Newsweek: CIA Conducted Mock Executions, Then Destroyed The Tapes

Newsweek is reporting that a CIA report about to be released reveals that mock executions took place, conducted by CIA investagors, who then destroyed evidence that it ever happened. (Pictured is a photo from Abu Ghraib taken in 2003.)

…the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation…Nashiri’s interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. “The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up,” said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with “imminent death.”

The report also says, according to the sources, that a mock execution was staged in a room next to a detainee, during which a gunshot was fired in an effort to make the suspect believe that another prisoner had been killed. The inspector general’s report alludes to more than one mock execution.

For more than a year, a federal prosecutor has been investigating the order by the National Clandestine Service’s to destroy videotapes chronicling these actions.  Justice Department memos that gave BushCo. the legal justification it believed it required to conduct enhance interrogations did not authorize mock executions.

Top Bush CIA officials, including Tenet’s successors as CIA director, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, strongly lobbied for the IG report to be kept secret from the public. They argued that its release would damage America’s reputation around the world, could damage CIA morale, and would tip off terrorists regarding American interrogation tactics.

Here’s a concept: if you don’t want to damage America’s reputation, don’t conduct these exercises in the first place.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.