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tabatha southey

"We agree with Conclusion 10 in full. It underpins the most important lesson that we have drawn from the study: CIA needs to develop the structure, expertise, and methodologies required to more objectively and systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our covert actions."

Those lines from a just-disclosed Central Intelligence Agency memo of 2013, written in response to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's 6,000-page study of the CIA's detention-and-interrogation program are, despite everything, among the most chilling to emerge this week.

To get the effect of reading the CIA response to the torture report, after reading the report itself, you have to imagine those words coming from actual monsters. Picture it as if you just opened a closet door in your home and found a revolting collection of grimy monsters – surrounded by stacks of paperwork and their own gag-inducing filth.

These are not charming Muppet-like monsters, no. Go to your most horrible, indeed murderous, monsters. Imagine you've just seen the monsters bite the heads off chickens – they bit slowly, twisted, on the necks. It was hard not to think they took visceral pleasure in this. Visceral because the monsters didn't eat the chickens. No one benefited from the monsters' considerable, laborious efforts at causing unfathomable (to those who've never been tortured) pain.

Just as no "actionable intelligence" and, predictably, much "outright fantasy" was garnered when the CIA waterboarded men – one 65 times in less than 24 hours, another 183 times; or when they subjected them to sleep deprivation "for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads." Some of those standing had broken feet; one, a sprained ankle; another, a prosthetic leg. There were also mock executions.

Now imagine that, as you stare in disbelief at these closet monsters, blood still on their lips, they start going on about "learning from the past while focusing on the future" and "going forward," as does the CIA in its memo.

The eerie familiarity of the corporate language in that response is the final straw. Most of us have worked for some version of this gung-ho, inept organization. Although mostly not one in the business of torturing people.

Torture, we now know (conclusively), is what the CIA indulged in, and it seems to have tortured in such a heedless and unavailing manner that the word "indulged" is the only word I can use.

"Business" is the right word as well. In 2005, the two psychologists brought in "to develop, operate and assess" (yes, and assess) the program – neither of whom had experience in interrogation, nor, according to the report, any "specialized knowledge of al-Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise" – formed a company specifically to conduct their work with the CIA.

"Shortly thereafter, the CIA outsourced most aspects of the program," and, the report notes, "the contractors received $81-million." Those undisturbed by the torture of the detainees (at least 26 of whom shouldn't have been detained in the first place; some of whom were held for months after this was determined to be the case; and one of whom was an "intellectually challenged" man kept only as "leverage" in the hopes of obtaining information from a family member) should at least deplore this as terrible business practice.

"The committee," the report also notes of one black site, "uncovered a photograph of a waterboard with buckets of water around it at a detention site where the CIA has claimed it never subjected a detainee to the waterboard."

The CIA has not explained this oddity, although perhaps it considered bandying the phrase "inefficient deployment of resources at an underutilized regional office" about. After all, "enhanced interrogation techniques" are the extreme, grotesque version of "downsizing."

Can we at least agree no one is allowed to say "going forward," if going backward they ground up a man's meal of "hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins" and "rectally infused" it into him?

Any admission that you lacked the ability to "objectively and systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our covert actions" when your "covert actions" involved "feeding" a man his own dinner up his ass feels wrong. That concession shouldn't be the"most important lesson" you learn from a report about how you tortured people and lied about it.

That you did things to a man in order to "disabuse him of the notion that he wouldn't be physically hit," and then failed to quantify the value of this endeavour; and that the return on stripping a man naked and "running him up and down a long hall while slapping and punching him" was not measurable in "a real-world setting" is beside the point, monsters.

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