CIA report: A tale of competing truths

• Activists fear, torture will remain policy option for future Presidents
• UN, rights bodies for prosecuting of senior officials of the Bush era
• CIA, Bush supporters defend tortures, says they helped save lives

New York: With the Senate report on US interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects now in the public record, debate has shifted from hypothetical to the concrete.

The UN and human rights groups have called for the prosecution of US officials involved in what a Senate report called the "brutal" CIA interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects. A top UN human rights envoy said there had been a "clear policy orchestrated at a high level". Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said that the CIA's actions were criminal and can never be justified.” "Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of officials, torture will remain a 'policy option' for future presidents," he said.

The CIA has defended its actions in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US, saying they saved lives. President Barack Obama said it was now time to move on.

In the hours after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee document was posted on the internet, journalists and interested parties began poring over the 500-page executive summary, highlighting its most controversial findings and drawing conclusions about its relevance.

The report is brutal, wrote the Daily Beast's Shane Harris and Tim Mak: "Interrogations that lasted for days on end. Detainees forced to stand on broken legs, or go 180 hours in a row without sleep. A prison so cold, one suspect essentially froze to death." Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson says the "rectal rehydration, without evidence of medical necessity" that some detainees underwent was "sexual assault, plus water".

Beyond the moral repugnancy of the specific examples cited, writes Vox's Max Fisher, the report shows that there was a "disastrous flaw" in the CIA's interrogation programme.

Other journalists took particular exception to the portion of the report that detailed how the CIA's public affairs department attempted to shape media coverage of the agency's practices.

A little over an hour after the report's release, the Wall Street Journal's website published an opinion piece in which former CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden and Deputy Directors John E McLaughlin, Albert Calland and Stephen R. Kappe defend their agency's record.

They call the report "a missed opportunity to deliver a serious and balanced study of an important public policy question".

They contend, contrary to the report's findings, that the interrogation programme "helped us disrupt, capture or kill terrorists". Its legality was clearly established by the US Justice Department, they continue, and the allegation that CIA representatives misled Congress and administration officials is "flat-out wrong".

The authors of the Senate report forget the sense of urgency that existed in the days after the 9/11 attacks, they write. (BBC)

By: Anthony Zurcher