The author of the Senate report on CIA torture, dramatised in a new film released on Friday, has said the failure to punish those responsible makes it more likely the US could again resort to illegal and ineffective interrogation techniques.
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The Amazon movie, The Report, tells the story of what Jones (played by Adam Driver) and his colleagues found out about the torture programme: the systematic use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and “stress positions”, and the extraordinary fact that the CIA itself had conducted a review that showed none of it was working. The programme did not provide useful intelligence – and yet the CIA hid that conclusion.
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“The government wanted to use evidence rooted in those CIA torture sessions to quickly execute the defendants in the 9/11 case. We’re putting that evidence on trial first, to show how unworthy it is of a country that believes in the rule of law.”
Torture was supposed to protect Americans, but it ended up robbing the survivors of 9/11 of what they most craved, Jones argues. The use of torture made it impossible to try them in federal court and secure convictions.
“Nothing angers me so much as the lack of justice for the families of the victims,” he said. “Justice has been denied to them, because of this programme.”
The thrust of this article seems to be that torture is ineffective and the tragedy is those in Guantanamo without charge for 17+ years may not be convicted in federal court because they were tortured.
The US systematically tortured a large number of people over the course of years. No Americans have tried for this. The woman who called for the destruction of CIA videotapes of torture now heads the CIA.
The US has been holding people in prison without charge for over a decade.
