The CIA is a cancer on humanity
“It was found that ‘literally, a detainee could go for days or weeks without anyone looking at him’, and that his team found one detainee who ‘as far as we could determine’, had been ‘chained to a wall in a standing position for 17 days’. According to the CIA interrogator, the detainees literally looked like a dog that had been kennelled. When the doors to their cells were opened, ‘they cowered.’”
The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s partially declassified Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program has given an extensive picture of a network of US-run concentration camps.
The cruelty inflicted on the inmates is mindboggling. In one of the main facilities, codenamed “Cobalt”: “CIA detainees were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. The chief of interrogations described COBALT as a ‘dungeon’. Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique.”
The report details torture techniques used by the CIA operatives in vivid detail. Detainees were chained to walls naked in frigid temperatures. Detainees with broken legs were made to stand on their legs for hours. Detainees were ‘walled’, that is, slammed repeatedly against the concrete walls of the prison during interrogations, repeatedly water boarded (Abu Zubaydah, accused of being an aid to Osama bin Laden, on 84 occasions; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the 9/11 attack, “at least 183 times”), beaten, blindfolded, dragged through corridors.
They were humiliated, told they would never see the light of day, told their mothers would be raped and killed by CIA operatives, told they would be raped, subjected to extreme sleep deprivation that led to disturbing hallucinations, subjected to forceful rectal feeding. This torture went on for days, weeks, months, years.
“Among other abuses … the interrogators had engaged in ‘Russian Roulette’ with a detainee. The CIA placed detainees in ice water “baths”. The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to one detainee that he would only leave in a coffin-shaped box. One interrogator told another detainee that he would never go to court, because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you”.
One of the prisoners, Gul Rahman, did not survive this torture. He froze to death.
“[CIA OFFICER 1] ordered that Gul Rahman be shackled to the wall of his cell in a position that required the detainee to rest on the bare concrete floor. Rahman was wearing only a sweatshirt, as [CIA OFFICER 1] had ordered that Rahman’s clothing be removed when he had been judged to be uncooperative during an earlier interrogation. The next day, the guards found Gul Rahman’s dead body. An internal CIA review and autopsy assessed that Rahman likely died from hypothermia – from having been forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants.”
The CIA officer responsible for this murder – and of course, the name is redacted in the report – faced no consequences for subjecting a human being to a terrifying death. Instead, just four months later, the officer in question received a $2,500 cash prize for “consistently superior work”. Less than a month after the death of Gul Rahman, the plans also called for detainees’ clothes to be removed completely in a facility where the temperature was just 7 degrees.
The study, in painstaking detail, describes how torture was encouraged and engineered by the CIA even as individual agents who carried out the brutality broke down in tears. Even the doctors and medical personnel became accomplices, overseeing the abuse and clearing detainees for more of it.
It is a study of chilling and violent dehumanization. While it is limited to an assessment of the CIA, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib showed that the brutal techniques are also carried out by the much larger military.
Sickeningly, two military psychologists, Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, made a fortune out of the misery. They invented and oversaw many of the torture techniques, setting up a company that took over the CIA program and broadened it. The CIA paid them $81 million dollars.
The Obama administration has stated that it will not prosecute anyone as a result of the practices detailed in the report. The only person prosecuted for any of this is John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst and case officer turned whistleblower who is serving 30 months in prison.
The rank, Orwellian hypocrisy of the United States government – of trumpeting freedom, democracy and peace while torturing, murdering and invading – is incredible. Currently, US embassies around the world are on high alert in case of a “possible terrorist attack”. No matter how far it goes, no matter how many people it tortures, no matter how many countries it invades, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of people it murders it is “fighting for freedom and democracy”. More than 2,400 people have been killed by Obama’s drone strikes alone and the wars continue.
The US is a terrorist state exposed. Yet CIA chiefs, top military brass and the political right are lining up to justify and cheer-on the torture. According to former Republican representative and radio host Joe Walsh, those who carry out torture are “American heroes”.
That’s the twisted logic of imperialism.
