The quantum of cruelty
Five years after the review was ordered, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee voted earlier this month to release the executive summary from a 6,300-page report that details for the first time the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation programs and practices since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The still-classified report is expected to cast a new and harsh light on the CIA’s use of brutal and inhumane techniques to elicit intelligence from suspected terrorist detainees. It also is expected to assert that the CIA misled the committee about the nature of its clandestine activities, according to recent public comments by some committee members. President Obama, who shut down the CIA’s detainee program and formally banned torture shortly after taking office in 2009, has pledged to declassify the report’s summary once the CIA has completed its review of the document, a process that could take months. Alberto Mora knows all too well how the...