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The CIA’s outsourced torture is lost to history
- throw7 5y ago"...we’ve decided to live in this world of limited oversight." Read it and weep... I can just imagine any of the main players of this sordid state of affairs saying: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!" I have to say though you have to admire how incredible a cleaner Haspel is. Spotless really.
- saiya-jin 5y agoYeah next time folks here will defend CIA as bunch of highly moral patriots, well they are either clueless or outright lying, which goes well along what CIA is anyway supposed to do. US has no moral high ground. US folks here might feel like they still do, but to 95% of the world, US can easily end up bigger bully than any other state, ie Russia or China. And by bully I mean murders, kindappings, torture, rape and so on. Or just death of few hundreds of thousands of civilians. For reasons that are at best dubious. How many of those in the article were coming from Afghanistan theatre, a war that US and allies lost recently and ran away quicker than locals could say 'but wait...' ? Man, am I pissed off. US should be trying to win, or at least keep good friends in near future. This is not how one should do it.
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- Clubber 5y ago>ran away quicker than Uh, we've been there 20 years. If we had run away quicker, it would have saved a lot of lives and money.
- the-dude 5y agoI am sure he means the pace of the retreat.
- chasd00 5y agoi wouldn't get too worked up, the article cites only one instance from Abu Hamza al-Tabuki while claiming to document 14. The article has a lot of words but little actual information, I would ask for more specific details before letting the author really get under your skin.
- fruityrudy 5y agoA good way to try out waterboarding is swimming with a face mask. It’s not for everyone.
- tudorw 5y ago"The violence of change pales against the violence of maintaining the status quo." Unknown.
- LeifCarrotson 5y agoFascinating content, but interrupted six separate times by a "Type your email... Subscribe" text box. I wonder what the conversion rate is on that fifth box; who misses it the first four times and then decides to sign up? Back on topic, I do hope that some of this is simply being withheld and is not truly lost to history, but it does make one wonder: At what point will the digital information inside secretive state agencies like the CIA be analyzed by, say, 3rd-millenium historians, in the same way that we analyze cave paintings? I enjoy reading through some of the declassified Apollo mission engineering documents, but I would be shocked if a future government was willing to release such shameful material even decades after it was no longer of strategic importance and the individuals involved were all deceased.
- germinalphrase 5y agoI have heard (though I can’t remember the source) that at a certain point on the secrecy ladder, digital files are viewed as intrinsically insecure so documents are only created and handled as hard copies. Obviously, I have no idea if this is actually true.
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- the_af 5y agoI googled Gina Haspel, mentioned as a CIA person who destroyed records of torture, and her Wikipedia page mentions she "does not use social media". I bet she doesn't, and for good reason!
- ncmncm 5y agoWhat I am looking for is prosecution. Everything done in those programs was explicitly against numerous laws, and everyone involved knew it at the time. I see no reason not to indict every person who participated, at any level, with numerous felonies, along with everyone whose responsibility was to stop it, and didn't. There is way more than enough guilt to go around. Prosecutions should particularly include CIA executive management.
- tux3 5y agoAll of this is clearly extremely immoral. There is no accountability, which is itself extremely immoral. Both of these are worth stopping. Legality did not affect their decisions, neither should it ours, in this case. Let's write the laws if we have to; this needs corrective action.
- ncmncm 5y agoWe don't need to write new laws. We just need to execute on the laws that were, and are, already in place. The new US Attorney General could start issuing indictments immediately. Most of these laws have no Statute of Limitations deadline, so remain viable no matter how far back you go.
- tux3 5y agoIf the laws have been successfully ignored, then something is severely dysfunctional with the current approach. I don't think this can be explained just by "individual people being evil". You can't just designate a few scapegoats at the CIA, ruin their lives as punishment, and call the problem solved. There are severely wrong incentives in place. We do need to write more laws. Or rather, your country does.
- ncmncm 5y ago"Laws are not being enforced! Let's make new laws to require that laws be enforced!" What is wrong with this picture?
- the_af 5y agoReading about all of this I wonder about the lack of oversight and accountability, and misleading answers to various governmental committees (and to the public, of course). And I know the blanket answer is "well, we cannot divulge our secrets, it would endanger national security!". But that's often not true. It's self-evident that making detailed records of active intelligence operations public would be self-damaging, but lying about torture is not one of those things. Saying "well, the president claimed we were supposed to guarantee detainees the same standards of treatment as under American law", when someone who conducted the rendition program says "that's a lie" is not the kind of secret you suppress because it would otherwise endanger national security -- it's the kind of secret you suppress because you're undemocratic. Same with destroying records of torture. The underlying matter here is: how did the US as a (modern) country decide that some things should not be subjected to democracy, that some rules cannot be decided or at least known by the people, and that this must be done "for their own good"? "But national security!" is a bullshit answer. No-one is asking them to divulge the list of their covert agents right now.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI suspect it is more a case of half the country is fine with what happened and the other half has some issues with it, but not enough to spend political capital on it. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/26/americans-divided-in-views-of-use-of-torture-in-u-s-anti-terror-efforts/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/26/americans-d... Americans are split on torture.
- the_af 5y agoLikely. However, my question goes beyond whether torture is good or bad, but about whether people think some things should not be handled in a democratic, open way and should not be subject to serious oversight, and that it's ok to lie about them "for the greater good". If I was a US citizen who agreed with the application of torture in some situations -- to be clear, I don't -- even I would be wary of the lying. Next time it will be applied to a policy I do not agree with, and I will be kept in the dark "for my own good".
- Invictus0 5y agoWhat's most appalling to me is that "[the torture program] was the CIA’s central counterterrorism program at the time". If the best thing our intelligence agency can come up with is torture, it speaks really poorly to the rest of the work the agency was doing. I wonder how many years it will be before we have a president with the conscience to just shut it down.
- puchatek 5y agoI keep hearing that torture doesn't provide reliable information. And then i read that an organization that specializes in obtaining information uses torture extensively. Either nobody holds them accountable for when their dodgy intel doesn't check out or i have been misled and torture does in fact yield good results. Which one is it?
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThis assumes their goal is to get actual intel and not just politically actionable intel. Torture is a great way to make someone say whatever you want them to.
- dTal 5y agoWhy go through the whole dog and pony show of actually torturing them? Just claim they said what you want in the torture chamber. It amounts to exactly the same thing and nobody will contradict you. Honestly, I just think they like doing it.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThough I don't disagree that much of it is just sadism, there is also some need for a paper trail. The "informant" denying they ever said anything causes more problems than them recanting what they said while tortured.
- michaelmrose 5y agoInstitutions like people have beliefs and positions irrespective of these positions relationship with reality. For example the FBI which would would reasonably expect to be experts in scientific analysis spent decades sending experts to testify as to the nature of matching hair that was left at crime scenes with real live suspects. Turns out that upon review 95% of the cases in which they gave testimony were flawed and they notably couldn't reliably tell dog hair from human hair let alone identify suspects. Just think of it people got 4 year degrees in a scientific field and built entire decades long career pretending to do something effectively not only to others but to themselves and their superiors. They testified in court dressed up in fancy suits with fancy titles when they were less effective at doing their job than a magic 8 ball. It would be like finding out your doctor wasn't exactly clear on the difference between a liver and a kidney and him and all his colleagues were just kind of faking it and hoping you wouldn't notice. The only saving grace that made them look sort of effective was the fact that they quite frequently but not always had ample evidence against the suspect meaning they were far more than average sending them hair samples of people who were in fact already known to be the real killer so they could in theory appear somewhat accurate by for example always saying yes if the hair was the same color which is you know fantastic for black people. Why would we expect a field of endeavor that is entirely isolated from any accountability to be good at anything?
- theknocker 5y agoEvery "progressive" who supports the intelligence community should be legally required to stand in a mirror and laugh at themselves every morning.