Human Rights First Calls for Full Accounting of CIA Interrogation Practices

The Central Intelligence Agency continues to resist an accounting of interrogation methods it employs and its role in detention and abuse of prisoners held in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and other secret locations. CIA Director Porter Goss and Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 17, 2005 on a range of issues including a still unreleased CIA Inspector General report on detainee abuses and renditions. Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has oversight over the CIA, has deflected calls for a formal Committee inquiry into allegations of abuse.

A number of investigations have examined the roles of various military units and the armed forces in general in the growing scandal of detainee abuses but no report on the role of the CIA has yet been completed. Several military investigators have complained of the lack of CIA cooperation. Military investigations noted that the CIA’s presence within military detention facilities confused military interrogators on which interrogation guidance was controlling and that CIA agents transferred already abused detainees to military detention centers.

“In a democracy no government agency can be immune from congressional oversight. The CIA must come clean on its role in hiding ghost detainees, its interrogation methods and the scope of its involvement in abuses,” said Elisa Massimino, Human Rights First Washington Director. “The intelligence committees are approaching dereliction of duty in their failure to launch a formal inquiry into these matters.”

The Administration released memos in the summer and fall of 2004 revealing the CIA’s requests for greater legal authority to conduct aggressive interrogations with methods such as “waterboarding,” denial of pain killer medication, simulated drowning, and threatening to transfer detainees to other countries’ interrogators, and to transfer detainees out of Iraq to other nations for interrogation. The CIA has also reportedly authorized about 150 renditions of terrorist suspect to countries known to routinely practice torture.

Other findings from the March 17 Committee hearing:

• Goss would not explain whether other agencies vetted the CIA’s renditions that sent suspects to other countries with a known practice of torture and abuse;
  
• Goss acknowledged that there had been “some uncertainty” within the CIA as to what was permitted in interrogations of terrorist suspects.
  
• Goss characterized the practice of “waterboarding” - which entails strapping an individual to a board - and repeatedly forcing him underwater, as a “professional interrogation technique” that he would not discuss in public. That technique and other unlawful methods are believed to have been used on numerous terrorist suspects.
  
• Jacoby and Goss agreed that in addition to violating the laws and values of the United States, torture does not produce reliable intelligence and endangers U.S. soldiers captured abroad.

Read our report about secret detentions:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/detainees/rpt_disclose_intro.htm

Read our report about previous investigations:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/PDF/detainees/
Getting_to_Ground_Truth_090804.pdf