Torture: American Style

[Lauren Johnson]

USAID:

.....

1. Dan Mitrione and The Office of Public Safety (OPS):

"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount to achieve the desired effect."
Dan Mitrione, USAID official

Of the many dark-red blotches in USAID's record, none compares to the agency's Office of Public Safety (OPS) program and its most notorious official, Dan Mitrione.

Brief background: After the end of World War Two, America emerged as the de facto inheritor of the Europeans' empires, a role America quickly grew to enjoy. The Marshall Plan offered an imperial blueprint on how America's dominant wealth and aid could manipulate the internal political futures of our Allies like France and Italy, where American aid was key in keeping Communists from taking power.

USAID grew out of programs like the Marshall Plan, but the agency itself wasn't established until 1961 under President Kennedy. Under Kennedy's reorganization, a police training program set up under President Eisenhower, the Office of Public Safety (OPS), was placed under USAID's authority. The OPS had been set up in 1957 to train friendly overseas police forces how to be more professional, more democratic, less corrupt, more like us but in reality, the OPS was essentially a CIA proxy, headed by an agent named Byron Engle, its ranks covertly sprinkled with CIA spooks in hotspots across the globe.

Former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth wrote that the "the two primary functions" of the USAID police training program were to allow the CIA to "plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world," and to bring to the United States "prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees." ["Police Program is Called CIA Cover," New York Times, May 7, 1978]

Dan Mitrione wasn't a CIA man himself. Mitrione was a small-town cop and a family man from Richmond, Indiana, who joined the FBI, and was sent to Brazil in the early 1960s under USAID's Office of Public Safety to train the fledging democratic government's police force. A few years later, in 1964, a US-backed coup overthrew Brazil's democratically-elected president Joao Goulart, and installed a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled for the next two decades, with largesse from USAID's coffers, and vital training and equipment supplied by USAID officials like Mitrione.

By the end of the 1960s, when Mitrione left for Uruguay, USAID had trained over 100,000 of Brazil's police in the dark arts of rule-by-terror; another 600 Brazilian police were brought to the US for special USAID training in explosives and interrogation techniques.

Brazil's military dictatorship murdered or disappeared hundreds of dissidents, and tortured and jailed thousands more. Among those tortured: a Marxist student named Dilma Rousseff, arrested in 1970 and subjected to beatings to her face that distorted her dental ridge, and electrical shocks from car batteries, resulting in the hemorrhaging of her uterus. Today, Rousseff is Brazil's president and she's not too happy about the NSA tapping her phones.

The junta also murdered one ex-president in a staged car accident in 1976. Another ex-president who allegedly died of a heart attack in 1978 is now believed to have been poisoned.

With Brazil successfully pacified, in 1969 Dan Mitrione was transferred to a new hotspot: Uruguay, which was reeling under the increasingly popular left-wing Tupamaro rebels. After taking his post as the new head of USAID's police training mission in Uruguay, Mitrione secured a house in the capital Montevideo, and personally soundproofed the cellar. Mitrione thoroughly tested the sound-proofing by blasting Hawaiian music from a stereo in the cellar, and standing out on the street to listen; and later, by having one of his trainees fire a pistol inside his soundproofed cellar while Mitrione stood at different points on his neighborhood street.

Once satisfied, Mitrione began teaching human anatomy and the human nervous system to the elite Uruguayan police officials hand-picked by USAID for counter-insurgency training in America. Then according to a CIA double-agent secretly working for Cuba, Manuel Hevia, and corroborated by journalist A. J. Langguth Mitrione began performing gruesome live torture demonstrations on homeless beggars plucked off the streets of Montevideo. Four of Mitrione's human guinea pigs were tortured to death, including one woman according to Hevia, testing on street beggars was something Mitrione learned to do while training Brazil's police.

In Langguth's book about Mitrione and USAID's torture programs, "Hidden Terrors," he quotes Hevia's eyewitness account of Mitrione's live torture demonstrations:

"As subjects for the first testing, they took beggars, known in Uruguay as bichicones, from the outskirts of Montevideo, along with a woman from the border with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the different voltages on the different parts of the human body, together with the uses of a drug to induce vomiting I don't know why or for what and another chemical substance.
"The four of them died."

Mitrione taught local police specialized forms of electroshock torture, introducing wires so thin they could fit between the teeth and gums. He also demonstrated drugs that induced violent vomiting fits, and advised on psychological tortures, such as playing tapes of a woman and child screaming in a room next to the interrogation room, and telling the detainee those are his wife and child. And it was all done under the aegis of USAID.

Hevia eventually wrote about his experiences with the CIA, and gave few interviews about his experience serving as a Cuban double-agent inside the CIA, an assignment that brought him face to face working with Mitrione. In a 1978 New York Times article, Hevia is quoted saying,

"If you ask me whether any American official participated in torture, I'd say yes, Dan Mitrione participated. If you ask me whether there were interrogations, I'd say no, because the unfortunate beggars who were being tortured had no way of answering because they were asked no questions. They were merely guinea pigs to show the effect of electric shock on different parts of the human body."

Hevia made a point of not blaming Mitrione, who was "only carrying out policy." But Hevia was clearly bothered by Mitrione's cold, technocratic approach:

"The special horror of the course was its academic, almost clinical atmosphere. Mitrione was a perfectionist. He was coldly efficient, he insisted on economy of effort….A premature death, he would say, meant that the technique failed."

In 1979, the Times' A. J. Langguth, who had resisted believing witnesses' testimony about Mitrione's torture sessions until then, described in a wrenching Times article, "Torture's Teachers," how he was finally forced to accept the awful truth after he was able to corroborate Manuel Hevia's story:

We can read the accusations, even examine the evidence and find it irrefutable. But, in our hearts, we cannot believe that Americans have gone abroad to spread the use of torture.

Mr. Mitrione has become notorious throughout Latin America. But few men ever had the chance to sit with him and discuss his rationale for torture. Mr. Hevia had once.

Now, reading Mr. Hevia's version, which I believe to be accurate, I see that I too had resisted acknowledging how drastically a man's career can deform him. I was aware that Mr. Mitrione knew of the tortures and condoned them. That was bad enough. I could not believe even worse of a family man. A Midwesterner. An American.

Langguth today professor emeritus at USC's Annenberg J-school quotes directly from Mitrione's own words:

"When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician.

"Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die . . .

"Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist . . ."

Mitrione took over the USAID police training program in Uruguay in 1969, and within months, the country was racked by allegations of widespread torture and police abuses. In 1970, Uruguay's Senate opened an investigation and heard testimony from tortured men and women who'd been subjected to electrocutions, genital mutilation and psychological torture.

As things heated up in 1970, Hevia was recalled back to Havana to end his years working as a Cuban mole inside the CIA. Before leaving Uruguay, Hevia had one final meeting with Mitrione:

"The last time I talked to Mitrione was in his home one evening over drinks. He said that he considered interrogation to be a complex art. First you have to soften up the detainee with blows and the usual abuse. The objective was to humiliate the victim, separating him from reality, making him feel defenseless. No questions, just blows and insults. Then just silent blows."

In August 1970, Tupamaro rebels kidnapped Mitrione and demanded the release of 150 Tupamaro rebels in exchange for freeing him. Publicly, the Nixon Administration's position was not to negotiate with terrorists. Ten days after Mitrione was kidnapped, his dead body was discovered in the trunk of a car.

Recently declassified cables show that behind the scenes, the Nixon Administration pushed hard to free Mitrione, not through negotiation, but through threats of terror. Nixon's people pushed their Uruguayan counterparts to threaten to kill not only the Tupamaros prisoners in their custody, but also to hunt down the prisoners' relatives and kill them too. As reported in the National Security Archives, after Mitrione's body was discovered, Uruguayan authorities did exactly as Nixon's people demanded:

The nine documents posted today by the National Security Archive contain evidence that the Government of Uruguay unleashed death squads activity in the wake of Mitrione's execution, and that the United States was aware of these extra-judicial operations.

2. Other Offices of Public Safety (OPS's)

"At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind."
John Gilligan, director of USAID under Jimmy Carter [quoted in William Blum's book "Killing Hope"]

Multiply Dan Mitrione's story by all the other Dan Mitrione's working in all the other USAID Offices of Public Safety that we rarely hear about, and you start to get a sense of how small USAID's failed Twitter revolution in Cuba is by the agency's standards.
A few more examples of other USAID police training ventures through the Office of Public Safety:

The Vietnam War: USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the "soft" side of the Phoenix Program funding the failed "Land to the Tillers" program granting peasants small plots of land, a program that has a poor track record, but serves some important foreign policy/propaganda purpose every time it's rolled out because it remains one of the most enduring boondoggles in the USAID kit.

Laos: In 1967, USAID Co-funded with the CIA a suspected private opium airliner, Xieng Khouang Air Transport. Later, as the CIA-backed Hmong were under attack from Lao Marxist rebels and North Vietnamese forces, USAID forcibly resettled Hmong families in the line of their advance to protect the pro-US government in Vientaine. According to Albert McCoy's classic investigative book, "The Politics of Heroin,"

"Knowing that the Hmong fought better when their families were threatened, USAID … seemed intent on keeping them in the area for a final, bloody stand against the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao…Since USAID decided where the rice was dropped, the Hmong had no choice but to stand and fight."

Guatemala: By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum's book "Killing Hope." Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.
According to Victoria Sanford's "Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala," USAID programs supported the death squads as they carried out the genocide:

Though the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) claimed complete dissociation from the army's security operations (which were veiled in development language) in fact AID provided several million dollars to the army's rural security.
…During the Guatemalan army's successive campaigns of genocide against the Maya, international aid continued to flow into Guatemala. Whether by design or through willful ignorance, U.S. AID, U.S. Food for Peace, UN WFP, private voluntary organizations (now called NGOsnongovernmental organizations), and the countries of Israel and Taiwan provided financial, technical, and material support to the Guatemalan army.

El Salvador: According to NYU historian Greg Grandin, in El Salvador, where 75,000 were killed between 1979 and 1992,

"n the early 1960s agents from the State Department, Green Berets, CIA, and USAID organized two paramilitary groups that would become the backbone of that country's death squad system."

In the brief window between Watergate and the Church Committee, Democratic Sen. James Abourezk managed to shut USAID's police training program down. Which meant that from then on, USAID would have to be a tad more subtle.

* * * *

3. Haiti:
After populist left-wing candidate Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the first democratic elections in Haiti in 1990, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy began pouring funds into opposition groups opposed to Aristide. Noam Chomsky writes:

Aid for "democracy promotion" sharply increased, directed to antigovernment, probusiness groups, mainly through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), also the National Endowment for Democracy and AIFLD (the AFL-CIO affiliate with a notorious antilabor record throughout the Third World). One of the closest observers of Haiti, Amy Wilentz, wrote that USAID's huge "Democracy Enhancement" project was "specifically designed to fund those sectors of the Haitian political spectrum where opposition to the Aristide government could be encouraged."

A few months later, in 1991, Aristide was overthrown in a coup.

* * * *

4. Peru mass-sterilization:
In the early 1990s, Alberto Fujimori won Peru's presidency, and quickly imposed harsh shock therapy measures that impoverished millions. Peru's impoverished masses weren't responding to shock therapy the way Fujimori and the neoliberal consensus thought they should. So Fujimori currently in prison for crimes against humanity decided the only way to cut poverty among the indigenous population was to cut the number of poor indigenous people. Literally.

Between 1996-98, the Fujimori regime forcibly mass-sterilized some 300,000 women, mostly indigenous peoples in the Andes and Amazon regions. Fujimori's mass forced-sterilization program is one of only two such national programs known since the end of World War Two. And yes, it received enthusiastic funding from USAID, which donated $35 million to the program.

* * * *

5. Russia:
There were many ways to transform Russia in the 1990s, but thanks to funding from USAID, the path chosen was the most brutal and disastrous of all: Shock therapy, mass privatization, and the mass impoverishment of 150 million people. As Janine Wedel and my former eXile partner Matt Taibbi documented, USAID funding and support empowered a single "clan" from St. Petersburg led by Anatoly Chubais, who oversaw the complete destruction of Russia's social welfare system, and the handing over of lucrative assets to a tiny handful of oligarchs.
Under Chubais' stewardship, Russia's economic output declined some 60% in the 1990s, while the average Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years. Russia's population went into a freefall, Russia's worst death-to-birth ratio at any time in the 20th Century which is amazing when you think that USAID's privatization program had to compete with the ravages Hitler, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin wreaked on Russia.

USAID funded Chubais through public-private organizations and a Harvard program that was so patently corrupt, Harvard and its program directors including economist Andrei Shleifer were sued by the US Department of Justice for "conspiring to defraud" the US government (not to mention Russians). USAID also paid public relations giant Burson-Marsteller to sell the disastrous voucher program to the Russian public, in a mass media advertising blitz that promoted Chubais' political party on the eve of parliamentary elections. It was this USAID funded privatization, and the USAID-backed Russia "democrats," which soured Russians on market capitalism and democracy (renamed "dermokratsia" or "shitocracy" in Russian).

Since Putin came to power and American influence waned, USAID and other privately-funded NGOs have focused on exposing widespread corruption and election fraudareas that were of little interest to the same aid groups in the Yeltsin era.

* * * *

6. Palestine:
In 2006, the Washington Post revealed a covert $2 million USAID propaganda effort to help the "moderate" Palestinian Authority's election bid against Hamas:

The approximately $2 million program is being led by a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But no U.S. government logos appear with the projects or events being undertaken as part of the campaign, which bears no evidence of U.S. involvement and does not fall within the definitions of traditional development work.

U.S. officials say their low profile is meant to ensure that the Palestinian Authority receives public credit for a collection of small, popular projects and events to be unveiled before Palestinians select their first parliament in a decade. Internal documents outlining the program describe the effort as "a temporary paradigm shift" in the way the aid agency operates. The plan was designed with the help of a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who worked in postwar Afghanistan on democracy-building projects.

Yes, just another "temporary paradigm shift." Because as we know, under normal circumstances, USAID would never, ever act so secretively. That's not what USAID is about. Just ask the users of ZunZuneo.

[Magda Hassan]

As American as apple pie.

CIA's history of its Office of Technical Services Division, which James Mitchell worked for. http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001225679.pdf

Sae office as MKULTRA

[Magda Hassan]

And every product needs to have a good marketing program to sell it to the buyers. CIA purveyors of quality bull shit and torture.

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CIA Had Propaganda Campaign Which Involved Leaking Classified Information to Sell Torture

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[TD] By: Kevin Gosztola Wednesday December 10, 2014 2:13 pm[/TD]
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Philip Mudd, former deputy CTC director

The CIA had a propaganda campaign to defend its detention and interrogation program. It involved the leaking of classified information to shape the public's opinion, undermine criticism and deceive Congress and is detailed in the executive summary of the Senate intelligence committee's torture report, which shows the extent to which CIA officials were willing to engage in unauthorized disclosures, even as it fought to keep the program secret in the courts.

The torture report summary additionally highlights how the agency would not file crimes reports when leaked information was flattering to the agency.
In a conversation on April 13, 2005, with the chief of ALEC Station, the CIA unit hunting down Osama bin Laden, Deputy Chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC), Philip Mudd, declared, "We either get out and sell, or we get hammered, which has implications beyond the media. [C]ongress reads it, cuts our authorities," and "messes up our budget."
Mudd added, "We either put out our story or we get eaten. There is no middle ground."
The CIA developed a campaign to push propaganda on the "effectiveness" of using torture techniques on detainees into the media.
In December 2004, as the National Security Council (NSC) was "considering endgame' options for CIA detainees," the CIA developed talking points for CIA Director Porter Goss to use with principals of the NSC. "If done cleverly, selected disclosure of intelligence results could heighten the anxiety of terrorists at large about the sophistication of [US government] methods and underscore the seriousness of American commitment to prosecute aggressively the War on Terrorism," the CIA decided.
Intelligence gained and the lives saved from high-value detainee interrogations could be included in the propaganda campaign.
The CIA's Office of Public Affairs (OPA) and various CIA officers provided "unattributed background information on the program to journalists for books, articles and broadcasts," even as the existence of the torture program was still classified. Crimes reports were not submitted, including one particular case involving Ronald Kessler's book, The CIA at War," because it "contained no first-time disclosures" and "OPA provided assistance with the book."
Senior Deputy General Counsel John Rizzo indicated the determination that there was no crime committed stemmed from the fact that the CIA's cooperation with Kessler was "blessed" by the CIA director.
When Douglas Jehl of the New York Times wrote an article in March 2005 with "significant classified information," a lawyer with the CIA concluded, "Part of this article was based on background' provided by OPA. That, essentially, negates any use in making an unauthorized disclosure [report]."
Jesselyn Radack, an attorney who represented CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou who was sentenced to prison and prosecuted after he spoke out about the CIA's use of waterboarding, called the propaganda campaign by the agency "stunning," especially how it deceived not only the White House and Congress but the press as well.
"It's incredibly disturbing to me that the CIA was engaged in such a propaganda campaign and engaging in leaks of classified information while at the same time it filed six crimes reports against John Kiriakou for allegedly mishandling classified information."
"It doesn't square, however, with [President Barack] Obama administration's unprecedented use of the Espionage Act against more people for alleged mishandling of classified information than all previous presidential administrations combined," she also wrote in an article for Salon.
"When the Washington Post/New York Times Quotes Senior Intel Official,' It's Us"
Mudd recognized that a public campaign involving classified leaks might be problematic to CIA employees. He counseled that CIA not "advertise" discussions between CIA personnel and the media to the CIA "workforce" because "they'd misread it."

Yet, what is important to recognize is that the public never knew that the "senior intelligence officials" were really people in CIA's Public Affairs Office making authorized disclosures. Neither did the judges adjudicating Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits or, later, lawsuits on behalf of victims of rendition, detention and torture.
Following a National Security Council Principals Committee meeting on April 15, 2005, the CIA "drafted an extensive document describing the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program for an anticipated media campaign." CIA attorneys suggested disclosures not be attributed to the CIA itself.
"This should be attributed to an official knowledgeable' about the program (or some similar obfuscation)," one CIA attorney suggested. "But should not be attributed to a CIA or intelligence official."
Later in December 2005, when Jehl was writing a story on the CIA's detention and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a CIA officer concluded it was "not necessarily an unflattering story."
Jehl provided a "detailed outline of his proposed story" and "informed the CIA that he would emphasize that the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques worked, that they were approved through an inter-agency process and that the CIA went to great lengths to ensure that the interrogation program was authorized by the White House and the Department of Justice."
It is not clear how Jehl came up with these conclusions, which he was going to put in his story, but since he seemed so willing to be subservient to the interests of the CIA, the CIA did not dissuade him from describing any of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques." And the chief of ALEC Station wondered whether cooperating if working with Jehl would be "undercutting our complaint against those leakers' while at the same time advocating that CIA inform Jehl of "other examples of CIA detainee exploitation success.'"
"A Work of Fiction"
The problem with this campaign, however, was that it was making it more difficult to deny FOIA requests. The same attorney said, "Our Glomar figleaf is getting pretty thin. Another CIA attorney acknowledged the draft of this campaign made the legal "declaration" the attorney had just written "about the secrecy of the interrogation program a work of fiction.
An official with the CIA's Counterterrorism Center legal division urged CIA leadership to "confront the inconsistency" between CIA court declarations "about how critical it is to keep this information secret" and the CIA "planning to reveal darn near the entire program."
On June 24, 2005, Dateline NBC produced a program with "on-the-record quotes from Goss and Mud, as well as quotes from top American intelligence officials.'" It was called "The Long War: World View of War on Terror."
"The program and Dateline NBC's associated online articles included classified information about the capture and interrogation of CIA detainees and quoted senior U.S. intelligence analysts' stating that intelligence obtained from CIA interrogations approaches or surpasses any other intelligence on the subject of al-Qaida and the construction of the network.'"
Additionally, "The Dateline NBC articles stated that Al-Qaida leaders suddenly found themselves bundled onto a CIA Gulfstream V or Boeing 737 jet headed for long months of interrogation," and indicated that Abu Zubaydah, [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed], Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Abu Faraj al-Libi were picked up and bundled off to interrogation centers.' The articles also stated that the capture of bin al-Shibh led to the captures of KSM and Khallad bin Attash. This information was inaccurate."
The Senate intelligence committee found no CIA records indicating an investigation into leaks or a crimes report had been submitted on the unauthorized disclosure of this classified information.
The CIA worked very closely with Kessler and he was very compliant with the agency, making him a great asset for the CIA's propaganda campaign.
Leaking to Undercut FBI Agents
In early 2007, he worked on a book that the CIA thought could be useful in pushing back against the "undue credit" he was giving to the FBI for "CIA accomplishments."
An official in the CTC Legal Division reacted, "[O]f course being the lawyer, I would recommend not telling Kessler anything." But, "for policy reasons," if the CIA cooperated, information should be provided to "undercut the FBI agents" that "leaked that they would have gotten everything anyway" without "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Kessler met with CIA officials and made "substantive changes," which "included the statement that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to coercive interrogation techniques' after he stopped cooperating.'" His "revised text further stated that the CIA could point to a string of successes and dozens of plots that were rolled up because of coercive interrogation techniques.'"
"The statements in the revised text were similar to CIA representations to policymakers and were incongruent with CIA records," the Senate intelligence committee stated.
The CIA could also be pleased with the fact that his book, "The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack," featured a passage arguing members of Congress and members of the media "have made careers for themselves by belittling and undercutting the efforts of the heroic men and women who are trying to protect us."
"[Wjithout winning the war being waged by the media against our own government," Kessler declared, "we are going to lose the war on terror because the tools that are needed will be taken away by Congress swayed by a misinformed public and by other countries unwilling to cooperate with the CIA or FBI because they fear mindless exposure by the press." Plus, "Too many Americans are intent on demonizing those who are trying to protect us."
New York Times Reporter Proposes a Story That CIA Considers to Be "Bullshit," Biased Toward FBI
The CIA was especially upset when David Johnston planned to run a story on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that was "bullshit" and "biased" against the FBI.

"We Risk Making Ourselves Look Silly"

An official with the CTC Legal Division was actually concerned the information being leaked might not be the best information to leak. On April 20, 2005, the official wondered if what Mohammed had "reported" about an alleged plot was good enough. "We risk making ourselves look silly if the best we can do is the Brooklyn Bridgeperhaps we should omit specific examples rather than 'damn ourselves with faint praise.'" And another official asked if OPA could "be more strongly declarative."
"'While we can't provide details (or maybe we can) 'the program has produced intelligence that has directly saved 100's/1000's of American and other innocent lives,'" was the official's suggestion. Such a statement was based in fabricated or inaccurate information.
Following the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act at the end of 2005, a CIA attorney working at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence expressed renewed interest in leaks that could promote the "effectiveness" of torture techniques being used.
The attorney saw "striking" similarities between the debate around the Detainee Treatment Act and what had happened in Israel when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled several "techniques were possibly permissible, but require some form of legislative sanction," and that the Israeli government "ultimately got limited legislative authority for a few specific techniques."
"Once this became a political reality here, it became incumbent on the [Bush] Administration to publicly put forth some facts, if it wanted to preserve these powers," the CIA attorney complained. "Yet, to date, the Administration has refused to put forth any specific examples of significant intelligence it adduced as a result of using any technique that could not reasonably be construed as cruel, inhuman or degrading. Not even any historical stuff from three or four years ago."
"What conclusions are to be drawn from the utter failure to offer a specific justification: That no such proof exists? That the Administration does not recognize the legitimacy of the political process on this issue? Or, that need to reserve the right to use these techniques really is not important enough to justify the compromise of even historical intelligence?"
Later, in 2012, when the CIA had an opportunity to assist in the production of a blockbuster movie on the raid to kill Osama bin Laden, a "hemorhhage of leaks" of "highly classified information" to filmmakers occurred.
Acting and deputy inspector generals for the CIA investigated who was behind the leaks, however, when CIA Director Leon Panetta, chief of staff Jeremy Bash and under secretary of intelligence Michael Vickers were implicated, the report on the investigation was edited to reflect the unauthorized disclosures had not come from senior officials.
Leaks about the value of CIA torture and what the agency wanted the world to believe about its contribution to the global "War on Terrorism," especially in hunting bin Laden, were permissible. But anything critical of CIA policies, in the press and potentially from intelligence employees, needed to be suppressed.

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/12...ll-torture

[Peter Lemkin]

Ah, yes, Mitrione.....and don't forget other than his torture expertise, he was Jim Jones 'case officer' for time...see here http://jimhougan.com/wordpress/?tag=dan-mitrione

[Magda Hassan]

Bonuses for psychopaths.

By Patrick Howell O'Neill Twitter on December 09, 2014

C.I.A. interrogators were paid $1,800 dollars per day tax-free to waterboard and conduct other torture on prisonersfour times the amount of interrogators who didn't employ waterboarding, according to a new U.S. Senate report on C.I.A. torture.


U.S. Senate


All in all, contract torturers were paid more than $80 million for their work between 2001 and 2009. A single contractor carrying out torture could potentially earn anywhere from $500,000 to almost $700,000 in a year in tax-free retainers.The torturers employed "techniques" like forced rectal feeding, physical assaults, mock burial, deliberate hypothermia, waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, deprivation of solid food, and forced nudity.
The torturers were at the center of a huge conflict of interest: The same people who were paid enormous amounts to put prisoners through torture were also the people who judged the torture's effectiveness and the prisoner's psychological stability and resistance. These same people making hundreds of thousands of dollars from torture also recommended the continuous use of torture.
A January 2003 cable from C.I.A. headquarters made clear that "the individual at the interrogation site who administers the [torture] techniques is not the same person who issues the psychological assessment of record."
They did it anyway, leading at least one C.I.A. doctor to say "any data collected by them from detainees with whom they previously interacted as interrogators will always be suspect."
Update 3:25pm CT, Dec. 9: The retainer salary of CIA contractors was tax-free according the Senate report.

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/cia-con...0-per-day/

[David Guyatt]

Ain't greed a wonderful motivator...

Bonuses for psychopaths.

By Patrick Howell O'Neill Twitter on December 09, 2014

C.I.A. interrogators were paid $1,800 dollars per day tax-free to waterboard and conduct other torture on prisonersfour times the amount of interrogators who didn't employ waterboarding, according to a new U.S. Senate report on C.I.A. torture.


U.S. Senate


All in all, contract torturers were paid more than $80 million for their work between 2001 and 2009. A single contractor carrying out torture could potentially earn anywhere from $500,000 to almost $700,000 in a year in tax-free retainers.The torturers employed "techniques" like forced rectal feeding, physical assaults, mock burial, deliberate hypothermia, waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, deprivation of solid food, and forced nudity.
The torturers were at the center of a huge conflict of interest: The same people who were paid enormous amounts to put prisoners through torture were also the people who judged the torture's effectiveness and the prisoner's psychological stability and resistance. These same people making hundreds of thousands of dollars from torture also recommended the continuous use of torture.
A January 2003 cable from C.I.A. headquarters made clear that "the individual at the interrogation site who administers the [torture] techniques is not the same person who issues the psychological assessment of record."
They did it anyway, leading at least one C.I.A. doctor to say "any data collected by them from detainees with whom they previously interacted as interrogators will always be suspect."
Update 3:25pm CT, Dec. 9: The retainer salary of CIA contractors was tax-free according the Senate report.

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/cia-con...0-per-day/

[Magda Hassan]

I am always amazed at how little it is that some people will sell their souls for. I bet they would have done the same if they were paid $150 per torture session. What am I saying, many would have done it for free. See Stanley Milgram