The long-awaited CIA torture report has been released

The official classified CIA torture report that is over 6,000 pages long exposes the illegal abuse and torture of detainees carried out by the CIA. The unclassified 525 page summery has now been released to the public by the United States Senate.

The report is a five year review that began in March 2009 and has been constructed using around six million pages of records and documents (Taylor et al, 2014). It holds details on the torture techniques and enhanced interrogation techniques that have been used on thousands of detainees across CIA-operated prisons and detention camps in multiple countries (Gambino, 2014).

A concern that has risen about the report is the comprehensibility due to the majority of the report including redactions. Andrew Prascow from Human Rights watch says “It makes it very difficult to track the chain of knowledge…You don’t know if the same person who got memos saying this isn’t working later said everything’s fine, this guy’s talking and then decided to up the severity of the abuse. … It’s designed to obfuscate.” (Gerstein, 2014).

A main finding from the report is that ‘the CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques’. It also found that the CIA did not keep an accurate account of detainees and out of a group of 119 detainees, 26 were wrongfully held (United States Senate, 2014).

Forms of torture that is discussed in the report and proved to be true include waterboarding, ‘rectal feeding’ and sleep deprivation. It also discusses how CIA officers often threatened detainees with harm such as sexual abuse to families (United States Senate, 2014).

Much of the treatment of prisoners of war discussed in the report has been found to profoundly violate the Geneva Conventions. A Geneva Conventions code is to provide a judicial review in a short period of time of being detained. Amnesty International (2011: 2) has since declared that “coalition and Iraqi forces detained tens of thousands of people arbitrarily, without charge or trial, for months or even years. Many were held incommunicado and without access to lawyers, leaving them vulnerable to torture and other ill-treatment.”

It has recently been confirmed that the CIA torture report will be available to buy in-store. ‘The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture’ is due to be released on 8th of January 2015 (Gambino, 2014).

Amnesty International. (2011). Broken Bodies, Tortured Minds. Abuse and Neglect of Detainees in Iraq. New York: Global Policy.

Gambino, L. (2014). Senate report into CIA torture to be published as ebook and paperback. The Guardian. [Online]. 10th December. [Date Accessed 26th December 2014]. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/10/senate-cia-torture-report-e-book-paperback

Gerstein, J. (2014). What's not in the Senate torture report. [Online]. [Date accessed 26th December 2014]. Available from: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/cia-torture-report-redactions-113454.html#ixzz3N0vUaI8w

Senate Select Committee. (2014). Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. USA: United States Senate.

Taylor, M et al. (2014). White House withholds thousands of documents from Senate CIA probe, despite vows of help. [Online]. [Date Accessed 26th December 2014]. Available from: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/12/221033/despite-vows-of-help-white-house.html