If there was ever a parable about the futility of Congressional "oversight," it's surely the uproar over the CIA's secret destruction of the videotapes of its torture sessions with the Al Qaeda men Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Here we have the spectacle of members of the CIA oversight committees, like Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, saying virtuously that the CIA never told them at the time about deep-sixing the videos. If true, the CIA was stupid. All the agency needed to have done was set up a secret viewing room on Capitol Hill and hold "last peek before we burn them" sessions. Sworn to silence, a few senators and reps would have trooped along, no doubt with Larry Craig in the front row hogging three seats with his wide stance. The CIA says it did brief key legislative overseers about torture techniques in about thirty private briefings. Democrats thus briefed included Pelosi, Harman and Rockefeller, along with Republicans Graham and Goss. With one unknown exception the politicians said it all looked fine to them, except the CIA should be rougher.

It's all in the labeling. Former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou says he used to think waterboarding wasn't torture but an enhanced interrogation technique--even though he refused to inflict it after experiencing it. Now that he's retired he thinks torture is the word to use. In the Algerian war of independence, the French general Jacques Massu had a twelve-volt battery clipped to his body to see how bad it was before he OK'd its use in interrogation, or so the story goes--though his torturers certainly finished off many of their victims. Let all these fence-hoppers, on the Hill or in the government or on the campaign trail, pontificating on what is or is not torture, get waterboarded, subjected to isolation, intense sound, savage cold, starvation and frequent physical abuse. Then let them give their opinion.

The CIA continues to maintain it doesn't go in for torture. As Jeffrey St. Clair and I describe in detail in Whiteout, our book on the CIA (available at www.counterpunch.org), the documented record of its savageries in this area goes back decades, starting with the recruitment of Nazi torture technicians in Operation Paperclip. The 1950s saw its increasing obsession with brainwashing and sensory deprivation. The CIA supplied the interrogators for the Phoenix program in Vietnam. Witnesses in Congress in 1972 testified that the torturers cut off fingers, ears and testicles, used electroshock, shoved wooden sticks through the skulls and into the brains of some prisoners and rammed electric probes up the rectums of others. Bart Osborn, a US Army Intelligence officer, told Congress in 1972, "I never knew in the course of all these operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died." In 1968, in Bien Hoa prison outside Saigon, CIA psychologists--frustrated by their failure to break their captives--performed horrifying atrocities.

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