Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent reports that ABC’s Brian Ross and Matthew Cole were told by a former CIA intelligence official that the blacked-out sections contain information about three detainees who died while under CIA interrogation, and an unspecified number whose whereabouts are unknown:
The official told ABC news: “a few just got lost and the CIA does not know what happened to them.”
The information was supposedly blacked out for “national security” reasons.
As I mentioned earlier, the American Civil Liberties Union, which sought the documents in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is considering whether it will challenge the legitimacy of the government’s redactions.
According to an article published yesterday in Homeland Security Today, the brutal interrogation tactics described in the unredacted parts of the Inspector-General’s Report violate a broad policy put into effect in the mid-1980s, following an uproar (within the CIA) that occurred after a Lebanese prisoner was tortured to death by two CIA interrogators:
The formerly “Top Secret” May 2004 CIA Inspector General’s (IG) report on “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities” that was partially declassified this week noted that “in 1984, [the] Office of Inspector General investigated allegations of misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual [redacted words],” and that “following that investigation, the Agency took steps to ensure Agency personnel understood its policy on interrogations, debriefings, and human rights issues. Headquarters sent officers to brief stations and bases and provided cable guidance to the field.”
The incident the IG referred to resulted in a prohibition on violent interrogations being put in place. According to classified information, two rookie CIA paramilitary officers tortured to death at least one of the Palestinian terrorists who were arrested by Lebanese police on suspicion of having been involved in the April 18, 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed eight employees of the CIA, including chief Middle East analyst Robert C. Ames and Chief of Station Kenneth Haas – two of the CIA’s best and brightest Middle East terrorism experts.
As HSToday.us reported almost two years ago, the killing of the terrorist was an intelligence debacle, according to classified CIA materials on the matter first provided to this reporter in the early 1990s by a senior CIA officer familiar with the incident.
To prevent a reoccurrence of that intelligence disaster (the death of the terrorist reputedly resulted in little actionable intelligence being obtained) the CIA was supposed to have put controls in place to prevent interrogations from ever again getting so out of control.
The classified CIA materials on the 1983 killing stated “new [CIA] recruits [began to be] trained in how to handle hostile interrogations and [to] prevent other excesses,” meaning physically violent torture that could cause death.
The CIA is said to have assured the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1989 that its agents were being trained in interrogation methods that would prevent a reoccurrence of what happened in Lebanon. The Committee learned of the murders when a decorated Senior CIA Operations Officer brought them to the Committee’s attention during a briefing to the Committee on another matter.
According to the classified information on what happened, two “new [CIA Staff Officer] recruits” – one of whom was nicknamed “Crunch” because of his known penchant for physical violence – “[had] no Middle East experience.” They were working as “CIA staff paramilitary officers … on assignment in Beirut” under the supervision of the Deputy Chief of Operations [DCO] for Near East and South Asia.”
The classified information stated as a matter of fact that the two officers “murdered [the] Lebanese Palestinians who had been arrested by Lebanese Government authorities on suspicion of involvement in the bombing of the US Embassy, Beirut.”
The secret materials described what happened: “Lebanese authorities allowed the CIA officers access to the prisoners, and the CIA officers electro-shocked, tortured, and then beat the suspects to death.”
The classified summary of the killing emphasized that it was “a clear-cut case of a gross violation of US and Lebanese law and CIA regulations which prohibit any CIA officer from participating in or condoning the use of torture and other physical interrogation techniques, and to protest and leave if a foreign government should attempt to or actually engage in such activity in the presence of US officers.”
[…]
What is clear is that a new policy was attached to the CIA’s “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual-1983” at about the time of the 1983 torture deaths that stated “the use of force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international and domestic; it is neither authorized nor condoned. The interrogator must never take advantage of the source’s weaknesses to the extent that the interrogation involves threats, insults, torture or exposure to unpleasant or inhumane treatment of any kind.”
[…]
According to the CIA’s secret summary on the Beirut killings, The Deputy Chief of Operations (DCO) “was very upset about [the incident], and … the Lebanese Government … protested to the CIA and the [State Department], and wished to detain the CIA officers for trial.” The DCO “said the Lebanese Government also quietly protested the murders in a diplomatic note,” or demarche, in diplomatic parlance.But, the classified summary points out, “the CIA and the US Government refused to turn the CIA officers over to the Lebanese, and they were instead brought back to the US,” whereupon “the CIA investigated … and fired the two employees. The case was referred to the US Attorney General for criminal prosecution, but the decision was made to suppress the investigation and public knowledge of the incident, and not to prosecute the officers involved … on national security grounds.”
[…]
Some professional IC interrogators said the lessons learned from the Beirut disaster were ignored or forgotten by the time of the 9/11 attack, as evidenced by the uproar over post-9/11 terrorist interrogations.“What happened in Beirut [in 1983] was supposed to have been a lesson in what not to do,” a former counterterrorist explained, noting, “the purpose of interrogation is to extract intelligence that can be acted on … torturing your subject to death does you no good if he hasn’t given you the information you need.”
The above link to this article is a cached copy. I came across the article by chance last night while searching on Google for an online copy of the IG Report that would open on my computer (for some reason my machine hates the .pdf files many bloggers have posted).I typed “CIA Inspector General’s Report” and the above article was the first hit.
However, when I tried to get the article back today to write about it here, I kept getting “broken link” messages. I’m not familiar enough with the kind of error messages you get if an article has been intentionally removed to know if that’s what happened, but I decided anyway to use the cached copy, since it was available to me.
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