Senate investigators on Tuesday delivered a blistering indictment of CIA interrogation techniques after 9/11, accusing the spy agency of using harsh tactics that broke the law.
The report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee also charged that the CIA lied to Americans by insisting that their controversial interrogations had saved lives by rooting out terror plots.
Those claims, it said, were undermined by the agency’s own records.
The techniques that came under fire included waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique classified by the United Nations as torture.
Other aggressive tactics included keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours — 7½ days — and forcing them to stand or remain in other stressful positions for long periods of time.
Prisoners were stripped, beaten and slammed against walls, confined to small boxes and threatened with death, it said.
CIA interrogators also threatened to harm their children, sexually abuse the mother of one detainee and slit the throat of another prisoner’s mother, the report said
At least five terrorists were subjected to “rectal rehydration,” a form of feeding through the rectum that the report said was not medically necessary.
Critics, including congressional Republicans, argued against making the report public, saying the release would incite anti-American violence overseas.
And US military and diplomatic facilities abroad were put on alert ahead of the release because of fears of violent retaliation by Islamic extremists.
About 2,000 Marines were on standby to respond to threats against embassies or other US interests, NBC reported.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Majority Democrats in the Senate blasted the CIA in the 500-page report, a summary of a full report that runs roughly 6,700 pages and remains confidential.
“Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee.
President Obama gave credit to the work of the CIA and admitted that the Bush administration had faced tough choices about how to keep the US safe after the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks.
But he said the report documented interrogation techniques that were “inconsistent with our values as a nation.”
“No nation is perfect,” Obama said. “But one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better.”
“I will continue to use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those methods again,” Obama said.
A number of ex-CIA officials posted an angry online response at CIASavedLives.com, charging that the Senate report was rife with errors and failed to understand the realities of the post-9/11 threat to Americans.
“It felt like a ‘ticking time bomb’ every single day,” they said. “In this atmosphere, time was of the essence. We had a deep responsibility to do everything within the law to stop another attack.”
The CIA was expected to release an official rebuttal to the report later Tuesday.
The document also revealed that the CIA hired a pair of outside psychologists to develop and execute its interrogations even though neither had experience interrogating anyone or expertise on terrorism.
The shrinks then formed a company — and were paid $80 million by the CIA, the report found.
The report also revealed that then-President Bush was never briefed by the CIA on the interrogation techniques and secret detention of terror suspects during the first four years of the program.
When he did learn the details in the middle of 2006, he was “uncomfortable” with some of the techniques, especially keeping detainees in stress positions for lengthy periods, the report said.
It said the agency wanted to keep the White House informed, but that senior administration officials wanted to keep Bush and cabinet-level officials out of the loop.
The CIA general counsel at the time, John Rizzo, wrote in an agency email that the White House told the agency to not brief cabinet officials in 2002 because they were worried about press leaks.
But Rizzo said the White House’s implication was that if then-Secretary of State Colin Powell knew the details, “he would blow his stack.”
Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were briefed on the interrogation techniques sometime in 2003, the committee report states.
Other top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, also were eventually briefed about the program, but the briefings were misleading or incomplete, the report said.
In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Bush defended the CIA practices.
“Here’s what I’m going to say, that we’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the CIA serving on our behalf. These are patriots,” he said. “And whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base.”