Just as the use of torture violates international law so too did the attack on Afghanistan and the War on Terror. (HERE )
The War on Terror is military aggression which is prohibited by the United Nations Charter which is a treaty that the U.S. has an obligation to follow. Under the U.S. Constitution all treaties signed by the president and ratified by the Senate become the "law of the land".
Violations of the Geneva Conventions on torture and the violations of the U.N. Charter by the U.S.A are also violations of U.S. law. Those responsible should be held accountable before a court of law for their crimes. Those such as in the Obama Administration that give a pass on enforcing the law and upholding their sworn duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution are also in violation of international and domestic laws.
Advocates of torture such as Cheney say that both torture and the War on Terror are keeping Americans safe and saving American lives. Yet they cannot point to a single instance in which they have saved any lives or prevented any terrorist attacks. Instead we know that thousands of Americans have died in Afghanistan and Iraq and tens-of-thousands of Americans have been wounded and permanently disabled, committed suicide, orphaned, widowed and had their lives ruined. That is just on the American side of the War on Terror. On the Afghan and Iraqi side the numbers are in the millions.
The Torture Report is an embarrassment to the C.I.A.'s image as an organization and to the United States of America. If nothing else the Torture Report pulled back the curtain of secrecy and exposed the unprofessional, inefficient and amateurish workings of the C.I.A. One should wonder if the entire War on Terror is being run the same sloppy way.
As with the military in the War on Terror, the C.I.A. has become dependent on private contractors. War has become even more profitable for the private sector. It used to be that the private sector just provided the boots and the bullets. Now it provides the hired guns and the torturers too. And they don't come cheap even though it is often the government and the tax payers that trains them for their future private jobs.
The government has created its own Frankenstein's monster of privatization. The government sector loses the trained and experienced people because they go to the private contractors for more pay. When the government hires private contractors more of its own employees leave to work for the contractors. It is a vicious cycle that is very profitable for the private sector. They are mercenaries that take no responsibility or accountability to the American people.
The C.I.A. like the rest of the War on Terror hired private contractors to devise a prisoner interrogation program. Whether the C.I.A. had already decided that it was going to use torture is unclear but regardless there is no evidence that it explored any other methods. Instead it went with two contractors that had experience as psychologists for the U.S. Air Force's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (S.E.R.E.) program.
Part of the S.E.R.E. program teaches military personnel how to endure torture such as was used by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War and North Korea during the Korean Conflict. The torture used by the North Vietnamese and the North Koreans was designed to force false confessions and propaganda from prisoners, not to gain military intelligence from them.
The psychologists turned the S.E.R.E. program upside down as a way to use torture to try to gain truthful confessions and military intelligence on terrorists. Apparently no one at the C.I.A. even questioned the efficacy of using torture. From what we know and from what the C.I.A. has told us they did not seek out expert advice from prison authorities, law enforcement, hostage negotiators and even their own research that showed that torture was not effective. Instead it is as if the C.I.A. did what former director George Tenet denied that they did: "Sat around the campfire and said Oh' boy now we get to go and torture some people". (HERE )
So Dick Cheney and former C.I.A. directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden and all the other torture advocates tell the American people how important the torture program was at saving American lives. So why did the C.I.A. put someone the Torture Report calls Interrogator #1 in charge when they knew he was incompetent? The only reason given was that he was deployable.
According to the torture report, Interrogator #1 was somebody that could barely pass his security clearance. He was said to have anger management problems, was immature, lacked honesty and judgment, was on his first overseas assignment, had no experience or training interrogating prisoners and was not trusted to follow orders in the field. So they put him in charge of torturing people?
Then when Interrogator #1 killed a prisoner from hypothermia by leaving him chained to a cold floor they reprimanded him with a suspension for ten days without pay. He also hung people from the ceiling for an extended period of time while he took a leave of absence. Later the C.I.A. put him in charge of a training program for interrogators. He was responsible for certifying other torturers. You can't make this stuff up.
The C.I.A. didn't even know how many people they had in captivity. Former C.I.A. Director Michael Hayden testified before Congress that the C.I.A. had "less than 100" prisoners. When that proved wrong, he "corrected" his statement to about 100...saying "more than 10 but less than 200". In one instance the Torture Report shows that the CIA "found" 44 prisoners in its detention that nobody knew anything about.
Like the War on Terror, it is doubtful that anybody really knows how much money was being spent on torture. The reported amount is approximately $300 million, not including employee compensation. The C.I.A. had suitcases full of cash for a slush fund. It was handed out as bribes to foreign officials to get foreign countries to accept black sites for torturing prisoners. Often nobody even bothered to count the money given out or get recipes. It was just too much trouble one agent said.
It is the same with the War on Terror. Taxpayer money is just going into a bottomless money pit. Planeloads of cash flown into Iraq have been lost. Nobody is counting or keeping track of where the money goes. What is worse is the endless number of lives that are going into that pit too.
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