The Senate Report on the C.I.A.’s Torture and Lies

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD DEC. 9, 2014

The world has long known that the United States government illegally detained and tortured prisoners after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and lied about it to Congress and the world. But the summary of a report released today of the Senate investigation of these operations, even after being sanitized by the Central Intelligence Agency itself, is a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend and even harder to stomach.

The report raises again, with renewed power, the question of why no one has ever been held accountable for these seeming crimes — not the top officials who set them in motion, the lower-level officials who committed the torture, or those who covered it up, including by destroying videotapes of the abuse and by trying to block the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of their acts.

At one point, the report says, the C.I.A. assured Congress that the behavior of the secret jailers and interrogators was nothing like the horrors the world saw at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That was the closest the agency seems to have come to the truth — what happened appears to have been worse than what took place at Abu Ghraib.

The Senate committee’s summary says that the torture by C.I.A. interrogators and private contractors was “brutal and far worse” than the agency has admitted to the public, to Congress and the Justice Department, even to the White House. At least one detainee died of “suspected hypothermia” after being shackled partially naked to a concrete floor in a secret C.I.A. detention center run by a junior officer without experience, competence or supervision. Even now, the report says, it’s not clear how many prisoners were held at this one facility, or what was done to them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/the-senate-report-on-the-cias-torture-and-lies.html