There comes a point in the history of every nation where a nation's former director of intelligence faces the press and proudly defends
forcing pureed foods up the rectums of captured prisoners.
When presented with the conclusion that the tactic of "rectal rehydration" detailed in the report was abusive, Hayden defended the practice.
"That was a medical procedure because of detainee health. The people that are responsible there for the health of these detainees saw that they were becoming dehydrated," said the former CIA chief.
"I'm not a doctor and neither are you," Hayden told CNN's Jake Tapper. "This is one of the ways that the body is rehydrated."
Let us pray "I am not a doctor, so who's to say what's torture" does not become the next "I am not a scientist, so pollution schmallution." But it no doubt will.
For the record, Physicians for Human Rights says that using the procedure "without evidence of medical necessity" is in fact "torture." And, for the record, they are doctors.
“Contrary to the CIA’s assertions, there is no clinical indication to use rectal rehydration and feeding over oral or intravenous administration of fluids and nutrients,” said Dr. Vincent Iacopino, PHR’s senior medical advisor. “This is a form of sexual assault masquerading as medical treatment. In the absence of medical necessity, it is clear that the only purpose behind this humiliating and invasive procedure is to inflict physical and mental pain.”
Pervasive in the report are acknowledgments that the CIA torture program was not a carefully honed machine, but a often-unsupervised hodgepodge of abuses undertaken by individuals who were
inexperienced, untrained, and who seemed uninterested in whether their invented tortures were even needed.
Please read below the fold for more on these torture abuses.
At one facility in 2002, code-named COBALT, "untrained CIA officers …conducted frequent, unauthorized, and unsupervised interrogations of detainees *using harsh physical interrogation techniques that were not—and never became—part of the CIA's formal 'enhanced' interrogation program," the report found. COBALT is reportedly a prison in Afghanistan the agency nicknamed "the Salt Pit." In one example identified by the report, an interrogator left a COBALT detainee chained naked to the concrete floor. The detainee later died of suspected hypothermia.
The CIA also put a junior official with absolutely no relevant experience in charge of this entire facility. Later, when the CIA's inspector general investigated COBALT, the CIA said it knew little about what happened there.
Suspects were also tortured before the CIA had even conformed
they had captured the right person:
[Abu Hudhaifa] was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be.
As for Hayden's specific assertion that "rectal rehydration" was undertaken as a medical procedure, the report disputes that specifically.
According to CIA records, interrogators began using the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques at DETENTION SITE COBALT a "few minutes" after the questioning of KSM began. KSM was subjected to facial and abdominal slaps, the facial grab, stress positions, standing sleep deprivation (with his hands at or above head level), nudity, and water dousing.(439) Chief of Interrogations [REDACTED] also ordered the rectal rehydration of KSM without a determination of medical need, a procedure that the chief of interrogations would later characterize as illustrative of the interrogator's "total control over the detainee."
The decision to not prosecute actual instances of torture seems all the more remarkable now that we know the extent to which the program was constructed ad hoc with rules put in place afterwards, if enforced at all. The Bush administration was determined to use torture, and the CIA was therefore tasked with carrying it out.
Perhaps the common use of untrained or inexperienced "interrogators" in the secret sites against supposedly high-value captives is another hint that more experienced and trained individuals in the agency wanted no part of the program, nor wanted their names in the inevitable reports drafted afterward of what happened and who did it.