Heretofore secret CIA documents on the organizations use of "enhanced interrogation" methods were finally released yesterday. Included in the documents were the two memos ex-Vice President Dick Cheney had argued would prove definitively that the Bush Administrations authorization to use torture had been effective and, ultimately, saved American lives.
Late last week Newsweek had published some of the details of the content - the use of mock executions with guns and power drills had been employed by the CIA operatives. The documents official release yesterday yielded additional detail; beatings with rifle butts, strangulation, threats to rape the suspects mother and kill the suspects children.
These specific methods were even outside the illegal interrogation techniques authorized by White House attorneys. The reports note that the CIA Inspector General had repeatedly brought the extraordinary abuse to the attention to then Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Justice Department, but they refused to initiate any investigations or criminal charges against rogue interrogators.
With respect to Mr. Cheney's assertion that torture produced results (and was, therefore, justified), the documents fall short of providing the "proof" the ex-vice president had promised. The documents note the use of both historically legal and Bush Administration sanctioned illegal interrogation methods, and assert valuable intelligence was derived. In other words, the documents fail to make a clear case that the intelligence was gotten via torture and not historically legal interrogation methods.
From Spencer Ackerman:
Again, perhaps the blacked-out lines of the memos specifically claim and document that torture and only torture yielded this information. But what�s released within them does not remotely make that case. Cheney�s public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don�t.
And though the previous administration, from President Bush and Vice President Cheney to Attorney Generals Ashcroft and Mukasey, assured Americans the interrogations done in our name was perfectly legal, the just issued reports make it very clear the CIA operatives knew very well what they were being asked to do was illegal.
From the documents:
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The CIA's uneasiness was well founded. No doubt after watching the Bush Administration successfully label Abu Ghraib guards as rogues and "bad apples" for following protocols provided by their Justice Department memos, CIA operatives were nervous that they too would be thrown to the wolves as soon as the extent of the torture became known.
Given Attorney General Holder's decision yesterday to appoint a federal prosecutor to investigate whether criminal charges against these CIA operatives are warranted, it would seem their fears about becoming scapegoats for the Bush Administration was well founded.
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