Report highlights brutal CIA techniques

“Enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the CIA on militants detained in secret prisons were ineffective and never produced information which led to the disruption of imminent terrorist plots, a declassified report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee found.

The report said the CIA misled the public and government policymakers about the effectiveness of the programme, which ran from 2002 to 2006 and involved questioning al Qaeda and other captives around the world.

The report prepared by the Intelligence Committee after a five-year investigation said the techniques used were “far more brutal” than the CIA ever told policymakers or the public.

“This document examines the CIA’s secret overseas detention of at least 119 individuals and the use of coercive interrogation techniques — in some cases amounting to torture,” committee chair Dianne Feinstein said.

Specific examples of brutality by CIA interrogators cited in the report include the November 2002 death from hypothermia of a detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor at a secret CIA prison.

Some were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads, and “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” was carried out without any documented medical need.

The report describes one secret CIA prison, whose location is not identified, as a “dungeon” where detainees were kept in total darkness, constantly shackled in isolated cells, bombarded with loud noise or music, and given only a bucket in which to relieve themselves.

It says that during one of the 83 occasions on which he was subjected to a simulated drowning technique the CIA called “waterboarding,” an al Qaeda detainee known as Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth”, though he later was revived.

President Barack Obama said the report reinforces his opinion that the interrogation methods did not serve broader counterterrorism efforts and significantly damaged the United States’ global standing.

CIA director John Brennan acknowledged that its detention and interrogation programme “had shortcomings and that the agency made mistakes” but the agency pushed back against the panel’s criticism.

The agency insists information gleaned from detainees held and questioned in the CIA programme “advanced the strategic and tactical understanding of the enemy in ways that continue to inform counter-terrorism efforts to this day”.

It was unclear whether the report would lead to further attempts to hold those involved accountable.

The legal statute of limitations has passed for many of the actions.