CIA EIT Report Released

[garthand]

As some of you may know, the senate report on the use of EITs by the CIA has finally been released. Obviously people will have different opinions on whether the report is accurate or the actions justified, but I thought I'd provide some more interesting snippets from the nearly 500 page executive summary.

 

• The CIA outsourced most of the EIT/torture operations to private contractors
• Obama's executive orders forbidding torture were vague and ineffective
• Even after officially issuing orders to stop torture, the Obama administration quietly continued encouraging torture
• Some non-terrorists were abducted and tortured, generally to gain leverage over their friends and families
• Several non-terrorists were detained and raped at black site facilities
• The CIA lost at least one facility codenamed COBALT due to poor management which resulted in staff going rogue
• The CIA destroyed documents related to the facilities in order to avoid accountability to congress
• Contractors "disappeared" several oversight officers sent by the CIA, due to internal confusion the CIA never looked into this and reported the disappearances as accidents or as stemming from terrorist activities
• Due to difficulty actually locating terrorists, the CIA paid warlords in Afghanistan to supply the prisons. At least some of these detainees were random civilians.
• Inconsistent medical practices and lack of trained staff led to several detainee deaths before useful information could be extracted.
• The CIA had twice conducted an internal investigation that cited disorganization and lack of oversight as major hurdles, but these were both abandoned due to internal pressure.
• Much of the information gained through interrogation turned out to be false.
• There's substantial evidence that the CIA knowingly falsified information provided to both presidents Bush and Obama in order to buy support for the program

You can grab the full summary here (it's embedded).

 

Again, people will have differing opinions on the accuracy or morality of all of this, but if true it definitely paints a picture of an agency that has some serious problems with management, and should probably stop relying on contractors.

[alt3rn1ty]

Even if only one line of it is true, its still terrible.

 

 

So to summarise recent news reports over the last year :

 

After Edward Snowdens revelations - NSA and GCHQ are sharing collected data ( to go cross international boundaries where home laws do not apply to their actions ) on everyones communications ( be that Skype teenagers playing show me yours while Microsoft is allowing the data hoover to suck up all those paedo videos for government officials to watch / Or innocent Facebook exchanges / or insecure email / Your ISP handing over all communication links made from your IP address ( even if someone else has hacked into your insecure wifi ( pending an update from the router vendor which will never happen ) from a parked car and using your broadband to communicate with whoever ) .. Basicly any words you say on the internets various communications methods, plus all the same via mobile phones / pads ) ..

 

.. Which in those huge data storage centres can be "automatically" keyword searched for potential threats or links to the same with your online friends, by the NSA / CIA / Outsourced warlords / Help centres from a sweaty flea bitten office worker in Pakistan with a machine being used insidiously by spooks with <insert nation developed source here> malware / Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

 

Next thing you know your holiday flight can be diverted to an airfield close to a black site to "pick up extra fuel", and you become the target of some entirely random torture and rape, just to get info about your friends.

 

Excellent system we have, your lives randomly at the mercy of a computer search bot in a secret data storage centre.

 

Good to know innocents are being protected from terrorism anyway .. oh.

 

 

Is any of the above wrong ?, I would like to hope so, but I am not confident. What a mess.

[garthand]

I agree that things are a big mess right now. I keep coming back to that saying, "Every country has the government it deserves." Clearly, we've screwed up big time in the states.

[garthand]

Well well.... it looks like there may be something to this report after all. After the Guardian recently reported on an alleged black site in Homan Square, Chicago, more information about this sorry bastard comes up. Turns out that Zuley, (his name still strikes fear locally due to his rampant abuses, use of torture and false convictions) was also in charge of some interrogations at Guantanamo. Couldn't pick a better guy, eh? Looks like both team blue and team red have shit all over their faces now. Good luck getting American media to actually cover this though.

[VaultDuke]

As a european, i'm afraid to have to tell my american friends I'm no longer surprised by any mistreatment of basic human right by your country. Your government knows quite well why it never signed any of the important international treaties like Genève convention or joined the human rights court in den hag. They'd be in a shit ton of trouble if they did. Continue seeing the Snowden leaks and the problems with your secret agencies as an isolated problem, but realize that the world will see the USA with continued increasing distrust as time goes by.

What the US did for us Germans after the second world war was amazing and a stellar display of human behavior and we are forever grateful of that. But sometime since then things have taken a turn for the worse and we now live in a world full of international mistrust. I don't know how and when we can solve this, but i believe as humans worldwide, this is the biggest problem we current have to solve internationally. Otherwise we're trapped in a downward spiral, and it's saddening.

[Arthmoor]

Uh. The United States is a signatory to all 4 of the Geneva Conventions, along with whatever the additional Protocol III is.

 

It is true however that we did not sign on to recognize the World Court thing because of the national sovereignty issues involved. It had nothing to do with wanting to hide our evil ways or anything like that

[garthand]

Like Arth mentioned the US is bound by international prohibitions against torture, hence heavy reliance on legal interpretations around "unlawful combatants" versus "enemy combatants" in order to avoid torture prohibitions. Regardless of prevailing legal theories around whether accused or proven terrorists are protected by the Geneva Conventions, what Zuley did in Chicago violates a host of local and national laws.

 

In addition to the decades stolen from those who were falsely accused and imprisoned, Zuley has cost the city of Chicago nearly $100 million in legal settlements over the last few years due to his reckless disregard for the legal process. The man is a liability and has likely undermined our ability to defend ourselves against terrorist attacks due to his sloppy work at Guantanamo.