ACLU sues psychologists over CIA interrogation tactics, Rise in child abuse investigations linked to fears of witchcraft

ACLU sues psychologists over CIA interrogation tactics  
The Associated Press  ERIC TUCKER Oct 13th 2015

WASHINGTON (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday sued two former Air Force psychologists who designed a CIA program that used harsh interrogation techniques to elicit intelligence from suspected terrorists, saying the pair endorsed and taught torture tactics under the guise of science.

The lawsuit comes 10 months after the release of a damning Senate report that said the interrogation techniques had inflicted pain on al-Qaida prisoners far beyond the legal limits and did not yield lifesaving intelligence.

The suit accuses the psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, of developing an interrogation program that relied on beatings, sleep deprivation, starvation, waterboarding and other methods that caused physical and psychological suffering on prisoners in CIA custody….

The suit was filed in federal court in Washington state on behalf of three former CIA prisoners. One, Gul Rahman, was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison called the Salt Pit, subjected to isolation, darkness and extreme cold water, and was later found dead of hypothermia. The other two men, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, are now free.

The lawsuit was brought under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows noncitizens to sue in U.S. courts over human-rights violations. A 2010 Associated Press report, citing former U.S. officials, said the CIA promised to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for the psychologists if the program ran into trouble.

The suit repeats many of the allegations that surfaced in an exhaustive Senate investigation issued last year. It found sweeping flaws with the CIA’s approach to interrogations.

The complaint alleges that the psychologists, despite having no practical interrogation experience or specific background in al-Qaida, devised a program for the CIA that drew from 1960s experiments involving dogs and the theory of “learned helplessness.” In making their case to the CIA, the psychologists argued that just as abused dogs will become passive and compliant, humans subject to “uncontrollable pain” would “become helpless and unable to resist an interrogator’s demand for information,” according to the lawsuit.

The pair, who worked as independent contractors for the CIA, formed a company that was ultimately paid $81 million and which as of April 2007 directly employed 11 of the 13 interrogators used by the agency, the complaint states. The men were also themselves involved in some of the interrogations….
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/10/13/aclu-sues-psychologists-over-cia-interrogation-tactics/21248565/

Rise in child abuse investigations linked to fears of witchcraft
Ruth Gledhill Christian Today Contributing Editor 12 October 2015

Police are investigating increasing numbers of cases where children are being assaulted because of suspicions about witchcraft.
This year so far, 27 cases of ritual child abuse have or are still being investigated by the Metropolitan Police, including two allegations of rape. This compares to to 24 in 2013, 19 in 2012 and nine in 2011. There have ben 148 referrals to the Met since 2004….

Allegations included a child being swung around and smacked on the head to “drive out the devil” and youngsters being dunked in water, according to an investigation by the BBC.

Deaths linked to ritual child abuse include Kristy Bamu, 15, tortured and drowned by his sister and her boyfriend in 2010 and Victoria Climbie in 2000, whose aunt and boyfriend had believed she was possessed and who were found guilty of murder.

Det Supt Terry Sharpe said ritualistic abuse was a hidden crime.
“Abuse linked to belief is a horrific crime which is condemned by people of all cultures, communities and faiths. A number of high-profile investigations brought the issue of ritual abuse and witchcraft into the headlines, but it is important that professionals are clear about the signs to look for.”
Some families genuinely believed the victim had been taken over by the devil or an evil spirit, he said.
“Regardless of the beliefs of the abusers, child abuse is child abuse.”….
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/child.abuse.linked.to.witchcraft.on.the.rise/67340.htm

US torture doctors could face charges after report alleges post-9/11 ‘collusion’

US torture doctors could face charges after report alleges post-9/11 ‘collusion’
Leading group of psychologists faces a reckoning following repeated denials that its members were complicit in Bush administration-era torture
Spencer Ackerman  Saturday 11 July 2015

The largest association of psychologists in the United States is on the brink of a crisis, the Guardian has learned, after an independent review revealed that medical professionals lied and covered up their extensive involvement in post-9/11 torture. The revelation, puncturing years of denials, has already led to at least one leadership firing and creates the potential for loss of licenses and even prosecutions.

For more than a decade, the American Psychological Association (APA) has maintained that a strict code of ethics prohibits its more than 130,000 members to aid in the torture of detainees while simultaneously permitting involvement in military and intelligence interrogations. The group has rejected media reporting on psychologists’ complicity in torture; suppressed internal dissent from anti-torture doctors; cleared members of wrongdoing; and portrayed itself as a consistent ally against abuse.

Now, a voluminous independent review conducted by a former assistant US attorney, David Hoffman, undermines the APA’s denials in full – and vindicates the dissenters.

Sources with knowledge of the report and its consequences, who requested anonymity to discuss the findings before public release, expected a wave of firings and resignations across the leadership of an organization that Hoffman finds used its extensive institutional links to the CIA and US military to facilitate abusive interrogations….
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jul/10/us-torture-doctors-psychologists-apa-prosecution

PSYCHOLOGISTS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
PsySR Responds to Hoffman Report about APA Collusion
http://www.psysr.org/about/statements/PsySR_Statement-Hoffman_Report.pdf

A national hero’: psychologist who warned of torture collusion gets her due
Jean Maria Arrigo was largely ignored and the subject of a smear campaign for sounding alarms about psychologists’ post-9/11 torture complicity but has emerged from the damning report as the story’s hero – and martyr
Spencer Ackerman in New York

Monday 13 July 2015

Jean Maria Arrigo’s inbox is filling up with apologies.

For a decade, colleagues of the 71-year-old psychologist ignored, derided and in some cases attacked Arrigo for sounding alarms that the American Psychological Association was implicated in US torture. But now that a devastating report has exposed deep APA complicity with brutal CIA and US military interrogations – and a smear campaign against Arrigo herself – her colleagues are expressing contrition.

Arrigo estimates she has received perhaps a dozen such emails since David Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor, confirmed what she has crusaded against for a decade: the APA’s institutional involvement with torture led to a concerted effort to quash dissent, lie to the public, and silence people like her. In a story full of villains, Arrigo emerges from Hoffman’s report as a hero – and a martyr….
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jul/13/psychologist-torture-doctors-collusion-jean-maria-arrigo

American Psychological Association Bolstered C.I.A. Torture Program, Report Says

American Psychological Association Bolstered C.I.A. Torture Program, Report Says
By JAMES RISEN APRIL 30, 2015

WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, according to a new report by a group of dissident health professionals and human rights activists.

The report is the first to examine the association’s role in the interrogation program. It contends, using newly disclosed emails, that the group’s actions to keep psychologists involved in the interrogation program coincided closely with efforts by senior Bush administration officials to salvage the program after the public disclosure in 2004 of graphic photos of prisoner abuse by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“The A.P.A. secretly coordinated with officials from the C.I.A., White House and the Department of Defense to create an A.P.A. ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the C.I.A. torture program,” the report’s authors conclude….

The involvement of health professionals in the Bush-era interrogation program was significant because it enabled the Justice Department to argue in secret opinions that the program was legal and did not constitute torture, since the interrogations were being monitored by health professionals to make sure they were safe.

The interrogation program has since been shut down, and last year the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a detailed report that described the program as both ineffective and abusive.

Rhea Farberman, a spokeswoman for the American Psychological Association, denied that the group had coordinated its actions with the government. There “has never been any coordination between A.P.A. and the Bush administration on how A.P.A. responded to the controversies about the role of psychologists in the interrogations program,” she said….

In early June 2004, a senior official with the association, the nation’s largest professional organization for psychologists, issued an invitation to a carefully selected group of psychologists and behavioral scientists inside the government to a private meeting to discuss the crisis and the role of psychologists in the interrogation program.

Psychologists from the C.I.A. and other agencies met with association officials in July, and by the next year the association issued guidelines that reaffirmed that it was acceptable for its members to be involved in the interrogation program.

To emphasize their argument that the association grew too close to the interrogation program, the critics’ new report cites a 2003 email from a senior psychologist at the C.I.A. to a senior official at the psychological association. In the email, the C.I.A. psychologist appears to be confiding in the association official about the work of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the private contractors who developed and helped run the enhanced interrogation program at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons around the world….
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says-american-psychological-association-collaborated-on-torture-justification.html

‘Sons Of Guns’ Star Indicted On Multiple Rape Charges, Why the Torture Report Won’t Change Anything

‘Sons Of Guns’ Star Indicted On Multiple Rape Charges
The Huffington Post

Cavan Sieczkowski December 19, 2014

The former star of Discovery Channel’s “Sons of Guns,” Will Hayden, was indicted on multiple rape charges Wednesday in Louisiana.

An East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicted Hayden, 49, on three counts of rape involving two females, the Times-Picayune reported. The charges against him include two counts of aggravated rape and one count of forcible rape. If convicted of aggravated rape, he faces a mandatory life sentence.

Hayden is accused of raping two preteen girls, according to the Advocate. He is accused of raping a girl in East Baton Rouge beginning in March 2013, when she was 11 years old, until August 2014.

Additionally, a woman, who is now in her 30s, also came forward claiming Hayden raped her in the 1990s when she was 12 years old, the Advocate reported….
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainment/celebrity/sons-of-guns-star-indicted-on-multiple-rape-charges/ar-BBh07RX

Why the Torture Report Won’t Change Anything
At most, it only further proves the incompatibility of a secret intelligence service and an open democracy.
Tim Weiner  December 16, 2014

The report on the brutalities of the CIA’s secret prisons is the most important work by the Senate Intelligence Committee since congressional oversight of the CIA began in the 1970s. Its descriptions of torture and deception are as compelling as the newsreels of the Nuremberg trials….

It appears that the CIA did not give President Bush a full report on the gory details of the secret prisons for four years. This is “plausible deniability,” which shields the president from legal or moral hazard by keeping him in the dark. That practice was supposed to have ended decades ago.

The CIA had also forbidden the use of torture—“not only because it is wrong, but because it has historically proven to be ineffective,” in the words of Richard Stolz, chief of the clandestine service under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Stolz is cited in the Senate report. The CIA’s codes of conduct before 9/11 clearly stated, “Inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.”

False answers were what Congress got from Bush’s CIA directors and their underlings. They delivered deceptive testimony and destroyed videotapes of torture. Brennan had to reprimand five officers for cybersnooping on the Senate’s files. The intelligence committees cannot function if the CIA lies to them and spies on them. That, too, was supposed to have ended when the committees were created in the 1970s….
http://www.thenation.com/article/193161/why-torture-report-wont-change-anything

The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings

The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings

Reframing the CIA’s interrogation techniques as a violation of scientific and medical ethics may be the best way to achieve accountability.

Lisa Hajjar December 16, 2014

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”

In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.” Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies….

The “war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”

In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America….
http://www.thenation.com/article/193185/cia-didnt-just-torture-it-experimented-human-beings#

Here Are The Most Horrific Details From The Senate Torture Report, Read The Senate Torture Report

Here Are The Most Horrific Details From The Senate Torture Report
Nick Wing  12/09/2014

On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the long-awaited summary of its torture report, revealing horrific details about the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program.

Many of the details in the report are sickening and graphic. They are perhaps made only more disturbing by the overarching conclusion that the torture and “enhanced interrogation” employed by the CIA failed to produce the types of significant intelligence that had been used to defend the program in the past.

You can go here to read the unsealed summary of the report, including a section on initial findings and hundreds of pages of declassified documents. Below is a compilation of some of the most abhorrent details from it….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/senate-torture-report-details_n_6295396.html

Read The Senate Torture Report Here
The Huffington Post  By Paige Lavender
12/09/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/senate-torture-report_n_6247726.html

Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Interrogations, More Than A Quarter Of The World’s Countries Helped The CIA Run Its Torture Program, Senate report finds CIA torture produced ‘fabricated’ intel and thwarted no plots

Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Interrogations
By MARK MAZZETTI  DEC. 9, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.

In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

….The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.

The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.

….The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at least 26 were wrongfully held.”

….The program expanded, with dozens of detainees taken to secret prisons in Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other countries. In September 2006, Mr. Bush ordered all of the detainees in C.I.A. custody to be transferred to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after that the C.I.A. held a small number of detainees in secret at a different facility for several months at a time, before they were also moved to Guantánamo Bay.

Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators, but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-intelligence-committee-cia-torture-report.html

More Than A Quarter Of The World’s Countries Helped The CIA Run Its Torture Program  12/09/2014

….According to several U.S. officials involved with the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the Senate document would enable readers to identify the many countries that aided the CIA’s controversial torture program between 2002 and roughly 2006. These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/cia-torture-countries_n_6297832.html

Senate report finds CIA torture produced ‘fabricated’ intel and thwarted no plots
After waterboarding, 9/11 mastermind told interrogators what ‘he thought they wanted to hear’   By Michael Isikoff   12/9/14

After days of brutal interrogations, in which he was slammed against walls, slapped in the gut, and repeatedly waterboarded — “near drownings” that caused him to vomit — 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his CIA interrogators he was “ready to talk.”

The story he told in March 2003: He had sent an al-Qaida operative to Montana to recruit African-Americans for terrorist attacks inside the U.S. The alarming new claim sent FBI agents scrambling to find evidence of the plot, but they came up with nothing.

And for good reason: KSM later admitted he had fabricated the story — that because he was being subjected to such rough measures, he “simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear,” according to an internal agency cable quoted in the mammoth Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Tuesday by the panel’s chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The invented Montana plot is only one example of multiple wild-goose chases and other false leads that were produced by the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” — what President Barack Obama himself has labeled “torture” — in the years after 9/11, according to the 489-page Senate report.

“The methods in question … regularly resulted in fabricated information,” the report states in its key findings….

Many of the techniques laid out in the report have been publicly known for years — forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary and temperature manipulation, wall slamming and, of course, waterboarding, a practice dating back to the Spanish Inquisition in which subjects are strapped down and doused with water to simulate the experience of drowning….

A CIA prison in Afghanistan (known as the Salt Pit but referred to as COBALT in the report) was described in CIA cables as a “dungeon” where hooded prisoners were kept in complete darkness and shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music — and only a bucket to use for human waste. One of the detainees died from hypothermia after being left naked from the waist down….

The committee report examined 20 “case studies” in which agency officials had claimed they had thwarted plots or rounded up suspects based on aggressive interrogations. These assertions, the panel found, were “inaccurate and contradicted by the CIA’s own records.”….
https://news.yahoo.com/senate-report-finds-cia-torture-produced–fabricated–intel-and-thwarted-no-plots—232012393.html

CIA Torture Report: Chinese Communist Methods, Waterboarding, Sleep deprivation, Exposure to cold, Physical isolation, Sensory deprivation, Physical degradation

“They were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation.”
“It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs.”

also:  Mind Control Documents & Links

Congress Clashes Over Release Of CIA Torture Report
December 08, 2014  Lauren Hodges

Leaders on Capitol Hill are at odds regarding a report on CIA methods — including torture — used to extract information in the so-called war on terror.

Chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has been fighting for the release of her 480-page executive summary of the report since April of this year, and it finally was scheduled for a reveal this week….

NPR’s Sam Sanders reported Sunday that “officials who’ve seen the report say it details sleep deprivation, confinement and waterboarding.”

On Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR’s Mara Liasson spoke with host Rachel Martin about the Obama administration’s view of the release.

“The administration supports releasing the report. And the State Department says Kerry told Feinstein that the timing of the release was her choice. But the administration is concerned about how the report would affect ongoing efforts against ISIS, the Islamic State terrorist group, and the safety of Americans who are being held hostage around the world. And it wants those issues to be taken into account.”….
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/07/369262235/congress-clashes-over-release-of-cia-torture-report

U.S. on alert for release of report on CIA’s use of torture
The Canadian Press By Alexander Panetta December 8, 2014

WASHINGTON – For months, there’s been a battle in the shadows of Washington over a report on torture by the CIA.

The covert conflict saw the CIA spy on Congress. Intelligence officials quietly argued against the report’s release, on the basis that it would endanger American lives. The White House eventually stepped in, mediating negotiations about what to include — and what to black out.

It’s being made public now.

A congressional committee that studied the use of torture during the Bush era is poised Tuesday to release a 480-page executive summary of its findings, a heavily scrutinized and edited synopsis of a broader 6,000-page document compiled by a Senate panel….

The CIA admitted to snooping on Senate staffers’ computers while they prepared the report. At first, the agency denied accusations of domestic espionage against the elected body. Eventually, it confessed and apologized, ascribing its actions to the belief that staffers were consulting unauthorized documents.

Still, that failed to mollify members of Congress. Several called for the CIA director’s resignation for what they described as a violation of the country’s basic democratic order….

The report into the CIA comes six years after the Senate released a study into the military — and offered a glimpse into how its interrogation techniques were developed after 9-11.

It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs.

The Chinese method came to be rebranded as Biderman’s Principles, after the academic who researched the Korean War practice. He boiled it down to an eight-step program: physical isolation, followed by sensory deprivation, exhaustion and discomfort, threats, occasional rewards, powerlessness, physical degradation, and the enforcement of arbitrary rules.

According to the 2008 Senate report, the Navy trainers handed out a chart on those coercive techniques to the personnel at Guantanamo Bay.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-braces-release-long-awaited-report-cias-torture-221653528.html

CIA torture report: US raises security ahead of release  8 December 2014
The report appears to conclude CIA officials lied about the programme to Bush administration officials….

The full 6,000-page report, produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee, remains classified.

The 480-page summary is being released by Democrats on the panel.

President Barack Obama halted the CIA interrogation programme when he took office in 2009, and has acknowledged that the methods used to question al-Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.

During the presidency of George W Bush, the CIA operation against al-Qaeda – known internally as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation – saw as many as 100 suspected terrorists held in “black sites” outside the US.

Analysis: Jon Sopel, BBC North America editor

What more can we learn about the CIA’s interrogation programme from this heavily redacted report? Based on leaks, Tuesday’s release seems to answer three major questions:

First. Were the interrogation methods – torture if you like – more extensive and more brutal than previously admitted? It looks like the conclusion is yes.

Second. Did these interrogation techniques deliver life-saving intelligence to the US? That answer appears to be no.

Third. Were CIA officials at the time honest with the White House on what the programme was getting up to? Again, no….

They were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation….
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30383924

Sexual threats, other CIA methods detailed in Senate report
By Mark Hosenball and Jeff Mason   WASHINGTON Mon Dec 8, 2014

(Reuters) – Graphic details about sexual threats and other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants will be detailed by a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the spy agency’s anti-terror tactics, sources familiar with the document said.

The report, which the committee’s majority Democrats are expected to release on Tuesday, describes how senior al Qaeda operative Abdel Rahman al Nashiri, suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was threatened by his interrogators with a buzzing power drill, the sources said. The drill was never actually used on Nashiri.

In another instance, the report documents how at least one detainee was sexually threatened with a broomstick, the sources said….

The report, which took years to produce, charts the history of the CIA’s “Rendition, Detention and Interrogation” program, which Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush ended many aspects of the program before leaving office, and Obama swiftly banned so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which critics say are torture, after his 2009 inauguration.

The committee’s bottom-line conclusion is that harsh interrogations did not produce a single critical intelligence nugget that could not have been obtained by non-coercive means.

That conclusion is strongly disputed by many intelligence and counter-terrorism officials, who say that there is no question such interrogations led to major breakthroughs….

While the Justice Department had authorized techniques like sleep deprivation, controls and supervision of such methods were sometimes lax when the CIA began detaining and interrogating militants starting in August 2002, said sources familiar with the interrogation program.

A more rigorous system of monitoring how the techniques were used was in place by early 2003, the sources said….
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/08/us-usa-cia-torture-idUKKBN0JM24I20141208

Mind Control Documents & Links
proof mk-ultra exists
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case,  Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project.
https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/

In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis The Nazis Next Door, Florida hazing trial begins in college marching band death, Church of England to examine 1950s records in child abuse investigation

– In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis
The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men “The agency’s own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania.”

–  Florida hazing trial begins in college marching band death
“he died of hemorrhagic shock resulting from blunt force trauma after running through a gauntlet of band members beating him”

– Church of England to examine 1950s records in child abuse investigation

In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis
By ERIC LICHTBLAU OCT. 26, 2014

WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.

The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”

And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official….

In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.

The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had all worked as F.B.I. informants, providing leads on Communist “sympathizers.” Five of the men were still active informants….

Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.

One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews.

Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote….

When Israeli agents captured Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, Otto von Bolschwing went to the C.I.A. for help because he worried they might come after him, memos show.

Agency officials were worried as well that Mr. von Bolschwing might be named as Eichmann’s “collaborator and fellow conspirator and that the resulting publicity may prove embarrassing to the U.S.” a C.I.A. official wrote….

In all, the American military, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war, according to Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at American University who was on a government-appointed team that declassified war-crime records.

The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher, said Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian on the declassification team, but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible.

“U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes,” he said. “Information was readily available that these were compromised men.”….

When the Justice Department was preparing in 1994 to prosecute a senior Nazi collaborator in Boston named Aleksandras Lileikis, the C.I.A. tried to intervene.

The agency’s own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked “under the control of the Gestapo during the war,” his C.I.A. file noted, and “was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna.”

Even so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany — paying him $1,700 a year, plus two cartons of cigarettes a month — and cleared the way for him to immigrate to America four years later, records show….

This article is adapted from “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,” by Eric Lichtblau, to be published Tuesday by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html

Florida hazing trial begins in college marching band death
By Barbara Liston
ORLANDO Fla. Mon Oct 27, 2014 1

(Reuters) – Three years after the beating death of a Florida college band member brought national attention to its hazing rituals, the alleged ringleader of the abuse went on trial on Monday for manslaughter.

….a former member of the Florida A&M University’s celebrated “Marching 100” band, faces hazing charges for his role in the death of Robert Champion, a band drum major.

….Fourteen band members have faced charges for punching, kicking and striking Champion during a hazing ritual known as “Crossing Bus C.” Most received probation and community service in plea deals. Charges were dismissed against a fifteenth person….

Champion’s death was ruled a homicide by a medical examiner, who found he died of hemorrhagic shock resulting from blunt force trauma after running through a gauntlet of band members beating him on the darkened bus.

Champion had long refused to engage in the band’s hazing rituals, but ultimately decided to participate in what witnesses called an attempt to gain respect….
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/27/us-usa-hazing-florida-idUSKBN0IG1PV20141027

Church of England to examine 1950s records in child abuse investigation
Justin Welby says personnel files will be searched for allegations of abuse as study into confessional confidentiality also launched

Michael White and Rajeev Syal
The Guardian, Monday 27 October 2014

The Church of England is examining the personnel files of thousands of clergymen and women dating back to the 1950s as part of a wide-ranging investigation into historical allegations of child abuse, the archbishop of Canterbury has confirmed.

The Most Rev Justin Welby, the principal leader of the Church of England, said that the move is part of a renewed effort to ensure that there are no allegations of abuse which have been ignored, overlooked or covered up.

Following recent disclosures of evidence of child abuse within the church, Welby conceded that the investigations would show that “there is more that has not been revealed”…..
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/27/justin-welby-1950s-personnel-files-clergy-child-abuse-investigation-confessional-confidentiality

A warning on ‘torture report’ release

A warning on ‘torture report’ release
By Michael Isikoff August 8, 2014 Yahoo News

….The memo, with its stark warnings about potential violence, is the latest development in a struggle  between Feinstein’s committee and the CIA over how many details should be made public about the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation” — including the near drowning technique known as waterboarding — of top terror suspects. The techniques were authorized by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, but were banned by President Obama when he took office .

Intelligence sources familiar with the report say it graphically describes — in some cases, with grisly details — the harsh tactics that agency officers and contractors used for weeks at a time to try to get top suspects like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk. The report also recounts the death of an Afghan suspect after he was shackled and left half naked in freezing temperatures in an agency interrogation facility known as “the Salt Pit” in 2002.

The committee accuses CIA officials of misrepresenting the program to Congress and the Justice Department, claiming it yielded important intelligence about potential terror plots that were actually learned elsewhere, the sources said. Another charge is that the agency undercounted the number of detainees who were subjected to such harsh methods, asserting in 2006 it was no more than 100, leaving out about 20 others who received similar rough treatment in Afghanistan. Both findings have been sharply challenged by former CIA officials who are planning a lengthy rebuttal when the report is released.

When the intelligence committee approved, on a partisan vote, the report last April, Feinstein said “the results were shocking” and that the report “exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation.”

“This will be an ugly story when it comes out,” agrees one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the findings of the report…..
http://news.yahoo.com/a-warning-on–torture-report–release-233244652.html