CIA Kept Prisoners Alive So It Could Torture More

Abuse 'sickening': human-rights lawyer
By Will McCahill,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 28, 2009 9:37 PM CDT
CIA Kept Prisoners Alive So It Could Torture More
A protester.   (Wikiemedia Commons)

Detainees tortured to the brink of death were sometimes given medical treatment to keep them alive so CIA operatives could torture them further, a human-rights lawyer alleges. “The CIA engaged in some horrendous abuses, but they appear to have taken precautions to have actually prevented people from dying—which might sound humanitarian, but in fact was kind of sickening,” John Sifton tells Russia Today.

Sifton says the CIA and US military intelligence ran parallel programs, with the CIA’s more secretive and the military’s more careless: “The military subjected a lot of people to the same techniques, but without the precautions, and as a result a large number of detainees in military custody died.” Meanwhile, the CIA program “only had a few dozen detainees at any given time—but it’s the one that saw the biggest abuses, the most serious forms of torture.”
(More CIA stories.)

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