April 2, 2014
By emptywheel
...The lies CIA told Congress (click here) in its first several years of the torture program include that it,
- Refused, at first, to reveal that the CIA relied on the September 17, 2001 Finding and therefore hid that the President had personally authorized the torture.
- Briefed on torture techniques that had happened months in the past, but claimed they had never yet been used.
- Falsely claimed CIA had not tortured before the August 1 memos purportedly authorizing it.
- Claimed Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah were not yet compliant as late as February 2003, even though they had been found compliant, after which CIA continued to use torture anyway.
- Claimed the torture tapes were a perfect match with what had been recorded in the torture log when a CIA OGC lawyer reviewed them in December 2002.
- Did not disclose the tapes had already been altered by the time CIA OGC reviewed them.
- Claimed the torture tapes had shown the torturers followed DOJ’s guidance when in fact they showed the torturers exceeded DOJ guidance.
- Misled regarding whether the detainees who had been killed had been tortured.
- Oversold the value of information provided by Abu Zubaydah.
- Lied about importance of torture in getting Abu Zubaydah to talk.
There are a number of claims CIA made that are almost certainly also false — most notably with regards to what intelligence came from torture — but most of that didn’t get recorded in the CIA’s records. I fully expect we’ll find details of those in the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
September 17, 2001: Bush signs “Gloves Come Off” Memorandum of Notification that authorizes capture and detention of top al Qaeda leaders, but leaves CIA to decide the details of that detention
Before I focus on the briefings, some background is in order...
