Torture Was Systemic, Doesn’t Work … and Both Dems and Repubs Approved It
The Guardian reports:
CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on, the European court of human rights said in a historic judgment released on Thursday.
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“The grand chamber of the European court of human rights unanimously found that Mr el-Masri was subjected to forced disappearance, unlawful detention, extraordinary rendition outside any judicial process, and inhuman and degrading treatment” ….
“Masri’s treatment at Skopje airport at the hands of the CIA rendition team – being severely beaten, sodomised, shackled and hooded, and subjected to total sensory deprivation – had been carried out in the presence of state officials of [Macedonia] and within its jurisdiction,” the court ruled.
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UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, described the ruling as “a key milestone in the long struggle to secure accountability of public officials implicated in human rights violations committed by the Bush administration CIA in its policy of secret detention, rendition and torture“.
He said the US government must issue an apology for its “central role in a web of systematic crimes and human rights violations by the Bush-era CIA, and to pay voluntary compensation to Mr el-Masri”.
Indeed, as we’ve repeatedly noted, torture – including physical torture, as well as sodomy and other types of sexual torture – were widespread and systematic.
We’ve also thoroughly documented that torture is wholly ineffective in producing intelligence, and severely weakens national security. And that it was used for wholly political reasons.
Today, on the eve of the release of the major propaganda film “Zero Dark Thirty”, the Washington Post notes:
The Senate intelligence committee approved a long-awaited report Thursday concluding that harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs, officials said.
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Officials familiar with the report said it makes a detailed case that subjecting prisoners to “enhanced” interrogation techniques did not help the CIA find Osama bin Laden and often were counterproductive in the broader campaign against al-Qaeda.
The committee chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), declined to discuss specific findings but released a written statement describing decisions to allow the CIA to build a network of secret prisons and employ harsh interrogation measures as “terrible mistakes.”
“I also believe this report will settle the debate once and for all over whether our nation should ever employ coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said.
While the press is playing this as a partisan issue – with Democrats condemning torture and Republicans saying it was a necessary evil – Democrats like Pelosi, Harman, Rockefeller actually knew all about it and approved, or at least covered it up.
