The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has release a shocking report into the CIA use of torture during America’s post-9/11 panic. The New York Times has a handy 7 point summary, pointing out that the torture was more brutal and extensive than previously supposed, that it was ineffective, and that CIA officials lied to Congress and made exaggerated claims to journalists about the effectiveness of the programme.
Its truly sickening and should not have happened. The USA is supposed to be better. It has set a terrible example to brutal human rights abusing regimes like Iran. Ayatollah Khameni has been pointing out America’s hypocrisy.
They claim #humanrights &trample its basics in their prisons,in interactions w nations &even w their own ppl.#TortureReport #Ferguson 2/8/10
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) December 10, 2014
It looks like the United Kingdom might have been complicit in the torture programme too.
For those of us who want to read the full report, a 525-page PDF version is available on the webspace of Senator Diane Feinstein.
Plenty of journalists have been writing about the report. Andrew Sullivan has ‘live-blogged’ his reading of it. When they do cite a paragraph, they can’t link directly to it. It strikes me that far more people would be able to read an engae with the report if it were in HTML format. This is a ‘live’ example of the principle behind my Leveson Report (As It Should Be) project.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report should be converted to HTML as soon as possible, preferably hosted by a civil liberties NGO or a newspaper. It took me a while to convert the Leveson Report into HTML but a crowdsourced effort could convert this torture report in a matter of days, if not hours.