“U.S. Senate ’Torture’ Report Summary to Be Declassified in a Few Days,” a Reuters headline reported Tuesday, complete with scare quotes around the word “torture.” In the article, journalist Mark Hosenball reported that “CIA’s use of harsh ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods such as waterboarding, or simulated drowning, on a handful of prisoners, and other stress tactics on a larger set of captured militants, did not produce any significant counter-terrorism breakthroughs.” The next paragraph helpfully noted that, “Human rights activists and CIA critics, including some U.S. politicians, have described the CIA’s techniques as torture.” Near the end, Hosenball explained where “the militants subjected to enhanced interrogation” — with no scare quotes this time — were captured.
It has been more than 10 years since pictures from Abu Ghraib first revealed the U.S. was torturing detainees. Since that time we’ve seen the CIA’s own inspector general describe how CIA exceeded the limits set by the Department of Justice and the CIA. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse laid out the U.S. court precedent — ignored by John Yoo when he rubber-stamped CIA’s torture while at the Department of Justice — that concluded waterboarding is torture. Gitmo’s own convening authority, Susan Crawford, admitted in 2009 we tortured Mohammed al-Qahtani at the prison. A top British court called our treatment of detainee Binyam Mohammed “at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” making it a violation of the Convention Against Torture. The European Union Court of Human Rights declared Poland complicit in our torture of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri. And we’ve seen Republicans — both those voting for and against the declassification of the torture report — calling CIA’s torture “torture.”
