A US congressional report on the CIA's interrogation and detention practices after the 9/11 attacks, 'accidentally' leaked by the White House to an Associated Press reporter, says that the techniques used on al Qaeda detainees were far more brutal than previously understood. The methods employed to extract information from the prisoners included slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, sleep deprivation and the near-drowning technique known as 'water boarding.' The CIA also ran a secret Renditions Programme, under which many terrorism suspects kidnapped from European countries were secretly transferred to prisons, better known as "black sites", in Eastern Europe as well as some other countries in the Middle East where extreme torture is routinely applied to extract confessions.
None of this is new information. The use of water boarding torture method was extensively reported back in 2007, creating widespread uproar. In a television interview the then US vice president and a central figure in George W. Bush's neocon cabal, Dick Cheney, had infamously dismissed water boarding just as "a dunk in the water." The dunk, according to experts, aside from causing profound pain, can damage the lungs and brain from oxygen deficit, and may even lead to death. At the time many had also pointed out that the torture techniques employed by the US, aside from being violative of the UN Convention Against Torture, do not help extract useful information. More often than not, detainees tend to say things their torturers want to hear. No wonder the present report notes the tactics failed to produce life-saving intelligence. Sadly, the US' European allies too have had no qualms about facilitating its renditions programme. While some Eastern European countries, like Poland, allowed CIA to imprison suspects on their soil and subject them to torture and degrading treatment, others such as Britain, aided transportation of the detainees to the 'black sites' in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, which strictly prohibits prisoner torture.
Now that a congressional penal has concluded, on the basis of a laborious exercise, that in some cases CIA's actions constituted torture, also posing the question isn't it clear that CIA engaged in torture as defined in the 'Torture Convention'? The next logical step should be to hold those responsible to account. That though is not going to happen. Neither is Washington going to apologise for any of its inhuman practices. America as former president George H. W. Bush arrogantly declared (then vice president) while commenting on the 1988 shooting down by the US Navy of an Iranian passenger plane, "I will never apologize for the United States - I don't care what the facts are." Though President Obama is not as arrogant as the two Bush presidents, he too asserted at a gathering of veterans two years ago, "We will never apologise." And, of course, he never apologised to Pakistan for the 2011 unprovoked attack by US forces on a Pakistani border post causing the death of 24 soldiers of an ally. The congressional committee's findings will be forgotten after some heated discussion in the media, and exchange of recriminations between the Republicans and Democrats.