Article Response #14

          The CIA’s interrogations of terrorists detainees during the Bush era were considered brutal and didn’t reveal any information that prevented an attack, according to the Senate report that was released Tuesday.  The report issued by the senate intelligence committee is condemnation of tactics considered by many as torture. 

         The techniques were flawed and poorly managed often-contained false information. CIA misled the Bush White House about the harsh methods it used to contain results from interrogating al Qaeda suspects. The report is highlighting the divide over combating terrorism that dominated Washington a decade ago. Democrats argue the tactics conflicted with American values while leading members of the Bush administration insist they were key to stopping another homeland attack. 

         The report contains details of secret facilities that the detainees where subjected to near drowning, or waterboarding, days of sleep deprivation, threatened with mock executions and threats that relatives would be sexually abused. The claim of the report is primarily that CIA methods did not produce information necessary to save lives that was not already available from other means. 

       Supporters of the program believe that it was pivotal in obtaining intelligence from detainees that couldn’t be obtained through conversational interrogations. It was reported tat a detainee was said to have died of hypothermia after being held nude chained to the concrete while other times other prisoners were hooded and dragged up and down corridors while bring beat up. It was believed that 26 detainees were held there wrongfully as partly because there was no information to justify detention. 

       Dianne Feinstein said that CIA’s actions in aftermath of 9/11 were a “stain on our values and on our history. A 500 page summary cannot remove that stain, but it can and does say that our people and the world that America is big enough to admit when it’s wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes.”

        President Barack Obama said in a statement about the report “were not only inconsistent with our values as a nation, they did not server our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests.” Obama outlawed these interrogation techniques soon after become president in 2009.