Bernard E. Harcourt - The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens

Subjects should be warned not to be subjugated more than is strictly necessary.

William of Ockham, A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government (circa 1340)

O N D ECEMBER 9, 2014, C ALIFORNIA SENATOR D IANNE F EINSTEIN made public a 547-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence documenting the widespread use of torture by the United States after 9/11. The Senate report revealed far more intensive applications of torture than had previously been known. One prisoner was waterboarded at least 183 times. At one point, within less than 24 hours, he was subjected to more than 65 applications of water during 4 waterboarding sessions.

Another prisoner was subject to torture for almost 20 straight days on a near 24-hour-per-day basis. During the period, he was waterboarded 2 to 4 times a day with multiple iterations of the watering cycle during each application. During one waterboarding session, the prisoner became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth, and remained unresponsive until medical intervention, when he regained consciousness and expelled copious amounts of liquid. During the same period, that prisoner was also subjected in varying combinations, 24 hours a day to walling,

In addition to exposing the scope of these known torture techniques, the Senate report also revealed the previously undisclosed use of mock executions, ice-water baths, rectal rehydration (defined as rectal feeding without documented medical necessity), and threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to cut [a detainees] mothers throat. The Senate report uncovered the true nature of seemingly restrained techniques. The use of sleep deprivation, for instance, involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. The report documented at least one fatality: A detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died from suspected hypothermia at the facility. (The late journalist Anthony Lewis documented another death, according to an autopsy report, by asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression.) The report also revealed orchestrated efforts to cover up the extent of the torture, making full documentation impossible. In one case, for instance, a review of the catalogue of videotapes found that recordings of a 21-hour period [of interrogation], which included two waterboarding sessions, were missing. Still today, the full extent of the use of torture by American personnel is unknown.

Only a few hours before the release of the Senate torture report, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that the United States had launched a Predator drone strike in the Shabwa province of Yemen.

The first armed drone reached Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, a few weeks after the World Trade Center attacks. Soon thereafter, President George W. Bush signed an executive order directing the creation of a secret list of high-value targetsknown colloquially as the kill listand authorized the CIA to kill anyone on the list without further instructions or presidential approval. Drone use proliferated greatly after President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. Between January 20, 2009, and December 31, 2015, the Obama administration reportedly launched 473 strikes outside areas of active hostility.

At the same time as the drone strike in the Shabwa province, the press also reported that the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) had issued a classified order reauthorizing the Section 215 program of the USA PATRIOT Act for another ninety days. Section 215,

Section 215 was running alongside a number of other NSA programs for the massive bulk-collection and analysis of personal data of Americans and others, with ominous names such as PRISM, BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, BULLRUN, MYSTIC, UPSTREAM, and so on. The PRISM program, launched in 2007, gave the NSA direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple, and more. In conjunction with other programs, such as XKeyscore, PRISM allowed NSA agents and contractors to extract any persons e-mail contacts, user activities, webmail, and all their metadata; using other programs and tools, like the DNI Presenter, the agency could, according to the investigative reporting of Glenn Greenwald, read the content of stored emails, read the content of Facebook chats or private messages, and learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies. According to the