Newly declassified information show

Newly declassified information shows a surprising set of CIA rationales for waterboarding—and more.
The CIA said it would only torture detainees to psychologically break them, according to a previously-unreported passage from a 2007 Justice Department memo. It’s a claim that’s at odds with how congressional investigators say the agency really handled captives in the early days of the war on terror.
And it’s not the only eye-opening assertion found in newly declassified portions of Bush-era documents on the CIA’s use of torture. A second document says that the CIA believed itself to be legally barred from torturing others countries’ detainees—but not from using so-called enhanced interrogations on its own captives.
In a passage from a 2007 memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the CIA said it would only subject detainees to harsh techniques, such as waterboarding, in order to break a detainee down to the point where he would no longer withhold information. The interrogations weren’t designed to get answers to specific questions; in fact, the agency interrogator “generally does not ask questions... to which the CIA does not already know the answers,” the memo states.
But that claim is contradicted by the agency’s actual record, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the government to disclose the portions of the document.
“The CIA claimed that it had the ability to torture its captives to the precise point where they would become compliant and produce useful, accurate information,” Dror Ladin, an ACLU attorney who reviewed the documents, told The Daily Beast. “As we know from the Senate [Intelligence Committee] report [on torture], these representations were not remotely accurate. Instead, the CIA would brutalize prisoners in search of answers they didn’t have, leading desperate prisoners to fabricate information.”
After a lengthy investigation of the CIA program, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that “CIA interrogators asked open-ended questions... to which the CIA did not know the answers, while subjecting detainees to the enhanced interrogation techniques.”
The CIA took that approach with Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda operative who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and is one of three CIA detainees who was known to be waterboarded. According to the committee’s report, his interrogation “focused on him being told to provide ‘the one thing you don’t want me to know,’ and remained a central figure of the program.”
The committee excoriated the integration program and found that it didn’t produce useful intelligence. President Obama has called the techniques that the agency deployed under his predecessor “torture,” and the CIA has abandoned them.
The passage from the 2007 memo, authored by Steven Bradbury, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, for the CIA’s top lawyer, John Rizzo, was released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the ACLU. While much of that memo, and others from the office, had previously been declassified and published, the group had fought to have more passages revealed.
The documents “are significant because they deepen the public’s understanding of how the Office of Legal Counsel went so far astray during the torture program,” Ladin told The Daily Beast. “These memoranda demonstrate the legal contortions that OLC lawyers engaged in to repeatedly reauthorize, under a shifting set of rationales, an obviously unlawful torture program.”
The CIA rejected claims that it systematically misled the Department of Justice to secure approval of its program through 2007.
The “CIA continues to stand by its response to the [Senate] study, which was publicly released in December 2014. CIA’s response addressed many of topics that are now being reexamined by virtue of the release of documents under” the Freedom of Information Act, CIA Spokesperson Ryan Trapani explained to The Daily Beast.
In a December 2014 memo in response to the study, the CIA asserted:
“The Study’s conclusions fail to note the general trend that, beginning in April 2003, as interrogators became more knowledgeable, as it became easier to use information from one detainee to get more from another, and as our understanding of the effectiveness of various techniques grew, CIA’s interrogations gradually relied less on coercion.”
The documents also reveal the lengths the CIA went to persuade the Justice Department that the program was useful and wouldn’t cause long-term harm.

Results (Vietnamese) 1:

Vừa được giải mật thông tin cho thấy một đáng ngạc nhiên thiết lập của CIA rationales cho waterboarding — và nhiều hơn nữa.CIA cho biết sẽ chỉ tra tấn tù nhân để tâm lý phá vỡ chúng, theo một đoạn unreported trước đó từ một bản ghi nhớ sở tư pháp năm 2007. Đó là một yêu cầu bồi thường đó là mâu thuẫn với Quốc hội làm thế nào các nhà điều tra nói rằng những tù nhân cơ quan thực sự xử lý trong những ngày đầu của cuộc chiến tranh chống khủng bố.Và nó không phải là sự khẳng định mở mắt chỉ tìm thấy trong phần vừa được giải mật của thời đại Bush tài liệu của CIA sử dụng tra tấn. Một tài liệu thứ hai nói rằng CIA tin rằng bản thân để được hợp pháp bị tra tấn những người khác nước tù nhân — nhưng không phải từ bằng cách sử dụng cái gọi là nâng cao thẩm về tù nhân của riêng mình. Trong một đoạn văn từ một bản ghi nhớ năm 2007 bởi văn phòng sở tư pháp của Pháp sư, CIA cho biết sẽ chỉ đề tù nhân để kỹ thuật khắc nghiệt, như waterboarding, để phá vỡ một detainee xuống đến điểm mà ông sẽ không còn giữ lại thông tin. Các thẩm không thiết kế để có được câu trả lời cho câu hỏi cụ thể; trong thực tế, cơ quan hợp "nói chung không đặt câu hỏi... mà CIA không đã biết câu trả lời," các tiểu bang bản ghi nhớ. Nhưng mà yêu cầu bồi thường mâu thuẫn của hồ sơ thực tế của cơ quan, theo các người Mỹ dân sự Liberties Union, mà kiện chính phủ tiết lộ các phần của tài liệu.“The CIA claimed that it had the ability to torture its captives to the precise point where they would become compliant and produce useful, accurate information,” Dror Ladin, an ACLU attorney who reviewed the documents, told The Daily Beast. “As we know from the Senate [Intelligence Committee] report [on torture], these representations were not remotely accurate. Instead, the CIA would brutalize prisoners in search of answers they didn’t have, leading desperate prisoners to fabricate information.”After a lengthy investigation of the CIA program, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that “CIA interrogators asked open-ended questions... to which the CIA did not know the answers, while subjecting detainees to the enhanced interrogation techniques.”The CIA took that approach with Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda operative who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and is one of three CIA detainees who was known to be waterboarded. According to the committee’s report, his interrogation “focused on him being told to provide ‘the one thing you don’t want me to know,’ and remained a central figure of the program.”The committee excoriated the integration program and found that it didn’t produce useful intelligence. President Obama has called the techniques that the agency deployed under his predecessor “torture,” and the CIA has abandoned them.The passage from the 2007 memo, authored by Steven Bradbury, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, for the CIA’s top lawyer, John Rizzo, was released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the ACLU. While much of that memo, and others from the office, had previously been declassified and published, the group had fought to have more passages revealed.The documents “are significant because they deepen the public’s understanding of how the Office of Legal Counsel went so far astray during the torture program,” Ladin told The Daily Beast. “These memoranda demonstrate the legal contortions that OLC lawyers engaged in to repeatedly reauthorize, under a shifting set of rationales, an obviously unlawful torture program.”The CIA rejected claims that it systematically misled the Department of Justice to secure approval of its program through 2007. The “CIA continues to stand by its response to the [Senate] study, which was publicly released in December 2014. CIA’s response addressed many of topics that are now being reexamined by virtue of the release of documents under” the Freedom of Information Act, CIA Spokesperson Ryan Trapani explained to The Daily Beast.In a December 2014 memo in response to the study, the CIA asserted:“The Study’s conclusions fail to note the general trend that, beginning in April 2003, as interrogators became more knowledgeable, as it became easier to use information from one detainee to get more from another, and as our understanding of the effectiveness of various techniques grew, CIA’s interrogations gradually relied less on coercion.”The documents also reveal the lengths the CIA went to persuade the Justice Department that the program was useful and wouldn’t cause long-term harm.