Torture Report's Footnotes Alone Are Frightening

One detainee may have been simply in 'wrong place at wrong time'
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 10, 2014 2:36 PM CST
Torture Report's Footnotes Alone Are Frightening
This 2008 file photo shows then-CIA Director General Michael Hayden.   (AP Photo/Chuck France, File)

If you don't have time to read the 528-page summary of the Senate's findings on interrogation techniques, you can get a sense of its revelations just by reading the footnotes, Vocativ reports. The site offers material from just the first 200 of the report's 38,000 footnotes:

  1. Seven of the 39 detainees who faced the techniques offered no intelligence information.
  2. Waterboarding left detainee Abu Zubaydah "completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open full mouth," according to internal CIA emails.
  3. One detainee was confined in a coffin-shaped box.
  4. One detainee, who was held wrongfully, "may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time," per the CIA.

  1. President Bush learned about waterboarding in 2006, and he "expressed discomfort” with the “image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself," according to a CIA briefing.
  2. Indeed, a bucket for toilet use was considered a reward for prisoners.
  3. It wasn't until more than six years into the interrogation program that the CIA surveyed its results.
  4. The Senate's vast findings don't even include information from some 9,400 CIA documents kept secret under White House executive privilege.
  5. Mother Jones points out that another footnote asserts that information from harsh interrogation didn't lead to Osama bin Laden, despite the CIA's argument to the contrary.
Click for Vocativ's full list, read about the 13 torture techniques detailed in the report, or see what critics think the report got wrong. (More CIA stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X