Part III Thematic Chapters, A Means and Methods of Warfare, 1 The CIA Torture Report: was there a method in the madness?

Subject(s):

Military assistance — Armed conflict, international — Armed conflict, non-international — Humanitarian intervention — Armed forces

The first chapter of Part III of this book presents analysis on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Report on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) detention and interrogation programme. This report came out in August 2014 and had taken five years to complete at a cost of more than $40 million. It was the subject of prolonged wrangling between the Senate and the intelligence community. The chapter concludes by stating that it is impossible to say what ramifications the Obama Administration's rapprochement with international law will have in the long term, if any. At the very least, the publication of the SSCI report provides an important bookend to a particularly painful chapter of American history, and the questions and introspection it has prompted may help ensure that such frenzied methods are never again undertaken in the name of national security. This can only be a good thing.