Senate releases CIA torture report

[Peter Lemkin]

Yeah, treatment of whistleblowers - there's another area where Obama's been just as bad as Bush, perhaps worse.

Sadly, not 'just as'...but much worse. Under Obama more whistleblowers have been prosecuted than all other administrations combined!...how'z that for 'change you can rely on'?!

[David Guyatt]

Yeah, treatment of whistleblowers - there's another area where Obama's been just as bad as Bush, perhaps worse.

Sadly, not 'just as'...but much worse. Under Obama more whistleblowers have been prosecuted than all other administrations combined!...how'z that for 'change you can relay on'?!

The same thing happens here in the UK too. It's a strategy, I think. You get a conservative/republican government/president who relentlessly pushes the edge well past what is deemed acceptable by the populace (those who can be bothered or care, anyway). He/She eventually has to retire or is voted out of office and the other member of the tag-team, labour/democrat, get elected by the people with a released sigh, praying that they, at least, will reverse some of the awfulness that has happened. But all soon learn they are even worse that the first member of the tag team.

In this way the agenda always gets pushed further and further to the right, until today it is radically changed beyond recognition of a decade or two earlier. This, I think, is aimed at changing the world rapidly, rather than manufacturing change far more slowly - but inexorably towards the planned destination.

[Dawn Meredith]

Yeah, treatment of whistleblowers - there's another area where Obama's been just as bad as Bush, perhaps worse.

Sadly, not 'just as'...but much worse. Under Obama more whistleblowers have been prosecuted than all other administrations combined!...how'z that for 'change you can relay on'?!

According to Sibel Edmonds he has gone after more whistle blowers than all his predecessors combined.
Yup, change you can believe in.

[Peter Lemkin]

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: First, the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques were not an effective way to gather intelligence information. Second, the CIA provided extensive amounts of inaccurate information about the operation of the program and its effectiveness to the White House, the Department of Justice, Congress, the CIA inspector general, the media and the American public. Third, CIA's management of the program was inadequate and deeply flawed. And fourth, the CIA program was far more brutal than people were led to believe.

AMY GOODMAN: The Senate report details a list of torture methods used on prisonerswaterboarding, sexual threats with broomsticks, medically unnecessary "rectal feeding." In one case, a prisoner had his entire "lunch tray" of hummus, pasta and nuts puréed and administered by enema. Prisoners were threatened with buzzing power drills. Some captives were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.
Speaking on the floor of the Senate Tuesday, Senator Feinstein discussed the death of Gul Rahman at a CIA black site north of Kabul, Afghanistan, known as the Salt Pit.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: CIA placed a junior officer, with no relevant experience, in charge of the site. In November 2002, an otherwise healthy detainee, who was being held mostly nude and chained to a concrete floor, died at the facility from what is believed to have been hypothermia. In interviews conducted in 2003 by the CIA officer of the inspector general, CIA's leadership acknowledged that they had little or no awareness of operations at this specific CIA detention site.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Feinstein discussing the death of Gul Rahman. The Senate report also reveals Rahman was only detained due to mistaken identity.
In another case, a detainee named Abu Hudhaifa was subjected to "ice water baths" and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be.
According to the Senate report, the CIA ran black sites in Afghanistan and Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and a secret site at the Guantánamo Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields.
The Senate report released Tuesday is just the summary of a much longer investigation into CIA's torture practices. Key parts of the summary were redacted. The names of two psychologists who helped the CIA create the torture program are not included in the summary. The report does detail that the psychologists, whose names are James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, received an $81 million contract from the CIA.
So far, no one involved in the CIA interrogation program has been charged with a crimewith one exception: the whistleblower John Kiriakou. In 2007, he became the first person with direct knowledge of the program to publicly reveal its existence. He is currently serving a 30-month sentence.
For more on the Senate torture report, we're joined by Reed Brody, counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch. He's written several reports for Human Rights Watch on prisoner mistreatment in the war on terror, including a 2011 report which called for a criminal investigation of senior Bush administration officials.
Reed, since I'm speaking to you from Lima, Peru, where the U.N. climate summit is happening, and you're in New York, and there's a satellite delay, if you could just lay out the most critical points that have come out in this, again, just the summary, not the actual thousands of pages that are still classified, but the remarkable revelations in this summary that has been released by the Senate Intelligence Committee?
REED BRODY: Sure, Amy. As you say, the first thing that really jumps out is just the sheer pervasiveness of the brutality. I mean, even those of us who have been looking at this for the last 10 years, as one of my colleagues said, may be not surprised, but shocked.
You know, you described the rectal feeding, the rectal hydration. You know, this was not just one prisoner, this was a number of prisoners. And they were used, according to the CIA documents, as a means of behavior control. I mean, this is, you know, an IV infusion placed up somebody's rectum, and the person is in a forward-facing position, their head lower than their torso, at which point you put in a rectal tube with an IV. The flow will regulate, sloshing up the large intestines. You put up the tube as large as you can, then you open the IV wide. No need to squeeze the bag, let gravity do the work. And this was notyou know, this is rape. This is the CIA discussing in emails and documents the methods they are using to rape detainees.
A detainee who died in the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, who was partially nude and chained to a concrete floor, who died from suspected hypothermia; at least three detainees were threatened with harm to their families, threats to the children of detainees, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee; a detainee told that he would never be allowed to leave alive; detainees placed in ice water baths; people shackled in dark cells, called bythe CIA's own people referred to it as a "dungeon"I mean, this is medieval stuff. And, you know, it reallyit reallyI have say, it's really shocking, even for me.
As you mentioned, this was a dysfunctional program. The interrogation program was essentially outsourced to these two psychologists, who you mentioned. And neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator. They had no specialized knowledge of al-Qaeda, no background in counterterrorism or any relevant linguistic or cultural information. And as you pointed out, they received $81 million. And these contractors made up 85 percentor their company that they created and other contractors made up 85 percent of the workforce for these detainee operations.
Now, at the same time that it was run amok, there was a cultureand this is important to understandof just, you know, let them loose. On a number of occasions, there were complaints. There werethings went up to headquarters. And the word that came back was: "Look, we'd rather be safe than sorry." And in one case, no action was taken against a CIA officer for wrongful detention because, quote, "[t]he Director strongly believes that mistakes should be expected in a business filled with uncertainty. ... [T]he director believes the [scale tips] decisively in favor of accepting mistakes that over connect the dots [against those that] under connect them." Even in the case of the death from suspected hypothermia that we talked about, headquarters decided not to take action because they were "motivated to extract any and all operational information."
You pointed out, I think, probably the key thing being discussed in Washington today is the conclusion that no actionable intelligence that could not have been garnered by other means were extracted through this program. And the committee went through 20 incidents in which the CIA claimed to have garnered actionable intelligence that was used to capture people or to foil plots. And in each of those 20 incidents, the committee found either that the intelligence already existed, that it wasn't used, or that the plot in fact didn't exist. And people particularly focus on the capture of Osama bin Laden and the identification of the courier who led the U.S. to Osama bin Laden. And the committee found that the vast majority of the intelligence about the Qaeda courier, quote, "was originally acquired from sources unrelated to the CIA's detention and interrogation program, and the most accurate information acquired from a CIA detainee was provided prior to the CIA subjecting the detainee to ... enhanced interrogation techniques."
Another thing we see here constantly is the desire to evade the law. You referred to, and Dianne Feinstein, in what I found to be a remarkable speech on the Senate floor, referred to the lies. But there are a lot of little tidbits that we find in this report. For instance, you mentioned there was, in addition to the black sites in foreign countries, there was a black site at Guantánamo. But in 2004, the Supreme Court in the Hamdan ruling basically said the Constitution applies in Guantánamo. And at that point, the detainees who were in Guantánamo were shipped out of Guantánamoand this is the CIA detainees, of courseand they were sent to Morocco. And actually, what's interesting tidbit in the report is that they were actually placed in a Moroccan jail, as opposed to the other countries where they were placed in CIA facilities. And the problem was that they heardthey were so close to the Moroccan prisoners that they could hear the Moroccan prisoners screaming.
In the other cases, in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, the CIA detention centers were far away fromthey were CIA detention centers. What is interesting in this report, too, about those centers is the kind of the diplomatic cost of having CIA detention centers in another country. Often, the ambassadors to those countries were not informed or were only informed after the deal was done. In order to basically buy the cooperation of these countries, the U.S. had to offer them wish lists of what they wanted. In one very interesting note in the reportand it shows the kind of the perverse effect of having a CIA detention centerthe secretary of state in 2004 ordered a U.S. ambassador in an unnamed country to démarche the country to ask that that country provide for its prisons full access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. But, of course, the problem was, at the same time, the U.S. had prisoners in that country who it was keeping secret and, obviously, not available to the Red Cross.
Final and probably most important point is, I guess, what is not in this report. This report, you know, deals with one aspect of one part of the detainee mistreatment in the war on terror. It deals with the CIA prisoners held in black sites. It does not, for instance, deal with renditions by the CIA. So there's no mention in here of the CIA sending prisoners to places like Syria, under Bashar al-Assad, where people like Maher Arar, who has been on your show several times, was tortured. It does not talk about people being sent to Libya, under Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence agencies, where they were tortured. It does not talk about people being sent to Egypt. And it doesn't talk about what the Pentagon was doing. It doesn't talk about the programs approved by Donald Rumsfeld.
And probably more importantly, by focusing everything on the CIA, it tends to kind of let off the hook all those people above who authorized these programs. So, we know, and from President Bush's own memoirs, that he authorized waterboarding. Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, these are all people who signed off on the authorization on these techniques, not to mention the lawyers, people like John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who gave the legal authorization for this.
Earlier, you had President Obama's remarks, in which he said that it was important that this report be made public so that, hopefully, we won't make these mistakes again. These aren't mistakes. These are crimes. And, you know, Dianne Feinstein, in her Senate remarks, referred to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which says that torture can never be justified under any circumstances. Well, that convention says something else. It says that torture must be prosecuted, that when someone is alleged to have committed torture, the state concerned must refer that case to their competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
What assurance do we have that this is not going to happen again? You know, it's not enough, again, to say, "Well, we tortured some folks, this was a bad policy choice, I'm going to put a stop to the torture." You know, it is not a policy choice, again. It is a crime. And there needs to beif this is really going to beif there are really going to be any deterrence for this not happening again, there needs to be prosecutions. And it's wonderfulyou know, you've talked about Human Rights Watch's work around the world. Human rights organizations regularly, when countries commit torture, when individuals commit torture, we call on those countries to hold the abusers to account. And that has to be the same thing for the United States. We believe, as you mentionedand we're not the only ones, the United Nations has said the same, Amnesty International has said the samethat there is a case to answer for senior U.S. leaders on charges of torture, for the things in this report and for the wider authorizations that they gave for torture and war crimes to be committed.

[Michael Barwell]

Supposeing for a minute that all I've said about the security state and their powers of the mind, invasive, controlling and destructive, the "power" of the psychopaths on the psyops teams to infect and infest an individuals mind, to drive them to death and insanity - and their intoxicated ravenous over-willingness to do these things; to whistleblow this would be a brave action indeed. Literally, they can and do put things in ppl's minds, reference them, and call that 'evidence of guilt', because it pleases them to do so. They can and do make automatons/drones of ppl. Kill remotely by heart stopping, torture and crucify with EM frequencies. Again, a brave whistleblower indeed. The sythetic 'trigeminal/migrainous' neuralgia I had every night for 6months felt as tho' a drill were destroying the side of my face and head, truely excruciating and obviously functionally incapactiating. It would take some guts to face that willingly.
More whistleblowers have been hung out to dry on Obamas watch than any other presidents (I gather), and of course, there's John Kiriakou.

[Albert Doyle]

What nobody has the backbone to say in public is that the old order in America would not hesitate to say that it doesn't matter if torture produced good intel, that America simply wouldn't do it under any circumstances because of its high principles. The cheap shit-heels that now run America forget that and try to assert there's some form of good torture. What this is telling us is that the leaders with integrity are in fear of the new American huns that will bully them if they don't toe the line on fascist torture.

[Albert Doyle]

...and any future in politics is all but shot....I wouldn't even be surprised if he died in an accident sometime not long from now.

The Udall family has a strong connection to environmentalism and land conservation in the west. The environment is the modern day n word of politics because when it gets raped or ignored no one notices. When Udall goes down his environmental heritage goes with him and gets subverted to our new Wal Mart, land rights lobby whore government paradigm. There's plenty of polyester suit cheap pols to fill his void that will be well funded and supported by the CIA bastards Udall correctly criticized.

What some people don't understand is that our government is now a CIA operation. This is the full vestige and culmination of the Business Plot manifesting itself as it fully plays out in today's age.

It's very important to pay attention to media articles. If you're smart the pretend journalism they are doing is not intended to create check and balance or control of what they are criticizing but is instead intended as notification to the public of the next outrage they are intended to stomach and accept.

[Tracy Riddle]

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/12/d...issue.html

While the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is very important, it doesn't address the big scoop regarding torture.
Instead, it is the Senate Armed Services Committee's report that dropped the big bombshell regarding the U.S. torture program.
Senator Levin, commenting on a Armed Services Committee's report on torture in 2009, explained:

The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting FALSEconfessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures [and] waterboarding.

McClatchy filled in important details:

Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said thatCheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 according to a newly released Justice Department document…
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued." Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
"I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."
Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

The Washington Post reported the same year:

Despite what you've seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a "ticking time bomb" scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: "Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.

Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
As Truthout reported:

Jessen's notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a "master" SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).
***
The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered not just enhanced interrogation techniques,' but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar," he said. "What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen's instruction. It isEXPLOITATION, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to reverse-engineer' a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, notinterrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press."

In a subsequent report, Truthout notes:

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD's most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA's teaching academy, said …. "This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence" …. "If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using."

Interrogators also forced detainees to take drugs … which further impaired their ability to tell the truth.
And one of the two main architects of the torture program admitted this week on camera:

You can get people to say anything to stop harsh interrogations if you apply them in a way that does that.

And false confessions were, in fact, extracted.
For example:

• A humanitarian aid worker said: torture only stopped when I pretended I was in Al Qaeda
  

• Under torture, Libyan Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi falsely claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida and WMD
  

• President Bush mentioned Abu Zubaydah as a success story, where torture saved lives. Zubaydah was suspected of being a high-ranking al-Qaida leader. Bush administration officials claimed Zubaydah told them that al-Qaida had links with Saddam Hussein. He also claimed there was a plot to attack Washington with a "dirty bomb". Both claims are now recognized to be false, even by the CIA, which also admits he was never a member of al-Qaida.
  

• One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
  

• The so-called 9/11 mastermind said: "During … my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear" (the self-confessed 9/11 "mastermind" falsely confessed to crimes he didn't commit)
  

And the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees. And the government went to great lengths to obstruct justice and hide unflattering facts from the Commission.
According to NBC News:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
  

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being "tortured."
  

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves
  

Details here.
Today,
Today, Raymond McGovern a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials writes at former Newsweek and AP reporter Robert Parry's website:

But if it's bad intelligence you're after, torture works like a charm. If, for example, you wish to "prove," post 9/11, that "evil dictator" Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and might arm the terrorists with WMD, bring on the torturers.
It is a highly cynical and extremely sad story, but many Bush administration policymakers wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11 and thus were determined to connect Saddam Hussein to those attacks. The PR push began in September 2002 or as Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card put it, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
By March 2003 after months of relentless "marketing" almost 70 percent of Americans had been persuaded that Saddam Hussein was involved in some way with the attacks of 9/11.
The case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a low-level al-Qaeda operative, is illustrative of how this process worked. Born in Libya in 1963, al-Libi ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought he would know of any Iraqi training of al-Qaeda.
The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI's Dan Coleman, who "lost" al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said,"Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links" between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
CIA interrogators elicited some "cooperation" from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business.
By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had "provided" unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi's treatment improved as he expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq "to learn about nuclear weapons."
Al-Libi's claim was well received at the White House even though the Defense Intelligence Agency was suspicious.
"He lacks specific details" about the supposed training, the DIA observed. "It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."
Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, told the Senate, "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
Just What the Doctor Ordered
President Bush relied on al-Libi's false Iraq allegation for a major speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."
And Colin Powell relied on it for his famous speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, declaring: "I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story."
Al-Libi's "evidence" helped Powell as he sought support for what he ended up calling a "sinister nexus" between Iraq and al-Qaeda, in the general effort to justify invading Iraq.
For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.
You see, despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from early 2004 when al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda's connections with Iraq, a subject "about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."
According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and "placed him in a small box" for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to "tell the truth." When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he "was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back" and then was "punched for 15 minutes."
After Al-Libi recanted, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. By then, however, the Bush administration had gotten its way regarding the invasion of Iraq and the disastrous U.S. occupation was well underway.
***
Intensive investigations into these allegations after the U.S. military had conquered Iraq failed to turn up any credible evidence to corroborate these allegations. What we do know is that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bitter enemies, with al-Qaeda considering the secular Hussein an apostate to Islam.
Al-Libi, who ended up in prison in Libya, reportedly committed suicide shortly after he was discovered there by a human rights organization. Thus, the world never got to hear his own account of the torture that he experienced and the story that he presented and then recanted.
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of Muammar Gaddafi's regime at the time of al-Libi's death, explained to Newsweek, "This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya."

Paul Krugman eloquently summarized the truth about the torture used:

Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There's a word for this: it's evil.

Torture Program Was Part of a Con Job

As discussed above, in order to "justify" the Iraq war, top Bush administration officials pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create a false linkage between between Al Qaida and Iraq. And see this and this.
But this effort started earlier …
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam".

He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case." In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda".
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuitthat Saddam was behind 9/11.
Moreover, President Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that theCIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this.
Suskind also revealed that "Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.' "
Cheney made the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 on many occasions.
For example, according to Raw Story, Cheney was still alleging a connection between Iraq and the alleged lead 9/11 hijacker in September 2003 a year after it had been widely debunked. When NBC's Tim Russert asked him about a poll showing that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, Cheney replied:

It's not surprising that people make that connection.

And even after the 9/11 Commission debunked any connection, Cheney said that the evidence is "overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime , that Cheney "probably" had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not doing their homework' in reporting such ties.
Again, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this.
Even then-CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted "crap" in its justifications for invading Iraq.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill who sat on the National Security Council also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11.
Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office.
And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might "have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power." And see this.
The administration's false claims about Saddam and 9/11 helped convince a large portion of the American public to support the invasion of Iraq. While the focus now may be on false WMD claims, it is important to remember that, at the time, the alleged link between Iraq and 9/11 was at least as important in many people's mind as a reason to invade Iraq.
So the torture program was really all about "justifying" the ultimate war crime: launching an unnecessary war of aggression based upon false pretenses.
Postscript: It is beyond any real dispute that torture does not work to produce any useful, truthfulintelligence. Today, the following question made it to the front page of Reddit:

Why would the CIA torture if torture "doesn't work"? Wouldn't they want the most effective tool to gather intelligence?

The Senate Armed Services Committee report gave the answer.

[Charles Keeble]

'trigeminal/migrainous' neuralgia I had every night for 6months felt as tho' a drill were destroying the side of my face and head, truely excruciating and obviously functionally incapactiating.

You've just described what I've experienced most days since 11/20/2012. It's tough to want to do much beyond back and forth to work.

[Peter Lemkin]

False coerced 'confessions' for a false propaganda democracy...fitting. America is certainly in the dying stage of Empire - the most dangerous.