Controversies following the publication of the US Senate torture report

A US Senate report on the torture tactics used by the CIA to obtain information about terrorist activities has caused a lot of controversy in Washington.

Valentin Țigău, 11.12.2014, 15:22

The publication on Wednesday of a US Senate report on the interrogation techniques used by the CIA in secret detention facilities in Europe and Asia has sparked heated debates. According to the conclusions of the report, these techniques, used during George W Bush’s administration, were inefficient and harsher than initially admitted by the CIA and did not help collect useful data to prevent further terrorist attacks. In response to the report, the CIA head John Brennan admitted his institution did make mistakes, but defended the usefulness of its prisoner interrogation programme, despite the use of brutality and torture.

The CIA believes the results of its operations are more important than the way in which they were conducted and cited as an example the capturing of the Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in May 2011. The CIA critics say, however, that Bin Laden’s capturing was not the result of interrogation techniques and that the prisoners detained by the CIA subjected to torture did their best to hide the identity of the courier whose discovery led to finding out the whereabouts of Bin Laden. President Barack Obama condemned the use of torture by the CIA, saying the methods detailed in the report are contrary to the American values.

According to Radio Romania’s correspondent in Washington, the public version of the report also shows that, in some cases, the CIA offered a number of foreign officials millions of dollars to allow the creation of secret CIA detention centres in their countries, but fails short of naming any of these countries.

The Washington Post writes, however, that the confidential version of the report mentioned five countries, namely Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Afghanistan and Thailand, locations which are referred to only by colour-themed codes in the report. The code name for the alleged secret CIA prison in Romania is Bright Light, while the secret detention site in Poland is codenamed Blue. The former Polish president Aleksander Kwasnieswski recently admitted that the CIA did have a secret detention facility in his country where it interrogated terrorism suspects.

Asked by the media about the existence of similar sites in Romania, the country’s president at the time, Ion Iliescu said he had no knowledge of such CIA sites in Romania and was not faced with this issue during his term in office. Two previous reports by the Council of Europe and the Human Rights Watch have accused Romania of hosting CIA secret prisons. In 2006, a Romanian Senate inquiry concluded, however, that the existence of CIA detention facilities in Romania could not be confirmed.