Sen. Jay Rockefeller
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Did we torture people over the last 13 years?
“Yeah,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller. “Sure did.”
Rockefeller, a member and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which last week released its comprehensive report on the CIA’s detention programs, said his committee found out about the torture before President George W. Bush did.
The tactics detailed in the report included waterboarding; sleep deprivation; putting inmates in coffin-sized boxes; forcing inmates to stand, chained for hours and days on end; and feeding an inmate a puree of hummus, pasta, nuts and raisins through his rectum.
But, Rockefeller said, Vice President Dick Cheney knew all about the CIA’s programs.
“Oh, yeah,” Rockefeller said when asked about Cheney. “They always use the word ‘plausible deniability,’ but you don’t do that with the president of the United States in a situation where you’re breaking international laws and your own laws, you just don’t do that. I’ll never figure out — I think it was they took the fear of 9/11 and just turned it into ‘open for business.’”
In a wide-ranging interview Tuesday, Rockefeller, D-W.Va., described the release of the Senate report as perhaps the biggest victory of his 30-year Senate career…
