Jesus would be proud.
Instead of prosecuting torturers, Obama prosecuted the guy who revealed the program | Vox
The details in the Senate report on Central Intelligence Agency torture, released today, are shocking. But don’t expect anyone to be held responsible. The only person the Obama administration has prosecuted in connection with the torture program is a man who revealed its existence to the media.
Much of the information in the report is new to the public, but a lot of it would have been uncovered during a detailed torture investigation Attorney General Eric Holder conducted during President Obama’s first term. After carefully examining the evidence, Holder decided not to prosecute anyone for the CIA’s torture. “The department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” Holder said when he dropped investigations into two torture-related deaths in 2012.
That seems consistent with Obama’s own views on the subject. Asked about investigating CIA torture in 2009, Obama replied that “it’s important to look forward and not backwards.”Obama admitted that “we tortured some folks” earlier this year, but he didn’t call for those responsible to be punished.
But the Obama administration has had a different attitude when it comes to those who revealed the existence of the CIA torture program. In 2012, the Obama administration charged former CIA official John Kiriakou for leaking classified information related to the torture program to reporters. Threatened with decades in prison, Kiriakou was forced to plead guilty and accept a 30-month prison sentence. He’s in prison right now.
Obama has vowed to “use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those methods again.” But prosecuting people who revealed the program, instead of the people responsible, makes it more likely that abuses like this will happen again.
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Hypothermia, Broken Limbs, and Rectal Feeding: Details from the CIA Torture Report
One prisoner at a CIA black site froze to death. Others were forced to stand on broken feet, threatened sexually with broomsticks, or subjected to “rectal feeding” for no apparent medical reason. The Senate Intelligence Committee released those details and more Tuesday in the 500-page executive summary of its report on the CIA’s Bush-era “enhanced interrogation” program.
Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein unveiled the long-awaited, long-delayed report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA’s now-discontinued “Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation” program this morning, calling it a “stain on our country and our values.”
The controversial 6,700-page report describes, among other things, detainees being kept in a dark, freezing, dungeon-like prison, being kept awake for up to 180 hours at a time, and being subjected to “near-drowning” over and over. The three-year Senate investigation concluded the “brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values” were not effective in prying intelligence from detainees.
The report also found that the CIA misled the public, the White House and Congress on both the brutality of the program and its effectiveness.
“The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting,” the report states. “Abu Zubaydah, for example, became ‘completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.’ Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving in to a ‘series of near drownings.’"
CIA interrogators threatened detainees with broomsticks and power drills and threatened to rape and kill detainees’ mothers. Other detainees with broken feet and legs were subjected to stress positions for extended periods of time.
