One Torture Report, Two Very Different Interpretations Down Party Lines
— -- Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have issued a minority report in which they rebutted some of the assertions made in the majority’s report written mainly by the committee’s Democrats and released earlier Tuesday.
Here are some events contained in the report on which the majority and minority takes are completely opposed to one another:
The capture of Jose Padilla: The majority report said its review of cables and other CIA records shows that the use of CIA’s torture techniques on the detainee Abu Zubaydah “played no role” in the identification of the terrorist Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen and Muslim convert who was convicted in 2011 for involvement in a terror conspiracy, or the thwarting of plots in which Padilla was involved. The majority also noted that the intelligence community had deemed Padilla’s plots “infeasible.”
But the minority report asserted that the “breadth” of the information Abu Zubaydah gave up while he was being subjected to enhanced interrogation, and the impact that information had on subsequent intelligence efforts, reflected the effectiveness of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
Thwarting of the U.K. Urban Targets Plot: While the CIA frequently cited the purported thwarting of Khalid Sheikh-Mohamed’s plot against targets at Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf as an enhanced interrogation success story, the report says the plot itself never progressed beyond the planning of initial stages before its main orchestrators were captured.
But the minority report contended the CIA interrogation program “played a key role in disrupting the Heathrow and Canary Wharf plotting.”
The “tip-off” about bin Laden courier Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti: The committee report noted repeatedly that multiple detainees provided information about Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, a key courier to Osama bin Laden, outside of enhanced interrogation. Hassan Ghul, who provided key information about al-Kuwaiti in 2004, provided the most valuable information on al-Kuwaiti, the report found, before he was subject to torture techniques.
The minority report said that while there was other information in CIA databases about al-Kuwaiti, the information was not recognized as important by analysts until after other detainees corroborated that information during enhanced interrogation.
