The executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture was released in December, publicizing evidence that the agency subjected detainees to various types of abuse in order to elicit information.
But newly declassified documents obtained by VICE show that the CIA conducted its own investigation prior to the Senate’s. Despite claims of those held in black site prisons who reported being forced to take “mind-altering” substances, the CIA would not confirm these claims.
"One of the detainees," journalist Jason Leopold told BradCast on Radio Sputnik, "he accused his captors of drugging his food and drugging him."
But providing a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not the CIA used drugs during interrogations may be a bit trickier.
"Yes, we drugged detainees, and then we interrogated them," Leopold says, quoting findings of the Defense Department investigation. "But we did not drug them for the purposes of their interrogation."
These type of murky “yes and no” responses from various levels of the US government have made it difficult to ascertain the true nature of the terror program. And this could have been by design.
"In this world, getting those two paragraphs [of the Senate report] is a victory because of how secretive this agency is," Leopold says. "We don’t know anything about these guys."
