Enhanced Interrogation Methods

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism for the program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world, including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in ''The New York Times''. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white torture". Translated as Several detainees endured medically unnecessary " rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.

The number of detainees subjected to these methods has never been authoritatively established, nor how many died as a result of the interrogation regime, though this number could be as high as 100.Deaths under torture the CIA admits
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* The CIA admits to waterboarding three people implicated in the September 11 attacks: Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Mohammed al-Qahtani. A Senate Intelligence Committee found photos of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the Salt Pit prison, where the CIA had claimed that waterboarding was never used. Former guards and inmates at Guantánamo have said that deaths which the US military called suicides at the time, were in fact homicides under torture. No murder charges have been brought for these or for acknowledged torture-related homicides at Abu Ghraib and at Bagram.

Debates arose over whether "enhanced interrogation" violated U.S. anti-torture statutes or international laws such as the UN Convention against Torture. In 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes depicting prisoners being interrogated under torture; an internal justification was that what they showed was so horrific they would be "devastating to the CIA", and that "the heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain." The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, stated that waterboarding is torture—"immoral and illegal", and in 2008, fifty-six Democratic Party members of the US Congress asked for an independent investigation.

American and European officials including former CIA Director Leon Panetta, former CIA officers, a Guantanamo prosecutor, and a military tribunal judge, have called "enhanced interrogation" a euphemism for torture. In 2009, both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder said that certain techniques amount to torture, and repudiated their use. They declined to prosecute CIA, US Department of Defense, or Bush administration officials who authorized the program, while leaving open the possibility of convening an investigatory "Truth Commission" for what President Obama called a "further accounting".

In July 2014, the European Court of Human Rights formally ruled that "enhanced interrogation" was tantamount to torture, and ordered Poland to pay restitution to men tortured at a CIA black site there.Court confirms enhanced interrogation in Poland is torture
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* In December 2014, the U.S. Senate published around 10% of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, a report about the CIA's use of torture during the George W. Bush administration.

History of approval by the Bush administration

Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Bush administration officials conferring by video link from bunkers decided to treat the attacks as acts of war, rather than merely crimes. The question arose: were captured prisoners to be treated as prisoners of war? Officials including Justice Department lawyer John Yoo recommended classifying them as "detainees" outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions or any other domestic or military law, and incarcerating them in special prisons instead of the barracks-like "prisoner-of-war camp you saw in ''Hogan's Heroes'' or ''Stalag 17''." On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a still-classified directive giving the CIA the power to secretly imprison and interrogate detainees.

In late 2001, the first detainees including men like Murat Kurnaz and Lakhdar Boumediene, later established to be innocent and arrested on flawed intelligence or sold to the CIA for bounties, were brought to hastily improvised CIA/military bases such as Kandahar, Afghanistan. They were subjected to beatings, electric shocks, exposure to extreme cold, suspension from the ceiling by their arms, and drowning in buckets of water. An unknown number died as a result. In late 2001 and early 2002, interrogation under torture at secret sites was still ad hoc, not yet organized as a bureaucratic program, nor sanctioned under Justice Department legal cover.

As early as November 2001, the CIA general counsel began considering the legality of torture, writing that "the Israeli example" (using physical force against hundreds of detainees) could serve as "a possible basis for arguing ... torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm."

In April 2002, the CIA had captured its first important prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, who was transferred to a CIA black site and at the suggestion of psychologist James Mitchell the CIA embarked on interrogation methods which included sleep deprivation using bright lights and loud musicstill prior to any legal authorization from the US Justice Department. Later that April, Mitchell proposed a list of additional tactics, including locking people in cramped boxes, shackling them in painful positions, keeping them awake for a week at a time, covering them with insects, and waterboarding, a practice which the United States had previously characterized in war crimes prosecutions as torture.

Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA's clandestine service, asked his superiors for authorization for what Rodriguez called an "alternative set of interrogation procedures". The CIA sought immunity from prosecution, sometimes known as a "get out of jail free card".

In May 2002, senior Bush administration officials including CIA Director George Tenet, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John Ashcroft met to discuss which techniques the CIA could legally use against Abu Zubaydah. Condoleezza Rice recalled "being told that U.S. military personnel were subjected in training to certain physical and psychological interrogation techniques". During the discussions, John Ashcroft is reported to have said, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

Jay Bybee, head of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, collaborated with John Yoo to draft and sign what are now known as the Torture Memos. These classified memoranda legalized a number of torture techniques for use on detainees by very narrowly defining torture and expansively defining executive authority. After the Justice Department completed the Torture Memos, Condoleezza Rice told the CIA that the techniques were approved in July 2002. Dick Cheney said "I signed off on it; so did others." In 2010 Cheney said, "I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program." In 2009 Rice said " never tortured anyone"; she maintained the abuse was "not torture", but was "legal", and "right".

In addition, in 2002 and 2003, the CIA says they briefed several Democratic congressional leaders on the proposed "enhanced interrogation technique" program. These congressional leaders included Nancy Pelosi, the future Speaker of the House, and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Democrat Jane Harman. The response to the briefings was "quiet acquiescence, if not downright support", according to officials present. Ms. Harman was the only congressional leader to object to the tactics being proposed. Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee after the 9/11 attacks, said he was not briefed on waterboarding and that in three instances agency officials said he'd attended briefings on days that his personal journal shows he was elsewhere.

At least one Bush administration official opposed torturing prisoners, Condoleezza Rice's most senior adviser Philip Zelikow. Upon learning details of the program, Zelikow wrote a memo to Rice contesting the Justice Department's Torture Memos, believing them wrong both legally and as a matter of policy. Zelikow's memo warned that the interrogation techniques breached US law, and could lead to prosecutions for war crimes. The Bush Administration attempted to collect all the copies of Zelikow's memo and destroy them. Jane Mayer, author of '' The Dark Side'', quotes Zelikow as predicting that "America's descent into torture will in time be viewed like the Japanese internments", in that "(f)ear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools."

Development of techniques and training

The authorized "enhanced interrogation" (the originator of this term is unknown, but it appears to be a calque of the German "", meaning "intensified interrogation", used in 1937 by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller) was based on work done by James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in the Air Force's Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) program. The CIA contracted with the two psychologists to develop alternative, harsh interrogation techniques. However, neither of the two psychologists had any experience in conducting interrogations. Air Force Reserve Colonel Steve Kleinman stated that the CIA "chose two clinical psychologists who had no intelligence background whatsoever, who had never conducted an interrogation ... to do something that had never been proven in the real world." Associates of Mitchell and Jessen were skeptical of their methods and believed they did not possess any data about the impact of SERE training on the human psyche. The CIA came to learn that Mitchell and Jessen's expertise in waterboarding was probably "misrepresented" and thus, there was no reason to believe it was medically safe or effective. Despite these shortcomings of experience and know-how, the two psychologists boasted of being paid $1000 a day () plus expenses, tax-free by the CIA for their work.

The SERE program, which Mitchell and Jessen would reverse engineer, was used to train pilots and other soldiers on how to resist "brainwashing" techniques assumed to have been employed by the Chinese to extract false confessions from captured Americans during the Korean War. The program subjected trainees to "waterboarding ... sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to extreme temperatures, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds at extremely damaging decibel levels, and religious and sexual humiliation", including forced enemas and other anal assault. Under CIA supervision, Miller and Jessen adapted SERE into an offensive program designed to train CIA agents on how to use the harsh interrogation techniques to gather information from terrorist detainees. In fact, all of the tactics listed above would later be reported in the International Committee of the Red Cross Report on Fourteen High Value Detainees in CIA Custody as having been used on Abu Zubaydah.

The psychologists relied heavily on experiments done by American psychologist Martin Seligman in the 1970s on learned helplessness. In these experiments caged dogs were exposed to severe electric shocks in a random way in order to completely break their will to resist. Mitchell and Jessen applied this idea to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. Many of the interrogation techniques used in the SERE program, including waterboarding, cold cell, long-time standing, and sleep deprivation were previously considered illegal under U.S. and international law and treaties at the time of Abu Zubaydah's capture. In fact, the United States had prosecuted Japanese military officials after World War II and American soldiers after the Vietnam War for waterboarding and as recently as 1983. Since 1930, the United States had defined sleep deprivation as an illegal form of torture. Many other techniques developed by the CIA constitute inhuman and degrading treatment and torture under the United Nations Convention against Torture and Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

According to Human Rights First:

Internal FBI memos and press reports have pointed to SERE training as the basis for some of the harshest techniques authorised for use on detainees by the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003.

And ''Salon'' stated:

A March 22, 2005, sworn statement by the former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo said instructors from SERE also taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba.

While Jane Mayer reported for ''The New Yorker'':

According to the SERE affiliate and two other sources familiar with the program, after September 11 several psychologists versed in SERE techniques began advising interrogators at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Some of these psychologists essentially "tried to reverse-engineer" the SERE program, as the affiliate put it. "They took good knowledge and used it in a bad way", another of the sources said. Interrogators and BSCT members at Guantánamo adopted coercive techniques similar to those employed in the SERE program.

and continues to report:

many of the interrogation methods used in SERE training seem to have been applied at Guantánamo."

A bipartisan report released in 2008 stated that:

a February 2002 memorandum signed by President George W. Bush, stating that the Third Geneva Convention guaranteeing humane treatment to prisoners of war did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees, and a December 2002 memo signed by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, approving the use of "aggressive techniques" against detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, as key factors that lead to the extensive abuses.

However, the Bush administration's February 2002 memorandum had, in fact, stated that only al-Qaeda detainees were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. That same order held that Taliban detainees would be entitled to treatment under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
These standards were ordered for all detainees in 2006, al-Qaeda members included, following the Supreme Court's ruling in ''Hamdan v. Rumsfeld''.

Donald Rumsfeld rescinded his December 2002 memo after six weeks.

Common Article 3 remained the policy under the Obama administration, and not the balance of the Third Geneva Convention.

Central Intelligence Agency

A Congressional bipartisan report in December 2008 established that:

harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA and the U.S. military were directly adapted from the training techniques used to prepare special forces personnel to resist interrogation by enemies that torture and abuse prisoners. The techniques included forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, and until 2003, waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.

According to ABC News, former and current CIA officials have come forward to reveal details of interrogation techniques authorized in the CIA. These include:

#Waterboarding: The prisoner is bound to a declined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Material is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over them, asphyxiating the prisoner.
#Hypothermia: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near , while being regularly doused with cold water in order to increase the rate at which heat is lost from the body.
#Stress positions: Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor (and/or wall), for more than 40 hours, causing the prisoners' weight to be placed on just one or two muscles. This creates an intense amount of pressure on the legs, leading first to pain and then muscle failure.
#Abdomen strikes: A hard, open-handed slap is dealt to the prisoner's abdomen. Doctors consulted over the matter advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.
# Insult slap: An open-handed slap is delivered to the prisoner's face, aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.
#Shaking: The interrogator forcefully grabs the front of the prisoner's shirt and shakes the prisoner.
In December 2007, CIA director Michael Hayden stated that "of about 100 prisoners held to date in the CIA program, the enhanced techniques were used on about 30, and waterboarding used on just three.".

The report, "Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program", published by the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights, described personnel in the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS) performing research on the prisoners as the above techniques were used both serially and in combination. This report was based on previously classified documents made available by the Obama administration in 2010.

According to ABC news in 2007, the CIA removed waterboarding from its list of acceptable interrogation techniques in 2006. ABC stated further that the last use of waterboarding was in 2003.

Defense Intelligence Agency

In 2003, the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "Working Group" on interrogations requested that the DIA come up with prisoner interrogation techniques for the group's consideration. According to the 2008 U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody, the DIA began drawing up the list of techniques with the help of its civilian employee, a former Guantanamo Interrogation Control Element (ICE) Chief David Becker. Becker claimed that the Working Group members were particularly interested in aggressive methods and that he "was encouraged to talk about techniques that inflict pain."

Becker claimed that he recommended the use of drugs due to rumors that another intelligence agency, name of which was redacted in the Senate report, had successfully used them in the past. According to the analysis of the Office of Defense Inspector General, the DIA's cited justification for the use of drugs was to " elaxdetainee to cooperative state" and that mind-altering substances were not used.

Some more lurid revelations of DIA's harsh interrogations came from FBI officers, who conducted their own screenings of detainees in Guantanamo along with other agencies. According to one account, the interrogators of what was then DIA's Defense HUMINT Service (currently the Defense Clandestine Service), forced subjects to watch gay porn, draped them with the Israeli Flag and interrogated them in rooms lit by strobe lights for 16–18 hours, all the while telling prisoners that they were from the FBI.

The real FBI operative was concerned that DIA's harsh methods and impersonation of FBI agents would complicate the Bureau's ability to do its job properly, saying "The next time a real Agent tries to talk to that guy, you can imagine the result." A subsequent military inquiry countered FBI's allegations by saying that the prisoner treatment was degrading but not inhuman, without addressing the allegation of DIA staff regularly impersonating FBI officers - usually a felony offense. A year before this investigation was concluded, it was revealed that interrogations by special units of the U.S. military services were much harsher and more physical than any of the above DIA practices, to the point that 2 DIA officials reportedly complained, after which they were threatened by non-DIA interrogators.

Similar activities are thought to have transpired at the hands of DIA operatives in Bagram, where as recently as 2010 the organization ran the so-called "Black jail". According to a report published by The Atlantic, the jail was manned by DIA's DCHC staff, who were accused of beating and sexually humiliating high-value targets held at the site. The detention center outlived the black sites ran by the Central Intelligence Agency, with the DIA continuing to use "restricted" interrogation methods in the facility under a secret authorization. It is unclear what happened to the secret facility after the 2013 transfer of the base to Afghan authorities following several postponements.

U.S. Armed Forces

The following techniques were authorized by the U.S. military:
#Yelling
#Loud music, and light control
#Environmental manipulation
#Sleep deprivation/adjustment
#Stress positions
#20-hour interrogations
#Controlled fear (including use of dogs)

In November 2006, former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, in charge of Abu Ghraib prison until early 2004, reported seeing a letter apparently signed by United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that allowed contractors employed by the U.S. to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation. Karpinski stated that the "methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation ... playing music at full volume, having to sit uncomfortably" and that "Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques." She said that she considered this treatment to be contrary to the Geneva Conventions, which state "Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." According to Karpinski, the handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written, "Make sure this is accomplished."

On May 1, 2005, ''The New York Times'' reported on an ongoing high-level military investigation into accusations of detainee abuse at Guantánamo, conducted by Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt of the Air Force, and dealing with: "accounts by agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who complained after witnessing detainees subjected to several forms of harsh treatment. The FBI agents wrote in memorandums that were never meant to be disclosed publicly that they had seen female interrogators forcibly squeeze male prisoners' genitals, and that they had witnessed other detainees stripped and shackled low to the floor for many hours."

On July 12, 2005, members of a military panel told the committee that they proposed disciplining prison commander Major General Geoffrey Miller over the interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani, who was forced to wear a bra, dance with another man, and threatened with dogs. The recommendation was overruled by General Bantz J. Craddock, commander of U.S. Southern Command, who referred the matter to the army's inspector general.

In an interview with AP on February 14, 2008, Paul Rester, chief military interrogator at Guantanamo Bay and director of the Joint Intelligence Group, said most of the information gathered from detainees came from non-coercive questioning and "rapport building", not harsh interrogation methods.

American Psychological Association

The American Psychological Association (APA), the primary professional organ of psychologists in the United States, collaborated with the Bush administration in secret to write legal and ethical justifications for the torture.

Initial reports and complaints

In 2006, senior law enforcement agents with the Criminal Investigation Task Force told MSNBC.com that they began to complain in 2002 inside the U.S. Department of Defense that the interrogation tactics used in Guantanamo Bay by a separate team of military intelligence investigators were unproductive, not likely to produce reliable information, and probably illegal. Unable to get satisfaction from the army commanders running the detainee camp, they took their concerns to David Brant, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), who alerted Navy General Counsel Alberto J. Mora.

General Counsel Mora and Navy Judge Advocate General Michael Lohr believed the detainee treatment to be unlawful, and campaigned among other top lawyers and officials in the Defense Department to investigate, and to provide clear standards prohibiting coercive interrogation tactics. In response, on January 15, 2003, Rumsfeld suspended the approved interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay until a new set of guidelines could be produced by a working group headed by General Counsel of the Air Force Mary Walker.

The working group based its new guidelines on a legal memo from the United States Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel written by John Yoo and signed by Jay S. Bybee in August 2002, which would later become widely known as the " Torture Memo". General Counsel Mora led a faction of the Working Group in arguing against these standards, and argued the issues with Yoo in person. The working group's final report was signed and delivered to Guantánamo without the knowledge of Mora and the others who had opposed its content. Mora has maintained that detainee treatment has been consistent with the law since the January 15, 2003, suspension of previously approved interrogation tactics.

It was not known publicly until 2008 that Yoo wrote another legal opinion, dated March 14, 2003, which he issued to the General Counsel of DOD, five days before the invasion of Iraq started. In it, he concluded that federal laws related to torture and other abuse did not apply to interrogators overseaswhich at that time the administration applied to Guantanamo as well as locations such as Iraq.

Public positions and reactions

President Bush stated "The United States of America does not torture. And that's important for people around the world to understand." The administration adopted the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to address the multitude of incidents of detainee abuse. However, in his signing statement, Bush made clear that he reserved the right to waive this bill if he thought that was needed.

Porter Goss, the Director of Central Intelligence, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 17, 2005, described waterboarding as falling into the area of "professional interrogation techniques", differentiating them from torture.

''The Washington Post'' reported in January 2009 that Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions, stated about the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of the alleged " 20th hijackers" of the September 11 attacks:

The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. ... You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge .e., to call it torture

Crawford decided not to prosecute al-Qahtani because his treatment fell within the definition of torture, so evidence was tainted by it having been gained through coercion.

Former President Bush in his published memoirs defends the utility of "enhanced interrogation" techniques and continues to assert that they are not torture.

Former President Obama, former Attorney General Holder, and Guantanamo military prosecutor Crawford have called the techniques torture. The British government has determined the techniques would be classified as torture, and dismissed President Bush's claim to the contrary. A report by Human Rights First (HRF) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) stated that these techniques constitute torture. "A United Nations report denounced the US abuse of prisoners as tantamount to torture. The UN report called for cessation of the US-termed "enhanced interrogation" techniques, as the UN sees these methods as a form of torture. The UN report also admonishes against secret prisons, the use of which, is considered to amount to torture as well and should be discontinued.

In 2009, Paul Kane of ''The Washington Post'' said that the press was hesitant to define these techniques as torture, as it is a crime and nobody who engaged in "enhanced interrogation" has been charged or convicted. In the summer of 2009, NPR decided to ban using the word torture in what was a controversial act. Its Ombudsman Alicia Shepard's defense of the policy was that "calling waterboarding torture is tantamount to taking sides." However, Berkeley Professor of Linguistics, Geoffrey Nunberg, pointed out that virtually all media around the world, other than what he called the "spineless U.S. media", call these techniques torture.

Effectiveness and reliability

Senate Intelligence Committee report

On December 9, 2014, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released a 525-page document containing the key findings and an executive summary, of their report into the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program. The remainder of the 6,000-page report remains classified. The report concluded that the interrogation techniques were far more vicious and widespread than the CIA had previously reported; that "brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence at times brought even IAemployees to moments of anguish." The report said that CIA officials had deceived their superiors at the White House, members of Congress and even sometimes their peers about how the interrogation program was being run and what it had achieved.

The executive summary lists 20 key findings:

# The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
# The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
# The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
# The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
# The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.
# The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
# The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
# The CIA's operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.
# The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA's Office of Inspector General.
# The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
# The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
# The CIA's management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program's duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
# Two contract psychologists devised the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
# CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.
# The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA's claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
# The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
# The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious or significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systematic and individual management failures.
# The CIA marginalized and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.
# The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
# The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States' standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.

The Senate Report examined in detail specifically whether torture provided information helpful in locating Osama Bin Laden, and concluded that it did not, and that the CIA deliberately misled political leaders and the public in saying it had.

The three former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden, who had supervised the program during their tenure, objected to the Senate Report in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, calling it poorly done and partisan. They insisted that some information derived from the CIA program was useful, specifically that interrogation techniques made some detainees compliant and that the "information provided by the totality of detainees in CIA custody" had led to Osama Bin Laden. According to the CIA, enhanced interrogation "conditions" were used for security and "other valid reasons, such as to create an environment conducive to transitioning captured and resistant terrorist (sic) to detainees participating in debriefings."

Republican Senator John McCain, citing Obama Administration CIA Director Leon Panetta (who did not join with the others in the Wall Street Journal Op-ed) had previously said that brutality produced no useful information in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden; leads were "obtained through standard, noncoercive means". In May 2011, Panetta had written to Senator McCain, that:

In 2014, Panetta wrote that torture did produce some useful information, but that the product was not worth the price, and if asked whether America should engage in similar practices he would say "no". Obama Administration CIA director John Brennan said that it is "unknowable" whether brutality helped or hindered in the collection of useful intelligence. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest