The CIA Detention and Interrogation Programme

Background

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks produced the most substantial expansion of CIA operational authorities in the Agency's post-1970s history. President George W. Bush signed a series of presidential findings in the period immediately following 9/11, including the Memorandum of Notification of 17 September 2001 that authorised CIA covert operations against al-Qaeda. The MON authorised, among other authorities, the capture and detention of al-Qaeda figures by the CIA — a domain in which the Agency had not maintained substantial institutional capacity since the Phoenix Program era and the post-1970s reforms.¹

The institutional context across late 2001 and early 2002 produced rapid Agency activity to develop a detention and interrogation programme. The Agency's Counterterrorism Center, under the direction of Cofer Black and subsequently Jose Rodriguez, became the operational lead. The Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice — particularly through Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo — produced a series of legal memoranda that progressively defined what techniques would be considered consistent with the Geneva Conventions and the federal anti-torture statute (18 U.S.C. § 2340). The 1 August 2002 OLC memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee — substantially drafted by Yoo — constituted the central legal foundation for what the Agency progressively described as "enhanced interrogation techniques."²

The Programme

The Agency's programme operated through a network of overseas detention facilities — "black sites" — across multiple countries. The substantive scale of the operation was progressively documented by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's investigation. The SSCI Committee Study, the declassified executive summary of which was published on 9 December 2014, established that the programme had detained 119 individuals across the period 2002–2009. The Committee Study identified multiple specific facilities — described by their CIA cryptonyms including "Cobalt" (Afghanistan), "Cat's Eye" (Thailand), and successor facilities in Romania, Lithuania, Poland, and other countries.³

The substantive interrogation techniques used in the programme were progressively expanded across the post-2002 period, drawing in part on Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training methodology developed by the US Air Force and adapted by CIA contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. The techniques included:

• Walling: The repeated forceful slamming of detainees against a flexible wall.
• Stress positions: The forced holding of physical positions for prolonged periods.
• Sleep deprivation: The denial of sleep for periods up to seven and a half consecutive days.
• Confinement boxes: The forced confinement of detainees in small boxes for extended periods.
• Waterboarding: The simulated drowning of detainees through controlled introduction of water onto a cloth covering the face. Three detainees were waterboarded under the formal programme: Abu Zubaydah (83 times), Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (3 times), and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (183 times).⁴

The Senate Committee Study found additional techniques that had not been authorised by the OLC legal memoranda but that were used at multiple facilities, including rectal feeding and rectal hydration. The Committee Study found that detainee Gul Rahman had died at the "Cobalt" facility in Afghanistan in November 2002 after being subjected to short-shackling in a stress position in cold conditions; the CIA officer responsible had not been criminally referred and had subsequently received a cash bonus.⁵

Disclosure

The basic outlines of the programme became publicly known progressively across the post-2004 period. The Abu Ghraib military-prison photographs — published in April 2004, drawn from US Army Reserve military-police personnel rather than from the CIA programme — produced the first sustained public attention to detention practices in the post-9/11 period. The November 2005 Washington Post article by Dana Priest, "CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons" — which produced specific public confirmation of the existence of CIA black sites in multiple countries — was the most consequential single disclosure of the early period. The December 2007 disclosure that CIA officials had destroyed videotapes of interrogation sessions in 2005 produced sustained subsequent attention.⁶

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began its formal investigation in 2009. The investigation, conducted on the basis of the Committee's review of more than 6.3 million pages of CIA documents, ran across approximately five years and produced what is conventionally referred to as the SSCI Committee Study — the most comprehensive investigation of any contemporary CIA programme. The full report runs to more than 6,700 pages; only the 525-page declassified executive summary was published on 9 December 2014. The complete classified report remains under seal pending the resolution of multiple ongoing FOIA proceedings.⁷

The SSCI Committee Study's findings — particularly that the programme had been more brutal than represented to policymakers, that it had not produced unique intelligence that would not have been available through other means, and that the Agency had on multiple occasions actively provided inaccurate information to the executive branch and to Congress — were substantially contested by senior CIA officials. CIA Director John Brennan responded with a December 2014 statement disputing several of the Committee findings while acknowledging that the programme had had "shortcomings"; multiple former CIA officials including Jose Rodriguez, José Pertierra, and former Directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden published responses contesting elements of the report.⁸

The most consequential subsequent legal proceedings produced limited substantive remediation. The Department of Justice's preliminary review of CIA activities, conducted under Special Counsel John Durham, concluded in August 2012 without criminal charges. Multiple US courts have heard claims related to the programme; El-Masri v. Tenet and successor cases produced dismissals on state-secrets grounds. The European Court of Human Rights' rulings — El-Masri v. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (December 2012), Al Nashiri v. Poland (July 2014), Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland (July 2014), and successor cases — produced substantial findings of state complicity in CIA operations on European territory.⁹

Legacy

The detention and interrogation programme has functioned, since the post-2014 SSCI report period, as a load-bearing reference for the question of US intelligence-service practice in the post-2001 period and for the institutional question of how programmes operating outside ordinary professional and ethical norms are constrained, exposed, and accountable. The case has been the subject of substantial subsequent academic, legal, and policy literature.¹⁰

For the institutional history of the CIA specifically, the programme has been the most-cited reference point of the post-2001 period. The institutional consequences across the post-2009 period included the Obama Administration's January 2009 Executive Order 13491 prohibiting interrogation techniques not specified in the Army Field Manual, the formal closure of the programme, and successive institutional reorganisation. The 2018 confirmation of Gina Haspel — who had served at the "Cat's Eye" facility in Thailand in 2002 and had subsequently been involved in the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes — as Director of Central Intelligence produced sustained public debate over the institutional accountability for the programme.¹¹

For the broader question of Western state practice on detention and interrogation, the case has produced substantial subsequent legislative and judicial response. The McCain Amendment of 2005 (the Detainee Treatment Act), the Military Commissions Act of 2009, and the John McCain – Dianne Feinstein Detainee Treatment Amendment of 2015 (codifying limitations on interrogation techniques) constituted the principal US legislative response. European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence on the rendition cases continues.¹²

For comparative reference, the case has been characterised in subsequent academic literature as the post-2001 successor to the institutional questions raised by MKUltra in the 1950s–1970s — a successor case of CIA programme development outside ordinary professional, legal, and ethical norms.¹³

Related agencies

This dossier relates principally to the Central Intelligence Agency. The country-level context is on the page for the United States. The related dossier on Project MKUltra addresses the institutional precedent.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Memorandum of Notification, 17 September 2001, declassified portions; Bob Woodward, Bush at War (Simon & Schuster, 2002).
2. Office of Legal Counsel memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee to Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales, "Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340–2340A," 1 August 2002 (the "Bybee memo"), declassified.
3. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program, declassified executive summary, 9 December 2014.
4. SSCI Committee Study, op. cit., particularly the Findings and Conclusions and chapters on specific detainee cases.
5. SSCI Committee Study, chapter on the Cobalt facility and the death of Gul Rahman; National Security Archive, "CIA Torture Unredacted" investigative reconstruction.
6. Dana Priest, "CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons," Washington Post, 2 November 2005; Mark Mazzetti, "C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations," New York Times, 6 December 2007.
7. SSCI Committee Study, op. cit.; ACLU v. CIA FOIA litigation collection.
8. Statement of CIA Director John O. Brennan on the Committee Study, 11 December 2014; Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives (Threshold Editions, 2012).
9. Special Counsel John H. Durham, statement on conclusion of preliminary review, August 2012; El-Masri v. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, ECtHR Application no. 39630/09, judgment 13 December 2012; Al Nashiri v. Poland, ECtHR Application no. 28761/11, judgment 24 July 2014; Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland, ECtHR Application no. 7511/13, judgment 24 July 2014.
10. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday, 2008); Mark Danner, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
11. Executive Order 13491, "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations," 22 January 2009; "Haspel Confirmed as C.I.A. Director Despite Torture Concerns," New York Times, 17 May 2018.
12. Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, Pub. L. 109-148; Military Commissions Act / NDAA FY2010, Pub. L. 111-84; National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, Pub. L. 114-92, sections on interrogation techniques.
13. Mayer, The Dark Side; Danner, Spiral; subsequent academic comparative analysis.