“Globalizing Torture” – More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture

“Globalizing Torture” – More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture

6 FEB
By Spencer Ackerman

February 06, 2013 “Wired” – – In the years after 9/11, the CIA ran a worldwide program to hold and interrogate suspected members of al-Qaida, sometimes brutally. It wasn’t alone: The agency had literally dozens of partners that helped in ways large and small. Only it’s never been clear just how many nations enabled CIA capture and torture; cooperated with it; or carried it out on behalf of the U.S. — until now.

A new report from the Open Society Foundation details the CIA’s effort to outsource torture since 9/11 in excruciating detail. Known as “extraordinary rendition,” the practice concerns taking detainees to and from U.S. custody without a legal process — think of it like an off-the-books extradition — and often entailed handing detainees over to countries that practiced torture. The Open Society Foundation found that 136 people went through the post-9/11 extraordinary rendition, and 54 countries were complicit in it.

Some were official U.S. adversaries, like Iran and Syria, brought together with the CIA by the shared interest of combating terrorism. “By engaging in torture and other abuses associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition,” writes chief Open Society Foundation investigator Amrit Singh in a report released early Tuesday, “the U.S. government violated domestic and international law, thereby diminishing its moral standing and eroding support for its counterterrorism efforts worldwide as these abuses came to light.”

Iran didn’t do any torturing on behalf of the CIA. Instead, it quietly transferred at least 15 of its own detainees to Afghan custody in March 2002. Six of those found their way into the CIA’s secret prisons. “Because the hand-over happened soon after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan,” Singh writes, “Iran was aware that the United States would have effective control over any detainees handed over to Afghan authorities.” At least one of those detainees, Tawfik al-Bihani, ended up at Guantanamo Bay, where his official file makes no mention of his time with the CIA.

Iran’s proxy Syria did torture on behalf of the United States. The most famous case involves Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen snatched in 2002 by the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport before the CIA sent him to Syria under the mistaken impression he was a terrorist. In Syrian custody, Arar was “imprisoned for more than ten months in a tiny grave-like cell, beaten with cables, and threatened with electric shocks by the Syrian government,” Singh writes.

But it wasn’t just Arar. At least seven others were rendered to Syria. Among their destinations: a prison in west Damascus called the Palestine Branch, which features an area called “the Grave,” comprised of “individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins.” Syrian intelligence reportedly uses something called a “German Chair” to “stretch the spine.” These days the Obama administration prefers to call for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, the murderer of over 60,000 Syrians, to step down.

Many, many other countries were complicit in the renditions. For a month, Zimbabwe hosted five CIA detainees seized from Malawi in June 2003 before they were released in Sudan. Turkey, a NATO ally, allowed a plane operated by Richmor Aviation, which has been linked to CIA renditions, to refuel in Adana in 2002 and gave an Iraqi terrorist suspect to the CIA in 2006. Lots of countries played host to CIA rendition flights, including Sri Lanka, Thailand, Afghanistan, Belgium and Azerbaijan. Italy let the plane carrying Arar refuel. Under Muammar Gadhafi, Libya was an eager participant in the CIA’s rendition scheme — and the Open Society Foundation sifted through documents found after Gadhafi fell to discover that Hong Kong helped shuttle a detainee named Abu Munthir to the Libyan regime.

The full 54 countries that aided in post-9/11 renditions:

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

 The Open Society Foundation doesn’t rule out additional ones being involved that it has yet to discover.

Singh and the Open Society Foundation don’t presume that the CIA is out of the extraordinary renditions game under Obama. Danger Room pal Jeremy Scahill recently toured a prison in Somalia that the CIA uses. While Obama issued an executive order in 2009 to get the CIA out of the detentions business, the order “did not apply to facilities used for short term, transitory detention.” The Obama administration says it won’t transfer detainees to countries without a pledge from a host government not to torture them — but Syria’s Assad made exactly that pledge to the U.S. before torturing Maher Arar.

Much of this is likely to be contained in the Senate intelligence committee’s recent report into CIA torture. It’s unclear when, if ever, that report will be declassified. But the Open Society Foundation’s study into renditions comes right as Obama aide John Brennan — already under pressure to clarify his role, if any, in post-9/11 torture — is about to testify to the panel ahead of becoming CIA director. It remains to be seen if the Senate committee will ask Brennan to clarify if the CIA still practices extraordinary rendition, along with its old friends.

Wired.com © 2013 Condé Nast.

Image embedded in this article by ICH, did not appear in the original item. 

References to Britain’s intelligence agencies were deleted

 References to Britain’s intelligence agencies were deleted at their request from the damning US report on the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11, it has emerged.

Rowena Mason and Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2014


A spokesman for David Cameron acknowledged the UK had been granted deletions in advance of the publication, contrasting with earlier assertions by No 10. Downing Street said any redactions were only requested on “national security” grounds and contained nothing to suggest UK agencies had participated in torture or rendition.

However, the admission will fuel suspicions that the report – while heavily critical of the CIA – was effectively sanitised to conceal the way in which close allies of the US became involved in the global kidnap and torture programme that was mounted after the al-Qaida attacks.

On Wednesday, the day the report was published, asked whether redactions had been sought, Cameron’s official spokesman told reporters there had been “none whatsoever, to my knowledge”.

However, on Thursday, the prime minister’s deputy official spokesman said: “My understanding is that no redactions were sought to remove any suggestion that there was UK involvement in any alleged torture or rendition. But I think there was a conversation with the agencies and their US counterparts on the executive summary. Any redactions sought there would have been on national security grounds in the way we might have done with any other report.”

The two main cases relevant to the involvement of Britain’s spying agencies related to Binyam Mohamed, a UK citizen tortured and secretly flown to Guantánamo Bay, and the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami-al-Saadi, two prominent Libyan dissidents, and their families, who were flown to Tripoli in 2004 where they were tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

There is no reference at all in the Senate’s 500-page summary report to UK intelligence agencies or the British territory of Diego Garcia used by the US as a military base. But the executive summary contained heavy redactions throughout, prompting speculation that references to US allies has been erased.

In the wake of the Senate report, the UK government is coming under increasing pressure to order a more transparent inquiry into the actions of MI5 and MI6 amid claims of British complicity in the US torture programme.

Asked about the need for a full public inquiry, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, conceded yesterday that he was open to the idea if an outstanding investigation by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which meets weekly in secret, leaves remaining questions unanswered. No 10 also suggested Cameron had not ruled this out if the ISC does not settle the torture issue.

The government had initially commissioned an inquiry by retired judge Sir Peter Gibson to look at the UK’s treatment of detainees after 9/11. However, he only managed a preliminary report raising 27 serious questions about the behaviour of the UK security services, before it was replaced by an investigation handled by the ISC in December last year.

The ISC’s report on the UK’s involvement in rendition after 9/11 will not, however, be completed before next year’s election, so it is unclear how many members of the nine-strong panel of MPs and peers will still be in parliament to complete the work.

The current chair, former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, said that the ISC’s previous examination of the UK’s involvement in rendition in 2007, which absolved the agencies, had “quite rightly been severely criticised, because the committee at the time wasn’t given by MI6 all the material in their files”.

Rifkind said he was confident that that would not happen again. Yet the current ISC investigation will not examine the two key cases of the Libyan dissidents being kidnapped and delivered to the Gaddafi regime because they are the subject of a police inquiry.

MPs from all three main parties said the UK agencies’ requests for deletions from the US underlined the need for a more transparent public inquiry than the one being conducted by the ISC, which hands its reports to Downing Street for pre-approval.

David Davis, the Tory MP and former shadow home secretary, said: “Downing Street’s U-turn on its previous denial that redactions had taken place tell us what we already know – that there was complicity, and that it wasn’t reflected in the Senate report. “We know from the behaviour of the previous government with respect to the Binyam Mohamed case, that the term national security includes national embarrassment.”

Sarah Teather, the Lib Dem former children’s minister, also added: “It’s not good enough to kick it into the future and hope a future government will pick it up. We’ve had all sorts of semi-inquiries. Watching what’s happened in the last couple of days, as comments flip around, that’s the experience of campaigners who’ve been trying to get justice on behalf of people who have accused the British intelligence services of acting in this way.”

Diane Abbott, the Labour MP, said that “as a first step we need to know what was removed from the reports” and secondly more must be revealed about what UK government ministers knew at the time.

The US is at least trying to be honest about what went on,” she said. “To their shame, the UK authorities are still trying to hide their complicity in torture. We need to know how much ministers knew. And if they didn’t know why not?”

Earlier Abbott, who ran for the Labour leadership against both Miliband brothers, said ex-foreign secretary David Miliband needed to be “completely transparent” about his involvement in the era.

But Ed Miliband came to his brother’s strong defence as he was asked yesterday whether the former cabinet minister had “questions to answer”.
US hid UK links in CIA torture report at request of British spy agencies
Downing Street says UK intelligence asked for redactions to be made in Senate report on the grounds of national security

“He’s talked about these things in the past,” the Labour leader said. “I know how seriously he took these things in government. I know he answered questions about this in the House of Commons while he was in government. He is never someone who would ever countenance the British state getting involved in this sort of activity.”

Pressed on whether Tony Blair had questions to answer, Ed Miliband said: “Anyone who has read this report will be deeply troubled. I’m not going to speak for that report.

“The government has previously announced an inquiry into these issues, and then held off on the inquiry because there are court cases going on. It’s right to let those court cases take their course here.”

PFLP: In response to murder of Abu Ein, escalate resistance in all forms

PFLP: In response to murder of Abu Ein, escalate resistance in all forms
Dec10 2014

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine joins the Palestinian people in mourning the martyred leader Ziad Abu Ein, a member of the Revolutionary Council of Fateh movement and Chair of the Committee Against the Wall and Settlements.

Abu Ein died after being attacked by occupation soldiers who assaulted him with tear gas during a procession to plant olive trees on the land of Turmusayya village, north of Ramallah, threatened with confiscation and colonization.

The Front expresses its sincere condolences to the Fateh movement and commends the struggler Abu Ein, who defended the rights of our people and confronted the Zionist occupation.

The life of the martyr is marked by struggle and confrontation with the occupation, including imprisonment and deportation, as well as his confrontation of the racist annexation wall.

The response to the death of Ziad Abu Ein must be to escalate resistance in all of its forms. The PFLP demands that the Palestinian Authority immediately end security cooperation with the occupation. The strength of the masses of our people must be unleashed to carry out revolutionary action in all areas of Palestinian struggle.

சமரன்: தனியார்மய தாராளமய பாதையே, தாய் சேய் மரணங்களுக்கு க...

சமரன்: தனியார்மய தாராளமய பாதையே, தாய் சேய் மரணங்களுக்கு க...: மருத்துவ, சுகாதாரத் துறைகளை அரசாங்கம் கைவிட்டு, பன்னாட்டு, உள்நாட்டு முதலாளிகள் கொள்ளையிடும் களமாக மாற்றுவதே மருத்துவ மனைகளில் தாய்-சே...

The Senate Report on the C.I.A.’s Torture and Lies

The Opinion Pages | EDITORIAL

The Senate Report on the C.I.A.’s Torture and Lies
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDDEC. 9, 2014

The world has long known that the United States government illegally detained and tortured prisoners after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and lied about it to Congress and the world. But the summary of a report released Tuesday of the Senate investigation of these operations, even after being sanitized by the Central Intelligence Agency itself, is a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend and even harder to stomach.

The report raises again, with renewed power, the question of why no one has ever been held accountable for these seeming crimes — not the top officials who set them in motion, the lower-level officials who committed the torture, or those who covered it up, including by destroying videotapes of the abuse and by trying to block the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of their acts.

At one point, the report says, the C.I.A. assured Congress that the behavior of the secret jailers and interrogators was nothing like the horrors the world saw at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That was the closest the agency seems to have come to the truth — what happened appears to have been worse than what took place at Abu Ghraib.

The Senate committee’s summary says that the torture by C.I.A. interrogators and private contractors was “brutal and far worse” than the agency has admitted to the public, to Congress and the Justice Department, even to the White House. At least one detainee died of “suspected hypothermia” after being shackled partially naked to a concrete floor in a secret C.I.A. detention center run by a junior officer without experience, competence or supervision. Even now, the report says, it’s not clear how many prisoners were held at this one facility, or what was done to them.

George J. Tenet, left, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency when the brutal tactics began. The report said he misled President George W. Bush.Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Interrogations DEC. 9, 2014 Senator Dianne Feinstein speaking to reporters Tuesday after her remarks on the Senate floor about the Intelligence Committee's report.Reaction to C.I.A.

Torture ReportDEC. 9, 2014 In that, and other clandestine prisons, very often no initial attempt was made to question prisoners in a nonviolent manner, despite C.I.A. assertions to the contrary. “Instead, in many cases the most aggressive techniques were used immediately, in combination and nonstop,” according to the summary of the declassified and heavily censored document. “Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at
times with their hands shackled above their heads.”

Detainees were walked around naked and shackled, and at other times naked detainees were “hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched.”

The C.I.A. appears to have used waterboarding on more than the three detainees it has acknowledged subjecting to that form of torture. During one session, one of those detainees, Abu Zubaydah, an operative of Al Qaeda, became “completely unresponsive.” The waterboarding of another, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the 9/11 attacks, became a “series of near drownings.”

Some detainees, the report said, were subjected to nightmarish pseudo-medical procedures, referred to as “rectal feeding.”

That some of these detainees were highly dangerous men does not excuse subjecting them to illegal treatment that brought shame on the United States and served as a recruiting tool for terrorist groups. To make matters worse, the report said that at least 26 of the 119 known C.I.A. prisoners were wrongfully held, some of them for months after the C.I.A. determined that they should not have been taken prisoner in the first place.

The C.I.A. and some members of the President George W. Bush’s administration claimed these brutal acts were necessary to deal with “ticking time bomb” threats and that they were effective. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, an avid promoter of “enhanced interrogation,” still makes that claim.

But “at no time” did the C.I.A.’s torture program produce intelligence that averted a terrorism threat, the report said. All of the information that the C.I.A. attributed to its “enhanced interrogation techniques” was obtained before the brutal interrogations took place, actually came from another source, or was a lie invented by the torture victims — a prospect that the C.I.A. had determined long ago was the likely result of torture.

The report recounted the C.I.A.’s decision to use two outside psychologists “to develop, operate and assess” the interrogation programs. They borrowed from their only experience — an Air Force program designed to train personnel to resist torture techniques that had been used by American adversaries decades earlier. They had no experience in interrogation, “nor did either have specialized knowledge of Al Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.”

They decided which prisoners could withstand brutal treatment and then assessed the effectiveness of their own programs. “In 2005, the psychologists formed a company specifically for the purpose of conducting their work with the C.I.A.

Shortly thereafter, the C.I.A. outsourced virtually all aspects of the program,” the summary said. And it noted that, “the contractors received $81 million prior to the contract’s termination in 2009.”

The litany of brutality, lawlessness and lack of accountability serves as a reminder of what a horrible decision President Obama made at the outset of his administration to close the books on this chapter in our history, even as he repudiated the use of torture. The C.I.A. officials who destroyed videotapes of waterboarding were left unpunished, and all attempts at bringing these acts into a courtroom were blocked by claims of national secrets.

It is hard to believe that anything will be done now. Republicans, who will soon control the Senate and have the majority on the intelligence panel, denounced the report, acting as though it is the reporting of the torture and not the torture itself that is bad for the country. Maybe George Tenet, who ran the C.I.A. during this ignoble period, could make a tiny amends by returning the Presidential Medal of Freedom that President Bush gave him upon his retirement.

USA வன் வதை குறித்து

SIC's CIA Torture Report

Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Interrogations
By MARK MAZZETTIDEC. 9, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.

President George W. Bush meeting with his war council in the Situation Room in March 2003.Bush Team Approved C.I.A. Tactics, but Was Kept in Dark on Details, Report Says DEC. 9, 2014

In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit, a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally
looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

The release of the report was severely criticized by current and former C.I.A. officials, leaving the White House trying to chart a middle course between denouncing a program that President Obama ended during his first week in office, and defending a spy agency he has championed.

Mr. Obama welcomed the release of the report, but in a written statement made sure to praise the C.I.A. employees as “patriots” to whom “we owe a profound debt of gratitude” for trying to protect the country. But in a later television interview, he reiterated that the techniques “constituted torture in my mind” and were a betrayal of American values.

“What’s clear is that the C.I.A. set up something very fast without a lot of forethought to what the ramifications might be,” he told Telemundo, adding: “Some of these techniques that were described were not only wrong, but also counterproductive because we know that oftentimes when somebody is being subjected to these kinds of techniques, that they’re willing to say anything in order to alleviate the pain.”

Mr. Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, said repeatedly that the detention and interrogation program was humane and legal. The intelligence gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of former C.I.A. officials have said more recently that the program was essential for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The Intelligence Committee’s report tries to refute each of these claims, using the C.I.A.'s internal records to present 20 case studies that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders, or even finding Bin Laden.

The report said that senior officials — including former C.I.A. directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — repeatedly inflated the value of the program in secret briefings both at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and in public speeches.
=======================
Ms. Feinstein

‘A Stain on Our Values’

In a speech in the Senate, moments after the report was released Tuesday morning, Ms. Feinstein described the tumultuous history of her investigation and called the C.I.A. interrogation program “a stain on our values and our history.”

She said, “History will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.’ ”

Rosemary Zimmermann Burlington, VT

I am angry that this has been done in the name of my safety and security. I would rather risk death than be party to this sickening torture. What are we defending if THIS is what we stand for? 

As she was preparing to speak, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, issued a response that both acknowledged mistakes and angrily challenged some of the findings of the Senate report as an “incomplete and selective picture of what occurred.”

=====================

“As an agency, we have learned from these mistakes, which is why my predecessors and I have implemented various remedial measures over the years to address institutional deficiencies,” Mr. Brennan said.

But despite the mistakes, he added, “the record does not support the study’s inference that the agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program.”

The report is more than 6,000 pages long, but the committee voted in April to declassify only its 524-page executive summary and a rebuttal by Republican members of the committee. The investigation was conducted by the committee’s

Democratic majority and their staffs. Many of the C.I.A.'s most extreme interrogation methods, including waterboarding, were authorized by Justice Department lawyers during the Bush administration. But the report also found evidence that a number of detainees had been subjected to other, unapproved methods while in C.I.A. custody.

The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.

Questions From Within

During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some C.I.A. officers began sending messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected.

“Strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic (email or cable traffic),” wrote Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.

The Senate report describes the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as a "series of near drownings." Credit Associated Press “Such language is not helpful.”

The Senate report found that the detention and interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah and dozens of other prisoners were ineffective in giving the government “unique” intelligence information that the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies could not get from other means.

The report also said that the C.I.A.'s leadership for years gave false information about the total number of prisoners held by the C.I.A., saying there had been 98 prisoners when C.I.A. records showed that 119 men had been held. In late 2008, according to one internal email, a C.I.A. official giving a briefing expressed concern about the discrepancy and was told by Mr. Hayden, then the agency’s director, “to keep the number at 98” and not to count any additional detainees.

The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at least 26 were wrongfully held.”

Abu Zubaydah

Abu Zubaydah’s torture moved some C.I.A. officers to tears. Credit U.S. Central Command, via Associated Press

It said, “These included an ‘intellectually challenged’ man whose C.I.A. detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign liaison services and were former C.I.A. sources, and two individuals whom the C.I.A. assessed to be connected to Al Qaeda based solely on information fabricated by a C.I.A. detainee subjected to the C.I.A.'s enhanced interrogation techniques.”



Many Republicans have said that the report is an attempt to smear both the C.I.A. and the Bush White House, and that the report cherry-picked information to support a claim that the C.I.A.'s detention program yielded no valuable information. Former C.I.A. officials have already begun a vigorous public campaign to dispute the report’s findings.

In its response to the Senate report, the C.I.A. said that to accept the committee’s conclusions, “there would have had to have been a years long conspiracy among C.I.A. leaders at all levels, supported by a large number of analysts and other line officers.”

The battle over the report has been waged behind closed doors for years, and provided the backdrop to the more recent fight over the C.I.A.'s penetration of a computer network used by committee staff members working on the investigation. C.I.A. officers came to suspect that the staff members had improperly obtained an internal agency review of the detention program over the course of their investigation, and the officers broke into the network that had been designated for the committee’s use.

Most of the detention program’s architects have left the C.I.A., but their legacy endures inside the agency. The chief of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center said during a meeting with Mr. Brennan in April that more than 200 people working for him had at one point participated in the program.

Winning Approval

According to the Senate report, even before the agency captured its first prisoner, C.I.A. lawyers began thinking about how to get approval for interrogation methods that might normally be considered torture. Such methods might gain wider approval, the lawyers figured, if they were shown to save lives.

“A policy decision must be made with regard to U.S. use of torture,” C.I.A. lawyers wrote in November 2001, in a previously undisclosed memo titled “Hostile Interrogations: Legal Considerations for C.I.A. Officers.”

Iyman Faris, left, also known as Mohammad Rauf,
and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were held in secret prisons.

The lawyers argued that “states may be very unwilling to call the U.S. to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”

The report describes repeated efforts by the C.I.A. to make that case, even when the facts did not support it. For example, the C.I.A. helped edit a speech by Mr. Bush in 2006 to make it seem as if key intelligence was obtained through the most brutal interrogation tactics, even when C.I.A. records suggested otherwise.

After the C.I.A. transported Abu Zubaydah to Thailand in 2002, two C.I.A. contractors, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were in charge of the interrogation sessions, using methods that had been authorized by Justice Department lawyers. The two contractors, both psychologists, are identified in the Senate report under the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar.

The program expanded, with dozens of detainees taken to secret prisons in Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other countries. In September 2006, Mr. Bush ordered all of the detainees in C.I.A. custody to be transferred to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after that the C.I.A. held a small number of detainees in secret at a different facility for several months at a time, before they were also moved to Guantánamo Bay.

Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators, but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.

Cables from C.I.A. headquarters to field offices said that overseas officers should put together “wish lists” speculating about what foreign governments might want in exchange for bringing C.I.A. prisoners onto their soil.

As one 2003 cable put it, “Think big.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Apuzzo and Peter Baker contributed reporting.
Sourcce: New York Times (Paid-Subscribed Article Copyrights NYT)

7 Key Points From the C.I.A Torture Report

TORTURE REPORT

7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report
By JEREMY ASHKENAS, HANNAH FAIRFIELD, JOSH KELLER and PAUL VOLPE
DEC. 9, 2014 New York Times

The report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence discloses new details about the C.I.A.’s torture practices.

1. The C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques were more brutal and employed more extensively than the agency portrayed.

The report describes extensive waterboarding as a “series of near drownings” and suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three prisoners the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The report also describes detainees being subjected to sleep deprivation for up to a week, medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” and death threats. Conditions at one prison, described by a clandestine officer as a “dungeon,” were blamed for the death of a detainee, and the harsh techniques were described as leading to “psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.”

Waterboarding is called “a series of near-drownings” (Page 86)
Detainees with psychological and behavioral issues (Page 114)

2. The C.I.A. interrogation program was mismanaged and was not subject to adequate oversight.

The report cites dissatisfaction among intelligence officers about the competence and training of interrogators. Those found to have violated agency policy were “rarely held accountable.” The architects of the program had never carried out a real interrogation. The report states that the C.I.A. resisted congressional oversight, restricted access to information, declined to answer questions about the program and “impeded oversight” by the agency's inspector general by providing false information.

An officer with no previous experience conducting interrogations (Page 50)
C.I.A. officers were "rarely held accountable" for death, injury or wrongful detention. (Page 14)

3. The C.I.A. misled members of Congress and the White House about the effectiveness and extent of its brutal interrogation techniques.

The report says that the C.I.A. provided false and misleading information to members of Congress, the White House and the director of national intelligence about the program’s effectiveness. It asserts that a review of cases, in which the agency claims to have collected “actionable intelligence” it would have been unable to obtain by other means, calls into question the connection between the information and any “counterterrorism success.”

How the C.I.A. represented the program’s effectiveness (Page 172)
Examples of inaccurate C.I.A. testimony (Page 462)

4. Interrogators in the field who tried to stop the brutal techniques were repeatedly overruled by senior C.I.A. officials.

C.I.A. personnel reported on multiple occasions to being “disturbed” by waterboarding and concerned over its legality. Officials, including the program’s architects, described the interrogation as a “template for future interrogation” of detainees. In one instance, a senior official pushed back against concern over the “legal limit” of brutal interrogation techniques by stating that the “guidelines for this activity” had been “vetted at the most senior levels of the agency.”

C.I.A. personnel concerned over waterboarding (Page 44)
Counterterrorism official pushes back on questions of legality. (Page 43)

5. The C.I.A. repeatedly underreported the number of people it detained and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques under the program.

The report states that the C.I.A. never produced an accurate count or list of those it had detained or subjected to brutal interrogation techniques. The agency said it detained “fewer than 100 individuals,” but a review of agency records indicated that it held 119. It also underreported the number of detainees who were subjected to torture.

C.I.A. director “instructed me to keep the detainee number at 98” (Page 15)

6. At least 26 detainees were wrongfully held and did not meet the government’s standard for detention.

The report found that at least 26 detainees “were wrongfully held,” including an “intellectually challenged” man who was used as “leverage” to obtain information from a family member, two former intelligence sources and two individuals identified as threats by a detainee subjected to torture. Agency records were often incomplete and, in some cases, lacked sufficient information to justify keeping detainees in custody.

Of 119 detainees, at least 26 were “wrongfully held.” (Page 14)

7. The C.I.A. leaked classified information to journalists, exaggerating the success of interrogation methods in an effort to gain public support.

The report found that the C.I.A. provided classified information to journalists but that the agency did not push to prosecute or investigate many of the leaks. C.I.A. officials asked officers to “compile information on the success” of the program to be shared with the news media in order to shape public opinion. The C.I.A. also mischaracterized events and provided false or incomplete information to the news media in an effort to gain public support.

Overview of representations to the media (Page 401)

Modi struggles in first big battle of reform campaign

December 8, 2014 2:57 am

Modi struggles in first big battle of reform campaign
Victor Mallet and Avantika Chilkoti in Mumbai Author

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses the media during the opening of the winter session of Parliament in New Delhi on November 24, 2014. The Narendra Modi government, which has promised big reforms in its first budget, is looking to push the Insurance Bill as well as the Goods and Service Tax Bill in the month-long winter session that begins today.

India’s government and main opposition party publicly support it. Foreign investors and many local businesses are also in favour.

Yet a plan to raise the foreign ownership cap for Indian insurance companies from 26 per cent to 49 per cent — a jump not even implying a transfer of control — has prompted an exhausting struggle among politicians and business leaders that shows how hard it will be for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to enact his promised economic reforms.

Mr Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party still hopes to push the Insurance Laws Amendment Bill through parliament this month in what would be the first significant legislative reform of the six-month-old government.

Among the beneficiaries that would be able to raise their stakes are the UK’s Standard Life , which wants to list its joint venture with HDFC, and Mitsui Sumitomo and Nippon Life of Japan, whose partners are Max India and Anil Ambani’s Reliance Group respectively. The law, the wording of which has yet to be finalised, is also expected to allow the entry of reinsurers and of Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market.

The bill was first presented to lawmakers six years ago by a Congress-led government. But it has been held hostage by political point-scoring over unrelated issues — first by the BJP in opposition and now by other parties in the upper house of parliament — and stalled by protectionists in the industry reluctant to share a promising new market with foreign investors.

The wording now being discussed would probably make a concession to Indian nationalists by requiring Indian management control — a restrictive move because under some of the existing joint venture shareholder agreements the operation is run by the minority foreign partner.

After waiting for years for access to India, some foreign investors in the sector would be frustrated if even the mildly reformist law on offer were blocked or further delayed.

David Sloan of risk consultancy Eurasia Group said that if the informal “Bombay Club” of protectionist Indian businesses succeeded in mandating Indian management control, some foreign investors would not only forgo increasing their stakes, they might even withdraw altogether.

“This would be a disaster not only for increasing insurance penetration and boosting financial inclusion, it would be a significant setback for the government’s efforts to attract long-term FDI,” Mr Sloan said.

49% Foreign ownership cap the bill would introduce, compared with current level of 26%

One senior executive at an Indian-foreign joint-venture insurer said: “I think it will be a massive embarrassment for the government if it doesn’t happen in this [parliamentary] session . . . The longer it takes, the less confidence people have. They [foreigners] have put in money on the presumption that it will go to 49 per cent.”

Chris Cummings, chief executive of TheCityUK, which lobbies for London’s financial centre, said of India’s insurance bill while on a visit to Mumbai last week: “It’s important unto itself, and it’s also totemic for the wider liberalisation of the economy.”

The life assurance, health and general insurance markets have huge potential for profitable expansion in one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing emerging markets — especially as 70 per cent of the life market is currently in the hands of state-controlled Life Insurance Corp.

In a study three years ago, Swiss Re noted that life coverage in India had grown more than tenfold in the decade to 2010 but that the country was exposed to a “protection gap” — the difference between required income after a breadwinner’s death and the sum of savings and insurance cover — of $6.7tn.

Anything that’s done to increase that penetration [of life insurance] is good for the country. I’m confident the government will find a way to make it happen
- Ravi Vishwanath, Tata AIA Life

Insurance executives and analysts say that while health insurance has been booming in India, the private sector life insurance business has been hit in the past few years by customer disappointment over earlier mis-sold products and the effects of the 2008 financial crisis.

There are nevertheless eager potential investors as well as willing recipients in India hungry for capital and expertise.

“From the industry perspective, it will ease the capital strain,” says Shashwat Sharma, a management consulting partner at KPMG in Mumbai. “If this [the law] goes through, I think $4bn of fresh capital will come into the market.”

A vibrant life insurance industry would boost domestic institutional investment in financial markets, still dominated by tycoons and their families. It would also help the government in its quest to fund billions of dollars of infrastructure projects, with the state seeking long-term money and life insurers hunting for currently unobtainable 30-year bonds in which to invest.

“It’s a perfect asset-liability match,” says Ravi Vishwanath, deputy chief executive of Tata AIA Life. “Anything that’s done to increase that penetration [of life insurance] is good for the country. I’m confident the government will find a way to make it happen. The industry has waited a long time for this.”
Source: FT

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