US Senate Report Details CIA Interrogation Program

A report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee detailing interrogation techniques and the detention of suspects by the CIA has been released this morning. The report, which took five years to compile, examines whether the methods of interrogation were more brutal than previously described:

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 C.I.A. 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 Senate report eventually concludes that the detention and interrogation techniques used on dozens of prisoners often did not result in providing the government “unique” intelligence information that the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies could not get from other means.

The full report is over 6,000 pages, but only the 524 page summary has been released to the public.

The summary also includes a rebuttal by Republican members of the committee which states the reasoning behind the report is to smear the Bush White House and the C.I.A.

Read the full article at the New York Times.