Senate torture report reveals American sadism 

By Brandon Martinez

A new Senate report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture to extract information from Muslim patsies in Guantanamo Bay and sundry other agency ‘black sites’ reveals Washington’s sheer sadism.

Russia Today’s summary of the damning Senate investigation highlights the CIA’s systemic use of torturous brutality on prisoners held in agency-run jails across the globe.

The Senate’s report acknowledges that the CIA caused an Afghan man, Gul Rahman, to essentially freeze to death in a prison cell at one of their torture centers north of Kabul. RT writes that, “Sometime that November [in 2001], a low-level CIA officer at COBALT ordered that Rahman be stripped naked, except for a sweatshirt, and ‘shackled to the wall of his cell in a position that required the detainee to rest on the bare concrete floor,’ according to the Senate committee.”

A particularly cringe-worthy revelation is that the CIA practiced “rectal feeding” where prisoners on hunger strikes were force-fed through their rectum in order to keep them alive. The RT commentary cited above writes that, “At least five CIA detainees were subjected to ‘rectal rehydration,’ or rectal feeding, the Senate report reads, in order to keep prisoners alive who allegedly otherwise refused to eat.”

The CIA also played upon prisoners’ fears to induce them to talk. According to the Senate report, a Saudi man named Abu Zubaydah who had severe entomophobia was put into a confinement box, which was then filled with insects. “In order to try and break them down during interrogations,” the RT summary further explained, CIA officers would threaten to harm prisoners’ family members, often telling them rape and death is what awaited their loved ones if they didn’t start talking. Sleep deprivation was a common tactic as well as prolonged standing, water boarding, ice water baths, suspending prisoners from the wall or ceiling by their limbs, and other inhumane methods.

Despite repeated and incessant violations, CIA officers who participated in the torture program were never reprimanded or punished by the agency, revealing that agency higher-ups were not only negligent but also complicit on every level. “There was no accountability,” the Senate report conceded.

In a display of demented hubris, former President George W. Bush defended the CIA torturers outed in the report, describing them as “patriots.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney, whose unbridled malevolence rivals that of Josef Stalin, damned the new report as “full of crap” and said that the CIA’s torture program was “perfectly justified.” “I’d do it again in a minute,” he told CNN.

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