A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency's post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned.
According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."
The law was broken. Who will be investigated? Who will go to jail?
Who am I kidding? No one will be investigated or held accountable for this--with the exception, maybe, of a few low-level scapegoats. The United States has become unmoored, in a very profound way, from its liberal founding principles (or maybe I'm being naive: maybe it has been unmoored for a very long time, or was never moored in the first place). There is no longer even an expectation of justice at the highest levels of government.
But ultimately this isn't a failure of the government to democratically represent the people; it's a failure of the people to collectively behave in a civilized manner. As it is, too many Americans practice a sort of aggrieved barbarism that results not just in the lack of condemnation of moral outrages such as unnecessary wars and torture, but an exultation of them. It is a remarkable and sickening thing to behold.
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