..."the CIA was ‘holding a number of detainees about whom’ it knew ‘very little.’ ”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/inhumane-scenes-cia-prisons

There is a tape recording somewhere, unless the Central Intelligence Agency has destroyed it, that captures the sound of a man named Nazar Ali crying. He was a prisoner in a secret C.I.A. prison, in a foreign country where terrorists were supposed to be interrogated. But Nazar Ali, whom a Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, part of which was released on Tuesday, suggests has a developmental disability—it quotes an assessment of him as “intellectually challenged”—was no sophisticated Al Qaeda operative. It is not even clear, from what’s been released of the report, that his interrogation was an attempt to gain information, or indeed that he was properly interrogated at all. According to the report, his “C.I.A. detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information.” A footnote later in the report, where his name appears, explains that Nazar Ali’s “taped crying was used as leverage against his family member.” Left unexplained is what the American operatives did to make this man cry. Did they plan ahead, preparing recording equipment and proddings, or did they just, from their perspective, get lucky?

(snip)

What is also disturbing is what the C.I.A. didn’t know, or ignored. According to the report, “In December 2003, a CIA Station overseeing CIA detention operations in Country [redacted] informed CIA Headquarters that it had made the ‘unsettling discovery’ that the CIA was ‘holding a number of detainees about whom’ it knew ‘very little.’ ” The report notes that at two sites, called Cobalt and Gray in the report, there were, for certain periods, almost no detailed records—and that, on the whole, the records got less detailed as time went on. Cobalt was also given, as a “warden,” an inexperienced officer on his first foreign tour whose prior assessments had focussed on his “lack of honesty, judgment, and maturity.” At Cobalt, a prisoner who was among the wrongly held died of hypothermia. According to the report, a chief of interrogations described Cobalt as a “dungeon.” Another visitor said that a prisoner there “literally looked like a dog who had been kenneled.” A delegation from the Federal Bureau of Prisons was said to have been “WOW’ed” by the level of sensory deprivation. The prisoners at Cobalt, meanwhile, were said to be of “medium value.”

This was part of a pattern; the report found that officers with questionable records and histories of violence were often placed in exactly the wrong sort of location for someone like that: playgrounds of impunity. They were joined, more and more, by contractors who had no real experience interrogating anyone—nor did they have appropriate linguistic skills or deep knowledge of either the culture or of Al Qaeda. In 2008, contractors comprised eighty-five per cent of the interrogation workforce. (“Company Y” has already billed the C.I.A. $1.1 million dollars as part of an “indemnification” agreement that pays its legal expenses related to the program through 2021.) The interrogations were not sophisticated intelligence gathering; they were people hammering away and swinging with the vague hope that something would emerge. Secrecy serves to hide incompetence, too.

(end snip)

I think secrecy may have been hiding something else, too.