report was initially released to the public, we made note of the outrageous incidents described in there. But while those violent incidents described in the report got the most media attention, huge chunks of the summary were devoted to whether proper procedures were followed or not and whether the torture actually got results or not. As I noted at the time, you could switch torture out and replace it with any other massive bureaucratic process the federal government put together and see the same kind of debates. So it seems likely that the massive full report would also be focused on the deep procedural issues of how the torture came to pass. Nevertheless, Shamsi says the full report would contain important information, and Americans should support its release.

"What we know is that the full report provides a lot more information about what was actually done and how, and critically … it sheds greater light on the essential corruption that [came from] a determination to torture—Which is that the CIA lied to the White House other parts of the executive branch and to Congress," she says. "Torture corrupts, and [the report] details the way torture corrupts and harms people along with institutions we care about."
http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/24/you-w ... g-of-ameri

Supreme Court turns away transparency lawsuit trying to force release of Senate report.