Army
CIA Interrogations 'Tantamount to Torture'
The United States brutalised scores of terror suspects with interrogation tactics that turned secret CIA prisons into chambers of suffering and did nothing to make America safer after the September 11 2001 attacks, Senate investigators have concluded.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report, years in the making, accused the CIA of misleading its political masters about what it was doing with its "black site" captives and deceiving Americans about the effectiveness of its techniques.
The report was the first public accounting of tactics employed after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and it described far harsher actions than had been widely known. Tactics included confinement to small boxes, weeks of sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, slapping and slamming, and threats to kill, harm or sexually abuse families of the captives.
President Barack Obama declared some of the past practices to be "brutal, and as I've said before, constituted torture in my mind. And that's not who we are," he told the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo in an interview.
"One of the things that sets us apart from other countries is that when we make mistakes, we admit them," he said.
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