John R. MacArthur: CIA's 'enhanced torture techniques were utterly useless'
- 9 years ago
It's been two months since a US Senate panel, after a long fight, released its sweeping indictment of the government's illegal detention and torture of terrorism suspects in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
John MacArthur, an American journalist and longtime publisher of Harper's magazine, co-authored the preface to the French version of the Senate report, along with a fellow journalist and law professor, Scott Horton.
After September 11, the CIA has had "carte blanche" to fight terrorism and "behaved as if it were a corporation with no responsibility to report anything to the government". In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the idea that torture was necessary to obtain intelligence started to be accepted by the American population. But the Senate findings were similar to those of a CIA's internal report, in which the agency "admits to itself that the enhanced torture techniques were utterly useless", he says.
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John MacArthur, an American journalist and longtime publisher of Harper's magazine, co-authored the preface to the French version of the Senate report, along with a fellow journalist and law professor, Scott Horton.
After September 11, the CIA has had "carte blanche" to fight terrorism and "behaved as if it were a corporation with no responsibility to report anything to the government". In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the idea that torture was necessary to obtain intelligence started to be accepted by the American population. But the Senate findings were similar to those of a CIA's internal report, in which the agency "admits to itself that the enhanced torture techniques were utterly useless", he says.
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