The Great Cycle of Torture and Arbitrary Detention
By The C.I.A. tortured its own informants. And it tortured innocent people because of bad information obtained through torture:
The Senate Democratic staff members who wrote the 6,000-page report counted 119 prisoners who had been in C.I.A. custody. Of those, the report found that 26 were either described in the agency’s own documents as mistakenly detained, or released and given money, evidence of the same thing.
Among the others mistakenly held for periods of months or years, according to the report, were an “intellectually challenged” man held by the C.I.A. solely to pressure a family member to provide information; two people who were former C.I.A. informants; and two brothers who were falsely linked to Al Qaeda by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 planner, who “fabricated” the information after being waterboarded 183 times.
In addition, the report says, “C.I.A. records provide insufficient information to justify the detention of many other detainees.”
Admittedly, the findings that an arbitrary, unaccountable torture regime was a human rights catastrophe that was useless or counterproductive in protecting national security are very, very partisan.