Salon.com > Waterboarding

Woman who helped run CIA torture may get major promotion

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:10:00 +0000

A woman who helped run the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, and oversaw the destruction of videotapes of prisoners being subjected to torture, may be appointed director of clandestine services under new CIA chief John Brennan.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the woman has been acting director of clandestine services -- a top appointment in the agency -- since last month. Now Brennan must decide whether to make permanent the promotion of the agent -- who is undercover and cannot be named -- with a past entrenched in the CIA's controversial post-9/11 activities. Brennan came under scrutiny during his confirmation process over his role in the Bush-era CIA practices. Although the counterterror czar insisted that he had long objected to waterboarding, his longtime colleagues at the agency have questioned the history of his disavowals -- Brennan was a senior CIA official when waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques became widespread practice.

Via WaPo:

“I begged them to stop”

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:13:00 +0000

Try to remain calm -- even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race. Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation. Try not to think about dying, because there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately. You’re helpless. You’re inagony.

In short, you’re a victim of “water torture.” Or the “water cure.” Or the “water rag.” Or the “water treatment.” Or “tormenta de toca.” Or any of the othernicknames given to the particular form of brutality that today goes by the relatively innocuous term “waterboarding.”

Former CIA lawyer: Brennan didn’t object to torture

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:25:00 +0000

During his Senate confirmation hearing to become CIA director, John Brennan insisted that while working in the CIA during the Bush administration, he had complained to colleague's about the agency's enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT's) used against detainees.

“I professed my personal objections to and views to some agency colleagues about certain of those EIT's, such as waterboarding, nudity and others where I professed my personal objections to it," Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “But I did not try to stop it because it was something that was being done in a different part of the agency.”

However, according to comments made by a longtime colleague of Brennan's, former CIA lawyer John Rizzo, the counterterror czar's "personal objections" were not known to even those working closely with him at the time. As HuffPo noted Tuesday, during a panel discussion on the film "Zero Dark Thirty" at Cardozo Law School, Rizzo supported the selection of Brennan as CIA director, but challenged his claims of objecting to waterboarding:

Cheney backs Obama on drones

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:09:00 +0000

In a broad interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, former Vice President Dick Cheney backed the president's program of targeting U.S. citizens abroad with drones. "I think it's a good program. And I don't disagree with the basic policy that the Obama administration has pursued in that regard," Cheney said.

Cheney joins a handful of other Republicans who have defended the program unconditionally, even as more lawmakers are calling for increased oversight of the administration's targeting of U.S. citizens.

Cheney, of course, was and is a big proponent of the Bush administration's use of waterboarding, and even told Rose that he has no regrets about it: "I didn't have any. Absolutely not." He added that waterboarding "absolutely" should still be part of American counterterrorism methods, despite what people like Stanley McChrystal say about it offending American values. "The question I think you've got to answer, Charlie, is how many people are you wanting to let die so that you don't, you know, offend your values?"

Torture: America’s other national pastime

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:23:00 +0000

If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare.

There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in the first decade of the twenty-first century we tortured people as national policy. One day, we’re going to have to confront the reality of what that meant, of what effect it had on its victims and on us, too, we who condoned, supported, or at least allowed it to happen, either passively or with guilty (or guiltless) gusto. If not, torture won’t go away. It can’t be disappeared like the body of a political prisoner, or conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing our bureaucratic eyes. After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us -- that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are.

Ex-CIA officer jailed for two years for leaking torture chief’s name

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:01:00 +0000

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou pleaded guilty Tuesday to leaking to a reporter the identity of a "covert CIA officer." Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the agency's program of extraordinary rendition and the use of waterboarding, will serve two and a half years in prison, but was only charged for revealing the identity of interrogation program chief Thomas Donahue Fletcher.

Based on Kiriakou's guilty plea, the prosecution dropped other charges including those filed under the Espionage Act. Kiriakou, 48, worked as a CIA operative during George W. Bush's first presidential term and took part in operations to capture al-Qaida suspects in Pakistan. In 2007 he spoke to ABC, revealing information about his former agency's Rendition, Detention, Interrogation (RDI) program.

The ex-agent originally faced four charges including leaking the name of the RDI program chief and the role of another CIA employee to a journalist and "two counts of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly illegally disclosing national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it," the January FBI report on the case noted.