“This article reveals for the first time a crucial untold aspect of the story behind the construction and development of the CIA’s torture programs, such as we can understand them today (December 2018).”
Jeffrey Kaye
Medium
Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
© eproduced by terms of license, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
“CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Detention Program — countries involved in the Program,” according to the Open Society Foundation. A major aspect of the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations has been purposefully hidden from view, primarily due to secrecy guidelines that make it illegal for anyone “read into” the program to reveal even its very existence.
Recent declassified documents make clear that there was not one, but two CIA torture programs. These programs used different interrogation techniques, responded to different bureaucracies within the CIA, and had very different levels of oversight.
This article reveals for the first time a crucial untold aspect of the story behind the construction and development of the CIA’s torture programs, such as we can understand them today (December 2018).
I will try to retell the history of the CIA’s interrogation and detention programs with this new understanding of how they originated, were constructed, and how they operated. This revisionist history is open source document-based, and it’s worth noting that there is much disinformation and obscure history to clarify.
At the close of this article, we will look at some possible reasons for the separation of the two programs, and the meaning of all this for current investigators and concerned citizens.
It’s been sixteen years since Gul Rahman died of hypothermia, beaten and left half-naked and short shackled to a bare prison floor at the CIA-run Salt Pit “black site” prison in Afghanistan. It is not known what the CIA did to his corpse. His body was never turned over to his family.
SaveAccording to a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, conditions at the Salt Pit were incredibly awful: “One senior interrogator, told the CIA OIG 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 the wall in a standing position for 17 days.”
Yet in other documents, we are told that CIA detainees were under constant surveillance. When Abu Zubaydah was locked inside a confinement box by CIA torturers, there were cameras transmitting “grainy video” of him inside the box at all times. The amount of time spent in extended sleep deprivation was meticulously monitored for some detainees, but not others.
How could there be such wide divergence in CIA torture operations? What was going on?
A Secret Program on “Enhanced Interrogation”
Twelve years ago, in September 2006, the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” and detention program essentially ended, when the remaining detainees held at CIA black sites around the world were sent to Guantanamo’s Camp 7. Its final demise can be traced to President Obama’s January 2009 withdrawal of the Bush-era Department of Justice memos which justified the use of waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation and other brutal interrogation techniques. …READ THE REST AT SOTT
