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"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" is a
euphemism A euphemism () is an innocuous word or expression used in place of one that is deemed offensive or suggests something unpleasant. Some euphemisms are intended to amuse, while others use bland, inoffensive terms for concepts that the user wishes ...
for the program of systematic
torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. Some definitions are restricted to acts ...
of detainees by the
Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
(CIA), the
Defense Intelligence Agency The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is an intelligence agency and combat support agency of the United States Department of Defense, specializing in defense and military intelligence. A component of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the ...
(DIA) and various components of the
U.S. Armed Forces The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. The armed forces consists of six service branches: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. The president of the United States is the ...
at remote sites around the world, including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay,
Abu Ghraib Abu Ghraib (; ar, أبو غريب, ''Abū Ghurayb'') is a city in the Baghdad Governorate of Iraq, located just west of Baghdad's city center, or northwest of Baghdad International Airport. It has a population of 189,000 (2003). The old road ...
, and
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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 Sleep deprivation, also known as sleep insufficiency or sleeplessness, is the condition of not having adequate duration and/or quality of sleep to support decent alertness, performance, and health. It can be either chronic or acute and may vary ...
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 ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
''. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "
white torture White torture, often referred to as white room torture, is a type of psychological torture technique aimed at complete sensory deprivation and isolation. A prisoner is held in a cell that deprives them of all senses and identity. It is particula ...
". Translated as Several detainees endured medically unnecessary " rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "
rectal feeding A nutrient enema, also known as feeding per rectum, rectal alimentation, or rectal feeding, is an enema administered with the intent of providing nutrition when normal eating is not possible. This treatment is ancient, dating back at least to the s ...
". 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 * * The CIA admits to waterboarding three people implicated in the
September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commer ...
: Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Mohammed al-Qahtani. A
Senate Intelligence Committee The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (sometimes referred to as the Intelligence Committee or SSCI) is dedicated to overseeing the United States Intelligence Community—the agencies and bureaus of the federal government o ...
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 law International law (also known as public international law and the law of nations) is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally recognized as binding between states. It establishes normative guidelines and a common conceptual framework for ...
s 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 The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washin ...
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 Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...
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 The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national sec ...
, 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 The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR or ECtHR), also known as the Strasbourg Court, is an international court of the Council of Europe which interprets the European Convention on Human Rights. The court hears applications alleging that ...
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 * * * 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 John Choon Yoo (; born July 10, 1967) is a Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Yoo became known for his legal opinions ...
recommended classifying them as "detainees" outside the protection of the
Geneva Conventions upright=1.15, Original document in single pages, 1864 The Geneva Conventions are four treaties, and three additional protocols, that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war. The singular term ''Geneva Conv ...
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 ''Hogan's Heroes'' is an American television sitcom set in a Nazi German prisoner-of-war (POW) camp during World War II. It ran for 168 episodes (six seasons) from September 17, 1965, to April 4, 1971, on the CBS network, the longest broadcast ...
'' 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 George John Tenet (born January 5, 1953) is an American intelligence official and academic who served as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, as well as a Distinguished Professor in the Pr ...
, National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice Condoleezza Rice ( ; born November 14, 1954) is an American diplomat and political scientist who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th Un ...
, Vice President
Dick Cheney Richard Bruce Cheney ( ; born January 30, 1941) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 46th vice president of the United States from 2001 to 2009 under President George W. Bush. He is currently the oldest living former ...
, Secretary of State
Colin Powell Colin Luther Powell ( ; April 5, 1937 – October 18, 2021) was an American politician, statesman, diplomat, and United States Army officer who served as the 65th United States Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005. He was the first Africa ...
, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld Donald Henry Rumsfeld (July 9, 1932 – June 29, 2021) was an American politician, government official and businessman who served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under president Gerald Ford, and again from 2001 to 2006 under Preside ...
, 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 The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in ...
? History will not judge this kindly." Jay Bybee, head of the Department of Justice's
Office of Legal Counsel The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is an office in the United States Department of Justice that assists the Attorney General's position as legal adviser to the President and all executive branch agencies. It drafts legal opinions of the Attorney ...
, 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 Nancy Patricia Pelosi (; ; born March 26, 1940) is an American politician who has served as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives since 2019 and previously from 2007 to 2011. She has represented in the United States House of ...
, 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 Jane Meredith Mayer (born 1955) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the Uni ...
, 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 In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language ...
of the German "", meaning "intensified interrogation", used in 1937 by
Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
chief
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) was based on work done by
James Elmer Mitchell James Elmer Mitchell (born 1952) is an American psychologist and former member of the United States Air Force. From 2002, after his retirement from the military, to 2009, his company Mitchell Jessen and Associates received $81 million on contrac ...
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 Martin Elias Peter Seligman (; born August 12, 1942) is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Seligman is a strong promoter within the scientific community of his theories of positive psychology and of well-being. H ...
in the 1970s on
learned helplessness Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. It was initially thought to be caused by the subject's acceptance of their powerlessness, by way of their discontinuing att ...
. 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
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in 2002 and 2003.
And ''
Salon Salon may refer to: Common meanings * Beauty salon, a venue for cosmetic treatments * French term for a drawing room, an architectural space in a home * Salon (gathering), a meeting for learning or enjoyment Arts and entertainment * 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
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.
While
Jane Mayer Jane Meredith Mayer (born 1955) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the Uni ...
reported for ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'':
According to the SERE affiliate and two other sources familiar with the program, after September 11 several
psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the pre ...
s versed in SERE techniques began advising interrogators at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Some of these psychologists essentially "tried to
reverse-engineer Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomp ...
" 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 The Third Geneva Convention, relative to the treatment of prisoners of war, is one of the four treaties of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War was first adopted in 1929, but significant ...
guaranteeing humane treatment to
prisoners of war A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of w ...
did not apply to
al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda (; , ) is an Islamic extremist organization composed of Salafist jihadists. Its members are mostly composed of Arabs, but also include other peoples. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian and military targets in various countr ...
or
Taliban The Taliban (; ps, طالبان, ṭālibān, lit=students or 'seekers'), which also refers to itself by its state (polity), state name, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a Deobandi Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalist, m ...
detainees, and a December 2002 memo signed by former
Defense Secretary The United States secretary of defense (SecDef) is the head of the United States Department of Defense, the executive department of the U.S. Armed Forces, and is a high ranking member of the federal cabinet. DoDD 5100.1: Enclosure 2: a The se ...
Donald Rumsfeld Donald Henry Rumsfeld (July 9, 1932 – June 29, 2021) was an American politician, government official and businessman who served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under president Gerald Ford, and again from 2001 to 2006 under Preside ...
, 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 Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. A Democrat from Illinois, Obama took office following a decisive victory over Republican ...
, 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 ABC News is the news division of the American broadcast network ABC. Its flagship program is the daily evening newscast '' ABC World News Tonight with David Muir''; other programs include morning news-talk show '' Good Morning America'', '' ...
, former and current CIA officials have come forward to reveal details of interrogation techniques authorized in the CIA. These include: #
Waterboarding Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the person to experience the sensation of drowning. In the most common method of waterboard ...
: 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 Asphyxia or asphyxiation is a condition of deficient supply of oxygen to the body which arises from abnormal breathing. Asphyxia causes generalized hypoxia, which affects primarily the tissues and organs. There are many circumstances that can ...
the prisoner. #
Hypothermia Hypothermia is defined as a body core temperature below in humans. Symptoms depend on the temperature. In mild hypothermia, there is shivering and mental confusion. In moderate hypothermia, shivering stops and confusion increases. In severe ...
: 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 The abdomen (colloquially called the belly, tummy, midriff, tucky or stomach) is the part of the body between the thorax (chest) and pelvis, in humans and in other vertebrates. The abdomen is the front part of the abdominal segment of the to ...
. 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 Classified may refer to: General *Classified information, material that a government body deems to be sensitive *Classified advertising or "classifieds" Music *Classified (rapper) (born 1977), Canadian rapper * The Classified, a 1980s American ro ...
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 Donald Henry Rumsfeld (July 9, 1932 – June 29, 2021) was an American politician, government official and businessman who served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under president Gerald Ford, and again from 2001 to 2006 under Preside ...
'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 The Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) is an arm of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which conducts clandestine espionage, intelligence gathering activities and classified operations around the world to provide insights and answer national ...
), forced subjects to watch
gay porn Gay pornography is the representation of sexual activity between males. Its primary goal is sexual arousal in its audience. Softcore gay pornography also exists; it at one time constituted the genre, and may be produced as beefcake pornogr ...
, draped them with the Israeli Flag and interrogated them in rooms lit by
strobe light A strobe light or stroboscopic lamp, commonly called a strobe, is a device used to produce regular flashes of light. It is one of a number of devices that can be used as a stroboscope. The word originated from the Ancient Greek ('), meaning ...
s 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 A felony is traditionally considered a crime of high seriousness, whereas a misdemeanor is regarded as less serious. The term "felony" originated from English common law (from the French medieval word "félonie") to describe an offense that res ...
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 Bagram (; Pashto/ fa, بگرام) is a town and seat in Bagram District in Parwan Province of Afghanistan, about 60 kilometers north of the capital Kabul. It is the site of an ancient city located at the junction of the Ghorband and Panjshir ...
, where as recently as 2010 the organization ran the so-called "
Black jail The black jail is a U.S. military detention camp established in 2002 inside Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. Distinct from the main prison of the Bagram Internment Facility, the "Black Jail" is run by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and U.S. Sp ...
". According to a report published by
The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
, 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 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
, 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 Brigadier general or Brigade general is a military rank used in many countries. It is the lowest ranking general officer in some countries. The rank is usually above a colonel, and below a major general or divisional general. When appointe ...
Janis Karpinski Janis Leigh Karpinski ( Beam, born May 25, 1953) is a retired career officer in the United States Army Reserve. She is notable for having commanded the forces that operated Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at the time of the ...
, in charge of
Abu Ghraib prison Abu Ghraib prison ( ar, سجن أبو غريب, ''Sijn Abū Ghurayb'') was a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, located west of Baghdad. Abu Ghraib prison was opened in the 1950s and served as a maximum-security prison with torture, weekly exe ...
until early 2004, reported seeing a letter apparently signed by
United States Secretary of Defense The United States secretary of defense (SecDef) is the head of the United States Department of Defense, the executive department of the U.S. Armed Forces, and is a high ranking member of the federal cabinet. DoDD 5100.1: Enclosure 2: a The se ...
Donald Rumsfeld Donald Henry Rumsfeld (July 9, 1932 – June 29, 2021) was an American politician, government official and businessman who served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under president Gerald Ford, and again from 2001 to 2006 under Preside ...
that allowed contractors employed by the U.S. to use techniques such as
sleep deprivation Sleep deprivation, also known as sleep insufficiency or sleeplessness, is the condition of not having adequate duration and/or quality of sleep to support decent alertness, performance, and health. It can be either chronic or acute and may vary ...
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 upright=1.15, Original document in single pages, 1864 The Geneva Conventions are four treaties, and three additional protocols, that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war. The singular term ''Geneva Conv ...
, 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 Lieutenant general (Lt Gen, LTG and similar) is a three-star military rank (NATO code OF-8) used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages, where the title of lieutenant general was held by the second-in-command on th ...
Randall M. Schmidt of the Air Force, and dealing with: "accounts by agents for the
Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice ...
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 Major general (abbreviated MG, maj. gen. and similar) is a military rank used in many countries. It is derived from the older rank of sergeant major general. The disappearance of the "sergeant" in the title explains the apparent confusion of ...
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 Bantz John Craddock (born August 24, 1949) is a former United States Army general. His last military assignment was as Commander, United States European Command and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe from December 2006 to June 30, 2009. He als ...
, 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 The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
(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 Law enforcement is the activity of some members of government who act in an organized manner to enforce the law by discovering, deterring, rehabilitating, or punishing people who violate the rules and norms governing that society. The term ...
agents with the
Criminal Investigation Task Force The Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) is an organization created in early 2002 by the United States Department of Defense to conduct investigations of detainees captured in the War on Terrorism. It was envisioned that certain captured in ...
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 Military intelligence is a military discipline that uses information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to assist commanders in their decisions. This aim is achieved by providing an assessment of data from a ...
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 Dave Brant is a retired career Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) special agent and executive. He served NCIS from 1977–2005, leading the agency as its director from 1997 until his retirement in December 2005. Background and education ...
, 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 The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United Stat ...
Office of Legal Counsel The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is an office in the United States Department of Justice that assists the Attorney General's position as legal adviser to the President and all executive branch agencies. It drafts legal opinions of the Attorney ...
written by
John Yoo John Choon Yoo (; born July 10, 1967) is a Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Yoo became known for his legal opinions ...
and signed by Jay S. Bybee in August 2002, which would later become widely known as the "
Torture Memo A set of legal memoranda known as the "Torture Memos" (officially the Memorandum Regarding Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside The United States) were drafted by John Yoo as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the U ...
". 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 Detention is the process whereby a state or private citizen lawfully holds a person by removing their freedom or liberty at that time. This can be due to (pending) criminal charges preferred against the individual pursuant to a prosecution or to ...
. However, in his
signing statement A signing statement is a written pronouncement issued by the President of the United States upon the signing of a bill into law. They are usually printed along with the bill in '' United States Code Congressional and Administrative News'' (USCCAN) ...
, Bush made clear that he reserved the right to waive this bill if he thought that was needed.
Porter Goss Porter Johnston Goss (; born November 26, 1938) is an American politician and government official who served as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 until 2004, when he became the last Director of Central Intellige ...
, 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 ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large n ...
'' reported in January 2009 that Susan J. Crawford,
convening authority The term convening authority is used in United States military law to refer to an individual with certain legal powers granted under either the Uniform Code of Military Justice (i.e. the regular military justice system) or the Military Commissions ...
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 The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoni ...
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 Alicia C. Shepard (born April 27, 1953, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American journalist, media writer and expert on the work and lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In February 2014, she moved to Kabul, Afghanistan to work with Afghan j ...
'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 The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (sometimes referred to as the Intelligence Committee or SSCI) is dedicated to overseeing the United States Intelligence Community—the agencies and bureaus of the federal government ...
(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 Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can ...
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 A justice ministry, ministry of justice, or department of justice is a ministry or other government agency in charge of the administration of justice. The ministry or department is often headed by a minister of justice (minister for justice in a ...
, 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 The Executive, also referred as the Executive branch or Executive power, is the term commonly used to describe that part of government which enforces the law, and has overall responsibility for the governance of a state. In political systems ...
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 George John Tenet (born January 5, 1953) is an American intelligence official and academic who served as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, as well as a Distinguished Professor in the Pr ...
,
Porter Goss Porter Johnston Goss (; born November 26, 1938) is an American politician and government official who served as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 until 2004, when he became the last Director of Central Intellige ...
, 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 John Brennan may refer to: Public officials * Jack Brennan (born 1937), U.S. Marine officer and aide of Richard Nixon * John Brennan (CIA officer) (born 1955), former CIA Director * John P. Brennan (1864–1943), Democratic politician in the U. ...
said that it is "unknowable" whether brutality helped or hindered in the collection of useful intelligence. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said whether information derived from CIA torture may have helped find Osama Bin Laden, President Obama believes "the use of these techniques was not worth it because of the harm that was done to our national values and the sense of what we believe in as Americans." Similarly, Republican McCain agreed with Democrat Dianne Feinstein in remarks on the Senate floor that torture "stained our national honor" and did "much harm and little practical good".


Internal CIA assessments of efficacy


=Panetta Review

= The Panetta Review was a review begun in 2009 by the CIA that examined the use of torture during interrogations of detainees. The review was described as "particularly scorching ... of extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding, which the memos described as providing little intelligence of any value."


=2015 review

= On request by the
National Security Advisor A national security advisor serves as the chief advisor to a national government on matters of security. The advisor is not usually a member of the government's cabinet but is usually a member of various military or security councils. National sec ...
Susan Rice Susan Elizabeth Rice (born November 17, 1964) is an American diplomat, policy advisor, and public official serving as Director of the United States Domestic Policy Council since 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, Rice served as the 27th U.S ...
in 2015, the CIA compiled a summary of key intelligence, which according to their records had been collected after the application of (unspecified) interrogation techniques. The memorandum lists intelligence related to the following topics: The Karachi Plot, The Heathrow Plot, The "Second Wave", The Guraba Cell, Issa al-Hindi, Abu Talha al-Pakistani, Hambali's Capture, Jafaar al-Tayyar, Dirty Bomb Plot, Shoe bomber, and Sh(a)kai (Pakistan). The CIA concluded that the enhanced interrogation techniques had been effective in providing intelligence and has been a key reason why al-Qa'ida has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since September 11, 2001.


Destruction of videotapes

In December 2007 it became known that the CIA had destroyed many videotapes recording the interrogation of prisoners. Disclosures in 2010 revealed that Jose Rodriguez Jr., head of the directorate of operations at the CIA from 2004 to 2007, ordered the tapes destroyed because he thought 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 New York Times'' reported that according to "some insiders", an inquiry into the C.I.A.'s secret detention program which analyzed these techniques, "might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations." In an op-ed for the ''New York Times'',
Thomas H. Kean Thomas Howard Kean ( ; born April 21, 1935) is an American businessman, academic administrator and politician. A member of the Republican Party, Kean served as the 48th governor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990. Following his tenure as governor, ...
and Lee H. Hamilton, chair and vice chair of the
9/11 Commission The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, was set up on November 27, 2002, "to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks", includin ...
, stated:
As a legal matter, it is not up to us to examine the C.I.A.'s failure to disclose the existence of these tapes. That is for others. What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one ''(of)'' the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.
Responding to the so-called "torture memoranda" Scott Horton noted:
the possibility that the authors of these memoranda counseled the use of lethal and unlawful techniques, and therefore face criminal culpability themselves. That, after all, is the teaching of '' United States v. Altstötter'', the Nuremberg case brought against German Justice Department lawyers whose memoranda crafted the basis for implementation of the infamous " Night and Fog Decree.
Jordan Paust concurred by responding to Mukasey's refusal to investigate and/or prosecute anyone that relied on these legal opinions
it is legally and morally impossible for any member of the executive branch to be acting lawfully or within the scope of his or her authority while following OLC opinions that are manifestly inconsistent with or violative of the law. General Mukasey, just following orders is no defense!


International Committee of the Red Cross report

On March 15, 2009,
Mark Danner Mark David Danner (born November 10, 1958) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' and frequent contributor to ''The New York Review of Books''. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affa ...
provided a report in the '' New York Review of Books'' (with an abridged version in ''The New York Times'') describing and commenting on the contents of a report by the
International Committee of the Red Cross The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC; french: Comité international de la Croix-Rouge) is a humanitarian organization which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and it is also a three-time Nobel Prize Laureate. State parties (signato ...
(ICRC), ''Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody'' (43 pp., February 2007). ''Report ...'' is a record of interviews with black site detainees, conducted between October 6 and 11 and December 4 and 14, 2006, after their transfer to Guantánamo. (According to Danner, the report was marked "confidential" and was not previously made public before being made available to him.) Danner provides excerpts of interviews with detainees, including Abu Zubaydah,
Walid bin Attash Walid Muhammad Salih bin Mubarak bin Attash ( ar, وليد محمد صالح بن مبارك بن عتش; born 1978) is a Yemeni prisoner held in extrajudicial detention at the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camp and is suspected of play ...
, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. According to Danner, the report contains sections on "methods of ill-treatment" including suffocation by water, prolonged stress standing, beatings by use of a collar, beating and kicking, confinement in a box, prolonged nudity, sleep deprivation and use of loud music, exposure to cold temperature/cold water, prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles, threats, forced shaving, and deprivation/restricted provision of solid food. Danner quotes the ICRC report as saying that, "in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (CIDT) is treatment of persons which is contrary to human rights or dignity, but is not classified as torture. It is forbidden by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3 of the European Convention ...
." A heavily redacted version of the November 8, 2006 meeting was released by the CIA on June 10, 2016. The report tells that the ICRC finds the detainees stories "largely credible, having put much stock in the fact that the story each detainee told about his transfer, treatment and conditions of confinement was basically consistent, even though they had been incommunicado with each other throughout their detention by us
he CIA He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...
"


Senate Armed Services Committee report

A bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report, released in part in December 2008 and in full in April 2009, concluded that the legal authorization of "enhanced interrogation techniques" led directly to the abuse and killings of prisoners in US military facilities at Abu Ghraib,
Bagram Bagram (; Pashto/ fa, بگرام) is a town and seat in Bagram District in Parwan Province of Afghanistan, about 60 kilometers north of the capital Kabul. It is the site of an ancient city located at the junction of the Ghorband and Panjshir ...
, and elsewhere. Brutal abuse believed to originate in Chinese communist torture techniques to extract false confessions from American POWs migrated from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan, then to Iraq and Abu Ghraib. The report concludes that some authorized techniques including "use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment" caused or were direct contributing factors in the cases of several prisoners who were tortured to death. The report also notes that authorizing abuse created the conditions for other, unauthorized abuse, by creating a legal and moral climate encouraging inhumane treatment. The legal memos condoning "enhanced interrogation" had "redefined torture", "distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws, ndrationalized the abuse of detainees", conveying the message that "physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment." What followed was an "erosion of standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely." The report accused Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputies of being, according to ''The Washington Post'', directly responsible as the "authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security."


Comparison to the Gestapo interrogation method called 'Verschärfte Vernehmung'

''
Atlantic Monthly ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
'' writer
Andrew Sullivan Andrew Michael Sullivan (born 10 August 1963) is a British-American author, editor, and blogger. Sullivan is a political commentator, a former editor of ''The New Republic'', and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, ' ...
has pointed out similarities between the
Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
interrogation method called '' and what the US called "enhanced interrogation". He asserts the first use of a term comparable to "enhanced interrogation" was a 1937 memo by Gestapo Chief
Heinrich Müller Heinrich Müller may refer to: * Heinrich Müller (cyclist) (born 1926), Swiss cyclist * Heinrich Müller (footballer, born 1888) (1888–1957), Swiss football player and manager * Heinrich Müller (footballer, born 1909) (1909–2000), Austrian ...
coining the phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung", German for "sharpened questioning", "intensified" or "enhanced interrogation" to describe subjection to extreme cold, sleep deprivation, suspension in stress positions, and deliberate exhaustion among other techniques. Sullivan reports that in 1948 Norway prosecuted German officials for what trial documents termed "Verschärfte Vernehmung" including subjection to cold water, and repeated beatings. Sullivan concludes:
The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture"enhanced interrogation techniques"is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.


Effect on United States reputation

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in assessing the effect of the Bush torture program on the reputation of the United States in the world, stated that the damage to U.S. reputation had been incalculable. "No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the worldever."


Investigation and calls for prosecution


Request for special counsel probe

On June 8, 2008, fifty-six House Democrats asked for an independent investigation, raising the possibility that authorising these techniques may constitute a crime by Bush administration officials. The congressmen involved in calling for such an investigation included
John Conyers John James Conyers Jr. (May 16, 1929October 27, 2019) was an American politician of the Democratic Party who served as a U.S. representative from Michigan from 1965 to 2017. The districts he represented always included part of western Detroit ...
,
Jan Schakowsky Janice Schakowsky ( ; née Danoff; born May 26, 1944) is an American politician who has served as the U.S. representative from since 1999. She is a member of the Democratic Party. The district is anchored in Chicago's North Side, including mu ...
, and Jerrold Nadler. The letter was addressed to
Attorney General In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general (sometimes abbreviated AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. The plural is attorneys general. In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have exec ...
Michael B. Mukasey Michael Bernard Mukasey (; born July 28, 1941) is an American attorney and former federal judge who served as the 81st Attorney General of the United States from 2007 to 2009. Born in New York City in 1941, Mukasey attended Ramaz School, gradua ...
observing that:
information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law. ... Because these apparent 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were used under cover of Justice Department legal opinions, the need for an outside special prosecutor is obvious.
According to ''The Washington Post'' the request was denied because Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey felt that "officials acted in 'good faith' when they sought legal opinions, and that the lawyers who provided them used their best judgment." The article also reported that " warned that criminalizing the process could cause policymakers to second-guess themselves and 'harm our national security well into the future. After Cheney acknowledged his involvement in authorising these tactics Senator
Carl Levin Carl Milton Levin (June 28, 1934 – July 29, 2021) was an American attorney and politician who served as a United States senator from Michigan from 1979 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the chair of the Senate Armed Services ...
, chair of the Armed Services Committee, a ''New York Times'' editorial, Glenn Greenwald and Scott Horton stressed the importance of a criminal investigation: "A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse."


United Nations Convention Against Torture

Shortly before the end of Bush's second term, news media in other countries were opining that under the
United Nations Convention Against Torture The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT)) is an international human rights treaty under the review of the United Nation ...
, the U.S. is obligated to hold those responsible to account under
criminal law Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It prescribes conduct perceived as threatening, harmful, or otherwise endangering to the property, health, safety, and moral welfare of people inclusive of one's self. Most criminal law ...
. On January 20, 2009, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture, Professor
Manfred Nowak Manfred Nowak (born 26 June 1950 in Bad Aussee) is an Austrian human rights lawyer, who served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2004 to 2010. He is Secretary General of the European Inter-University Center for Human Rig ...
, remarked on German television thatfollowing the inauguration of President
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...
George W. Bush no longer had head of state immunity, and that under international law, the U.S. is mandated to start criminal proceedings against all those involved in these violations of the UN Convention Against Torture. Law professor Dietmar Herz explained Nowak's comments by saying that under U.S. and international law former President Bush is criminally responsible for adopting torture as an interrogation tool.


Binyam Mohamed case

On February 4, 2009, the High Court of
England and Wales England and Wales () is one of the three legal jurisdictions of the United Kingdom. It covers the constituent countries England and Wales and was formed by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. The substantive law of the jurisdiction is En ...
ruled that evidence of possible torture in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who was held in Guantanamo Bay until 2009, could not be disclosed to the public:
as a result of a statement by
David Miliband David Wright Miliband (born 15 July 1965) is the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the International Rescue Committee and a former British Labour Party politician. He was the Foreign Secretary from 2007 to 2010 and the Member of ...
, the
Foreign Secretary The secretary of state for foreign, Commonwealth and development affairs, known as the foreign secretary, is a Secretary of State (United Kingdom), minister of the Crown of the Government of the United Kingdom and head of the Foreign, Commonwe ...
, that if the evidence was disclosed the US would stop sharing intelligence with Britain. That would directly threaten the UK's national security, Miliband had told the court.
The judges said they found it "difficult to conceive" the rationale for the US's objections to releasing the information, which contained "no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters". Adding, "we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials". Responding to the ruling, David Davis, the Conservative MP and former Shadow Home Secretary, commented:
The ruling implies that torture has taken place in the inyam/nowiki> Mohamed case, that British agencies may have been complicit, and further, that the United States government has threatened our high court that if it releases this information the US government will withdraw its intelligence cooperation with the United Kingdom.
The High Court judges also stated in 2009, that a criminal investigation, by the UK's
Attorney General In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general (sometimes abbreviated AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. The plural is attorneys general. In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have exec ...
, into possible torture had begun. In February 2010, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that material held by the UK Foreign Secretary must be made public. The judges also concluded that Binyam Mohamed had been subjected to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities" and that
British Intelligence The Government of the United Kingdom maintains intelligence agencies within three government departments, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence. These agencies are responsible for collecting and analysing foreign and d ...
knew that Mohamed was being tortured by the CIA.


Legality

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. considered the U.S. torture policy "the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the
rule of law The rule of law is the political philosophy that all citizens and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws, including lawmakers and leaders. The rule of law is defined in the ''Encyclopedia Britannic ...
in American history." After the disclosure of the use of the techniques, debates arose over the legality of the techniques—whether they had violated U.S. or international law.


U.S. government

Following the
September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commer ...
in 2001, several memoranda analyzing the legality of various interrogation methods were written by
John Yoo John Choon Yoo (; born July 10, 1967) is a Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Yoo became known for his legal opinions ...
from the
Office of Legal Counsel The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is an office in the United States Department of Justice that assists the Attorney General's position as legal adviser to the President and all executive branch agencies. It drafts legal opinions of the Attorney ...
. The memos, known today as the torture memos, advocate enhanced interrogation techniques, while pointing out that avoiding the Geneva Conventions would reduce the possibility of prosecution under the US
War Crimes Act of 1996 The War Crimes Act of 1996 is a law that defines a war crime to include a " grave breach of the Geneva Conventions", specifically noting that "grave breach" should have the meaning defined in any convention (related to the laws of war) to wh ...
for actions taken in the
War on Terror The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is an ongoing international counterterrorism military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks. The main targets of the campaign are militant ...
. In addition, a new US definition of torture was issued. Most actions that fall under the international definition do not fall within this new definition advocated by the U.S. The Bush administration told the CIA in 2002 that its interrogators working abroad would not violate US prohibitions against torture unless they "have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering", according to a previously secret US Justice Department memo released on July 24, 2008. The interrogator's "good faith" and "honest belief" that the interrogation will not cause such suffering protects the interrogator, the memo adds. "Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture", Jay Bybee, then the
Assistant Attorney General Many of the divisions and offices of the United States Department of Justice are headed by an assistant attorney general. The president of the United States appoints individuals to the position of assistant attorney general with the advice and ...
, wrote in the memo, dated August 1, 2002, addressed to the CIA acting General Counsel
John A. Rizzo John Anthony Rizzo (October 6, 1947August 6, 2021) was an American attorney who worked as a lawyer in the Central Intelligence Agency for 34 years. He was the deputy counsel or acting general counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the Wa ...
. The initial release of 18-page memo was heavily redacted, with 10 of its 18 pages completely blacked out and only a few paragraphs visible on the others. Another memo released on the same day advises that "the waterboard", does "not violate the Torture Statute." It also cites a number of warnings against torture, including statements by President Bush and a then-new Supreme Court ruling "which raises possible concerns about future US
judicial review Judicial review is a process under which executive, legislative and administrative actions are subject to review by the judiciary. A court with authority for judicial review may invalidate laws, acts and governmental actions that are incomp ...
of the nterrogationProgram." A third memo instructs interrogators to keep records of sessions in which "enhanced interrogation techniques" are used. The memo is signed by then-CIA director
George Tenet George John Tenet (born January 5, 1953) is an American intelligence official and academic who served as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, as well as a Distinguished Professor in the Pr ...
and dated January 28, 2003. The memos were made public by the
American Civil Liberties Union The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...
, which obtained the three CIA-related documents under
Freedom of Information Act Freedom of Information Act may refer to the following legislations in different jurisdictions which mandate the national government to disclose certain data to the general public upon request: * Freedom of Information Act 1982, the Australian act * ...
requests. They were among nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, and the CIA that provide details on the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody in the "War on Terror" gathered by the ACLU. A less redacted version of the August 1, 2002, memo signed by
Assistant Attorney General Many of the divisions and offices of the United States Department of Justice are headed by an assistant attorney general. The president of the United States appoints individuals to the position of assistant attorney general with the advice and ...
Jay Bybee (regarding Abu Zubaydah) and four memos from 2005 signed by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury addressed to CIA and analysing the legality of various specific interrogation methods, including waterboarding, were released by
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...
's administration on April 16, 2009. Following the release of the CIA documents, Philip Zelikow, a former State Department lawyer and adviser to then-Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice Condoleezza Rice ( ; born November 14, 1954) is an American diplomat and political scientist who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th Un ...
, said that in 2005, he had written a legal memo objecting to torture. In it he argued that it was unlikely that "any federal court would agree (that the approval of harsh interrogation techniques) ... was a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution." He claimed that the Bush Administration had ordered all copies of his legal memo be collected and destroyed.


Subsequent torture memoranda

In May 2005, in response to requests from the CIA, Bradbury authored several memoranda that confirmed that several so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" did not constitute torture, including waterboarding, walling, stress positions, striking a prisoner, exposure to extreme temperatures, dousing with cold water, and forced
sleep deprivation Sleep deprivation, also known as sleep insufficiency or sleeplessness, is the condition of not having adequate duration and/or quality of sleep to support decent alertness, performance, and health. It can be either chronic or acute and may vary ...
of up to 180 hours ( days), even when used in combination. These memoranda found the CIA's practices to be lawful if applied in accordance with specified conditions, limitations, and safeguards, including those set forth in the agency's interrogation procedures. Bradbury's memoranda were described by Democrats as an attempt to sidestep anti-torture laws and subvert a 2004 public Justice Department legal opinion characterizing torture as "abhorrent". These memoranda were publicly released by the Obama Administration on April 16, 2009. Bradbury authored an additional memo dated July 2007, seeking to reconcile the interrogation techniques with new developments, including intervening legislation such as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the December 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. In response to this and other new legislation, the 2007 memo provided legal authorization and OLC approval for a more limited set of actions for use when interrogating high-value detainees. This approval encompassed six listed techniques, including temporary food deprivation of no less than per day, sleep deprivation by being forced to hold a "standing position for as many as four days", and several types of physical striking. The cumulative effect of Bush administration legal memos and exemption from prosecution had been to create a "law free zone" according to the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo, where civilian politicians expected the military to use torture "against our will and judgment".


International legal bodies

On May 19, 2006, the UN Committee against Torture issued a report stating the U.S. should stop secretly detaining, torturing, and ill-treating terror suspects, since such treatment is illegal under international law. In July 2014, the
European Court of Human Rights The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR or ECtHR), also known as the Strasbourg Court, is an international court of the Council of Europe which interprets the European Convention on Human Rights. The court hears applications alleging that ...
condemned the government of Poland for participating in CIA
extraordinary rendition Extraordinary rendition is a euphemism for state-sponsored forcible abduction in another jurisdiction and transfer to a third state. The phrase usually refers to a United States-led program used during the War on Terror, which had the purpos ...
to a black site in Poland for enhanced interrogation, which the court called "torture, inhumane and degrading treatment". The court ordered the government of Poland to pay restitution to men who had been tortured there.


Human rights organizations

A report by Human Rights First (HRF) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) stated that these techniques constitute torture. Their press release said:
The report concludes that each of the ten tactics is likely to violate U.S. laws, including the War Crimes Act, the U.S. Torture Act, and the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. Human Rights First (HRF) and Physicians for Human Rights (PFH) report *
The
Constitution Project The Constitution Project is a non-profit think tank in the United States whose goal is to build bipartisan consensus on significant constitutional and legal questions. Its founder and president is Virginia Sloan. The Constitution Project’s w ...
convened a review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It concluded in 2013 that "it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture" and that the nation's highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.


Ban on interrogation techniques

On December 14, 2005, the Detainee Treatment Act was passed into law, setting the Army policy as standard for all agencies and prohibiting "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment". On February 13, 2008, the U.S. Senate, in a 51 to 45 vote, approved a bill clarifying this language, allowing only "those interrogation techniques explicitly authorized by the 2006 Army Field Manual." ''The Washington Post'' stated:
The measure would effectively ban the use of simulated drowning, temperature extremes and other harsh tactics that the CIA used on
al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda (; , ) is an Islamic extremist organization composed of Salafist jihadists. Its members are mostly composed of Arabs, but also include other peoples. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian and military targets in various countr ...
prisoners after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
President George W. Bush has said in a BBC interview he would veto such a bill after previously signing an
executive order In the United States, an executive order is a directive by the president of the United States that manages operations of the federal government. The legal or constitutional basis for executive orders has multiple sources. Article Two of t ...
that allows "enhanced interrogation techniques" and may exempt the CIA from Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. On March 8, 2008, President Bush vetoed this bill.
"Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists", Bush said in his weekly radio address. "The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terrorthe CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives." Bush said that the methods used by the military are designed for interrogating "lawful combatants captured on the battlefield", not the "hardened terrorists" normally questioned by the CIA. "If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the Field Manual, we could lose vital information from senior al Qaida terrorists, and that could cost American lives", Bush said.
Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...
senator Edward Kennedy described Bush's veto as "one of the most shameful acts of his presidency". He said, "Unless Congress overrides the veto, it will go down in history as a flagrant insult to the rule of law and a serious stain on the good name of America in the eyes of the world." According to
Jane Mayer Jane Meredith Mayer (born 1955) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the Uni ...
, during the transition period for then President-elect
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...
, his legal, intelligence, and national-security advisers had met at the CIA's headquarters in Langley to discuss "whether a ban on brutal interrogation practices would hurt their ability to gather intelligence", and among the consulted experts:
There was unanimity among Obama's expert advisers ... that to change the practices would not in any material way affect the collection of intelligence.
On January 22, 2009, President Obama signed Executive Order 13491 requiring the CIA to use only the 19 interrogation methods outlined in the United States Army Field Manual on interrogations "unless the Attorney General with appropriate consultation provides further guidance."Obama issues torture ban * * * *


Decision not to prosecute

Both U.S. and international law state that if a country is unwilling or unable to prosecute its own officials for torture, an international tribunal may do so. For instance, under the principle of '' aut dedere aut judicare'', parties to the
United Nations Convention against Torture The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT)) is an international human rights treaty under the review of the United Nation ...
are obligated to either prosecute the accused parties, or extradite them to a state that will. The United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Torture,
Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human ...
, and American legal scholars have called for the prosecution of Bush administration officials who ordered torture, conspired to provide legal cover for torture, and CIA and DoD personnel and contract workers who carried it out.Calls for Prosecution * * * *
John Yoo John Choon Yoo (; born July 10, 1967) is a Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Yoo became known for his legal opinions ...
, the former Bush administration attorney who authored the Torture Memos, has said that CIA officers risk prosecution for acts outside what the Justice Department specifically authorized. A dozen lower-ranking Defense Department personnel were prosecuted for abuses at
Abu Ghraib Abu Ghraib (; ar, أبو غريب, ''Abū Ghurayb'') is a city in the Baghdad Governorate of Iraq, located just west of Baghdad's city center, or northwest of Baghdad International Airport. It has a population of 189,000 (2003). The old road ...
; one CIA contractor who beat Abdul Wali to death in Afghanistan was convicted of felony assault. However, neither US domestic nor international prosecution of high-ranking officials is likely.


US domestic prosecution refused

President Obama, while condemning torture, ruled out prosecuting his Bush administration predecessors. According to University of California Law School Dean Christopher Edley Jr., who served on President Obama's transition team, the decision not to prosecute predated Obama's taking office and was due to concern about a backlash by leaders of the military, the
National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...
and the CIA. In an interview, Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor under Obama, commented on the difficult political problems that torture prosecutions would have created, both in distracting from the administration's response to the
Great Recession The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline, i.e. a recession, observed in national economies globally that occurred from late 2007 into 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At ...
and potentially alienating the president from his own agencies. Legal analysts such as
Eric Posner Eric Andrew Posner (; born December 5, 1965) is an American lawyer and legal scholar who has served as a counsel for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division since 2022. As a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner has ...
and
Andrew Napolitano Andrew Peter Napolitano (born June 6, 1950) is an American syndicated columnist whose work appears in numerous publications, including ''The Washington Times'' and ''Reason''. He was an analyst for Fox News, commenting on legal news and trials. ...
have said that prosecutions would create a precedent putting Obama administration officials at risk of politically motivated prosecutions by their successors.Commentary on why Obama won't prosecute * * * The US Department of Justice announced that there will be no trials even of those who went well beyond what the Torture Memos allowed, including those who tortured detainees to death.US Justice Department says no prosecutions * * The rationale has not been disclosed. In response to a FOIA lawsuit, the Obama administration argued that the rationale should be kept secret because "disclosing them could affect the candor of law enforcement deliberations about whether to bring criminal charges."


Foreign prosecution

There is no statute of limitations for war crimes in international law. However, prosecutions in either the
International Criminal Court The International Criminal Court (ICC or ICCt) is an intergovernmental organization and International court, international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to pro ...
, or in the courts of a particular nation invoking the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, are also regarded as unlikely. The U.S. under the Bush administration "unsigned" the treaty that had conferred on the International Criminal Court
jurisdiction Jurisdiction (from Latin 'law' + 'declaration') is the legal term for the legal authority granted to a legal entity to enact justice. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels. J ...
over Americans. In addition, President Bush signed the 2002
American Service-Members' Protection Act The American Service-Members' Protection Act (ASPA, Title 2 of ), known informally as the Hague Invasion Act, is a United States federal law which aims "to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the ...
allowing military invasion of
The Hague The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital o ...
to rescue any Americans the court might detain for war crimes trials. Some torture occurred in CIA black site prisons in countries that remain parties to the treaty, like Poland, Afghanistan, Lithuania, and Romania. But for political reasons those countries are not in a position to initiate a prosecution, nor to extradite US officials to face charges. Invoking the universal jurisdiction doctrine, the
Center for Constitutional Rights The Center for Constitutional RightsThe Center for Constitutional Rights
(CCR) is a
tried first in Switzerland and then in Canada to prosecute former President George Bush, on behalf of four tortured detainees. Bush cancelled his trip to Switzerland after news of the potential warrant came to light. Bush has traveled to Canada, but the Canadian government shut down the prosecution in advance of his arrest. The Center has filed a grievance with the United Nations for Canada's failure to enforce the Convention Against Torture, on which action is pending.


Consequence of failing to prosecute

Without any prosecutions the possibility remains that a future presidential administration could claim torture is legal and revive its practice.Torture becomes mere policy choice * * * * In February 2016, several leading U.S. presidential candidates openly argued for reintroducing torture. Including President
Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021. Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of P ...
who expressed his desire to bring back waterboarding. The U.S. reluctance to punish torturers has set back the fight against torture worldwide, according to Juan E. Méndez, the United Nations' special rapporteur on torture.


Prosecution of John Kiriakou

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou in 2007 was the first official within the U.S. government to confirm the use of waterboarding of
al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda (; , ) is an Islamic extremist organization composed of Salafist jihadists. Its members are mostly composed of Arabs, but also include other peoples. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian and military targets in various countr ...
prisoners as an interrogation technique, which he described as torture. On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to disclosing
classified information Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to kn ...
about a fellow CIA officer that connected the
covert operative A covert operation is a military operation intended to conceal the identity of (or allow plausible deniability by) the party that instigated the operation. Covert operations should not be confused with clandestine operations, which are performed ...
to a specific operation. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison on January 25, 2013.


European Court of Human Rights decisions

On July 24, 2014, the
European Court of Human Rights The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR or ECtHR), also known as the Strasbourg Court, is an international court of the Council of Europe which interprets the European Convention on Human Rights. The court hears applications alleging that ...
ruled that
Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...
violated the
European Convention on Human Rights The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR; formally the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) is an international convention to protect human rights and political freedoms in Europe. Drafted in 1950 by ...
when it cooperated with the US, allowing the CIA to hold and torture Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri on its territory in 2002–2003. The court ordered the Polish government to pay each of the men 100,000 euros in damages. It also awarded Abu Zubaydah 30,000 euros to cover his costs. On May 31, 2018, the ECHR ruled that
Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...
and
Lithuania Lithuania (; lt, Lietuva ), officially the Republic of Lithuania ( lt, Lietuvos Respublika, links=no ), is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania ...
also violated the rights of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2003–2005 and in 2005–2006 respectively, and Lithuania and Romania were ordered to pay 100,000 euros in damages each to Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri.


See also

* Bagram torture and prisoner abuse * Behavioral Science Consultation Team * Bush Six * Command responsibility *
Criticism of the War on Terror Criticism of the war on terror addresses the morals, ethics, efficiency, economics, as well as other issues surrounding the war on terror. It also touches upon criticism against the phrase itself, which was branded as a misnomer. The notion of a ...
*
Doublespeak Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs and "servicing the target" for bombing), in which case it is ...
*
Extraordinary rendition Extraordinary rendition is a euphemism for state-sponsored forcible abduction in another jurisdiction and transfer to a third state. The phrase usually refers to a United States-led program used during the War on Terror, which had the purpos ...
* Five techniques * High-Value Interrogation Group *
Human rights Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...
*
Iraq prison abuse scandals About six months after the United States invasion of Iraq of 2003, rumors of Iraq prison abuse scandals started to emerge. The best known abuse incidents occurred at the large Abu Ghraib prison. Graphic pictures of some of those abuse inciden ...
*
Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), also known as the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT), is a Malaysian organisation established in 2007 by the country's former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad to unilaterally investigate war cr ...
*
Law of war The law of war is the component of international law that regulates the conditions for initiating war ('' jus ad bellum'') and the conduct of warring parties (''jus in bello''). Laws of war define sovereignty and nationhood, states and territ ...
* Panetta Review * Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture * Torture and the United States * War crime * Subpoena ad testificandum


References


Works cited

*


Further reading

* *Grey, Stephen (2007) ''Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program'' *Jones, Ishmael (2008, 2010) ''The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture'' Encounter Books, New York. . *Levi, William Ranney (2009) "Interrogation's Law" *McCoy, Alfred W. (2006) ''A Question Of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror'' *U.S. Government, ''Coercive Interrogation: U.S. Views on Torture 1963–2003''


External links

* * * *Human Rights First
Tortured Justice: Using Coerced Evidence to Prosecute Terrorist Suspects (2008)Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the "Enhanced" Interrogation Program
http://phrtorturepapers.org/?page_id=87 mirror] A White Paper by Physicians for Human Rights, June 2010
Interrogation techniques at 'Britain's Abu Ghraib' revealedEx-US spy Anthony Shaffer talks about interrogation techniques during his posting in Afghanistan
on '' The State We're In (radio), The State We're In'' radio show, March 2011 {{Authority control 2000s crimes American phraseology Cover-ups George W. Bush administration controversies Human rights abuses in the United States Interrogation techniques Physical torture techniques Psychological torture techniques Propaganda in the United States Torture in the United States Torture-related organizations United States war crimes Euphemisms