So The CIA Lied, Why Should Africa Care?

There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics. ― Oheneba Nyamekye

LAGOS – An investigation in the U.S. by a senate committee has found that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lied to the White House and public about its torture of detainees after the Sept. 11 attacks and acted more brutally and pervasively than it admitted. A U.S. Senate report has said, drawing calls amongst the public in the USA to prosecute the American officials.

The report shows that the United States and her allies were abandoned to the tender mercies of the manipulative lies of the CIA. As if an agency that was commissioned to exactly lie was expected to be any different? In a world full of lying politicians, business and financial cheaters and deceitful agencies, who has ever given the CIA honesty?

These findings and their shared notoriety give the lie that the CIA was ever working for the betterment of the American people and the world.

Africa perhaps knows her lesson all too well. The CIA and Lies are synonymous in any rendition of African vocabulary. This agency has been involved in almost all murders of African revolutionaries who were eager to turn the economic fumbles of their respective countries around. Most notably, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, Steve Biko, and more recently Al Gaddafi, and the list goes on. But the CIA continues to lie through its teeth on every single detail about such killings of African leaders.

The U.S. itself is no alien to the machinations of the CIA. Twice it orchestrated the killings of two most notable civil rights activists, African Americans Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  For more than five decades, this institution has been renegade. Only now, and quite conveniently, the U.S. government itself feels shortchanged about some such CIA dealings.

The African proverb, “If an insect would bite you, it must already be inside your clothing,” has not been more poignant in this respect. The U.S. government has for decades nurtured a beast without demanding accountability. Now the chickens of that beast have come home to roost aplenty.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-year review of 6.3 million pages of CIA documents concluded that the intelligence agency and its methods have been counter productive. They failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing al Qaeda members and other captives in secret facilities worldwide between 2002 and 2006, when George W. Bush was president.

More surprising, the CIA interrogation program was devised by only two agency contractors in stark contrast to what any matured democracy would endorse. And for what? To squeeze information from suspects after the infamous Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. These two men designed interrogations that took place in countries that included Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

The details

Some captives were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads, and the report recorded cases of simulated drowning or “waterboarding” and sexual abuse, including “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” without any documented medical need.

It described one secret CIA prison, its location not identified, as a “dungeon” where detainees were kept in total darkness and shackled in isolated cells, bombarded with loud noise and given only a bucket in which to relieve themselves.

Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, speaking on the Senate floor after releasing the report, said the techniques in some cases amounted to torture and that “the CIA’s actions, a decade ago, are a stain on our values, and on our history.”

The U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, said the report revealed a “clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration” and called for prosecution of U.S. officials.

Civil rights advocates also called for accountability.

“Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York.

The CIA dismissed the findings, saying its interrogations secured valuable information. Many Republicans criticized the decision by Democratic lawmakers to release the report, which was put together by the committee’s Democratic majority, saying it would put Americans at risk.

The report found the techniques used were “far more brutal” than the CIA told the public or policymakers. Before the report’s release, the United States boosted security at its military and diplomatic facilities abroad.

The report said the CIA had tried to justify its use of torture by giving examples of what it called “thwarted” terrorist plots and suspect captures, but the “representations were inaccurate and contradicted by the CIA’s own records.”

Criminal prosecutions unlikely

The senate committee are also lying through their teeth on this issue if they still continue with this idea that someone could be held criminally responsible for all this.

Despite the calls for accountability, there seemed little prospect of criminal prosecutions of those who implemented the program, or measures to hold politicians who authorized it accountable.

A law enforcement official said the U.S. Justice Department had no plans to conduct any investigation of the CIA’s actions.

Intelligence officials said that at one point, the Justice Department, through a specially designated prosecutor, conducted a criminal investigation into around 20 cases of allegations that the CIA abused detainees. However, that investigation was closed without charges being filed.

President Barack Obama signaled he was more interested in focusing on the future than reopening a dark and contentious period from the country’s recent past.

While in office Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, and other Bush administration officials said the “harsh interrogation” program was justified by results that included halting plots and catching terrorists.

Bush ended many aspects of the program before leaving office, and Obama swiftly banned “enhanced interrogation techniques” after his 2009 inauguration.

Faulty intelligence

The report says CIA records showed that 7 of 39 CIA detainees subjected to harsh interrogations produced no intelligence at all while in CIA custody. Others made up stories, “resulting in faulty intelligence.”

The CIA had failed to use adequately trained and vetted personnel, the report said. The two psychologists contracted to set up the program and run it had no experience in interrogation or specialized knowledge of al Qaeda.

The report accuses the CIA of failing to thoroughly brief Bush about the interrogation techniques. Senate investigators said official records suggested that while the CIA planned to brief Bush in 2002, the White House subsequently told the agency Bush was not getting the briefing.

Investigators say Bush was not fully briefed on the program until 2006, around the time he shut it down, and expressed discomfort at learning the full details. In his memoirs Bush said he had been briefed on the program.

Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam in the 1960s, said Americans were entitled to the truth about the program and its disclosure that such methods were ineffective.

But the most prominent take away from this revelation for most Americans can be summed in the African proverb, what goes around comes around.

The worst thing about being lied to is knowing that you weren’t worth the truth and Americans, if at all they have any dignity left, should take this one most seriously.

In the rest of the world and in Africa, this is just noisy political bickering in the U.S., for we know the CIA is only doing what it has always been commissioned to do – and that is, Lie. Nothing can be further from that truth. Only our dear Americans are now fast realizing that what goes around, indeed comes around.

The CIA lied? Alas, who cares?