CIA Officer in Prison for Revealing Torture Program

[icanthearyou 3,316]

I guess no one likes a tattletale, except for me, of course.

http://news.yahoo.com/ex-cia-operative-says-prison-punishment-whistleblowing-torture-183259797--abc-news-topstories.html

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou is the only CIA employee connected to its interrogation program to go to prison. But he was prosecuted for providing information to reporters, not for anything connected to waterboarding or other actions that today’s Senate Intelligence Committee report calls “torture.”

No other person connected to the program has been charged with a crime, after the Justice Department said their actions had been approved legally or that there was not sufficient admissible evidence in a couple cases of potential wrongdoing, even in light of the death of two detainees in the early 2000s.

Today the Justice Department said that the Senate Intelligence report didn’t provide new information that would lead them to reopen any of the old cases.

Kiriakou was the first person with direct knowledge of the CIA interrogation program to publicly reveal its existence, in an interview with ABC News in 2007. He is now serving a nearly-three-year prison sentence for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but he says that’s only what the government wants people to believe.

“In truth, this is my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program and for telling the public that torture was official U.S. government policy,” Kiriakou said in a letter last May from a prison in Loretto, Penn. “But that’s a different story.”

In his groundbreaking interview with ABC News and later with other news outlets, Kiriakou described the details of the program which he had been briefed on but never witnessed firsthand. In some cases, it turned out that even Kiriakou, who served briefly as an ABC News consultant, was misled or kept in the dark about the extent of the program.

For instance, he told ABC News that al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah broke after being water boarded once for less than 35 seconds and began answering “every question” the next day. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks," Kiriakou said.

But later it was revealed Kiriakou was wrong and Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times, according to CIA documents released in 2009. Kiriakou later said in a book that the number of waterboarding sessions “rais[ed] questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Though Kiriakou’s 2007 admissions angered the CIA, the Agency said they were unrelated to the DOJ investigation that in 2012 accused Kiriakou of disclosing the name of the covert CIA operative to a reporter.

Kiriakou pleaded guilty to one charge in early 2013 and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Since, he and his supporters have mounted a public campaign aimed at getting him a pardon.

[Editor's Note: A previous version of this report mistakenly identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) as the al Qaeda member whose waterboarding session was described by Kiriakou. While KSM was later waterboarded, Kiriakou was describing the interrogation of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in his interview with ABC News.]

[autigeremt 5,665]

We should shut down the CIA.

[icanthearyou 3,316]

We should shut down the CIA.

I tend to agree. I think our intelligence gathering should be done through the military. Hopefully, it would lead to a more cooperative, and less competitive, effort.

[autigeremt 5,665]

We should shut down the CIA.

I tend to agree. I think our intelligence gathering should be done through the military. Hopefully, it would lead to a more cooperative, and less competitive, effort.

The CEO....ummmm Office of the President wouldn't go for it.

[TheBlueVue 177]

According to Saxby Chambliss, water boarding is an approved practice by the Geneva Convention thus is not considered torture. He said as much on Face The Nation. Not only that but, the majority elected to spend $40 million dollars on a report exposing what they originally had no problem with and after all was sad and done and money spent that report makes absolutely no recommendations.

So, one could reasonably ask, Whats the point of the report?

Edited December 10, 2014 by TheBlueVue

[AURaptor 1,113]

By all international law, these terrorist, non uniform combatants, ought to be killed on the battle field.

[AUDub 9,980]

According to Saxby Chambliss, water boarding is an approved practice by the Geneva Convention thus is not considered torture. He said as much on Face The Nation. Not only that but, the majority elected to spend $40 million dollars on a report exposing what they originally had no problem with and after all was sad and done and money spent that report makes absolutely no recommendations.

So, one could reasonably ask, Whats the point of the report?

I'd like to know where he read that.

[AUUSN 823]

According to Saxby Chambliss, water boarding is an approved practice by the Geneva Convention thus is not considered torture.

3. Waterboarding is torture; Waterboarding has been used as a form of torture since the Middle Ages. Oxford scholar Cecil Roth writes in his book The Spanish Inquisition:

The water-torture was more ingenious, and more fiendish. The prisoner was fastened almost naked on a sort of trestle with sharp-edged rungs and kept in position with an iron band, his head lower than his feet, and his limbs bound to the side-pieces with agonizing tightness. The mouth was then forced open and a strip of linen inserted into the gullet. Through this, water was poured from a jar ( jarra ), obstructing the throat and nostrils and producing a state of semi-suffocation. The process was repeated time after time, as many as eight jarras being applied.

The U.S. military has also always considered waterboarding to be torture. During the U.S. Army Trials of Japanese War Criminals Conducted in Yokohama, Japan, Yukio Asano was charged with “Violation of the Laws and Customs of War: 1. Did willfully and unlawfully mistreat and torture PWs.” Among the specifications listed were “beating using hands, fists, club; kicking; water torture; burning using cigarettes; strapping on a stretcher head downward.” Asano was convicted of a war crime for waterboarding American prisoners.

Many critics claim that waterboarding of prisoners cannot be considered torture since the technique has been used in training in the U.S. Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) school. The waterboarding done in SERE, however, has been frequently criticized within the Department of Defense.

Also, as Malcolm Nance, counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government’s Special Operations and a former Navy SERE school instructor, said in Small Wars Journal, there is a profound difference between waterboarding in training and what was done by the CIA:

The carnival-like he-said, she-said of the legality of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques has become a form of doublespeak worthy of Catch-22 . Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt.

The CIA’s own Inspector General says that what his agency did and what is done in SERE training are completely different:

A footnote in the recently released 2004 CIA Office of Inspector General’s review of the government’s interrogation program appears to undermine a key legal justification that allowed the spy agency to use the controversial technique of waterboarding against suspected terrorist detainees.

A central legal—and polemic—argument for use of waterboarding has been the fact that some U.S. soldiers are subjected to the procedure during training. In 2002, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a memo approving the technique, based in part on the fact that it had produced no long-term ill effects on soldiers who had undergone waterboarding during training. Those memos were later withdrawn by the DOJ.

But the latest review shows the waterboarding technique used on suspected terrorists was different in technique and duration from that administered to U.S. soldiers.

The OIG report says that experts’ initial analysis of waterboarding “was probably misrepresented at the time,” according to the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, because “the SERE [survival, evasion, resistance, and escape program] waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant.”

As a consequence, the OIG found, “according to [the Office of Medical Services], there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe.”

[AUDub 9,980]

An informative take.

Waterboarding is not simulated drowning — it is drowning

A former instructor at the school designed to teach U.S. soldiers how to resist torture speaks out against the "terrifying, painful" technique.

Chairman Conyers and members of the committee.

My name is Malcolm Wrightson Nance. I am a former member of the U.S. military intelligence community, a retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer. I have served honorably for 20 years.

While serving my nation, I had the honor to be accepted for duty as an instructor at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school in North Island Naval Air Station, California. I served in that capacity as an instructor and Master Training Specialist in the Wartime Prisoner-of-War, Peacetime Hostile Government Detainee and Terrorist Hostage survival programs.

At SERE, one of my most serious responsibilities was to employ, supervise or witness dramatic and highly kinetic coercive interrogation methods, through hands-on, live demonstrations in a simulated captive environment which inoculated our student to the experience of high intensity stress and duress.

Some of these coercive physical techniques have been identified in the media as Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. The most severe of those employed by SERE was waterboarding.

Within the four SERE schools and Joint Personnel Recovery community, the waterboard was rightly used as a demonstration tool that revealed to our students the techniques of brutal authoritarian enemies.

SERE trained tens of thousands of service members of its historical use by the Nazis, the Japanese, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese.

SERE emphasized that enemies of democracy and rule of law often ignore human rights, defy the Geneva Convention and have subjected our men and women to grievous physical and psychological harm. We stress that enduring these calumnies will allow our soldiers to return home with honor.

The SERE community was designed over 50 years ago to show that, as a torture instrument, waterboarding is a terrifying, painful and humiliating tool that leaves no physical scars and which can be repeatedly used as an intimidation tool.

Waterboarding has the ability to make the subject answer any question with the truth, a half-truth or outright lie in order to stop the procedure. Subjects usually resort to all three, often in rapid sequence. Most media representations or recreations of the waterboarding are inaccurate, amateurish and dangerous improvisations, which do not capture the true intensity of the act. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not a simulation of drowning — it is drowning.

In my case, the technique was so fast and professional that I didn’t know what was happening until the water entered my nose and throat. It then pushes down into the trachea and starts the process of respiratory degradation.

It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts. As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening — I was being tortured.

Proponents claim that American waterboarding is acceptable because it is done rarely, professionally and only on truly deserving terrorists like 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Media reporting revealed that tough interrogations were designed to show we had “taken the gloves off.”

It also may have led directly to prisoner abuse and murder in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The debate surrounding waterboarding has been lessened to a question of he-said, she-said politics. But I believe that, as some view it as now acceptable, it is symptomatic of a greater problem.

We must ask ourselves, has America unwittingly relinquished its place as the guardian of human rights and the beacon of justice? Do we now agree that our unique form of justice, based on the concepts of fairness, honor and the unwavering conviction that America is better than its enemies, should no longer govern our intelligence agencies?

This has now been clearly called into question.

On the morning of September 11, at the green field next to a burning Pentagon, I was a witness to one of the greatest displays of heroism in our history. American men and women, both military and civilian, repeatedly and selflessly risked their lives to save those around them. At the same time, hundreds of American citizens gave their lives to save thousands in both Washington DC and New York City. It was a painful day for all of us.

But, does the ultimate goal of protecting America require us to adopt policies that shift our mindset from righteousness and self-defense to covert cruelty?

Does protecting America “at all costs” mean sacrificing the Constitution, our laws and the Bill of Rights in order to save it? I do not believe that.

The attacks of September 11 were horrific, but they did not give us the right to destroy our moral fabric as a nation or to reverse a course that for two hundred years led the world towards democracy, prosperity and guaranteed the rights of billions to live in peace.

We must return to using our moral compass in the fight against al-Qaida. Had we done so initially we would have had greater success to stanch out terrorist activity and perhaps would have captured Osama bin Laden long ago. Shocking the world by bragging about how professional our brutality was was counter-productive to the fight. There are ways to get the information we need. Perhaps less-kinetic interrogation and indoctrination techniques could have brought more al-Qaida members and active supporters to our side. That edge may be lost forever.

More importantly, our citizens once believed in the justness of our cause. Now, we are divided. Many have abandoned their belief in the fight because they question the commitment to our own core values. Allied countries, critical to the war against al-Qaida, may not supply us with the assistance we need to bring terrorists to justice. I believe that we must reject the use of the waterboard for prisoners and captives and cleanse this stain from our national honor.

[AURaptor 1,113]

The justness of our cause has never been a reason to divide anyone, until the Dems made it one. This isn't about eradicating an entire population of American Indians. It's taking a handful of the most degenerate, violent and cold blooded killers and trying to make sure we don't have another 9-11.

It seems the Left are more upset that we waterboard 3 guys who deserve a bullet in their head than what they did to us in the first place.

You've already forgotten about 9-11.

[cooltigger21 0]

The left has no problem sending out airstrikes or drones to kill from afar. They don't want to put ground troops in and have no interest in actually capturing any of these people and trying to gain some intelligence from them to try and prevent future attacks. To the left America is the bad guy. We got what we deserved on 9/11. Americas chickens were coming home to roost and all of that drivel. These people have been oppressed by us and have a legitimate grievance.

Edited December 11, 2014 by cooltigger21

[quietfan 233]

By all international law, these terrorist, non uniform combatants, ought to be killed on the battle field.

I'm not aware of any international law that says it's okay to execute captured prisoners, or even persons attempting to surrender, on the battlefield without due process and legal review--uniform or not. Please enlighten me as to what laws you're referencing that allow this?

I'm not saying it's never happened in history. But we--i.e., modern civilized nations & Geneva Convention signees--consider those cases (such as Nazi executions of Allied prisoners in WWII) to be immoral and criminal.