Tensions run high over US Senate's release of CIA torture report (LIVE BLOG)

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GLOBALPOST LIVE BLOG: US SENATE RELEASES TORTURE REPORT

UPDATE: 12/9/14 4:00 PM ET

Signing off

This live blog is now closed.

UPDATE: 12/9/14 3:58 PM ET

The risks of torture

Louise Roug, Mashable's Global News Editor, offers an insightful analysis of the report:

"What should be the takeaway — beyond bipartisan bickering — is that when the United States is revealed to have made secret use of the same brutal methods it publicly abhors, it makes it too easy for countries such as Russia to label America a hypocrite nation," Roug writes. "It feeds the PR machine of militant groups such as the Islamic State. ... Beyond public diplomacy fallout, the torture program undermines what military personnel are trying to accomplish in the Middle East, Afghanistan and parts of Africa."

UPDATE: 12/9/14 3:20 PM ET

Reactions from international watchdog groups

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International weighed in on the torture report:

"The Senate report summary should forever put to rest CIA denials that it engaged in torture, which is criminal and can never be justified," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said. "The report shows the repeated claims that harsh measures were needed to protect Americans are fiction." 

"Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a 'policy option' for future presidents," he added.

"This report provides yet more damning detail of some of the human rights violations that were authorized by the highest authorities in the USA after 9/11," Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, said. "Despite much evidence having been in the public realm for years, no one has been brought to justice for authorizing or carrying out the acts in these CIA programs."

UPDATE: 12/9/14 2:38 PM ET

Ex-British Guantanamo inmate says CIA torture report won't help

Reuters — A former British inmate of Guantanamo Bay said CIA "torture" of terrorism suspects, detailed in a US Senate report on Tuesday, had fueled violence and the rise of Islamic State and that cataloguing it wouldn't help.

Moazzam Begg also said the release of the report, which included graphic details of "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, would do nothing to assuage anger about such actions across the Muslim world. "I don't think it will be teaching us anything we didn't already know," Begg told Reuters.

"It doesn't make anything better." He said examples cited in the report of brutality by CIA interrogators at secret prisons around the world "can only produce one result — false evidence, more hatred."

UPDATE: 12/9/14 12:45 PM ET

McCain comments on the report

Watch it here:

UPDATE: 12/9/14 12:08 PM ET

Obama pledges no repeat of harsh US interrogation methods

Reuters — President Barack Obama vowed on Tuesday that harsh US interrogation methods will not take place on his watch, saying the techniques did significant damage to American interests abroad without serving broad counterterrorism efforts.

Obama issued a written statement in response to a Senate report that detailed interrogation procedures carried out on terrorism suspects in the years after the 9/11 attacks.

"Rather than another reason to refight old arguments, I hope that today's report can help us leave these techniques where they belong, in the past," Obama said. Obama said the Senate report documents a troubling program involving enhanced interrogation techniques on suspects in secret facilities outside the United States.

"It reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests," he said.

UPDATE: 12/9/14 11:59 AM ET

Obama's remarks 

Watch it on NBC News:

UPDATE: 12/9/14 11:52 AM ET

For a quick snapshot of major findings...

Check out this handy interactive put together by The Washington Post:

UPDATE: 12/9/14 11:17 AM ET

Here's the report

Read it here.

Think Progress outlines five striking points from the report, starting with how the use of torture didn't prevent any terrorist attacks. The piece quotes this detail from the report:

"At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ‘ticking time bomb’ information that many believe was the justification for the use of these techniques."

UPDATE: 12/9/14 11:06 AM ET

'Enhanced interrogation techniques' weren't effective

Press release from @SenFeinstein lists 4 key findings from CIA torture report https://t.co/Rp9hBOYYiE pic.twitter.com/UXB0RoMBJs

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) December 9, 2014

UPDATE: 12/9/14 10:58 AM ET

Hagel says military on 'high alert' 

Agence France-Presse — US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Tuesday he had ordered top military commanders worldwide to be on high alert over the imminent publication of a report on the CIA's use of torture.

"I have ordered all our combatant commanders to be on high alert everywhere in the world," he told reporters in Baghdad, adding however that no specific threat had been reported.

UPDATE: 12/9/14 10:45 AM ET

US senators to speak on torture report

Watch live on NBC News:

UPDATE: 12/9/14 10:00 AM ET

US intensifying security at American facilities around the world

The US Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to release a report detailing the torture techniques employed by the Central Intelligence Agency following the 9/11 attacks, at 11 a.m. ET. Anticipating backlash, the White House and US intelligence officials are stepping up security at US facilities globally, Reuters reports:

US officials moved to shore up security at American facilities around the world as a precaution.

The report will include graphic details about sexual threats and other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, sources familiar with the document said on Monday.

The report, which took years to produce, charts the history of the CIA's "Rendition, Detention and Interrogation" program, which President George W. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

Bush ended many aspects of the program before leaving office, and President Barack Obama swiftly banned "enhanced interrogation techniques," which critics say are torture, after his 2009 inauguration.

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