New documents reveal that the United States Central Intelligence Agency has utilized more austere interrogation methods for government whistleblowers, including forcing them to watch their mothers navigate the Internet.
The documents, over 1500 in total, reveal specific torture methods, detailed progress reports, and some graphic imagery of the advanced interrogation methods now employed by the CIA.
The documents released detail the torture method used by the CIA to interrogate Internet hackers who have gained access to government documents. In many cases, hackers were tied to a chair in a room with only a computer and their mother. If the prisoners failed to answer interrogators’ questions, they were forced to watch their mothers attempt to sift their way through the Internet via Windows’ Internet Explorer 8. In the most extreme cases, victims were forced to watch their mother bid for an item on Ebay, sync their iPhone to iTunes, or download the latest version of Adobe Acrobat.
The White House has issued a statement regarding what multiple civil rights groups have deemed as torture, reading, “We have begun our own investigation into these claims and will report our findings and punish all those who have committed war crimes. The safety of the American people is and always will be our top priority.”
According to multiple reports, this statement was written by a detainee’s mother, who changed the font, color, and kerning of the letters halfway through, and forwarded it along to family in an email chain letter.
Other alleged torture tactics involved forcing detainees to watch their mothers attempt to delete their Facebook accounts, change their Amazon billing address, subscribe to Hulu Plus, create folders in Google Drive, alter the time of an event on their Google Calendar, share a GIF, download a widget, send a tweet, reblog a tumblr post, subscribe to a YouTube channel, or interact with the paper clip from Word ‘97.
Experts predict President Obama will not make any meaningful change surrounding this controversial new method.
