Chelsea Manning: The CIA's Torturers And The Leaders Who Approve Their Actions Must Be Called To Account

The most legal coercive interrogation techniques often used by conventional law enforcement are just as effective against terrorists as they have been in typical murder and kidnapping investigations. Torture then – at least in my experience, – has never been a part of the big picture of intelligence collection. It seems that smart and conventional methods are sufficient.

But regardless of whether these techniques were ineffective and counterproductive, the techniques outlined in the Senate torture report were far outside the boundaries of what is acceptable for the US intelligence community. Their supposed effectiveness is irrelevant to the fact that torture is wrong.

It is important to hold the officers, supervisors and, to a lesser extent, the politicians involved in creating and executing these programs, accountable. To let their horrific actions go unanswered would send an awful message to the world: it is wrong to torture and mistreat people, except when those doing it have the supposed blessing of the law and with the permission of high-ranking supervisors and politicians....

Chelsea Manning, Guardian Comment Is Free.

CIA: Torture

Says something that even the Mail's appalled.

Anal rape? Yes please!

From the newly declassified document via Wikileaks.

Now, if only there was some plucky young whistle-blower who could have leaked this earlier, so AmeriKKKa could put her in jail...

One of the worst myths official Washington and its establishment media have told itself about the torture debate is that the controversy is limited to three cases of waterboarding at Guantánamo and a handful of bad Republican actors. In fact, a wide array of torture techniques were approved at the highest levels of the U.S. Government and then systematically employed in lawless US prisons around the world – at Bagram (including during the Obama presidency), CIA black sites, even to US citizens on US soil. So systematic was the torture regime that a 2008 Senate report concluded that the criminal abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of the torture mentality imposed by official Washington.

American torture was not confined to a handful of aberrational cases or techniques, nor was it the work of rogue CIA agents. It was an officially sanctioned, worldwide regime of torture that had the acquiescence, if not explicit approval, of the top members of both political parties in Congress. It was motivated by far more than interrogation. The evidence for all of this is conclusive and overwhelming. And the American media bears much of the blame, as they refused for years even to use the word “torture” to describe any of this (even as theycalled these same techniques “torture” when used by American adversaries), a shameful and cowardly abdication that continues literally to this day in many of the most influential outlets.

Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept.

Peter Brookes for The Times.

Iraq: Military Intelligence?

The Washington Post reports that before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA's Iraq Operations Group considered making a fake sex tape that showed Saddam Hussein having sex with a teenage boy.
According to two former CIA spooks who worked on the project, it was believed that this would discredit Hussein among the people of Iraq.
“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” one of them told the Post. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”
Eventually the plan was abandoned when someone pointed out a major flaw.
“Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East - nobody cares,” according to one former CIA official. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”