I'm gratified to see that the most dangerous canard to come out of this agenda-driven sham of a report-that no intelligence was gained from EITs- was soundly rejected by the collective wisdom of the masses.

Only in Pew-Land does 51-29 support become 'about half' (as per the headline). You might think they were talking about Capital Punishment!

Decency evolves. Here is another take on the same story:

Torturers R Us

by digby

This makes me want to cry:

76% of Republicans say CIA interrogation methods justified; 37% of Dems agree, 46% disagree http://t.co/gKruktpkib pic.twitter.com/Y3f9bumhxZ
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) December 15, 2014

I'd love to hear them explain that to their kids. At church.

BTW: When people say there's no difference between the parties, this is the sort of thing that disproves it. Yes, there are many Democrats who support torture or idiotically think it works despite all evidence. But there are whole boatloads more Republicans who are cheerfully onboard the torture train.

It's not much, but it does explain why one might choose one party over another in a two party system.

.
.
digby 12/15/2014 12:30:00 PM

Does these details from the SSCI report, culled from CIA records, sound like torture to you?:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/09/the-most-gruesome-moments-in-the-cia-torture-report.html

The CIA has previously said that only three detainees were ever waterboarded: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri. But records uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee suggest there may have been more than three subjects. The Senate report describes a photograph of a “well worn” waterboard, surrounded by buckets of water, at a detention site where the CIA has claimed it never subjected a detainee to this procedure. In a meeting with the CIA in 2013, the agency was not able to explain the presence of this waterboard. Contrary to CIA’s description to the Department of Justice, the Senate report says that the waterboarding was physically harmful, leading to convulsions and vomiting. During one session, detainee Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded at least 183 times, which the Senate report describes as escalating into a “series of near drownings.”

In November 2002, a detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to the floor died, apparently from hypothermia. This case appears similar to the that of Gul Rahman, who died of similarly explained causes at an Afghan site known as the “Salt Pit,” also in November 2002.

At least five detainees were subjected to “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration,” without any documented medical need. “While IV infusion is safe and effective,” one officer wrote, rectal hydration could be used as a form of behavior control.

Others were deprived of sleep, which could involve staying awake for as long as 180 hours—sometimes standing, sometimes with their hands shackled above their heads.

The CIA forced some detainees who had broken feet or legs to stand in stress-inducing positions for hours at a time, despite having earlier pledged that they wouldn’t subject those wounded individuals to treatment that might exacerbate their injuries.

Decency evolves: You posted in defense of acts you don't dispute are torture and insisted, without factual, legal or moral justification, that such torture was justified because it was "doing what [we] need[ed] to do." I look at these unlawful acts by government officials, committed in part against at least 26 individuals who were misidentified or captured based on bad intelligence, and wonder why someone who purports to be in favor of law and order would condone rather than denounce them.

I perused the report and in my opinion I was not impressed. Not because some terrorists got tortured as I could care less if they felt a bit of extra pain, but because once again the CIA proved itself to be in the rookie league of intelligence agencies.

Intelligence for the most part is time sensitive. So if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to waterboarded 183 times, or kept up for a week, by the time he started talking anything he knew was probably useless. I can promise you if he was in the basement of the FSB HQ in Moscow he'd be talking a lot faster.

Going quasi off-topic briefly, I have no confidence in the CIA or the counter-intelligence unit of the FBI to accomplish anything useful. We spent untold billions building a nuclear bomb, and the Soviets stole all our info via the Rosenburgs et al and they were only caught because the Soviets found them no longer useful and passed the info along via other channels Robert Haansen sold secrets to the Russians for years and no one could figure it out. And of course the FBI was asleep at the switch while terrorists took flying lessons with little interest in landing lessons.

Anyway, maybe someday we'll realize hiring a bunch of boy scouts to run counter-intelligence isn't the way to get the job done - but until then the CIA and FBI do not make me feel safe.

So the Dems have expanded the definition of torture to include "rectal hydration".

So the enemas administered to me by my parents stain them as torturers and me an unwitting part of the growing culture of victimhood.

Decency evolves: You still aren't denying that the acts I described constituted torture, a wise choice given the language of 18 USC Secton 2340, which defines unlawful torture as follows:

"(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality."

People invoke necessity defenses in criminal trials, and I have no trouble with juries concluding that such justifications exist.

The decision about whether or not to prosecute officials acting from political motives involves enormous political considerations. Given the insistence of this Administration on "looking forward, not back" that won't happen. That's entirely unsurprising given the enormous conflict that would result from prosecutions, especially given the endorsement of many of the acts and techniques in question at the highest level of our national government. Watching Dick Cheney on Meet The Press this weekend is proof enough of that.

That said, endorsing torture shows little respect for the rule of law, defines deviancy down in an unacceptable way, and damages us at home and abroad, with little demonstrable benefit. I suspect that those who endorse it are more interested in exacting extrajudicial revenge and satisfying sadistic urges than in getting useful information anyway. That's the traditional view of torturers and it seems to comport with human experience of the practice. Torturers always have their reasons and traditionally they have been viewed by democracies with suspicion and contempt.

I have to say my evening would have just been fine if I didn't have to learn about rectal hydration and the plus/minuses of enemas as a child. I guess I missed out on all the fun.

Mjs and Matthew Faler--this is what you find risible enough to joke about:

CIA operatives subjected at least five detainees to what they called “rectal rehydration and feeding”.

One CIA cable released in the report reveals that detainee Majid Khan was administered by enema his “‘lunch tray’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins was ‘pureed and rectally infused’”. One CIA officer’s email was in the report quoted as saying “we used the largest Ewal [sic] tube we had”.

Rectal feeding is of limited application in actually keeping a person alive or administering nutrients, since the colon and rectum cannot absorb much besides salt, glucose and a few minerals and vitamins. The CIA administered rectal rehydration to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “without a determination of medical need” and justified “rectal fluid resuscitation” of Abu Zubaydah because he “partially refus[ed] liquids”. Al-Nashiri was given an enema after a brief hunger strike.

Risks of rectal feeding and rehydration include damage to the rectum and colon, triggering bowels to empty, food rotting inside the recipient’s digestive tract, and an inflamed or prolapsed rectum from carless insertion of the feeding tube. The report found that CIA leadership was notified that rectal exams may have been conducted with “Excessive force”, and that one of the detainees, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, suffered from an anal fissure, chronic hemorrhoids and symptomatic rectal prolapse.

The CIA’s chief of interrogations characterized rectal rehydration as a method of “total control” over detainees, and an unnamed person said the procedure helped to “clear a person’s head”.

Does this still sound like it's worth defending rather than excoriating?

ISIS is beyond awful. It needs to be and is being confronted. That said, sadism towards captives for the sheer hell of It hurt a lot and managed to help nothing. The immorality and incompetence of it was astounding and was a piece with our unnecessary war in Iraq. Both served to breed new enemies and erode our authority, without effectively combatting the enemy. When I see or hear defenses of the indefensible, and that's what torture is, from a career prosecutor, it rlles me.

(Correction, a former federal prosecutor and government official rather than a career prosecutor, as you reminded me before)

As an attorney, when my opponent keeps sliding away from discussing the merits of an act, that is a pretty obvious hint that the act in question is indefensible, and really what plausible defense could anyone-- you, a CIA agent, or the Almighty himself--offer for the conduct described above?

As for whose fault it was that the Senate committee didn't interview CIA agents, but instead relied on the CIAs own internal interviews conducted as part of the Panetta Review, Reason Magazine persuasively argues that the CIA, not the Senate, was at fault:

http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/09/whose-fault-is-it-cia-werent-interviewed

"The report claims that the CIA told them they would not “compel” CIA employees to cooperate with interviews due to the Department of Justice investigations . . . . So who to believe, here? It’s helpful to look at a previous spat between the CIA and Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein for some guidance. Way back in the spring there was a big fight between the two of them where Feinstein accused the CIA of snooping on Senate staffers who were preparing this report. Though the CIA denied it, they eventually had to eat their words. It turned out to be true. They had secretly searched the computers the Senate staffers were using to prepare the report and removed many documents.

According to Feinstein, the big point of conflict was that the Senate staff had somehow gotten access to the CIA’s own internal evaluation of its interrogation practices. Known as the Panetta Review (after then CIA Director Leon Panetta), the report came to some critical conclusions that matched the Senate’s conclusions. The CIA did not want the Senate to have access to the report, which Feinstein claims contradicts some of their defenses of their interrogation. The surveillance scandal revolved around access to this internal report.

So if the CIA engaged in secret surveillance against the Senate staff because it didn’t want them to have access to its own interviews with its own employees and its own analysis, perhaps we should greet with skepticism any claims that they would have been more than happy to sit down for a chat for this report."