CIA Threatened to Kill Detainee Families
August 25th, 2009Until the early 1980s, the U.S. military ran an intelligence training program in Latin America and elsewhere using manuals that taught foreign officers to offer bounties for captured or killed insurgents, spy on nonviolent political opponents, kidnap rebels’ family members and blackmail unwanted informants, according to recently declassified Army and Defense Department documents.
The manuals, known as Project X, were written by U.S. Army experts starting in 1965 for use by the U.S.-funded Joint Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program. Portrayed by the Army as instructional materials to help friendly governments fight Cuban- and Soviet-inspired rebels in Latin America, the manuals were “in fact a guide for the conduct of clandestine operations” against domestic political adversaries including peaceful ones, according to a panel of Army experts that later reviewed some of the material.
—Army’s Project X Had Wider Audience (1997)
Via: CBC News:
A newly declassified CIA report says interrogators threatened to kill family members of a man accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The report, written in 2004 and released Monday by the U.S. Justice Department, said CIA officers told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that if any other attacks happened in the United States, “we’re going to kill your children.”
The report also said Abd al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole warship bombing, was hooded and handcuffed and threatened with an unloaded gun and a power drill.
The unidentified interrogator also threatened Nashiri’s mother and family, implying that they would be sexually abused in front of him, according to the report.
Mohammed and al-Nashiri are currently being held by the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba.
In another case, CIA officers staged a mock execution — firing a gun in a room adjacent to an interrogation — in an apparent effort to convince a detainee that someone nearby had been killed, the report said.
Silly me thought 24 was fiction.
I really hope the other crap on tv remains what it should be: untrue.