The CIA IG Report’s “Other” Contents
In this post, I reviewed the known contents of the CIA IG Report’s 6-page section on torture for those who seem to forget we’ve seen substantive bits from that in the Bradbury memos. In this post, I’ll look at what else shows up in the Bradbury memos. In a follow-up post, I’ll look at what IG Report contents we haven’t seen (and therefore are all but guaranteed not to see).
From what we can reconstruct, the report appears to include the following:
- Intro and summary
- A history of CIA’s involvement in torture
- A description of the development of the torture techniques as if they were developed for use for Abu Zubaydah
- A review of the legal authorization for the program, with the critique that doctors were not involved in the pre-authorization review and, probably, a description of the ways that torture as practiced exceeded the guidelines included in Bybee Two
- An erroneous claim that everyone who should have been briefed was briefed
- Apparently a general review of how the program was implemented, including a description of the close involvement of medical personnel, and a description of what was done to which High Value Detainees
- A description of the decision to videotape and apparent reviews of what a review of the videotapes and cables revealed about whether the torture was what it was claimed to be
- Forty pages of completely redacted material
- The Effectiveness section
- A policy section that notes that the program includes many of the same techniques as the State Department qualifies as abusive
- Three pages of recommendations
- A number of Appendices–the CIA appears to be hiding the very existence of about five of these and most of the contents of the rest of them
While I couldn’t begin to guess what that 40 page completely redacted section includes, the stuff that has been made available show the IG was concerned about waterboarding (for a variety of reasons), believed the program to constitute the same kind of abuses the State Department condemned, and believed the approval process for the torture techniques (the Bybee Two memo) was inadequate.
Read the rest of the entry to see the more specific details of the program.