WaPo | One of the things that the CIA did, as exposed in the report, has
been getting a fair amount of rotation in news reports about the report.
Let the New York Times take it away:
In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.”
Seems like a strong material for a
question to put before the ex-CIA director. So Tapper opened a
discussion of “unauthorized” procedures, and cited rectal dehydration as
an example. Away they went:
Hayden:
No, stop! That was a medical procedure. That was done because of
detainee health — that the people responsible there for the health of
these detainees saw that they were becoming dehydrated. They had limited
options in which to go do this. It was intravenous with needles, which
would be dangerous with a non-cooperative detainee; it was through the
nasal passages –
Tapper: Pureeing hummus and pine nuts and –
Hayden:
Jake, I’m not a doctor and neither are you, but what I am told is this
is one of the ways that the body is rehydrated; these were medical
procedures. To give you a sense …
Tapper: You’re really defending rectal rehydration?
Hayden:
What I’m defending is history. To give you a sense as to how this
report was put together — this activity, which was done five times and
each time for the health of the detainee, not part of the interrogation
program, not designed to soften him up for any questioning.
