Americas...:CIA’s Torture Exceeds All Limits...

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US Senate investigators delivered a damning indictment of CIA interrogations Tuesday, accusing the spy agency of inflicting suffering on prisoners beyond its legal limits and peddling unsubstantiated stories that the harsh questioning saved American lives.

Treatment in secret prisons after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was worse than the government told Congress or the public, said the report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the first official public accounting after years of debate about the CIA's brutal handling of prisoners.

Five hundred pages were released, representing the executive summary and conclusions of a still-classified 6,700-page full investigation.
President Barack Obama declared the past practices to be "contrary to our values" and pledged, "I will continue to use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those methods again."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat and the committee chairman, branded the findings a stain on the nation's history. "Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured," she declared, commanding the Senate floor for an extended accounting of the harsh techniques identified in the report.

Tactics used included weeks of sleep deprivation, slapping and slamming of detainees against walls, confining them to small boxes, keeping them isolated for prolonged periods and threatening them with death. Three detainees faced the simulated drowning technique known as water-boarding. Many developed psychological problems.
But the "enhanced interrogation techniques" didn't produce the results that really mattered, the report asserts in its most controversial conclusion. It cites CIA cables, emails and interview transcripts to rebut the central justification for torture - that it thwarted terror plots and saved American lives.

The CIA said the report "tells part of the story" but "there are too many flaws for it to stand as the official record of the program."
Former CIA officials disputed the report's findings. So did some Senate Republicans, who accused Democrats of inaccuracies, sloppy analysis and cherry-picking evidence to reach a predetermined conclusion.
President George W. Bush approved the program through a covert finding in 2002, but he wasn't briefed by the CIA about the details until 2006. At that time Bush expressed discomfort with the "image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on himself."

At least five men in CIA detention received "rectal rehydration," a form of feeding through the rectum. The report found no medical necessity for the treatment. Others received "ice baths" and death threats. At least three in captivity were told their families would suffer, with CIA officers threatening to harm their children, sexually abuse the mother of one man, and cut the throat of another man's mother.

Gul Rahman received enhanced interrogation at a facility referred to as COBALT - understood as the CIA's "Salt Pit" in Afghanistan - in late 2002 shackled to a wall in his cell and forced to rest on a bare concrete floor in only a sweatshirt. The next day he was dead.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team