Enhanced interrogation

Enhanced interrogation — sometimes "enhanced interrogation techniques" or EITs — is the post-2001 institutional doctrinal term used by the United States government for the coercive interrogation programme conducted principally by the Central Intelligence Agency against suspected al-Qaeda and adjacent-organisation detainees in the 2002–07 period. The programme is substantially documented in the public record through the December 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program (the SSCI Detention Study, often referred to as the "Senate Torture Report" — the executive summary of which was declassified and released; the full 6,700-page report remains classified), the parallel CIA Inspector General's 2004 Special Review of Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities, and the substantial subsequent academic and journalistic literature.

The institutional history of the programme begins with the August 2002 Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memoranda (the "torture memos" authored principally by Jay Bybee and John Yoo) authorising specific interrogation techniques against detainees held by CIA. The techniques formally authorised across the programme's operational period included waterboarding (the simulated-drowning technique applied to Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri); walling (slamming the detainee against a flexible wall); cramped confinement (placement in coffin-sized boxes for extended periods); sleep deprivation up to 180 hours; stress positions; rectal feeding and rectal hydration (categorised by SSCI as having no legitimate medical basis); waterlogging through forced cold-water submersion; and the broader regime of dietary manipulation, nudity, and psychological pressure within which the specific named techniques were applied.

The programme operated through a network of CIA "black sites" — undisclosed detention facilities established in cooperation with foreign-government partners in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Afghanistan, and (on a more limited basis) other countries. The programme's documented detainee population was 119 individuals across the 2002–07 operational period, with the substantial majority of the highest-tempo coercive activity concentrated in the 2002–04 period. Two detainees (Gul Rahman, November 2002; Manadel al-Jamadi, November 2003 in the related but Defense Department–run Abu Ghraib facility) died in custody under conditions documented to involve the application of the techniques.

The institutional question of programme efficacy has been the principal subsequent published controversy. The SSCI Detention Study concluded that the programme had not produced unique intelligence — that the substantial intelligence the CIA had attributed to coercive interrogation could be traced to other collection vehicles or to non-coercive interrogation of the same detainees. The CIA's institutional response (the 2014 CIA Director's response, the post-publication statements of senior CIA officers including the programme's principal architect James Mitchell) contested that finding, asserting that specific identifications and disruptions had depended on coercive-interrogation product. The post-2014 academic and policy literature (the report of the Constitution Project Task Force on Detainee Treatment; the substantial subsequent peer-reviewed psychology-and-law literature on coerced confession reliability) has been substantially aligned with the SSCI conclusion on efficacy while continuing to acknowledge the contested institutional record.

The programme's subsequent legal disposition has been substantially limited. The Convention Against Torture (ratified by the United States in 1994) defined and prohibited torture as an absolute matter under international law; the European Court of Human Rights' 2014 Al Nashiri v. Poland and 2018 Al Nashiri v. Romania judgments held that the programme as conducted on European soil constituted torture under the European Convention. No CIA officer was prosecuted for the conduct of the programme; the 2009-12 Department of Justice review under John Durham closed without indictments. The 2015 amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (the McCain-Feinstein Amendment) statutorily prohibited the techniques going forward and required the Army Field Manual on interrogation as the binding standard for all US government interrogators.

The programme's institutional consequences for US intelligence-service operations have been substantial. The programme produced what the published record characterises as a sustained operational compromise of US intelligence-liaison relationships with the European partner services whose territory had been involved (most acutely the Polish and Romanian services), a sustained legitimacy cost in the multilateral institutional framework on coercive treatment of detainees, and a sustained operational concession on the human-source-recruitment terrain (foreign sources weighing the consequences of cooperation against the published institutional record on US handling of detainees in the 2002-07 period). The programme is now substantially a closed operational chapter; its institutional legacy in the public record is a sustained one.

See also

• Debriefing — the non-coercive interrogation modality the SSCI Study identified as more productive
• Rendition — the operational-transfer category under which the programme's detainee movements were conducted
• Paramilitary — the broader operational category within which the CIA's detention authority was framed
• Declassification — the framework under which the SSCI Study and adjacent material has reached the public record