Everything you need to read about the CIA torture report

1. The CIA torture program — the basics

• The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture practices is out. Here's the four sentence summary:

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• "The CIA's 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were not effective."

• "The CIA provided extensive inaccurate information about the operation of the program and its effectiveness to policymakers and the public."

• "The CIA's management of the program was inadequate and deeply flawed."

• "The CIA program was far more brutal than the CIA represented to policymakers and the American public."

• Exactly how brutal? Well, interrogators threatened to rape a detainee's mother, forced others to stand on broken feet, and inserted hummus into one's rectum.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Read the report in full here.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Want an explanation of the report and the political fight surrounding its release? See here.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

2. The CIA torture program — the details

• The Senate report concludes that the CIA systematically misled the Bush White House on torture techniques and their effectiveness.

  [NYT / Peter Baker]

• Here's a list of some of the biggest lies the CIA told Congress about torture.

  [New Republic / Jessica Schulberg and Adam Peck]

• Some of the interrogators in the torture program had "reportedly admitted to sexual assault" in the past.

  [ABC News / Erin Dooley]

• The report proves that torture didn't help us kill Osama bin Laden.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The CIA mistakenly tortured some of its own informants.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The agency paid over $80 million to psychologists to develop torture techniques.

  [NY Mag / Jesse Singal]

• One of the detainees was characterized as "mentally challenged."

  [BuzzFeed]

• Here are the names of the 119 confirmed detainees in secret CIA prisons.

  [Washington Post / Swati Sharma and Julie Tate]

• The 54 countries that participated in the CIA's torture-related rendition program, in one map.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• A Senate proposal for a commission to investigate torture spurred the CIA to destroy its interrogation tapes.

  [Adam Serwer]

3. The CIA torture program - the context

• As of 2011, 53 percent of Americans think torture is "often" or "sometimes" justified.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Brittany Lyte]

• No torturers have faced any criminal consequences, but someone who leaked information about US torture programs is being prosecuted.

  [Vox / Tim Lee]

• Dick Cheney dismissed the report as "a bunch of hooey."

  [NYT / Peter Baker]

• Just a reminder, amidst all this, that the goal is to prevent terrorist attacks, which kill significantly fewer people every year than lightning bolts.

  [Reason / Ronald Bailey]

• The report suggests that the Justice Department was misled as to the extent of the torture, but their memos have still effectively immunized the perpetrators from prosecution.

  [Bloomberg View / Noah Feldman]

• ACLU head Anthony Romero: pardon the torture perpetrators, so it's clear that what happened here was a crime.

  [NYT / Anthony Romero]

• If the administration does that, the least they could do is pardon Chelsea Manning too.

  [Crooked Timber / Henry Farrell]

• The case for abolishing the CIA.

  [The Week / Ryan Cooper]

4. Misc.

• Tommy the New York chimp has been denied personhood by a state appeals court.

  [The Atlantic / Nicholas St. Fleur]

• The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Amazon can deny workers pay for time spent on security screenings while leaving work.

  [Bloomberg View / Noah Feldman]

• Using the rhythm method for birth control? There's an app for that.

  [The Atlantic / Olga Khazan]

• Kanye West pulled Seth Rogen into his limo and rapped his entire new album at him.

  [Stereogum / Tom Breihan]

• Toys are more gender-segregated than they were in 1964.

  [The Atlantic / Elizabeth Sweet]

5. Verbatim

• "The refusal to pay ransoms to terrorists can seem callous, but in truth it is the only ethical policy."

  [Project Syndicate / Peter Singer]

• "If long-dead honoree Andrew Jackson, a virulent white supremacist even by the standards of his day, could have seen the uses to which his name would one day have been put, he’d have shot somebody."

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

• "One summer morning in 2006, Jean-Louis Courjault found two dead babies in his freezer."

  [Pacific Standard / Nabeelah Jaffer]

• "You know, no amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp."

  [Stella Young via NYMag / Melissa Dahl]

• "Pancake distilled the power of sadness like moonshine, extracting the most potent drops for his stories, sending it like a hard pinch to a numb world that twenty-six years after his death has yet to awaken."

  [The Believer / Samantha Hunt]

• "It is unfortunate to see anonymous staffers accusing TNR's owner Chris Hughes of trying to create 'another BuzzFeed.' If that is truly Hughes's ambition, then—in at least one important way—he will have created a publication significantly more moral than anything any recent TNR editor ever has."

  [The Atlantic / Ta-Nehisi Coates]

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