One of the most important takeaways from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report summary is that senior CIA personnel – which the report refers to as CIA headquarters – knew from the very beginning that torture was unlawful and learned quickly that their brutal program was pointless.
Yet they told the interrogators to keep torturing.
Unlawful and Futile
Before the CIA had a single prisoner in its custody, its lawyers began researching potential legal defenses to torture in November 2001. And in July 2002 its lawyers drafted a letter to the Justice Department seeking advance immunity from prosecution under the U.S. law that bans torture. The letter was never sent, but as John Sifton of Human Rights Watch has noted, it’s clear evidence that the CIA knew what it wanted to do was unlawful, and did it anyway.
Abu Zubaydah was the first victim of the CIA’s torture techniques.
Just days after his torture regimen began, in August 2002, CIA personnel sent cables back to CIA Headquarters, in which they repeatedly said they thought it “highly unlikely” that Abu Zubaydah had the information headquarters sought. And yet superiors at Langley told them to keep going.
CIA interrogators reported waterboarding sessions that left Abu Zubaydah “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” A CIA email dated August 11, 2002, said that even watching videos of the torture produced in the viewer “strong feelings of futility (and legality) [sic] of escalating or even maintaining the pressure.”
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