CIA Lied to Congress over Brutal Interrogation Program: Report

A Senate report concluded that CIA officials misled Congress and the American public by downplaying the severity of its interrogations and overstating intelligence gleaned from the sessions, The Washington Post said Monday.

CIA interrogation techniques (AFP)“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one US official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is ‘no’.”

Several officials familiar with the classified 6,300-page document, years in the making, said it detailed the brutality of an enhanced interrogation program that yielded little actionable intelligence beyond what was already obtained from detainees before they were subjected to the objectionable techniques.

Officials also spoke of the abuses undertaken within the vast system of secret detention sites to which terror suspects were taken and interrogated.

The abuse often took place under brutal conditions, including the previously undisclosed method of repeatedly dunking suspects in ice water — until President Barack Obama ordered the system dismantled in 2009.

Classified files reviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigators, who put together the report, showed that CIA employees left the agency’s secret black site in Thailand, disturbed by the abuses that were being administered there.

Officials told the Post that some of the most damning findings in the Committee’s report pertain to differences between statements senior CIA officials in Washington have made as opposed to written notes from CIA employees involved in the interrogations.

According to the Post’s anonymous sources, millions of records make clear that the CIA was able to obtain most of its valuable intelligence against Al-Qaeda, including the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, without use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

One official said nearly the entirety of valuable threat-related information from al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaida, captured in Pakistan in 2002, was obtained during questioning by an FBI agent while Zubaida was in hospital in Pakistan — before he was interrogated by the CIA, whose agents waterboarded him 83 times.