Last Call For Done In Our Name

The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Bush/Cheney era torture of detainees by the CIA is out, and it details nothing short of absolutely Inquisition levels of physical and mental torture.

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

And surprise!  Dick Cheney lied out of his ass about this program too.  Torture provided no useful, actionable intelligence whatsoever, but we did it anyway, and we kept doing it.

Monstrous.  Heads should roll for this, but of course they won't.

The release of the Senate report on CIA interrogation techniques prompted the Justice Department to say that it stands by its decision not to bring criminal charges after its own probe five years ago. "That review generated two criminal investigations, but the Department of Justice ultimately declined those cases for prosecution, because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain convictions beyond a reasonable doubt," the agency said in a statement Tuesday.

Oh well.  I guess that's that then.

Gitmo will remain open and CIA black sites will continue to hold detainees infinitely and nobody will ever be responsible for what was done in our name.

But the report dumps it all on the CIA, and not of course Bush/Cheney.  So we'll hear some paeans to "reform" and nothing will happen, and all this will happen again, if it's not happening now.

Same as it ever was.