[PP-discussions] No More Excuses, A Roadmap to Justice for CIA Torture

[Frédéric Lecointre]

It is now well established that following the attacks on the United
States on September 11, 2001, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores
of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention—sometimes
for years—or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or
otherwise ill-treated them. While the program officially ended in 2009,
the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing.

Many detainees were held by the CIA in pitch-dark windowless cells,
chained to walls, naked or diapered, for weeks or months at a time. The
CIA forced them into painful stress positions that made it impossible
for them to lie down or sleep for days, to the point where many
hallucinated or begged to be killed to end their misery. It used
“waterboarding” and similar techniques to cause near suffocation or
drowning, crammed detainees naked into tiny boxes, and prevented them
from bathing, using toilets, or cutting their hair or nails for months.
“We looked like monsters,” one detainee said of his appearance while in
CIA custody.

Much new information about detention and interrogation in the CIA
program became public with the release in redacted form of the 499-page
summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report in
December 2014 (“Senate Summary”). The Senate Summary reported that the
CIA subjected at least five detainees to “rectal feeding,” described in
one case as infusing the pureed contents of a lunch tray into the
detainee’s rectum via a medical tube, done “without evidence of medical
necessity.” The Senate Summary also found that during a waterboarding
session, one detainee became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles
rising through his open, full mouth.” The CIA forced some detainees to
stand for days on end without sleep while they had broken bones in their
legs and feet, even though CIA personnel knew this would cause them
long-term physical injury. A CIA cable described one detainee as
"clearly a broken man" and "on the verge of complete breakdown."

https://www.hrw.org/node/283564
-- 
Frédéric Lecointre